Prem Shankar Jha

Who fired the missiles? Assad or the rebels?

The West is accusing Assad and they say they have evidence.

Here is my take on it.

I found a collection of 59 videos that ‘livestreamed’ the Ghouta outrage. The first of them is a video uploaded by the ‘social activists’ that claims to be of the chemical rocket being fired by the Assad government. Please take a careful look at it.

You will notice the following anomalies:

  1. The Ghouta videos started appearing on the internet at 4.00 AM. So this video had to have been shot between 2.00 and 3.00 AM on Aug 21, Syria time. This means that there was someone on a balcony looking towards the launch site at this unearthly hour of the morning. This raises the following questions: why was he up at that time? Why did he have his phone with him then?
  2. Suppose he was just answering an overseas phone call that came at this unearthly hour. How was he able to switch on the phone camera and take this video quickly enough to capture the launch?
  3. As one will see, the entire launch from first small flash to the end of the big flash took no more than two seconds. Assume he had the phone in his hand, and happened to be looking at the exact spot the rocket rose from, how was he able to capture the entire three seconds on the camera?
  4. Only after I asked myself these questions did I notice that the cameraman had done more than that. He had had his camera running for four seconds BEFORE the rocket was launched.
  5. Then I noticed more: He had been pointing at the precise spot where he expected the rocket to rise from, because he found that it was slightly off center to the left, he immediately corrected the camera angle to get the flash in the center.
  6. The time the sound took to follow the flash was between six and seven seconds. That placed the camera man almost exactly a mile away from the launch site.

To sum up: a man with a phone or other camera was on a balcony that was at a perfect distance for recording a small rocket launch, with his camera running, facing the precise spot from which the rocket rose, and had begun filming a pitch black night, in which there was almost complete silence, four seconds before a chemical rocket was to rise from that spot.

Was this coincidence or design, and if design, whose design?

In case you have any difficulty opening the video from this page, please go to the url

http://www.reddit.com/r/syriancivilwar/comments/1kry33/live_thread_stream_of_videos_coming_out_of/

and see video titled “video claiming to show chemical missile being launched”.

Post script: This video was removed from Youtube shortly after the above article was uploaded.

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