New York Times Walks Back Its Breathless Endorsement of Obama's Dodgy Sarin Claims

I missed it, but the Times has published a remarkably circuitous retraction of its early reporting on the so called "slam dunk" fingering the Assad regime for the Sarin attack:

A new analysis of rockets linked to the nerve-agent attack on Damascus, Syria, in August has concluded that the rockets were most likely fired by multiple launchers and had a range of about three kilometers, according to the two authors of the analysis.

The authors said that their findings could help pinpoint accountability for the most lethal chemical warfare attack in decades, but that they also raised questions about the American government’s claims about the locations of launching points, and the technical intelligence behind them.

………

The authors of the new analysis —Theodore A. Postol, a professor of science, technology and national security policy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Richard M. Lloyd, an analyst at the military contractor Tesla Laboratories — evaluated the exteriors of the implicated rockets, visible in videos and photographs. The analysis suggested that they were propelled by motors taken from a common family of 122-millimeter conventional artillery rockets known as the BM-21, the authors said.

The BM-21 line is a globally abundant system of ground-to-ground rockets, colloquially called Grads, that originated in the Soviet Union but have been reproduced and updated by many countries, including post-Soviet Russia, China, Egypt and Iran. Both the Syrian army and the rebels possess them.

………

“It is clear that if the U.S. government’s claims that the allegedly observed launches came from ‘the heart’ of Syrian government controlled areas, there is a serious discrepancy between the meaning of this claim, the technical intelligence it relies on, and the technical properties of this munition,” he wrote.

Using published data about characteristics of motors in various Grad rockets and derivatives, Dr. Postol and Mr. Lloyd calculated potential maximum ranges for the sarin-filled rockets, with an emphasis on a common Grad variant’s motor.

“The dimensions of the inserted rocket motor very closely match the dimensions in the 9M22-U artillery rocket,” Dr. Postol wrote in an email on Thursday. “If the inserted motor is the same as the standard 9M22-U motor, then the maximum range of the munition would be no more than three kilometers, and likely less.”

That would be less than the ranges of more than nine kilometers calculated separately by The New York Times and Human Rights Watch in mid-September, after the United States had dropped its push for a military strike. Those estimates had been based in part on connecting reported compass headings for two rockets cited in the United Nations’ initial report on the attacks.

The published range for a 9M22-U rocket is about 20 kilometers, or 12.4 miles. But the Syrian rockets carried a bulky and apparently flat-nosed warhead — Dr. Postol called it “a soup can” — whose range would have been undermined by its large mass and by drag, the authors said.

Depending on the motors propelling different Grad models, the projected maximum ranges can vary from 2.5 to 3.5 kilometers, or 1.5 to 2.2 miles, Dr. Postol and Mr. Lloyd said.

The longer estimates seem unlikely, Dr. Postol said, because as a sarin-filled rocket was pushed to greater air speeds by a more powerful motor, the stresses created by its non-aerodynamic shape could cause it to tumble or break apart.

As Robert Parry noted on Consortiumnews, the Times buried the story:

The New York Times has, kind of, admitted that it messed up its big front-page story that used a “vector analysis” to pin the blame for the Aug. 21 Sarin attack on the Syrian government, an assertion that was treated by Official Washington as the slam-dunk proof that President Bashar al-Assad gassed his own people.

But you’d be forgiven if you missed the Times’ embarrassing confession, since it was buried on page 8, below the fold, 18 paragraphs into a story under the not-so-eye-catching title, “New Study Refines View Of Sarin Attack in Syria.”

Also, Seymour Hersh thoroughly documented the manipulation of the intelligence data, noting that, "A former senior intelligence official told me that the Obama administration had altered the available information – in terms of its timing and sequence – to enable the president and his advisers to make intelligence retrieved days after the attack look as if it had been picked up and analysed in real time, as the attack was happening."

This official noted the similarities to the infamous Gulf of Tonkin incident.

Let's see, we now have:

• Obama attempting to lie us into a war.
• Protecting Wall Street fat cats from meaningful consequences for their acts.
• Get out of jail free cards for tortures in the US state security apparatus.
• What looks increasingly like a full throated endorsement of the all encompassing security state.

This is going somewhere, but I cannot quite put my finger on it.