© Majles Rif/Youtube
Hundreds of videos showing apparent victims of a chemical weapons attack in Syria were uploaded to YouTube on August 20, a day before media reports say the attack actually happened, prompting Russia's Foreign Ministry spokesman to assert the incident was a "pre-planned" provocation staged by rebels.
As PBS reports, "At around 3 a.m. (on August 21st) , patients started streaming in from neighborhoods in suburban Damascus like Zamalka and Ain Terma," following the alleged chemical weapons attack.
However, a playlist of videos entitled '
Alleged Chemical Attack in Eastern Ghouta August 21st 2013' contains 159 videos - every one of which was uploaded to YouTube on August 20th.
While no one is denying that some kind of attack did indeed take place, the fact that hundreds of videos showing victims of the attack were uploaded to YouTube a day before the incident is supposed to have actually happened remains unexplained.
The time stamp attributed to uploaded videos applies to the country in which they were uploaded, meaning that the videos were uploaded in Syria on August 20th, which is seemingly impossible given that the attack took place in the early hours of the 21st. The only way the videos could display as being uploaded on the 20th was if they were uploaded in America, which is on an earlier time zone.
According to Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Aleksandr Lukashevich, this represents evidence of a "pre-planned" provocation. Lukashevich labeled the accusations "another anti-Syrian propaganda wave."
"We're getting more new evidence that this criminal act was of a provocative nature,"
he told RT. "In particular, there are reports circulating on the Internet, in particular that the materials of the incident and accusations against government troops had been posted for several hours before the so-called attack. Thus, it was a pre-planned action."
The unanswered question as to how footage showing victims of an attack that occurred on August 21 was uploaded to YouTube on August 20 is in addition to doubts cast about the veracity of the videos by several chemical weapons experts.
Paula Vanninen of the Finnish Institute for Verification of the Chemical Weapons Convention questions the behavior of those seen handling the victims in the video footage. "At the moment, I am not totally convinced because the people that are helping them are without any protective clothing and without any respirators....In a real case, they would also be contaminated and would also be having symptoms," he stated.
Stephen Johnson, an expert in weapons and chemical explosives at Cranfield Forensic Institute,
told Euro News that the video footage also looked suspect.
"There are, within some of the videos, examples which seem a little hyper-real, and almost as if they've been set up. Which is not to say that they are fake but it does cause some concern. Some of the people with foaming, the foam seems to be too white, too pure, and not consistent with the sort of internal injury you might expect to see, which you'd expect to be bloodier or yellower," Johnson said.
His comments were echoed by chemical and biological weapons researcher
Jean Pascal Zanders, who said that the footage appears to show victims of asphyxiation, which is not consistent with the use of mustard gas or the nerve agents VX or sarin. "I'm deliberately not using the term chemical weapons here," he said, adding that the use of "industrial toxicants" was a more likely explanation.
Careful here. I have some doubts. This whole "time of posting" thing might be a trap for alternative news sites trying to make some slap-dash critical thinking analyses, or it could just be a misguided guess that's gone viral. If the alternative media chatter is debunked quickly enough, Syria could be in trouble at any moment. There are a LOT of videos of innocent kids suffering and dying horribly, there is going to be a CHORUS of western media and government voices pushing to STOP whoever is blamed in the eyes of the majority.
Anyways...Let's figure out how Youtube determines and displays their "Published on" dates.
The first 95 videos on the list linked here are dated Aug 20th to me here, in Eastern Time in Canada. After that there are a lot on the 21st then onwards. When this article was written it was 159, now it's even higher, so more videos are being added. I can't force Youtube to change my time zone. Could some one closer to GMT share how many of those videos are dated Aug 20th to them? If it's less than 95, it means that Youtube is simply correcting the time-stamp on the video to a format that is more useful to the viewer, by displaying it according to the day that it would have been for the viewer, NOT the uploader.
All of the videos I scanned through in the first 95 (not all but a lot) which were posted before Aug 21 were in the dark, which would have been pre-6:00 or 7:00 AM Syria time (not sure about daylight savings interfering or not) so if I'm correct about the time-stamp translation, it really blows a hole in the idea that the videos were posted before the attack, which has already been written about in at least three or four articles that I've read, and those are just the ones I've come across personally. Major media and western governments may use this gaffe to allow them to paint critics as conspiracy nuts at a very critical time. Be certain of what you say before you spread it!