Over the years, 100s and 1000s of survivors, responders, medical doctors, local and int journalists, military defectors and investigators have witnessed and testified to the impact of these attacks. Samples, testimony, supplemental data has been collected on hundreds of attacks. https://twitter.com/Josiensor/status/1198968712403046402

International bodies have investigated dozens of them. Hundreds of experts and professionals were involved every step of the way. The results are thorough and internally consistent. Taken together, they show a picture of a far-ranging, years-long campaign of chemical weapons use.

There is a hard core of denialists, some of them for ulterior motives, some for mere contrarianism (many were involved in past genocide dial or even insane 9/11 theorizing). They're supported by a network of malicious, confused and automated, eventually reaching the ill-informed.

Any sufficiently complex event will throw off enough data that will allow a malicious or confused actor to pull out inconsistencies (think of the reports of early explosions in 9/11 conspiracies). It's the nature of lived reality. So you have to look at the whole board.

There is so much evidence that even teams of dedicated professionals struggle to grasp all. Some of it is accessible to laypeople, some of it is of a highly technical nature, much of it remains concealed so as not to endanger witnesses, methods or jeopardize future prosecutions.

Again, it's difficult to convey how much those who professionally work Syria do know. The UN agency tasked w/ collecting evidence on war crimes in Syria now estimates it will end up w/ 10+ million pieces of evidence - and that's them struggling to get access to most gov-held data

Sometimes you get glimpses into it - like the recent @nytimes investigations into Russian hospital targeting (itself frankly enough to indict the entire Russian air force in Syria), but that's just the tiniest of slices of the pie.

For the love of god, apply some common sense.

We're not dupes. Most of us spend a good share of our time battling and offending the authorities you think pull our strings. There's no monolithic "establishment." Nobody's out there burning their credentials for the sake of some secret cabal. It's much more boring than that.

Frankly, it only looks this way because these people never actually have to do any good-faith engagement with those directly involved, victims or investigators. They prefer abstraction over real life because it means they don't have to answer any voices outside their own heads.

I know most of the people who led these various efforts. They're good people who know their shit. None of them have any doubt as to what has occurred in Syria and all of them have said as much.

Rant over. I spent part of this weekend talking to victims and defectors. Harrowing.

Go get a soul - or at least a different hobby. Thank heavens for twitter quality filter.

Seriously... same freakin thread, every other week.