Death toll question... are Nerve Toxin deaths Isolated in the number?
Obama coming out early with a death toll of 1,429 for the Assad nerve gas attack was never supposed to be taken seriously... a precise number like that could only come from lengthy and careful study within a non-chaotic environment, and the number was offered at a time it could not possibly have been a known thing.
So it was like the Heinz ketchup "exactly 57 Communists" joke in The Manchurian Candidate. And I assume most of us felt a little pang of ill-ease at being deceived by that cynical pretense of omniscience.
But saying 1,429 to mean "somewhere around 1400" would be merely distasteful, in the way so much of advertising and public relations is distasteful. Pricing gasoline to end in 95 tenths of a penny is distasteful (i.e. $3.5795/gallon, rather than $3.58).
Not a major crime.
On the other hand, saying 1,429 to state your absolute knowledge when the number might be 400 or 1400 or 732 would be in the category of a lie.
But my question here is Is that number deaths from Nerve Gas? And if so, how could it have possibly been derived?
My impression is that the Sarin artillery rockets were part of an enormous artillery attack of conventional shells and rockets, as well as Sarin rockets.
Is that correct? If so, then how many total people died in that cluster of attacks? How were the nerve gas deaths differentiated?
I know how some individual nerve gas death would be differentiated. We have seen many pictures of people who clearly died from something other than conventional artillery. That's not the question. What process could possibly have differentiated 1,429 deaths specifically from exposure to neuro-toxin in that environment?
Somebody reading this will think this is petty. When a government asks your assent to do violence, however, like when you are on a death penalty jury, for instance, the expectation that the government be rigorously truthful is never petty.
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