This is incredible and I can only imagine how much time this took to create. Definitely also worth taking a look at their previous investigations at https://forensic-architecture.org/.
Everything about reporting this way is amazing, it’s an aspiring goal for on watchers of what data can provide. As you watch this you know that grant money is working hard here. Much respect for such a talented team bringing in complex engineering for all to consume.
Am I the only one who finds this a little disturbing?
I mean the thing is beautifully produced, no doubt, I don't want to take anything away from the skills of the people who made it.
But the slickness moves it somehow from "scrappy bunch who gathered all the open data & collaboratively figured stuff out" into a different category. More like "someone with very deep pockets wants to tell me a particular story". Like getting the sort of 10-page glossy brochure they use to sell manhattan penthouses, but it's from the local animal shelter... and there's nothing wrong with the kitten pictures, the photography is excellent, but you wonder a bit who paid all those professionals, and why.
If I’m not mistaken Forensic Architecture have a lot of connections to the art world (and architecture of course, it’s in the name of the project). Some of them teach at art schools (Goldsmiths etc.), they were nominated for the Turner Prize. I don’t know if it shows a shifting definition of what art is, but it’s interesting that this is the context that (in part) enables them to do their work. It also helps to explain the attention to visual presentation.
Thanks that's interesting. Although it also seems a slightly odd collision of worlds. I mean art is important, and can show us personal perspectives we might otherwise miss. (And maybe the super-slick presentation is something someone did for their own pleasure, not because some sponsor was willing to pay the day rate.)
But carefully weighing evidence and doubt isn't exactly the core idea of the art world. You will win few prizes by pointing out factual mistakes in others' work. (Not saying I know of any factual inaccuracies here, to be clear.)
I agree that this is work of very high technical quality. I was slightly disturbed, though, that this didn't include any interview from people working there, though. I realize it's neither trivial nor cheap to organize, bit it did leave me a strange feeling that I have trouble putting into words. Is there an element of arrogance in assuming we can simply "science the shit out of this" (to quote a well-known Martian), comfortably removed from the faraway site of a human tragedy and without involving any of the affected people, and call it a day?
Kind of like marketeers only trusting analytics and never talking to a single customer, but with an element of western arrogance on top of it.
Excellent video. We have the tech and skill to reconstruct reality, at the same time we do not possess the skill to let reason rule critical parts of our (here: Beirut's) infrastructure.
As humankind, we are probably closer than ever to hassle free life and we will nevertheless go down skirmishing and fighting.
The 12 minute video is worth watching. I was impressed in the density and clarity in the resulting research. Great job and thanks for open sourcing this
Nowhere it is said in the article that the Hezbollah is responsible for the presence of the ammonium nitrate. Yes they did use it in the past, like almost all terrorist organization/militia, but there is no evidence that they had anything to do with its storage in the port.
The AlJazeera article explain very well how it came here.
Rumours of the responsibility of the Hezbollah, or Israel depending on which side of the fence you are, for the blast has been going on since day one, and there hasn't been any substantial proof.
Don't get me wrong, I have no sympathy for the Hezbollah, but lets be honest, the tragedy can be very well explain by the sheer level of incompetence and corruption of the Lebanese government (in which the Hezbollah also plays a big role).
Why always no one has sympathy for Hezbollah and yet people are divided on whether they have sympathy for Israel or not?
They both have grievances against each other and both are set to exterminate the other. The USA picks sides but we don't have to. And I don't care if they say insensitive things or whatever. War is way bigger than words and both of them commit atrocities, that much is obvious. Both of them can also see history from a certain perspective and justify themselves, and I can see that in both cases also.
Yes, their mustache-twirling nefarious plot to have large quantities of a relatively stable substance placed in a warehouse in the incredible hope the warehouse might some day also contain tons of fireworks, 10k tires, and detonation cord to set things off.
> nor the videos from the firefighters before the explosion.
There were a few bits of video footage where I watched on horrified thinking "I wonder how they got hold of that memory card, because there's no way whoever filmed that got out alive..."
> Mr Collett contended that from an engineering perspective, the arrangement of goods within the building was the spatial layout of a makeshift bomb on the scale of a warehouse, awaiting detonation.
The storage and production is highly regulated. Every suspicious event must be communicated with the "Nationaal Coördinator Terrorismebestrijding" (coordinator counterterrorism).
I would hope that every person in any type of supervisory role over a warehouse took this as an opportunity to say "Oh f*ck I need to make sure my warehouse isn't next"
Well, if you remember the horrible port explosion in Tianjin, it seems not unlikely, China is a major exporter to Europe. The west probably has better site safety rules and hazmat regulations in place, though.
That is some serious level investigation and presentation. The video is insanely visually informative.
The 3D rendering matched with the mobile videos of the bags got my jaw dropped.
Very well done video, however they avoided the controversial issues of the explosion.
Everywhere in Lebanon, people reported seeing and hearing jets flying and even some videos show flying objects. They also never touched on what might have triggered the fire to begin with or whether there was a possibility of a weapons cache being hidden there.
or whether there was a possibility of a weapons cache being hidden there
I disagree, they show that the colour of the smoke and the different burn zones/phases is consistent with the declared contents of the warehouse. Anything further than that would be idle speculation.
I thought the cause of the fire was found? Wasn’t it sparks from workers welding on a security door to prevent someone from sneaking into the warehouse and setting off the giant bomb they had built?
From what I remember, the welders did their job and left, then the fire started later.
Also, they never question why 2 tons of unclaimed ammonium nitrate was just sitting in the warehouse for 5-6 years. This stuff is expensive yet no one was trying to get it back.
They never touched those controversial parts of the explosion:
-jets
-was the fire intentional?
-what was it doing there to begin with
Just because you finish a job doesn't mean there isn't hot items still around. Many companies and OSHA specifically, in the states require several hours of observation after doing things that create sparks in high combustible areas. Sparks from metal can also migrate quite far or catch easier to burn metals too.
The unclaimed ammonium nitrate was simply government negligence, it wasn't unclaimed it was confiscated and never moved or properly secured.
They also didn't investigate reports of John McClane (of the Die Hard movie fame) tossing a cigarette into the warehouse, backwards while walking away, a few minutes before the explosion... I'm unsatisfied that they didn't entertain my conspiracy theory! /s
If you actually informed yourself properly about this explosion (instead of reading -- I'm going to assume -- conspiracy websites), why the whole thing was sitting there for so long is pretty clear, and is actually briefly covered in the video (6:05): no one in the government nor military felt responsible nor did they want to take responsibility, having a fight using letters instead of recognizing the danger and acting to fix it. As to the source/why no one wanted it back, that's also been covered in the media.
I'm Lebanese myself and I did inform myself don't worry about me. I also talked to real people affected by the blast and claim they saw Jets as well. I would have loved it if the vid had tackled this and debunked it completely. I'm not claiming otherwise.
There was definitely military/gov negligence and I even call kit suicidal levels of incompetence.
However, they never talk about the original owners of the ammonium nitrate to begin with. I remember it being said that it was a ship that was sinking so it had to be emptied at the port for temporary storage. I'm asking why did the original owner of 2 TONS of it never came to get it back?
I don't think what I'm asking merits these kinds of answers.
Why does one video have to answer every question and entertain every theory? (Should it also answer my question if John McClane was seen at the scene?).
It's a video showing a 3D model/timeline from publicly released videos. If I claim "my friends saw Aladdin flying on his magic carpet before the explosion" but there's no video/photo of this claim, they can't use that claim for their reconstruction. And they're not going to talk about Aladdin because that's not the point of the video.
Are you for real? I swear you have to be trolling.
There are several videos showing flying objects and several people reporting that jets were flying. Again, Israeli jets flying over Lebanon is a normal occurrence and could be absolutely nothing. I will say it again, there exists SEVERAL different videos that show this. This is why I expected them to at least mention this.
Also the ammonium nitrate was not confiscated, they were taken to the port to prevent them from sinking in the sea. But they were never claimed back.
You're the one who is misinformed and is rejecting even a comment saying "I wish they tackled these subjects as well" which are without a doubt related to the explosion. Fuck off with your shitty sarcasm.
> There are several videos showing flying objects and several people reporting that jets were flying. [...] I will say it again, there exists SEVERAL different videos that show this.
Here's one article that talks about it. Again, there are plenty of doctored videos that are obviously fake but this article does not use them.
And people here seem to assume that me asking about it means that I believe that that it was an air strike. All I am saying is that I wished Forensic Architecture had tackled these subjects as well and debunked them since these are the actual controversial subjects regarding the blast.
So this one right [0] which is from right before the fireworks went off. What you're hearing is a lot of small explosions from fireworks going off around the edges before the main mass goes off, there's similar sounds in a lot of other videos of burning fireworks it's just a bunch of very small fireworks going off.
There's no other actual evidence of strikes none of the cameras seems to have caught the missile or bomb which with so many cameras watching the same thing you would have had one catch a frame at least of it and no one's found it.
You are not going to convince a bunch of people that generally require evidence for their beliefs to side with you on another possibility if it doesn't rise above speculation. You cannot even find a video to link to, admitting many are doctored, you simply keep saying there are lots of videos. You are in the wrong community if that's the conversation you want to have.
> Also, they never question why 2 tons of unclaimed ammonium nitrate was just sitting in the warehouse for 5-6 years. This stuff is expensive yet no one was trying to get it back.
It was seized, it belongs to the government at that point there was no one to come claim it. It was their job to safely store and dispose of in some manner.
the welders did their job and left, then the fire started later.
Are you familiar with tire fires? That's what the welders set off. These are not rapid combustive fires, they are slow burners that take some time to really get going. The fully expected result of welding setting off a tire fire is that it would smolder and get worse over a prolonged period of time (compared to an explosion)
* they never question why 2 tons of unclaimed ammonium nitrate was just sitting in the warehouse for 5-6 years*
It's been fairly well reported in other outlets that concerns were raised about the conditions in the warehouse, and then ignored.
jets
Jets fly, literally, everywhere.
intentional
No analysis has suggested this except conspiracy theory speculation
In the past this kind of material would be collected and analyzed by state intelligence services.
Combined by allies and used to gain leverage for individual or combined strategic priorities.
Something like, “Here is how negligent you were. Install this person in power or we leak this and your people revolt and you won’t be able to walk away.”
More recently, it seems, some news organizations have begun assembling reports using modeling and expert analysis.
A good example is The NY Times report on Philadelphia Police use of tear gas against a group of trapped protestors. [1]
Having this information about the Beirut warehouse explosion open-sourced so-to-speak, seems to signal a further shift away from reliance on state intelligence and the advertising-funded third state.
This reminds me some of the collected content created and posted to social media by the public in the aftermath of the downing of Ukrainian International Airlines Flight 752. That loose set of content eventually forced the Iranian government to admit responsibility.
I’d presume that the quality and speed of independent research and analysis of public data will increase to where a scene of non-media, ngo research groups grows, beating out the resources of any given media or government.
Sort of like warez, but with information analysis.
I think the argument is that, should Facebook use become pervasive enough that the bulk of interaction, be it social or financial happens there, you have already disappeared by nature of not using it.
Organize and signal-boost the mob that wants to persecute you, ban and deplatform anybody who dares to defend you, promote any material saying bad things about you, suppress any material that says good things about you. You don't live in a vacuum, neither does your employer, neither do your employer's clients, neither does your family, neither does their employer, neither do teachers at the school you kids go to... etc. etc. You get the idea. You don't have to be a member of the platform for it to be used to attack you.
Facebook, willingly or not, is part of the same entities' sourcing and influencing activities. We know this as established fact. Both your side's and various multipolar others.
Not even remotely similar. First of all, the CIA is primarily concerned with foreign intelligence, so you mean to be concerned with the NSA and the FBI.
With a warrant, the FBI can get everything about you from your ISP, tap your phone lines, hell they can bug your house. Social media is nothing. It's the low hanging fruit.
With the NSA there's dragnet surveillance on internet backbones. There again, the kind of monitoring any social media company might be able to do simply pales in comparison to dragnet metadata analysis of all Internet traffic. If you're an actual target of the NSA good fucking luck.
Social media might be terrible and draconian but if you want to talk about big brother the real fun doesn't even start until you have State actors in your threat model.
Why the hyperbole? "Big Brother" can disappear you into the night, never to be seen again till someone unearths a mass grave many decades later. Social media has no such power.
No direct evidence as you would expect. We only have circumstantial evidence such as selection of topics to cover and general view regarding covered events, which align quite well with position demonstrated by intelligence services. It also has some questionable funding sources (e.g. National Endowment for Democracy and Integrity Initiative), but I would say it also nothing more than circumstantial.
One recent analysis of Bellingcat behavior (not in general, but using a selected case) can be seen in this video (in Russian, but it has good English subtitles): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDhhCLyYCU4 Author of the video is a Ukrainian opposition leader, who fled the country during Yanukovich rule, got asylum in Europe, and since then lives there.
OSINT is certainly a thing, but there's a parallel development in shamelessness and polarization so that accurate reporting of the real history of events makes much less difference. Are there that many people whose support of the police will be shaken by the NYT report, or is the support of the police a matter of political affiliation that leads them to dismiss it as "biased"?
It’s not necessarily a binary though, is it? Articles like that enrich the discussion with new information, and may act to shift policy and perspectives over time. Expecting one article to turn someone’s opinions around completely is usually expecting too much. It’s a common expectation that “this story will change everything” but it seems to me that it takes time for things like this to sink in and change the momentum.
You've reduced this to only two possible positions: support the police or don't support them. How polarizing is that?
What about supporting the need for police while also supporting a need for reforming the police? I doubt there are even many cops that would disagree with a need for reform to some degree.
But creating two extreme positions, and then lumping everyone into those positions, is called politics and is considered mostly harmful.
Both the positions that police should completely cease to exist and that no reform should ever be carried out are so rare that they represent straw men.
When people talk about "support for the police" they are either referring to the degree to which they are comfortable with reform, or disingenuously trying to portray the situation as more partisan than it is.
America is certainly not the only country that divides things into "us vs them". I can think of several notable events in the past few years in various European countries that were exactly "us vs them" subjects. Even when there are multiple political parties in European politics the parties still tend to split into one of two major coalitions and those coalitions cause the people who support people in those coalitions to also divide.
Sure, fair enough. But then again those coalitions aren't generally static, but formed around circumstances, and thus don't necessarily create the same kind of blind team mentality that we see in sports for example. And the parties within the coalitions are still aware of their internal differences, they just choose to work together for a common cause, for a period of time.
That’s how it works in the U.S. as well. The political parties are made up of coalitions of voters and over time certain groups shift or change affiliation.
At least where I've voted in the US, there are rarely only two viable choices for a state or national legislature position. Some states resolve this using primaries for D/R candidates, and a few use stricter runoffs where there are frequently several D/R candidates. At least in the towns where I've lived, there were noticeable policy differences between many of these candidates within each party, although I will readily admit that I doubt this holds for most of the US. Also, it's still generally not as widely varying in views as in countries with 3+ parties (if made viable through proportional or similar voting) instead of the multiple rounds system popular in the US.
Going back to the original point someone made in this thread, I think this two-party multiple-views system in the US actually helps a bit to drive polarization. Seemingly disparate views are drawn together under a banner of [party] with an obvious (not actually clear or cohesive) enemy in the [other party].
America is one of maybe half a dozen countries in the world with a two-party system. The others are Malta, Zimbabwe, Jamaica, and a few other Caribbean countries.
What's your source? That seems extremely specious to me, for two reasons.
First, the US does not technically have a two-party system. If your standard is how many parties have seats in the national legislature or parliament, the US has three parties represented since Justin Amash is now affiliated with the Libertarian Party, as well as a few independents.
Secondly, many countries only have two parties that really matter in terms of having a realistic chance of forming a government--the UK and Canada are two examples that spring to mind. The third largest parties in those countries are the SNP and Bloc Quebecois, respectively--parties who want some specific part of the country to have greater autonomy if not independence. If your complaint is that the US doesn't have a Texas Independence Party winning seats in Congress, weird flex but okay.
Virtually every polity that uses a first-past-the-post voting system will end up with a two-party system. That's Duverger's Law. The primary counterexamples only prove the point, because they more or less replace one of the two national parties on a local level. (I used to live in Seattle, and while Seattle politics are officially non-partisan, Seattle has actually developed a de facto two-party system between mainstream Democrats and socialists.)
I personally favor multiparty systems with proportional representation, but that's no guarantee of anything. Israel (which somehow still ends up with a de facto two party system anyway) and Belgium have both notoriously failed to form majority governments for long periods of time.
The typical third party in Canada is NDP, which has had support between 15-25% of the vote within the last decade depending on the election. Which is quite different and quite more than the Libertarian party in the USA which has a very negligible influence. They also have been in power within a few provinces quite frequently. I don't think Canada was your best pick to make your point.
Independents won almost 20% of the popular vote in the 1992 U.S. general election. Also hold more seats in Congress. That’s a more apt comparison, not the Libertarian Party.
NDP won fewer seats than Bloc Québécois in the last election. And it’s worth pointing out, I think, that the most prominent US politician who would be aligned with the NDP ideologically, Bernie Sanders, is actually an independent rather than a Democrat.
That's mostly because Bloc Québécois is concentrated in a specific province, and often specific parts of that province, while the NDP's support is spread across all the provinces.
It's the same in the UK, where the Lib Dems got triple the vote of the SNP, but less than a quarter of the seats.
Yes, as I pointed out, this is an artifact of how Duverger’s Law guarantees that first-past-the-post voting systems lead to two-party systems. BQ is one of the two parties in Quebec just as SNP is one of the two parties in Scotland.
Very few people outside the anarchocommunist subreddits think police are unnecessary. Reform vs police-are-untouchable are the two major wings in the US.
You're only seeing these for specific issues that have become polarized because normal organic growth/reform/development/etc. has been halted. If it were not for the insular and unaccountable behavior of police, we would not be in a position where "abolish them entirely" would have more-than-fringe support.
Ask someone what they think of something as "political" as the H-1B program, let alone, oh, federal cheese labeling standards, and you'll see a lot of people who say "There are good and bad parts, I think we should keep the good parts and reform the bad ones, and my opinion on which specific parts are good or bad can be influenced by quality journalism."
> Ask someone what they think of something as "political" as the H-1B program, let alone, oh, federal cheese labeling standards, and you'll see a lot of people who say "There are good and bad parts, I think we should keep the good parts and reform the bad ones, and my opinion on which specific parts are good or bad can be influenced by quality journalism."
Nah. That's what I would say, but everyone else is a rabid partisan who will slavishly push whichever side their tribe is taking right now on skilled immigration. Or cheese.
While not directly assembled by state intelligence services, some of today's "independent" reports surely are supported or financed by them.
I'm not saying this one is, but verifying the independence and financing of any organisation is quite hard. A lot of work has gone into this fantastic presentation, and somebody had to pay for that. Since I watched it for free, it wasn't me...
I know where you are coming from but you are missing one big thing. Inherently in all observations coming from a newspaper, to a research paper and to an intelligence agency the reporting will be biased. What you have to do instead is to figure out what the bias is from that source of information and then combine the other sources to attempt to understand the outcome. The second thing is to remove your own inherent bias.
Everybody have some agenda, whoever collects and analyse the information now, whether it is the NYT or NGOs or a board in 4chan, they all have some agenda and they all want to leverage it to push their agenda.
> More recently, it seems, some news organizations have begun assembling reports using modeling and expert analysis.
This is hardly new and when it comes to news media it's hardly a good thing. It is incredibly easy to find biased experts and it's even easier to craft a false narrative using "modeling". Moving away from reporting directly observable events and interviewing people who observed them is a sign that modern media is exiting the business they are supposed to be engaged in. They're now (more than ever) firmly in the realm of opinion-shaping.
> the downing of Ukrainian International Airlines Flight 752. That loose set of content eventually forced the Iranian government to admit responsibility.
I read about that case in detail, and it's not as clear as the initial reporting.
It was a tough one since you can't tell with any certainty which airplanes are truly friendly or not. Iran was in a state of heightened alert because of disagreements with the US. (Some countries, like Israel, use civilian airliners and routes as cover for military flights.)
A related example is how Iraq used a civilian Dassault F-50 jet upgraded with Mirage electronics (radar, launch rails) for a number of clandestine military flights around the Middle East, including the flight that hit the USS Stark with 2 Exocet missiles. (The Stark's fire control system apparently didn't recognize the F-50 as a threat, even though it had a fighter escort.)
Yeah. But the most interesting visuals to me were the placement of 'leaked images' in the virtual warehouse. It had the effect of contextualizing those photos and, for lack of a better term, exploding them. The value to me is what it did to the photos rather than what the photos did to the creation of the space.
I'm not sure these instances fall under the photogrammetry umbrella.
I've always thought it'd be amazing to be able to view an event from different angles via crowd-sourced videos, and that it was very doable. From an information scientist point of view, I'm glad to see it's been done.
If you enjoy this, I'd recommend looking into the organisation Bellingcat.
They do investigative journalism using social media/crowd sourcing/leaked database, and many similar forensic techniques. They've done great analysis on the MH17 missile attack for example, which is documented in their podcast: https://www.bellingcat.com/resources/podcasts/2019/07/17/mh1...
See this branch which discusses Bellingcat: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25150913 (BTW it's interesting that the same link got mentioned twice here in comments, even though relation to the OP is weak in my opinion)
I RTFA. The direct link to media only contains snapshots of the video sources, not the videos themselves. The xlsx was added 1 hour after my comment was written, so I guess thanks are in order!
225 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 267 ms ] threadhttps://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEeyMdTjYEYESf_8HyiCRAg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OldnzVNE71E
How did I not know about this before! :)
Bye-bye to getting any work done for the rest of the day!
Watching some of their video's, they seem to use Blender a lot. :)
Am I the only one who finds this a little disturbing?
I mean the thing is beautifully produced, no doubt, I don't want to take anything away from the skills of the people who made it.
But the slickness moves it somehow from "scrappy bunch who gathered all the open data & collaboratively figured stuff out" into a different category. More like "someone with very deep pockets wants to tell me a particular story". Like getting the sort of 10-page glossy brochure they use to sell manhattan penthouses, but it's from the local animal shelter... and there's nothing wrong with the kitten pictures, the photography is excellent, but you wonder a bit who paid all those professionals, and why.
But carefully weighing evidence and doubt isn't exactly the core idea of the art world. You will win few prizes by pointing out factual mistakes in others' work. (Not saying I know of any factual inaccuracies here, to be clear.)
Have a drone take Lidar or whatever model of an area, feed the pictures in and some other data and the system produces videos like this.
This video was incredible!
https://blmprotests.forensic-architecture.org/
https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/police-bruta...
Kind of like marketeers only trusting analytics and never talking to a single customer, but with an element of western arrogance on top of it.
As humankind, we are probably closer than ever to hassle free life and we will nevertheless go down skirmishing and fighting.
Kudos to the team that put together this video, it is extremely well done.
"We" Albert Einstein are prodigies. "We" anti-vax are very far from the other end of "we"
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/08/05/beirut-blast-traci...
Here is an article about the history of ammonium nitrate:
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/08/deadly-hi...
(comment edited)
Rumours of the responsibility of the Hezbollah, or Israel depending on which side of the fence you are, for the blast has been going on since day one, and there hasn't been any substantial proof.
Don't get me wrong, I have no sympathy for the Hezbollah, but lets be honest, the tragedy can be very well explain by the sheer level of incompetence and corruption of the Lebanese government (in which the Hezbollah also plays a big role).
They both have grievances against each other and both are set to exterminate the other. The USA picks sides but we don't have to. And I don't care if they say insensitive things or whatever. War is way bigger than words and both of them commit atrocities, that much is obvious. Both of them can also see history from a certain perspective and justify themselves, and I can see that in both cases also.
This website (and organisation) is fascinating. There are other excellent videos on the site, for example:
https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/the-killing-...
There were a few bits of video footage where I watched on horrified thinking "I wonder how they got hold of that memory card, because there's no way whoever filmed that got out alive..."
> Mr Collett contended that from an engineering perspective, the arrangement of goods within the building was the spatial layout of a makeshift bomb on the scale of a warehouse, awaiting detonation.
I do start to wonder if any of such materials are stored like this in one of our ports, such as Rotterdam, The Netherlands.
I can't imagine such a mess to exist there.
But The Netherlands remembers the Firework explosion in Enschede, from 2000. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enschede_fireworks_disaster
It's not nearly at the scale of Beirut, but it killed 23 people.
The storage and production is highly regulated. Every suspicious event must be communicated with the "Nationaal Coördinator Terrorismebestrijding" (coordinator counterterrorism).
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/world/2019/...
Here is an account on the fireworks present in the warehouse:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/aug/07/beirut-explosi...
And yet it looks like things are still bad around Beirut port:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-lebanon-crisis-fire-tyres...
https://amp.dw.com/en/beirut-port-fire/a-54881149
Everywhere in Lebanon, people reported seeing and hearing jets flying and even some videos show flying objects. They also never touched on what might have triggered the fire to begin with or whether there was a possibility of a weapons cache being hidden there.
I disagree, they show that the colour of the smoke and the different burn zones/phases is consistent with the declared contents of the warehouse. Anything further than that would be idle speculation.
Also, they never question why 2 tons of unclaimed ammonium nitrate was just sitting in the warehouse for 5-6 years. This stuff is expensive yet no one was trying to get it back.
They never touched those controversial parts of the explosion: -jets -was the fire intentional? -what was it doing there to begin with
The unclaimed ammonium nitrate was simply government negligence, it wasn't unclaimed it was confiscated and never moved or properly secured.
If you actually informed yourself properly about this explosion (instead of reading -- I'm going to assume -- conspiracy websites), why the whole thing was sitting there for so long is pretty clear, and is actually briefly covered in the video (6:05): no one in the government nor military felt responsible nor did they want to take responsibility, having a fight using letters instead of recognizing the danger and acting to fix it. As to the source/why no one wanted it back, that's also been covered in the media.
There was definitely military/gov negligence and I even call kit suicidal levels of incompetence.
However, they never talk about the original owners of the ammonium nitrate to begin with. I remember it being said that it was a ship that was sinking so it had to be emptied at the port for temporary storage. I'm asking why did the original owner of 2 TONS of it never came to get it back?
I don't think what I'm asking merits these kinds of answers.
It's a video showing a 3D model/timeline from publicly released videos. If I claim "my friends saw Aladdin flying on his magic carpet before the explosion" but there's no video/photo of this claim, they can't use that claim for their reconstruction. And they're not going to talk about Aladdin because that's not the point of the video.
There are several videos showing flying objects and several people reporting that jets were flying. Again, Israeli jets flying over Lebanon is a normal occurrence and could be absolutely nothing. I will say it again, there exists SEVERAL different videos that show this. This is why I expected them to at least mention this.
Also the ammonium nitrate was not confiscated, they were taken to the port to prevent them from sinking in the sea. But they were never claimed back.
You're the one who is misinformed and is rejecting even a comment saying "I wish they tackled these subjects as well" which are without a doubt related to the explosion. Fuck off with your shitty sarcasm.
Where are these videos?
Here's one article that talks about it. Again, there are plenty of doctored videos that are obviously fake but this article does not use them.
And people here seem to assume that me asking about it means that I believe that that it was an air strike. All I am saying is that I wished Forensic Architecture had tackled these subjects as well and debunked them since these are the actual controversial subjects regarding the blast.
There's no other actual evidence of strikes none of the cameras seems to have caught the missile or bomb which with so many cameras watching the same thing you would have had one catch a frame at least of it and no one's found it.
[0] https://youtu.be/tFR1PJnLwg0?t=60
over central Beirut and not a single clear video of your phantom jet? come on.
It was seized, it belongs to the government at that point there was no one to come claim it. It was their job to safely store and dispose of in some manner.
Are you familiar with tire fires? That's what the welders set off. These are not rapid combustive fires, they are slow burners that take some time to really get going. The fully expected result of welding setting off a tire fire is that it would smolder and get worse over a prolonged period of time (compared to an explosion)
* they never question why 2 tons of unclaimed ammonium nitrate was just sitting in the warehouse for 5-6 years*
It's been fairly well reported in other outlets that concerns were raised about the conditions in the warehouse, and then ignored.
jets
Jets fly, literally, everywhere.
intentional
No analysis has suggested this except conspiracy theory speculation
I do wish they had touched on this. I'm not sure if the ignition source is known
Combined by allies and used to gain leverage for individual or combined strategic priorities.
Something like, “Here is how negligent you were. Install this person in power or we leak this and your people revolt and you won’t be able to walk away.”
More recently, it seems, some news organizations have begun assembling reports using modeling and expert analysis.
A good example is The NY Times report on Philadelphia Police use of tear gas against a group of trapped protestors. [1]
Having this information about the Beirut warehouse explosion open-sourced so-to-speak, seems to signal a further shift away from reliance on state intelligence and the advertising-funded third state.
This reminds me some of the collected content created and posted to social media by the public in the aftermath of the downing of Ukrainian International Airlines Flight 752. That loose set of content eventually forced the Iranian government to admit responsibility.
I’d presume that the quality and speed of independent research and analysis of public data will increase to where a scene of non-media, ngo research groups grows, beating out the resources of any given media or government.
Sort of like warez, but with information analysis.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/100000007174941/philadelphi...
"How the U.S. Military Buys Location Data from Ordinary Apps" https://www.vice.com/en/article/jgqm5x/us-military-location-... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25113117)
With a warrant, the FBI can get everything about you from your ISP, tap your phone lines, hell they can bug your house. Social media is nothing. It's the low hanging fruit.
With the NSA there's dragnet surveillance on internet backbones. There again, the kind of monitoring any social media company might be able to do simply pales in comparison to dragnet metadata analysis of all Internet traffic. If you're an actual target of the NSA good fucking luck.
Social media might be terrible and draconian but if you want to talk about big brother the real fun doesn't even start until you have State actors in your threat model.
https://www.bellingcat.com/resources/podcasts/2019/07/17/mh1...
One recent analysis of Bellingcat behavior (not in general, but using a selected case) can be seen in this video (in Russian, but it has good English subtitles): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDhhCLyYCU4 Author of the video is a Ukrainian opposition leader, who fled the country during Yanukovich rule, got asylum in Europe, and since then lives there.
If someone does not want to judge by the video content alone and wants to learn more about the author, you can read the following wiki links:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatoly_Shariy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_of_Shariy
He already said no.
What about supporting the need for police while also supporting a need for reforming the police? I doubt there are even many cops that would disagree with a need for reform to some degree.
But creating two extreme positions, and then lumping everyone into those positions, is called politics and is considered mostly harmful.
Nice definition. Sadly, way too accurate.
When people talk about "support for the police" they are either referring to the degree to which they are comfortable with reform, or disingenuously trying to portray the situation as more partisan than it is.
American politics. The amount of bipartisan countries in the world can be counted on one hand. But I get what you're saying and I agree completely.
Going back to the original point someone made in this thread, I think this two-party multiple-views system in the US actually helps a bit to drive polarization. Seemingly disparate views are drawn together under a banner of [party] with an obvious (not actually clear or cohesive) enemy in the [other party].
First, the US does not technically have a two-party system. If your standard is how many parties have seats in the national legislature or parliament, the US has three parties represented since Justin Amash is now affiliated with the Libertarian Party, as well as a few independents.
Secondly, many countries only have two parties that really matter in terms of having a realistic chance of forming a government--the UK and Canada are two examples that spring to mind. The third largest parties in those countries are the SNP and Bloc Quebecois, respectively--parties who want some specific part of the country to have greater autonomy if not independence. If your complaint is that the US doesn't have a Texas Independence Party winning seats in Congress, weird flex but okay.
Virtually every polity that uses a first-past-the-post voting system will end up with a two-party system. That's Duverger's Law. The primary counterexamples only prove the point, because they more or less replace one of the two national parties on a local level. (I used to live in Seattle, and while Seattle politics are officially non-partisan, Seattle has actually developed a de facto two-party system between mainstream Democrats and socialists.)
I personally favor multiparty systems with proportional representation, but that's no guarantee of anything. Israel (which somehow still ends up with a de facto two party system anyway) and Belgium have both notoriously failed to form majority governments for long periods of time.
That's mostly because Bloc Québécois is concentrated in a specific province, and often specific parts of that province, while the NDP's support is spread across all the provinces.
It's the same in the UK, where the Lib Dems got triple the vote of the SNP, but less than a quarter of the seats.
Ask someone what they think of something as "political" as the H-1B program, let alone, oh, federal cheese labeling standards, and you'll see a lot of people who say "There are good and bad parts, I think we should keep the good parts and reform the bad ones, and my opinion on which specific parts are good or bad can be influenced by quality journalism."
Nah. That's what I would say, but everyone else is a rabid partisan who will slavishly push whichever side their tribe is taking right now on skilled immigration. Or cheese.
I'm not saying this one is, but verifying the independence and financing of any organisation is quite hard. A lot of work has gone into this fantastic presentation, and somebody had to pay for that. Since I watched it for free, it wasn't me...
https://forensic-architecture.org/about/funding
Did you mean Third Estate? Or a state-like entity governed by ad revenue?
This is hardly new and when it comes to news media it's hardly a good thing. It is incredibly easy to find biased experts and it's even easier to craft a false narrative using "modeling". Moving away from reporting directly observable events and interviewing people who observed them is a sign that modern media is exiting the business they are supposed to be engaged in. They're now (more than ever) firmly in the realm of opinion-shaping.
I read about that case in detail, and it's not as clear as the initial reporting.
It was a tough one since you can't tell with any certainty which airplanes are truly friendly or not. Iran was in a state of heightened alert because of disagreements with the US. (Some countries, like Israel, use civilian airliners and routes as cover for military flights.)
A related example is how Iraq used a civilian Dassault F-50 jet upgraded with Mirage electronics (radar, launch rails) for a number of clandestine military flights around the Middle East, including the flight that hit the USS Stark with 2 Exocet missiles. (The Stark's fire control system apparently didn't recognize the F-50 as a threat, even though it had a fighter escort.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photogrammetry
I'm not sure these instances fall under the photogrammetry umbrella.
I've always thought it'd be amazing to be able to view an event from different angles via crowd-sourced videos, and that it was very doable. From an information scientist point of view, I'm glad to see it's been done.
They do investigative journalism using social media/crowd sourcing/leaked database, and many similar forensic techniques. They've done great analysis on the MH17 missile attack for example, which is documented in their podcast: https://www.bellingcat.com/resources/podcasts/2019/07/17/mh1...