OK Anons – we ARE the news (because the press has gotten LAZY and would much rather browse Twitter and crib off our homework than do their own research and thinking!), but we need to be careful…
I did the math, I am nearly certain that we played into a “wrap-up smear” from the Syrian & Turkish government propaganda rags. We picked it up in the notables first without considering the sources, and now Zero Hedge has this article (filled with weasel-words like “allegedly” and “claimed”) pinned at the top of their front page:
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-03-01/us-army-takes-50-tons-gold-syria-alleged-deal-isis
The original sources (and their owners) are:
-SANA (the Syrian State News Agency – Assad controlled)…
-The Daily Sabah (Turkish controlled, Turkey hates our Kurdish allies and the SDF and opposes our efforts in Syria, and Erdogan imprisons journalists who print what he doesn’t like!)…
Think logically: 50 TONS of gold got flown out by US military helicopters in “large boxes”? Nice story: let’s check the math to see if that makes sense.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sikorsky_UH-60_Black_Hawk
A UH-60 Blackhawk can carry 2,600 pounds (approx. 1 ton) of cargo internally, or 9,000 pounds (4.5 tons) externally on a sling. I very much doubt that we’d trust dangling that valuable a cargo out the bottom of a helo, so internally is the smart option. So we’re talking 40-50 helo-loads of gold being flown out… not an insignificant amount of air traffic!
“Locals witnessed US helicopters airlifting large cases of gold…”? 1 cubic inch of gold = 0.7 pounds; 1 ton of gold = 2857 cubic inches. 2857 cubic inches = 12”x12”x20. So 1 square foot by twenty inches high = 1 ton of gold. Not a very large case, is it, anons? And that’s all a single Blackhawk can carry in one load internally… or four such cases slung underneath of it if we were silly enough to do it that way.
If you’re having a hard time visualizing this, here is a link to a video showing what 1 ton of gold in bars looks like:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ilh5iUQIb4s
A UH-60 Blackhawk is 64 feet long. Four boxes of gold 1 foot wide would look TINY swinging around underneath of a Blackhawk, and it’d be obvious that it was straining to carry that load.
I call BULLSHIT on this one!!!