FROM EIR DAILY ALERT
Weaknesses Appear in Latest British Information-Warfare Operation
March 18, 2018 (EIRNS)—First we had the Christopher Steele dossier; then the “St. Petersburg Internet Research Agency” scam underlying Special Counsel Bob Mueller’s phony indictments of 13 Russians; and now the May government’s hyperventilating over hoked-up charges that Russian President Vladimir Putin tried to murder swapped British spy Sergei Skripal in Salisbury. This latest British Empire provocation comes at a time when U.S. Special Counsel Bob Mueller’s case against the President and the whole Russiagate attack are visibly failing. Whatever their further plans may be, one calculation in the British Empire’s fevered attacks on Russia over Skripal and nerve agent, was apparently the hope that a hyped-up war hysteria, fed into the U.S. from Europe, might help to create the circumstances in which the Mueller case and the Steele dossier—or other such efforts to somehow depose Trump—might be revived.
But May’s government is unpopular to begin with, and the weakness of her case is becoming more evident by the day. Craig Murray, a former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan whom we have quoted before on this case, wrote March 16 that Britain’s chemical-warfare scientists at Porton Down,
“are not able to identify the nerve agent as being of Russian manufacture, and have been resentful of the pressure being placed on them to do so. Porton Down would only sign on to the formulation ‘of a type developed by Russia,’ after a rather difficult meeting where this was agreed on as a compromise formulation. The Russians were allegedly researching, in the ‘Novichok’ program, a generation of nerve agents which could be produced from commercially available precursors such as insecticides and fertilizers. This substance is a ‘Novichok’ in that sense. It is of that type. Just as I am typing on a laptop of a type developed by the United States, though this one was made in China.”
The background to Porton Down’s reluctance, is of course former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s phony dossier on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, which EIR’s Founding Editor Lyndon LaRouche fought alongside the British WMD arms expert Dr. David Kelly, who exposed the “dodgy dossier, at the time, and died suspiciously shortly thereafter.
“To anybody with a Whitehall background this has been obvious for several days,” Murray continues.
“The government has never said the nerve agent was made in Russia, or that it can only be made in Russia. The exact formulation ‘of a type developed by Russia’ was used by Theresa May in parliament, used by the U.K. at the UN Security Council, used by Boris Johnson on the BBC yesterday and, most tellingly of all, ‘of a type developed by Russia,’ is the precise phrase used in the joint communique issued by the U.K., U.S.A., France and Germany yesterday.”
Rather than simply dismiss Murray as a crank and refuse to respond, British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson betrayed the government’s weak position by attempting to refute Murray on BBC. Hilariously—but typical for Boris “Bozo” Johnson—the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) told the BBC,
“We have no idea what Mr. Murray is referring to. The Prime Minister told MPs on Monday that world leading experts at Porton Down had positively identified this chemical agent. It is clear that it is a military grade nerve agent of a type developed by Russia. None of that is in any doubt.”
Johnson has finally invited the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) to come to London on March 19 to inspect a sample, as obligated by treaty. Murray’s sources say that London is lobbying for the OPCW to adopt London’s dodgy “of a type developed by Russia” line.
Then, today, on a Sunday, the FCO made a new intelligence discovery in the case, and issued a long statement, the gist of which reads,
“The Foreign Secretary revealed this morning that we have information indicating that within the last decade, Russia has investigated ways of delivering nerve agents likely for assassination. And part of this program has involved producing and stockpiling quantities of novichok. This is a violation of the Chemical Weapons Convention [CWC].”
An astonishing claim, but also very carefully worded. And does “Russia” even really mean Russia, for example? Maybe it does, but the same FCO statement also includes this paragraph:
“Russia is the official successor state to the U.S.S.R. As such, Russia legally took responsibility for ensuring the CWC applies to all former Soviet Chemical Weapons stocks and facilities.”
The Novichok program was allegedly pursued in then-Soviet Uzbekistan, where U.S. specialists later closed down and cleaned up the formerly Soviet labs.
