British-Inspired War against Xi and Trump
April 6, 2020 (EIRNS)—An over-the-top article in the London Mail on Sunday pointed to a source, perhaps a prime source, of the anti-China conniptions to be seen on Fox, Drudge, Daily Beast, Breitbart, etc. every day. That source is a British “charity,” started by all the neo-cons who brought you the Iraq wars and all the regime change “endless war” of the past 30 years.
“China Owes Us £351 Billion: Britain Should Pursue Beijing through the International Courts for Coronavirus Compensation, Major Study Claims as 15 Top Tories Urge ‘Reset’ in U.K. Relations with Country”—that’s the Mail on Sunday headline, not the article—bases itself on London’s major drummer for confrontation of every kind with China. This “major study,” is by the Henry Jackson Society, which boasts that it extensively penetrates both Mike Pompeo’s State Department and the Pentagon.
The 44-page study, “Coronavirus Compensation? Assessing Chinas Potential Culpability and Avenues of Legal Response,” which the Henry Jackson Society (HJS) released on April 6 appears to be no deeper than to take the entire sum which G7 countries have spent fighting the coronavirus pandemic—which it says is £3.2 trillion or $4 trillion—and claim that China owes it all. £351 billion is simply the U.K.’s “share” in this intended legal warfare suit, as it says in its executive summary: “In order to preserve the rules-based international system and to protect taxpayers from punitive liabilities, the world should seek to take legal action against the P.R.C. for the breaches of international law and their consequences.”
The listed “eminent individuals” who are “Signatories to the Statement of Principles” of HJS include former MI6 head Sir Richard Dearlove, originator of “Russiagate” and of the original 2002-2003 “dodgy dossier” then Prime Minister Tony Blair used to get George W. Bush to invade Iraq. HJS “International Patrons” include the U.S. neo-con warriors of the 1990s: Richard Perle; never-Trumper William Kristol; Carl Gershman, president of the National Endowment for Democracy; Robert Kagan, Brookings Institution, married to Victoria Nuland; former CIA Director James Woolsey, and others.
Its claim is that China was obligated by treaties to tell the world it had a new animal-based virus in December 2019—when the national leadership in Beijing was clearly unaware that was the case. Xi Jinping’s government, in fact, in early January sacked both Hubei Province and Wuhan city officials in order to end the bureaucratic obstruction by some of them and establish complete transparency about the disease. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Dr. Anthony Fauci has testified to this establishment of transparency; CIDRAP’s Professor Michael Osterholm said on April 2 that his University of Minnesota team had enough data from open sources to know by the first week of January, what was happening in Wuhan.
A similar threatening folly appeared in an article in the New York Post April 5, which claims that China “cornered the market” on medical supplies in January and February by importing large volumes, and making 3M corporation’s China division sell all its production to China. This article claims that President Donald Trump is thinking of suing China over this; but it quotes only the anti-China crusader Steven Bannon—who calls this a “biological Chernobyl”; Michael Wessell of the professionally anti-China “U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission”; and Christian Whiton, “a former senior diplomacy and trade adviser to the George W. Bush and Trump administrations.” 3M is quoted distancing itself from this idea and saying it is exporting 9 million N95 masks from China to the United States right now, but this is far down in the article.
The counter-accusations, that President Trump himself is responsible personally for the spread of disease in the United States, is equally wild. Consider: The Washington Post—supposed to be a national “flagship” publication—devoted 14 pages of its Sunday, April 5, first section to articles blaming Trump for all U.S. COVID-19 cases and deaths. Multiple reporters at the President’s daily task force conferences, led by CNN’s Jim Acosta, have relentlessly dug the same ditch.