It Wasn’t Russia

The British Government’s facile narrative over Salisbury finally fell apart in April last year. Gary Aitkenhead, Chief Executive of the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory at Porton Down, pulled the rug from under Theresa May and Boris Johnson by publicly confirming that (DSTL) could not identify the Novichok as having come from Russia. Turned out that the British Government’s allegation was featuring on comedy programs like the BBC’s Have I Got News For You, and rightly so.

It didn’t stop there. The Skripals have largely recovered. For some reason it would appear that they have been denied access to cell-phones. At any rate Yulia Skripal had to borrow a phone to ring her cousin Viktoria in Moscow. Russian TV then broadcast the call.

Some lunatic then briefed the British media that the call was faked. It clearly wasn’t, although Sky News wouldn’t accept that until they’d paid an expert to examine the broadcast. Pity they didn’t employ the same level of fact-checking for the original allegation!

The British Government, already coming under fire from even compliant pro-May/Heywood regime media outlets like Sky News and the BBC for its secretiveness, then decided to go from sleazy to extra-sleazy by denying Viktoria Skripal a tourist visa.

Young Viktoria’s cousin, a Russian national, survives a murder attempt by a nerve agent in England. She’s on the mend, feeling lonely, is up to receiving visitors and her much-loved cousin is denied a visa?
People can start to question whether the Cabinet Office/British Government (in practice the latter is a mouthpiece for the former) have decided to kidnap Yulia Skripal. Russia has been denied consular access, in breach of the Vienna Convention, using the old standby of dictatorships everywhere – ‘she doesn’t want to see her embassy’.

The media was denied access to her as well, although she was clearly up to talking and by the time she had made almost a complete recovery. Her family have been denied the right to see her.

As reported on Freenations blood samples were extracted from the Skripals without their consentor that of their next of kin. In order to get round British law an application was made to a High Court judge, Mr Justice Williams, who was materially misled. His Lordship was told that it was impracticable to contact the next of kin in Russia, which was nonsense, and that the Skripals had a 1% chance of survival. That estimate was afterwards demonstrated unduly pessimistic, thank goodness.

Did Porton Down water down the Novichok?

Gary Aitkenhead’s statement, aside from pulling the rug from under Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Cabinet Secretary Sir Jeremy Heyood and National Security Adviser Sir Mark Sedwill, raises an intriguing possibility. Did Porton Down deliberately mix the Novichok precursors in the wrong proportion?

Porton Down don’t let their limited stockpile of Novichok go walkies on a regular basis. In fact they take great care of their nerve agents. Gavin Williamson is all in favor of economies in the defense budget but you can’t ring Porton Down, give your Mastercard number, expiry date and the last three digits of your security code, order some Novichok and tell them that DPD will be around in the morning to pick it up.

Goodness knows what story the GO2 boys spun Porton Down, but it can’t have been all that convincing. Other than killing people there aren’t a lot of uses for Novichok. GO2 didn’t tell Porton Down that they were GO2, in other words German agents, or that they wanted the Novichok to knock off an ex-Russian agent living in Salisbury with his daughter and shut down their nearest Sainsburys into the bargain.

Like Russia, the British don’t really go in for chemical and biological weapons. Gassing people is essentially a German thing. British stockpiles are mainly for deterrent value and developing antidotes. It probably never was a British war plan which involved deploying Novichok on a large scale.

Porton Down had got the ratio wrong. Probably they pulled a flanker on GO2 by deliberately supplying a non-lethal sample. It’s unlikely that GO2 tested it before trying to murder the Skripals.
 
It’s not that easy to test – it’s not like World War II, when the Abwehr had plenty of unfortunate human subjects to test WMDs on at Dachau concentration camp. Civil liberties have taken a knock in Britain in recent years, thanks to GO2 and the Cabinet Office, but they haven’t yet been able to set up concentration camps in Wiltshire.

The 14 questions

The Russian Government has posed 14 questions to HMG, set out by Sputnik. They are all perfectly sensible questions, which HMG have been unable to answer. Moscow wants to know about the French role in the investigation, for example, and wants details on the treatment, in particular the antidote, given to the Skripals, each of whom is a Russian national.

The British public would like to know the answers as well. It might not be a specific antidote to Novichok, as opposed to generic treatments such as atropine, pralidoxime and diazepam, but the Russian government is entitled to know the treatment plan. This applies with less force to Col Skripal, as they let him go, but Yulia Skripal is not only a Russian citizen, she is domiciled in Russia.

The British Government’s derisive treatment of the Russian Government, on the basis that Russia is guilty, rather begs the question. The police investigation, pointless though it is, with respect (like most Met investigations). It’s not as though suspicious looking characters with snow on their boots have been spotted lurking around Salisbury. The Met have yet to name a single Russian suspect.

The Met were following the usual procedure when the Cabinet Office needed the waters muddied. They were running round interviewing anyone who was in or near Sainsburys that day, or knew Col Skripal, and viewing lots of CCTV footage, none of which covers Col Skripal’s house, where the actual attack took place.

It was all a bit Keystone cops, reminiscent of the Scotland Yard’s search for the ‘Phantom Raspberry Blower of Old London Town’, as featured in Spike Milligan’s hilarious serial in the 1976 series of the BBC’s The Two Ronnies. If the Met actually managed to find the GO2 boys responsible, assuming they haven’t been knocked off by their own side already, they’d doubtless get a call from the Cabinet Office telling them to let them go, or have some Novichok powder put on their front entrance.

yogaesoteric

January 16, 2019