John Chuckman
COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN THE INDEPENDENT
“Salisbury attack: Authorities deny giving mixed messages after official says ‘toxic’ nerve agent still present
“’City is safe for residents and visitors,’ officials say amid preparations for decontamination”
Of course, Salisbury is safe.
It was never in danger from this fraud.
Had there been any genuine nerve agent discovered in a public place, the entire area would have been promptly evacuated and cordoned off.
This was done in a British town in recent memory over an anthrax scare.
Well, anthrax is nasty, but real nerve agents are 100% fatal.
And, please, where did the antidote to this supposed nerve agent come from? How was it administered? It absolutely must be administered within minutes to those exposed. Yet again, how was the nerve agent identified without a reference sample in Britain? That’s the way labs work. So, if the material existed in Britain, and who knows where else, why is Russia the certain suspect?
The fact that the Skripals survived tells us either they were not exposed to nerve agent or that they were quickly given an antidote, but the time-line of events and the place where the Skripals were found a considerable time after supposed exposure does not fit in with that last possibility at all.
I can accept anything, so long as we’re talking about facts, not government’s unsupported claims. You know those high-power public relations agencies which are sometimes called upon by corporations when there is a disaster, such as the Tylenol poisonings of the 1980s. Well, one of their first pieces of advice to senior executives always is to own up to what has happened. Credibility with, and future trust by, the public is built on freely offering truth from the start.
It is no different for the affairs of governments. The approach of Theresa May and Boris Johnson has been precisely the opposite.
My God, on a very small scale, this whole Skripal Affair reminds me of the blind insistence by official America that Oswald – a man with past intelligence associations, a poor shot in the Marines, someone who expressed admiration for the President, a man associated with a cheap rifle from hell – killed John Kennedy. And, of course, all that always ignores the numerous bits of powerful evidence we have for shots from the front, “the grassy knoll.”
American officials even built a legend around Oswald’s supposed communism – of course, this was at a time in America when being labelled a communist was received the same way as being labelled a witch in 1600. If you study even a few facts of his life, the claim is preposterous. He did do some posing as a communist sympathizer while working with right-wing groups, but it was a pretty obvious pose, perhaps part of his role as a paid FBI informant (we even have his FBI informant number and there was an uncashed FBI voucher in his belongings). But, no, America officially asserts always that he was a communist, and a communist who hated something about America and President Kennedy.
Thinking people will recognize in that, the pattern of the old witch trials. It’s an ancient gimmick, but it still works on many human minds, at times, quite powerfully. The boys at MI6 and CIA understand that perfectly.
All of this is ridiculous, but it does show what governments can achieve if they lie and manipulate in a determined way and stick to the same implausible story over and over.
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Response to another comment, addressing events around Dr Kelly’s death in Britain near the invasion of Iraq:
Well said, and it is virtually certain Kelly was killed.
Perhaps not by British agents but others who feared that this international weapons expert had become a “loose cannon”
Kelly knew where a lot of “bodies” were buried, including the destination of the former Nationalist South Africa’s nuclear fissile material (they had at least half-a-dozen nuclear warheads at the time of the apartheid government’s collapse).
Kelly’s public comments about claims of Tony Blair’s government concerning Iraq’s weapons had made him a threat for disclosure, at the very least, to the recipient of that South African fissile material. At least, that’s my best guess. Of course, perhaps equally, a party who was desperate not to see the Iraq invasion derailed through expert testimony about what was really going on, had strong motives for killing him. It does just happen that there was a party matching both those criteria.
Again, in the Kelly case, there were all kinds of bits of evidence which render the verdict of suicide extremely unlikely.
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