Skripal – The Stupid Propaganda The State Can’t Let Go

Iain Davis
In This Together

The alleged Skripal chemical weapons attack is the UK state propaganda narrative it refuses to let go. Today (16/08/2019) the unquestioning parrot media are reporting that an unnamed police officer was poisoned with the deadly nerve agent Novichok during the immediate Skripal poisoning response. 

Eighteen months after the incident, they are still flogging this dead horse.

The whole fantasy has largely been propagated by the MSM. So I am going to cite them here, just to illustrate the numerous contradiction in their ludicrous yarn.

If you want to understand my take on this silliness then, before reading the rest, get a coffee, sit back and watch this video. [...]

According to the Metropolitan Police Counter Terrorism Policing network (CTP) scientists from the the Defence Science & Technology Laboratory (Dstl) at Porton down have confirmed “that traces of Novichok were in the blood sample” of the officer concerned.

We need to be very clear about what Novichok (the family of nerve toxins) is supposed to be. It is said to be a deadly military grade nerve agent. The bottle supposedly used to deliver the Novichok was found a couple of months after the attack. The lead investigator, Deputy Assistant Commissioner Dean Hayden, stated that it contained enough of the lethal nerve agent to potentially kill thousands of people.

He was right to be terrified, Novichok was said to be at least 5 times to 10 times more deadly than VX. It is unimaginably lethal, real nightmare stuff. Just 10mg of VX is enough to kill and Novichok is much worse. It is so deadly that Professor Alastair Hay (OBE,) a UK Government chemical warfare advisor, said just 50 micro-grams, that’s 50 millionths of a gram or 0.00005 g, is a lethal dose. To put this into perspective, that’s about a tenth of the size of a grain of sand.

Furthermore, Gary Aitkenhead, the chief executive of Dstl, reported that there is no known antidote to Novichok. The nerve agent was specifically designed to make possible oxim antidotes useless. Negating the third step in the three step process required if you ever hope to save anybody exposed to Novichok.

Exposure to Novichok is fatal unless aggressively managed. So the Skripal’s recovery was truly unbelievable because no one knew what they had been poisoned with a nerve agent for nearly two days and they were treated for a suspected Fentanyl overdose.

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Oops! NY Times Accidentally Unravels UK Government's Official Skripal Fairy Tale

Kit Klarenberg
Sputnik via sott.net

While London almost immediately blamed Moscow for being behind the poisoning of ex-Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter in the UK city of Salisbury in March 2018, Russia has strongly rejected its involvement, stressing it's been denied access both to the investigation into the incident and the Russian nationals affected.

On 16th April, the New York Times published a glowing profile of Gina Haspel, who in May 2018 became the seventh director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

The article referred to Haspel - the former head of a CIA 'black site' in Thailand at which an indeterminate number of suspected terrorists were viciously tortured - as an "adept tactician" blessed with "good listening, empathy and an ability to connect", and discussed the difficulties the intelligence chief faced in ensuring "her voice is heard at the White House", due to the intransigence of President Donald Trump and a White House that allegedly treats national security professionals "with deep skepticism".

So far, so obsequious - but buried in the hagiography is a fascinating disclosure. In a section titled 'The keys to talking to Trump? Realism and emotion', authors Julian E. Barnes and Adam Goldman document how Haspel "solidified her reputation" as one of the "most skilled briefers" of the President.

Following the 4^th March 2018 poisoning of former spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury, UK, top national security officials are said to have gathered inside the White House to discuss with Trump how Washington should respond - at the time, Whitehall was preparing to expel dozens of Russian diplomats from the UK, and aggressively pushing various key international allies to follow suit. 

Trump was said to have initially dismissed the significance of the poisoning, characterising it as "legitimate spy games, distasteful but within the bounds of espionage". However, Haspel lobbied the President to expel 60 Russian diplomats from the US - and persuaded Trump to take the "strong option" by showing him the Skripals "were not the only victims of Russia's attack".

"Ms. Haspel showed pictures the British government had supplied her of young children hospitalized after being sickened by the Novichok nerve agent that poisoned the Skripals. She then showed a photograph of ducks British officials said were inadvertently killed by the sloppy work of the Russian operatives. Ms. Haspel was not the first to use emotional images to appeal to the president, but pairing it with her hard-nosed realism proved effective: Mr. Trump fixated on the pictures of the sickened children and the dead ducks. At the end of the briefing, he embraced the strong option," the article states. 

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