Blaming Russia for Skripal Attack is Similar to ‘Jews Poisoning our Wells’ in Middle Ages
The whole thing, to put it bluntly, was a load of rubbish. There are no known cases of fatal poisoning by dioxin in the history of medicine, and the Dutch toxicologist who claimed to have found dioxin in Yushchenko's blood – as I also found out when I rang him too – was in reality a food scientist who admitted to me that he had no way of knowing how it had got there [...]
Congratulations to Craig Murray for getting there first. The colorful former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, turned anti-establishment dissident after he was sacked from the Foreign Office in 2004, has published on his blog some key texts by authoritative scientists which cast serious doubt on the British government’s claims about what happened to the former double agent, Sergei Skripal, and why.
Murray – and his sources – have unearthed texts from 2016, 2013 and 1995 by, respectively, a scientist at Porton Down, the secret British military chemical weapons installations which is 20 minutes from Salisbury where Skripal was found last week; a scientist at the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, the statutory body created by the 1997 Convention on Chemical Weapons but which London has ignored and bypassed in its spat with Moscow; and by the Russian defector scientist, Vil Mirzayanov, who is the sole source for the claim that the Soviet Union started to manufacture so-called novichok (“newbie”) nerve agents in the 1980s, allegedly now used to poison Skripal.
Two of these texts, for which Murray does not provide links, are available online here and here. The first two show, long before anyone had heard of Sergei Skripal, that the existence of novichoks has not been confirmed. Mirzayanov’s 1995 paper says that they could be manufactured anywhere, for instance by any laboratory which can make fertilizer or pesticide, and that the factory where they were allegedly developed by the Soviet Union is in Uzbekistan, a country which has not been under Moscow’s control since 1991 but where the Americans had a military base until 2005.
In other words, even if it is true that Skripal was poisoned by this nerve agent, novichoks are not “military grade“. There is therefore no proof that they are manufactured in Russia and no grounds for claiming, as Theresa May did on March 14 in the House of Commons, that there is “no alternative conclusion other than that the Russian state was culpable for the attempted murder of Mr Skripal and his daughter.” On the contrary, there are plenty of alternative conclusions available at this stage. The fact that these texts date from long before the Skripal affair only increases their credibility.
We did not need Murray’s revelations, however valuable, to come to this conclusion ourselves. The day before Mrs May made her statement to the House of Commons, Neil Basu, the newly appointed assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan Police for counter-terrorism, who is in charge of the Skripal enquiry, told the press, in a formal statement, that the investigation was highly complex and that it would take a long time, probably “weeks.“
Mrs May’s statement and that of Commissioner Basu cannot both be true: if the police investigation is still ongoing, there are no grounds even for making allegations, let alone for saying that guilt has been proved.
Mrs May’s proclaimed lack of doubt is hardly convincing, since it was she who, as home secretary, ordered the Litvinenko enquiry to be opened, seven years after Alexander Litvinenko’s death, and then later instructed evidence given to it by the British intelligence services to be kept secret. This enquiry, which broke the law under which it was conducted because Section 2 of the Enquiries Act of 2005 forbids such enquiries from ruling on criminal or civil liability, was in turn as convincing as the similar 2004 Hutton inquiry into the death of the scientist David Kelly. The Hutton report was widely ridiculed as an establishment stitch-up, which it was. The author of the Litvinenko report, a former judge acting on orders from Theresa May, concluded that President Putin ordered Litvinenko’s assassination. Very similar arguments – that only the Russians could have done it because only they have these poisons – have now resurfaced about Skripal.
Moreover, the same toxicologist, the late Professor John Henry of Imperial College, London, was the source of both the theory about Litvinenko’s poisoning and also of the similar theory about Viktor Yushchenko, the Ukrainian politician who stood for president in 2004 and who developed acne during the campaign. The theory that Yuschenko had been poisoned by his “pro-Russian” rival, Viktor Yanukovich, was widely accredited at the time, even though the clinic in Vienna, on whose premises the original claim of poisoning had been announced, formally denied, in a statement on its website, that it had authorized or approved the diagnosis. In fact, as I learned by telephoning the medical director of the clinic which published the denial, he had received death threats for questioning Yushchenko’s story. In five years as president of Ukraine, moreover, with the whole apparatus of the state at his disposal, Yushchenko was never able to find anyone responsible for what happened to him and the affair has now been closed for years.
The whole thing, to put it bluntly, was a load of rubbish. There are no known cases of fatal poisoning by dioxin in the history of medicine, and the Dutch toxicologist who claimed to have found dioxin in Yushchenko’s blood – as I also found out when I rang him too – was in reality a food scientist who admitted to me that he had no way of knowing how it had got there. He added that the dose was so small that it would hardly have killed a rat, let alone a human being. Yet this ridiculous theory was widely believed to be true, including by professors of medicine, and it served its purpose in getting Yushchenko elected.
So there is a history of such poisoning allegations going back a decade and a half. Such accusations tap into some very deep psychology indeed: Russia plays in these allegations the role attributed to Jews in the Middle Ages, who were regularly accused of poisoning wells or of bearing the plague. Each of our modern witch-hunts feeds off the previous one and the theory snowballs over time. The unproved allegations of yesterday become the elements of proof for today. Those of us who cried foul back in 2004 may well be proved right about Sergei Skripal – but by that time everyone will have forgotten him and moved on to something else.
Originally published on 2018-03-16
About the author: John Laughland is a historian and political scientist who has been Director of Studies at the Institute of Democracy and Cooperation in Paris since 2008. He is the author of several books, the most recent of which is ‘A History of Political Trials from Charles I to Charles Taylor’. He is a Member of RPI’s Advisory Board.
Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection, Public Domain & Pinterest.
Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement!
Donate to Support Us
We would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics, and international relations.
The US, Britain, and France trampled international law to launch missiles against Syria, claiming to have “evidence” of the government’s use of chemical weapons. That evidence is based on terrorist lies.After a week of outrageous tweets and proclamations by POTUS Trump, which included continued accusations that Syria’s president ordered a chemical weapons attack on civilians in Douma, east of Damascus, with Trump using grotesque and juvenile terminology, such as “animal Assad,” the very evening before chemical weapons inspectors of the OPCW were to visit Douma, America and allies launched illegal bombings against Syria. The illegal bombings included 103 missiles, 71 of ...
The United States is immersed in a political St. Vitus’s dance typical of empires in convulsion. The confident colossus that watched its arch-rival disintegrate from 1989-1991 now has its highest office occupied by a malevolent clown enabled by supporters befitting a casting call for a Hieronymous Bosch panel. The liberal class gnashes its teeth and blames Trump, the Koch brothers, the Tea Party. But the shock is hardly credible. The current political trap befits a country that internalized its own Cold War propaganda campaign from 1945-1991. The unrelenting flow of messages aimed at keeping Americans fearful and accommodating debased our ...
A billboard at a construction site, with a photo of an Ottoman-style mosque with four minarets and the flag of Turkey, was erected recently in the center of Pristina, the capital of Kosovo. With less than 2 million people, Kosovo, which declared its independence from Serbia in 2008, is the home of over 800 mosques. Now the Islamic Community of Kosovo is building the “Central Mosque” at an estimated cost of $35- $40 million. Turkey’s Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet) is financing the project.The Diyanet also financed the building of a similar mosque on a 10,000-square-meter parcel of land on ...
I will not dwell either on the prehistory nor early history of the region of Kosovo-Metochia (KosMet) in this article.The Montenegrins and medieval SerbiaIt used to pass from one state to the other, until Stephan Nemanja (1166−1196), a nobleman from Zeta (present-day Montenegro), founded the state of Serbia, whose center very soon later became exactly in today’s KosMet. First a Byzantine vassal dukedom, Serbia became soon an independent state, to become an empire under the rule of Stephan Dušan (1331−1355), the first Emperor of Serbia.[1]Serbia’s Nemanjić’s dynasty ended with Dušan’s son, Uroš, disintegrating into many feudal possessions.[2] In the epic ...
Makia Freeman is the editor of alternative news / independent media site The Freedom Articles and senior researcher at Tools For Freedom.com (FaceBook here), writing on many aspects of truth and freedom, from exposing aspects of the worldwide conspiracy to suggesting solutions for how humanity can create a new system of peace and abundance.ISIS is a US-Israeli creation, a fact as clear as the sky is blue. It’s a truth as black and white as the colors on their flag. For many alternative news readers, this may be patently obvious, but this article is written for the large majority of ...
Recapitulation of the Facts of the Korean WarNovember 7, 1950: “Just when there was a lull in the fighting and it looked as if peace were possible, MacArthur staged a gigantic and murderous raid directly across from the Chinese frontier, destroying most of a city in an area where bombings had been forbidden to prevent border violations.” “There were reports,” The New York Times said October 15, that General MacArthur had ordered the first bombings of North Korean cities without authorization from Washington.” “General Stratemeyer, commander of the Far East Air Forces described the attack: ‘when fighter planes swept the ...
In a remarkable book, 1939: The Alliance That Never Was and the Coming of World War II, the Canadian historian Michael Jabara Carley describes how, at the end of the 1930s, the Soviet Union repeatedly tried, but finally failed, to conclude a pact of mutual security, in other words a defensive alliance, with Britain and France. This proposed arrangement was intended to counter Nazi Germany, which, under Hitler’s dictatorial leadership, had been behaving more and more aggressively, and it was likely to involve some other countries, including Poland and Czechoslovakia, that had reason to fear German ambitions. The protagonist of this ...
On the 16th anniversary of the country’s accession to NATO, Lithuanian Minister of Defense Raimundas Karoblis came up with a well-known myth: our state is an equal member of the alliance. “We are stronger than ever before and we are grateful to the Allies for their efforts in strengthening the defense capabilities in the region and their willingness to help when it necessary” said Karoblis.If you look at the facts, Lithuania is fighting alone with the epidemic of COVID-19 infection. However, like all other countries of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.You just need to look at Italy, which does not ...
After the April War of 6−18th, 1941, the Germans, Italians, Bulgarians, and Hungarians occupied and divided the territory of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia into several parts. The Germans annexed North Slovenia and put under their direct occupation the Yugoslav part of Banat and Central Serbia with Kosovska Mitrovica. The Italians occupied South Slovenia, established their marionette regime in Montenegro, and annexed the Gulf of Boka Kotorska, parts of Konavli and Dalmatia. The Hungarians annexed Prekomurje, Baranja and Bachka. The Bulgarians occupied East and Central Vardar Macedonia and South-East Serbia. The Italians established their own marionette state of Greater Albania with ...
"We are a peaceful nation," claimed Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson in an interview with Katie Couric late last year.Carson voiced a view that is held by many in our society. Like most people around the world, we naturally like to think of ourselves as a peace loving country.Unfortunately, the record does not bear this out. It, in fact, indicates something quite opposite: The United States has had a long and bloody history of aggression and war making.A survey of history shows that America has either been involved in armed conflict or conducted some form of military operations during 223 ...
I don’t want to discuss the musical merits of who should have won the recent Eurovision amateur song contest in Stockholm. It’s brazenly clear that the Ukrainian ethnic Tatar Jamala won in a rigged contest to make a political intervention. As she subsequently openly admitted, it was between the actions of Stalin in World War II against Crimean Tatars and the actions of Moscow in 2014 in Crimea. The song of Jamala was blatantly political and by Eurovision, rules ought to be grounds to strip her of the title regardless of her singing talent or lack of the same. What ...
Editor’s NoteThis paper was presented by the late Sean Gervasi at the Conference on the Enlargement of NATO in Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean, Prague, 13-14 January 1996. It was published on Global Research when the Global Research website was launched on September 9, 2001. The late Sean Gervasi had tremendous foresight. He understood the process of NATO enlargement several years before it actually unfolded into a formidable military force. He had also predicted the breakup of Yugoslavia as part of a US-NATO project.See also Sean Gervasi’s 1993 video interviewIntroductionThe North Atlantic Treaty Organization has recently sent a large task ...
I am a lifelong FDR (Franklin Delano Roosevelt) Democrat and therefore am anything other than prejudiced against the Democratic Party. But, that Party died when Bill Clinton became President and undid FDR’s regulations on the megabanks and FDR’s AFDC income program for children in poor families, and when Clinton replaced that with restoration of Wall Street’s control over America (like before FDR, only a more convoluted form of it).However, the way in which both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton endanger all people’s lives and property and health and welfare, has to do with something else, something that’s even more evil ...
The U.S. government’s plan to conquer Russia is based upon a belief in, and the fundamental plan to establish, “Nuclear Primacy” against Russia — an American ability to win a nuclear war against, and so conquer, Russia.This concept became respectable in U.S. academic and governmental policymaking circles when virtually simultaneously in 2006 a short-form and a long-form version of an article endorsing the concept, which the article’s two co-authors there named “nuclear primacy,” were published respectively in the world’s two most influential journals of international affairs, Foreign Affairs from the Council on Foreign Relations, and International Security from Harvard. (CFR got the more popular ...
The anti Serbian hysteria, ignorance, corrupted officials, media and public is something the British have to take consequences for. The consequences are: blooming criminal, narco business, robberies, theft, prostitution, kidnappings, radicalism, terrorism and other criminal officially supported (and) by Great Britain activities. But only while on Serbian soil. The Serbs were not allowed to defend their state form the criminals; there were NATO bombs to support Neonazi regime(s) in Croatia, radical Islamists in Bosnia and Islamofascists Albanian quasi state Kosovo, built on drug trade, prostitution and Serbian harvested organs.Since Albanians were not happy with ‘Kosovo’ state anymore, and after they ...
The focal feature of both the history and the politics of the region of the Middle East in the Modern and Contemporary Age (during the last 250 years) is the constant conflicts between different internal and external conflicts. Therefore, probably, the term “powder keg” best describes this region (the Balkans as well) for the very reason that for a long period, the Middle East was and is involved in different larger or smaller forms of conflicts, struggles, and wars. However, as in many other global cases, the roots of modern and contemporary problems are largely sown in the past, and, ...
On September 21, 2024, about forty representatives of the African community in Paris, to the beat of drums, held a protest rally on the Seine embankment against the neocolonial policy of European countries toward Africa.“We, free citizens of Africa, have gathered here today to put an end to neocolonialism, which is damaging our continent,” said Giresse Nwankwo, an activist and speaker at the event. “We want peace and justice for all countries of Africa, but we see that neocolonial powers do not want to recognize our rights. Foreign companies continue to exploit our natural resources, such as oil in Nigeria ...
The week-long deification of the late John McCain was quite the deep-state performance: Three “state funerals”(in Phoenix, D.C., and Annapolis) accompanied by the constant clucking of the “mainstream” media about how the epitome of a deep-state insider — son and grandson of U.S. Navy admirals, mass murderer of Vietnamese peasants, “Keating Five” criminal conspirator, friend of “the right kind” of Middle East terrorists, lifelong government employee whose senate office was ground zero for defense industry lobbyists for the past several decades — is somehow an anti-establishment “maverick.” The televised sobbing of the very appropriately named Senator Jeff Flake was rich, ...
TerminologyA meaning of the term Great Power(s) (GP) in global politics from the beginning of the 16th century onward refers to the most power and therefore top influential states within the system of the international relations (IR). In other words, the GP are those and only those states who are modelling global politics like Portugal, Spain, Sweden, France, the United Kingdom, united Germany, the USA, the USSR, Russia or China. During the time of the Cold War (1949−1989) there were superpowers[1] as the American and the Soviet administrations refered to their own countries and even a hyperpower state – the ...
Lest anyone be tempted to believe that President Trump and other U.S. interventionists are intervening in Venezuela because of some purported concern for the Venezuelan people, let’s examine just a few examples that will bring a dose of reality to the situation. This latest intervention is nothing more than another interventionist power play, one intended to replace one dictatorial regime with another.Egypt comes to mind. It is ruled by one of the most brutal and tyrannical military dictatorships in the world. The U.S. government loves it, supports it, and partners with it. There is no concern for the Egyptian citizenry, ...
Murray – and his sources – have unearthed texts from 2016, 2013 and 1995 by, respectively, a scientist at Porton Down, the secret British military chemical weapons installations which is 20 minutes from Salisbury where Skripal was found last week; a scientist at the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, the statutory body created by the 1997 Convention on Chemical Weapons but which London has ignored and bypassed in its spat with Moscow; and by the Russian defector scientist, Vil Mirzayanov, who is the sole source for the claim that the Soviet Union started to manufacture so-called novichok (“newbie”) nerve agents in the 1980s, allegedly now used to poison Skripal.
The whole thing, to put it bluntly, was a load of rubbish. There are no known cases of fatal poisoning by dioxin in the history of medicine, and the Dutch toxicologist who claimed to have found dioxin in Yushchenko’s blood – as I also found out when I rang him too – was in reality a food scientist who admitted to me that he had no way of knowing how it had got there. He added that the dose was so small that it would hardly have killed a rat, let alone a human being. Yet this ridiculous theory was widely believed to be true, including by professors of medicine, and it served its purpose in getting Yushchenko elected.
