State Dept condemns journalist killings, except ones by Israeli soldiers
RT | May 4, 2018
Speaking on World Press Freedom Day, US State Department spokesperson Heather Nauert preached freedom from oppression for all journalists – unless they are Palestinian and the oppressor is Israel.
Nauert started her Thursday briefing by praising the State Department press pool and urging accountability for the “apparent assassination” of a BBC journalist in Afghanistan on Monday (one of the nine that were killed in that attack). She then profusely condemned the many violations of journalists’ rights across the world. Among the perpetrators, she listed Myanmar, Egypt, Turkey, Tanzania, Cambodia, the Philippines, Malta, Mexico and, of course, China and Russia. All of them were chastised as oppressive governments that repress, detain or outright murder unwanted journalists.
Once Nauert was done with her opening speech (which included congratulating one of the journalists present on her promotion and praising another’s dress choice), she moved on to other topics – but was pulled back on track by the first reporter to ask a question:
“Would you also condemn the recent deaths of journalists, Palestinian journalists in the Gaza Strip?”
Nauert answered that too many journalists die across the world, and the State Department can’t mention them all.
She said that the US, of course, is “always saddened by the loss of life,” but “Israel has a right to defend itself.”
Israel has been defending itself from Palestinian protesters across the border in Gaza for a month now. Within that time, the defensive action, which includes live gunfire, has claimed 45 lives – two of them journalists’ – and caused 6,000 injuries, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. The Israel Defense Force (IDF) says the Gazans were rioting, throwing improvised explosives and trying to break through the border fence.
When pressured further, Nauert claimed no detailed knowledge of any journalists killed or injured by the IDF, and ultimately told the pool reporters to go ask the Israeli government.
Better not Protest Israel’s birthday in America
By Eve Mykytyn | May 4, 2018
One more proof, if one were needed, that protesting Israel in the United States can be a perilous activity. Last Friday, Zionists groups organized a rave in Washington Square Park in NYC to celebrate Israel’s 70th Anniversary. (the rave post dated Israel’s independence day due to permit issues)
Protestors gathered nearby with the goal of reminding Zionists that their rave celebrated “the racism and the apartheid that is Zionism,” as NYU student Sheelan Mirza said.
“The ideology of Zionism is antithetical to Palestinian liberation,” remarked SJP President Khalid Abu Dawa. The protestors chanted, “Displacing lives is ’48, there’s nothing here to celebrate,” referencing the Nakba, the mass expulsion of Palestinians from their land.
A member of Students for Justice in Palestine was arrested after burning an Israeli flag, and another student was arrested when he crossed into the rave as the rave was ending, grabbed the microphone and yelled, “Free Palestine.”
These arrests were met with an unusually harsh response for student protestors, both students were held at a local precinct until 10:30 pm and then jailed overnight in Manhattan criminal court.
The next morning at their arraignments, the students were charged with a variety of harsh and seemingly inapplicable charges. The student arrested for burning the flag was charged with second-degree reckless endangerment (creating a substantial risk of physical injury to another) and resisting arrest. Each charge carries a substantial potential fine and the possibility of a year in jail.
The student who grabbed the microphone was charged with disorderly conduct, robbery in the second degree (a felony with a penalty of up to 15 years in prison) assault in the third degree and criminal mischief in the third degree. SEE for definitions and penalties.
The following video shows the protestor grabbing the microphone and his arrest. While the protestor might have disturbed the rave, this hardly looks like the commission of a serious felony. No one was hurt. Despite their relatively mild actions, both students have court dates in June for very serious charges that can follow them for life.
The Israel celebrants were more sanguine and apparently felt free to instruct the protestors. NYU sophomore and Realize Israel board member Bryan Buch said his organization is open to discussion, but the rave is not the place for it. Buch commented, “When you have a birthday, you don’t go out and you say, ‘Oh, you remember when you did that? You just say congratulations.” Of course, if you are mourning the Nakba, congratulations may not be the correct term for noting successful ethnic cleansing. In fact, Israel’s birthday party seems a uniquely appropriate place to remind Israel’s supporters of the human costs of their celebration.
Realize Israel president Adela Cojab compared the Israeli anniversary to the Fourth of July. “Every single country has their (sic) own nuances, …. but let’s say a Fourth of July barbecue isn’t the place to discuss it.” Just a reminder to Ms Cojab, Israel’s nuances are not yet America’s, nor is its independence day July 4th and even during America’s fourth of July celebrations one is still entitled to criticize America and even burn its flag.
‘Partners in crime’: Israel settlers and soldiers attack Palestinians in West Bank village
MEMO | May 4, 2018
Israeli settlers attacked Palestinians in the West Bank village of ‘Einabus with the assistance of Israeli soldiers, according to a new report by human rights NGO B’Tselem.
On the morning of 6 March, two Palestinians – ‘Ahed Hamad and Yasser Hamad – went to the northern part of the village to pave a road intended to help residents access their farmland.
Shortly after they began work, some 30 Israeli settlers, “some of them masked”, arrived from the direction of the notorious Yitzhar settlement, located some four kilometres away.
“The settlers surrounded the bulldozer and began throwing stones at it, breaking the windshield,” stated B’Tselem. “The two men tried to escape, but some of the settlers pursued them, throwing stones and hitting them, until they managed to escape into the village.”
“The settlers who remained near the bulldozer threw stones and sticks at it and slashed its tyres.”
Some 50 village residents then went to protect their lands, after which “the settlers returned in larger numbers, accompanied by soldiers”.
Settlers and Palestinian residents “threw stones at each other”, while Israeli occupation forces “fired live bullets, rubber-coated metal bullets and teargas” at the Palestinians. Six Palestinians were injured, of whom four were taken to hospital.
According to B’Tselem: “This incident is not unusual: settlers have attacked Palestinians in the presence of soldiers hundreds of times, with the soldiers sometimes – as in the present case – joining in the assault.”
Israel effectively condones this conduct and reaps the benefits: the Palestinian residents, who know they face a possible attack with no protection at any given time, hold back from going to their farmland – to tend the land or graze flocks – and this makes it easier for the state to take over the land.
Israel convicts Palestinian poet of incitement
Press TV – May 4, 2018
An Israeli court has convicted a renowned Arab poet of using her poems to provoke violence against the Tel Aviv regime’s military forces.
Dareen Tatour, who has been under extended house arrest since January 2016, was charged on Thursday in connection with three posts that she made on social media during a wave of attacks on Israeli soldiers which began in 2015.
In the indictment, Israeli prosecutors said they made the decision based on one specific poem — “Resist My People, Resist” — which was posted on Facebook, and three other posts that Tatour made, calling on Palestinian people to rise up to protect the al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem al-Quds.
The poem includes such lines as, “I will not succumb to the ‘peaceful solution,’ Never lower my flags, Until I evict them from my land.”
She also wrote in the poem, “Resist the settler’s robbery, And follow the caravan of martyrs.” This is a reference to Israel’s illegal settlement activities in the occupied Palestinian lands.
The indictment further claimed that the poem’s “content, its exposure and the circumstances of its publication created a real possibility that acts of violence or terrorism will be committed.”
Following her indictment, Israeli newspapers quoted Tatour as saying, “My trial ripped off the masks.”
“The court said I am convicted of terrorism. If that’s my terrorism, I give the world a terrorism of love,” she added.
The case has drawn international attention after Israel initially arrested Tatour in 2015 and then put the 36-year-old poet under house arrest.
Describing her arrest as a violation of freedom of expression for a poet, more than 150 literary figures, including authors Alice Walker and Naomi Klein, have so far called for her immediate release.
Member of Israeli Parliament, Ahmad Tibi, who is with the Joint (Arab) List at the Knesset, also condemned the court’s verdict, saying Tatour has received the conviction only because she was Arab.
“Dareen Tatour was found guilty solely because she is an Arab,” he tweeted. “[Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu, rabbis, and right-wing politicians continue to incite freely solely because they are Jewish.”
The Latest Act in Israel’s Iran Nuclear Disinformation Campaign
By Gareth Porter | Consortium News | May 3, 2018
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s claim in his theatrical 20-minute presentation of an Israeli physical seizure of Iran’s “atomic archive” in Tehran would certainly have been the “great intelligence achievement” he boasted if it had actually happened. But the claim does not hold up under careful scrutiny, and his assertion that Israel now possesses a vast documentary record of a covert Iranian nuclear weapons program is certainly fraudulent.
Netanyahu’s tale of an Israeli intelligence raid right in Tehran that carted off 55,000 paper files and another 55,000 CDs from a “highly secret location” requires that we accept a proposition that is absurd on its face: that Iranian policymakers decided to store their most sensitive military secrets in a small tin-roofed hut with nothing to protect it from heat (thus almost certainly ensuring loss of data on CDs within a few years) and no sign of any security, based on the satellite image shown in the slide show. (As Steve Simon observed in The New York Times the door did not even appear to have a lock on it.)
The laughable explanation suggested by Israeli officials to The Daily Telegraph – that the Iranian government was afraid the files might be found by international inspectors if they remained at “major bases” — merely reveals the utter contempt that Netanyahu has for Western governments and news media. Even if Iran were pursuing nuclear weapons secretly, their files on the subject would be kept at the Ministry of Defense, not at military bases. And of course the alleged but wholly implausible move to an implausible new location came just as Netanyahu needed a dramatic new story to galvanize Trump to resist the European allies’ strong insistence on preserving the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Act (JCPOA) nuclear deal with Iran.
In fact, there is no massive treasure trove of secret files about an Iran “Manhattan Project.” The shelves of black binders and CDs that Netanyahu revealed with such a dramatic flourish date back to 2003 (after which a U.S. National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) said Iran had abandoned any nuclear weapons program) and became nothing more than stage props like the cartoon bomb that Netanyahu used at the United Nations in 2012.
Disinformation Campaign
Netanyahu’s claim about how Israel acquired this “atomic archive” is only the latest manifestation of a long-term disinformation campaign that the Israeli government began to work on in 2002-03. The documents to which Netanyahu referred in the presentation were introduced to the news media and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) beginning in 2005 as coming originally from a secret Iranian nuclear weapons research program. For many years U.S. news media have accepted those documents as authentic. But despite the solid media united front behind that narrative, we now know with certainty that those earlier documents were fabrications and that they were created by Israel’s Mossad.
That evidence of fraud begins with the alleged origins of the entire collection of documents. Senior intelligence officials in the George W. Bush administration had told reporters that the documents came from “a stolen Iranian laptop computer”, as The New York Times reported in November 2005. The Times quoted unnamed intelligence officials as insisting that the documents had not come from an Iranian resistance group, which would cast serious doubt on their reliability.
But it turned that the assurances from those intelligence officials were part of an official dissimulation. The first reliable account of the documents’ path to the United States came only in 2013, when former senior German foreign office official Karsten Voigt, who retired from his long-time position as coordinator of German-North American cooperation, spoke with this writer on the record.
Voigt recalled how senior officials of the German foreign intelligence agency, the Bundesnachtrendeinst or BND, had explained to him in November 2004 that they were familiar with the documents on the alleged Iran nuclear weapons program, because a sometime source—but not an actual intelligence agent—had provided them earlier that year. Furthermore, the BND officials explained that they had viewed the source as “doubtful,” he recalled, because the source had belonged to the Mujahideen-E Khalq, the armed Iranian opposition group that had fought Iran on behalf of Iraq during the eight year war.
BND officials were concerned that the Bush administration had begun citing those documents as evidence against Iran, because of their experience with “Curveball” – the Iraqi engineer in Germany who had told stories of Iraqi mobile bioweapons labs that had turned to be false. As a result of that meeting with BND officials, Voigt had given an interview to The Wall Street Journal in which he had contradicted the assurance of the unnamed U.S. intelligence officials to the Times and warned that the Bush administration should not base its policy on the documents it was beginning to cite as evidence of an Iranian nuclear weapons program, because they had indeed come from “an Iranian dissident group.”
Using the MEK
The Bush administration’s desire to steer press coverage of the supposedly internal Iranian documents away from the MEK is understandable: the truth about the MEK role would immediately lead to Israel, because it was well known, that Israel’s intelligence agency Mossad had used the MEK to make public information that the Israelis did not want attributed to itself – including the precise location of Iran’s Natanz enrichment facility. As Israeli journalists Yossi Melman and Meir Javadanfar observed in their 2007 book on the Iran nuclear program, based on U.S., British and Israeli officials, “Information is ‘filtered’ to the IAEA via Iranian opposition groups, especially the National Resistance Council of Iran.”
Mossad used the MEK repeatedly in the 1990s and the early 2000’s to get the IAEA to inspect any site the Israelis suspected might possibly be nuclear-related, earning their Iranian clients a very poor reputation at the IAEA. No one familiar with the record of the MEK could have believed that it was capable of creating the detailed documents that were passed to the German government. That required an organization with the expertise in nuclear weapons and experience in fabricating documents – both of which Israel’s Mossad had in abundance.
Bush administration officials had highlighted a set of 18 schematic drawings of the Shahab-3 missile’s reentry vehicle or nosecone of the missile in each of which there was a round shape representing a nuclear weapon. Those drawings were described to foreign governments and the International Atomic Energy Agency as 18 different attempts to integrate a nuclear weapon into the Shahab-3.
Netanyahu gave the public its first glimpse of one of those drawings Monday when he pointed to it triumphantly as visually striking evidence of Iranian nuclear perfidy. But that schematic drawing had a fundamental flaw that proved that it and others in the set could not have been genuine: it showed the “dunce cap” shaped reentry vehicle design of the original Shahab-3 missile that had been tested from 1998 to 2000. That was the shape that intelligence analysts outside Iran had assumed in 2002 and 2003 Iran would continue to use in its ballistic missile.
New Nose Cone
It is now well established, however, that Iran had begun redesigning the Shahab-3 missile with a conical reentry vehicle or nosecone as early as 2000 and replaced it with a completely different design that had a “triconic” or “baby bottle” shape. It made it a missile with very different flight capabilities and was ultimately called the Ghadr-1. Michael Elleman, the world’s leading expert on Iranian ballistic missiles, documented the redesign of the missile in his path-breaking 2010 study of Iran’s missile program.
Iran kept its newly-designed missile with the baby bottle reentry vehicle secret from the outside world until its first test in mid-2004. Elleman concluded that Iran was deliberately misleading the rest of the world – and especially the Israelis, who represented the most immediate threat of attack on Iran – to believe that the old model was the missile of the future while already shifting its planning to the new design, which would bring all of Israel within reach for the first time.
The authors of the drawings that Netanyahu displayed on the screen were thus in the dark about the change in the Iranian design. The earliest date of a document on the redesign of the reentry vehicle in the collection obtained by U.S. intelligence was August 28, 2002 – about two years after the actual redesign had begun. That major error indicates unmistakably that the schematic drawings showing a nuclear weapon in a Shahab-3 reentry vehicle – what Netanyahu called “integrated warhead design” were fabrications.
Netanyahu’s slide show highlighted a series of alleged revelations that he said came from the newly acquired “atomic archive” concerning the so-called “Amad Plan” and the continuation of the activities of the Iranian who was said to have led that covert nuclear weapons project. But the single pages of Farsi language documents he flashed on the screen were also clearly from the same cache of documents that we now know came from the MEK-Israeli combination. Those documents were never authenticated, and IAEA Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei, who was skeptical of their authenticity, had insisted that without such authentication, he could not accuse Iran of having a nuclear weapons program.
More Fraud
There are other indications of fraud in that collection of documents as well. A second element of the supposed covert arms program given the name “Amad Plan” was a “process flow chart” of a bench-scale system for converting uranium ore for enrichment. It had the code name “Project 5.13”, according to a briefing by the IAEA Deputy Director Olli Heinonen, and was part of a larger so-called “Project 5”, according to an official IAEA report. Another sub-project under that rubric was “Project 5.15”, which involved ore processing at the Gchine Mine.” Both sub-projects were said to be carried out by a consulting firm named Kimia Maadan.
But documents that Iran later provided to the IAEA proved that, in fact, “Project 5.15” did exist, but was a civilian project of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, not part of a covert nuclear weapons program, and that the decision had been made in August 1999 – two years before the beginning of the alleged “Amad Plan” was said to have begun.
The role of Kimia Maadan in both sub-projects explains why an ore processing project would be included in the supposed secret nuclear weapons program. One of the very few documents included in the cache that could actually be verified as authentic was a letter from Kimia Maadan on another subject, which suggests that the authors of the documents were building the collection around a few documents that could be authenticated.
Netanyahu also lingered over Iran’s denial that it had done any work on “MPI” or (“Multi-Point Initiation”) technology “in hemispheric geometry”. He asserted that “the files” showed Iran had done “extensive work” or “MPI” experiments. He did not elaborate on the point. But Israel did discover the alleged evidence of such experiments in a tin-roofed shack in Tehran. The issue of whether Iran had done such experiments was a central issue in the IAEA’s inquiry after 2008. The agency described it in a September 2008 report, which purported to be about Iran’s “experimentation in connection with symmetrical initiation of a hemispherical high explosive charge suitable for an implosion type nuclear device.”
No Official Seals
The IAEA refused to reveal which member country had provided the document to the IAEA. But former Director-General ElBaradei revealed in his memoirs that Israel had passed a series of documents to the Agency in order to establish the case that Iran had continued its nuclear weapons experiments until “at least 2007.” ElBaradei was referring to convenient timing of the report’s appearance within a few months of the U.S. NIE of November 2007 concluding that Iran had ended its nuclear weapons-related research in 2003.
Netanyahu pointed to a series of documents on the screen as well a number of drawings, photographs and technical figures, and even a grainy old black and white film, as evidence of Iran’s nuclear weapons work. But absolutely nothing about them provides an evidentiary link to the Iranian government. As Tariq Rauf, who was head of the IAEA’s Verification and Security Policy Coordination Office from 2002 to 2012, noted in an e-mail, none of the pages of text on the screen show official seals or marks that would identify them as actual Iranian government documents. The purported Iranian documents given to the IAEA in 2005 similarly lacked such official markings, as an IAEA official conceded to me in 2008.
Netanyahu’s slide show revealed more than just his over-the-top style of persuasion on the subject of Iran. It provided further evidence that the claims that had successfully swayed the U.S. and Israeli allies to join in punishing Iran for having had a nuclear weapons program were based on fabricated documents that originated in the state that had the strongest motive to make that case – Israel.
Gareth Porter is an independent investigative journalist and historian on U.S. national security policy and the recipient of the 2012 Gellhorn Prize for journalism. His most recent book is Manufactured Crisis: the Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare, published in 2014.
Russian athletes exonerated but ignored in the West
By Rick Sterling | RT | May, 2018
A major revelation in the CAS decision is that Richard McLaren, whose reports have formed the basis for banning Russians from the last two Olympics, has qualitatively changed his claim against Russian athletes.
Last year, the Disciplinary Commission of the International Olympic Committee (IOC DC) issued rulings that 44 Russian athletes were guilty of Anti-Doping Rule Violations (ADRVs) at the Sochi 2014 Olympics.
Many of these athletes had been preparing intensely for the upcoming PyeongChang Winter Olympics. Some 39 Russian athletes quickly filed appeals to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), claiming their innocence. The hearings proceeded rapidly.
On February 1, 2018, the CAS announced its decisions: they partially upheld 11 appeals and entirely upheld the appeals of the other 28 Russian athletes. The decision rocked the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA). IOC President Thomas Bach said the decision was “extremely disappointing and surprising.”
A week ago, on April 23, the CAS published the full decisions for the first two of 39 Russian athletes. The documents explain the facts, evidence and reasoning behind the CAS decisions to partially or totally uphold the cases of the Russian athletes. The appeal by Aleksandr Zubkov was partly upheld. Alexander Legkov’s appeal was entirely upheld, his Sochi Olympics medals returned and his records reinstated.
McLaren changes his big accusation
The CAS decision revealed that McLaren made qualitative changes to claims made in his reports, which had formed the basis for the Russian bans. In his second report, McLaren concluded: “Over 1,000 Russian athletes competing in summer, winter and Paralympic sport, can be identified as being involved in or benefiting from manipulations to conceal positive doping tests.”
This claim featured in news headlines around the world. In the UK, The Guardian story headlined: “McLaren report: more than 1,000 Russian athletes involved in doping conspiracy.” The BBC said“Russian doping: McLaren report says more than 1,000 implicated.” The New York Times story ran: “Report Shows Vast Reach of Russian Doping: 1,000 Athletes, 30 Sports.”
The CAS decision on Alexander Legkov reveals that McLaren has changed his “key finding.” As described on page 68, “Prof. McLaren went on to explain that, in this respect, if his investigation obtained evidence that a particular athlete may have benefited from the scheme, then ‘It didn’t mean that they did benefit. It didn’t mean that they committed [an] anti-doping rule violation.'”
Sixteen months ago, international media had headlines stated that over 1,000 Russian athletes benefited from a vast state-run doping conspiracy. Now, McLaren says he did not really mean to say that… he meant that they “may have” benefited. There is a major difference between saying that someone “might have” committed a crime versus saying they did commit a crime. The former is speculative. The latter requires evidence.
The CAS looked at the evidence rather than simply accepting McLaren’s speculations and assertions.
In contrast with IOC President Bach’s statement, David Own at Inside the Games believes the CAS arbitrators are to be congratulated. “They seem to have made every effort, most properly in my view, to follow the evidence that was presented to them, while endeavoring to shut out the overheated geopolitical atmosphere still enveloping any issue pertaining to Vladimir Putin’s Russia.” He says the CAS decisions have helped buttress CAS credibility as an independent, objective and legally fair institution.
No decision on athlete’s due process rights
Unfortunately, the CAS decided to NOT consider “the athlete’s submissions concerning the alleged violations of his due process rights during the proceedings before the IOC DC… the Panel takes the view that no useful purpose would be served by determining whether the overturned findings and sanctions were the product of a procedure that failed to respect the Athlete’s due process rights.” (page 151, Legkov decision)
This is unfortunate, because the violations of due process have been blatant from the start of the accusations and penalization of Russian athletes. For example, the banning of Russian track and field and Paralympic athletes from the Rio Summer Games was based on McLaren’s first report, which did not allow Russians to respond to the accusations. The failure of due process was explained by sports attorney Ron Katz:
“Not even attempting to interview Russian officials is fundamentally unfair… Due process is not an empty phrase. Without it, there cannot be justice.”
The CAS’ “reasoned decision” reveals that the IOC Disciplinary Commission uncritically accepted the claims and assertions of Richard McLaren. In reality, as documented here, McLaren made many unfounded assertions and misrepresented the testimony of his own toolmarks expert. McLaren claimed that the findings were “immutable facts” and “conclusive” where the expert actually said: “These marks on their own should not be considered to be conclusive…” In his report, the expert added explanations for innocent causes which could result in the same type of marks. (Forensic Report EDP0902 at Evidence Disclosure Package)
Continuing the lack of due process, Russian athletes including Alexander Legkov were unfairly excluded from the most recent Winter Olympics held in PyeongChang. They were given very little time to appeal the decision banning them, and when their appeals were supported, they were still banned by the IOC. One could argue that for many of these athletes, “justice delayed is justice denied.” The February Winter Games were the last possible Olympics for some of the athletes.
When McLaren falsely claimed that “Over 1,000 Russian athletes were complicit in doping,” it was front-page news in Western media. Now that Russian athletes are being acquitted of doping violations, and relatively few are found guilty, the Western media is silent.
Czech President’s ‘Novichok bombshell’ undermines London’s credibility in Skripal case
RT | May 4, 2018
The UK’s intelligence services seem to have lost all remaining credibility, after the Czech President’s admission that his country had previously produced a nerve agent similar to the one Britain claims was used against Skripals.
“I think there are problems in and around the English spy agencies, who seem to be quite ready to manufacture evidence, in the case of the Steele dossier, maybe manufacture evidence in the case of the Skripal poisoning. And they are damaging their credibility. It takes a long time to regain credibility if you damage it this severely,” political analyst Charles Ortel told RT.
On Thursday, the Czech Republic’s president Milos Zeman revealed that his country had previously developed and tested an A-230 chemical agent of the Novichok group, similar to the one which, according to London, was Russia’s exclusively and was “highly likely” used by Moscow to poison former double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury on March 4.
The accusations were followed by sanctions against Russia and the expulsion of Russian diplomats from the UK and other countries that backed Britain’s stance. Ortel blamed the media for dangerously exacerbating the crisis without vetting the information coming out of London with due diligence.
“I think it is irresponsible the way supposed main street journalists leap on these stories without really vetting it and then get us into a place where tensions are escalated around the world, including two nuclear-armed powers Russia and the United States, and the third in the UK. This is a dangerous business,” Ortel said.
The claims of Russian involvement have not been backed up by either Britain’s own scientists at the Porton Down laboratories or by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), both of which say it’s not their job to apportion blame or to identify the toxin’s origin, but only the type of substance involved. Russia has also repeatedly denied the allegations and accused the UK of excluding it from the investigation, and of destroying evidence.
“I think it is a very dangerous business to start making accusations as serious as have been made in the case of Skripal, in the case of Steele… that are not actually backed up by hard facts,” the political analyst noted.
Baseless accusations, Ortel believes, could potentially ruin the career of British Prime Minister Theresa May, who, together with Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, led the charge against Moscow. After all, Russia has repeatedly reiterated that a number of countries had the means to produce nerve agents of the Novichok group.
“Lots of countries have made these. There is probably at least a dozen countries that have the capabilities to make these persistent nerve agents. And it does not surprise me that the Czech Republic and many other countries could do this. The Czech Republic is very advanced in their chemical and synthetic chemistry ability. And many nation states could have done this,” chemical weapons expert and Rice University professor James Tour told RT.
“Britain is in a very dangerous place and they kind-of have to stick to their story and it is possible that, by sticking to this story, the May government may ultimately be sacked,” Ortel told RT. “So they are in a place where it will be very difficult for them to admit a mistake after all these weeks and after their strong positions and actions that so many governments took, our own included, the US in reliance mostly on UK analysis.”
Previously, Moscow pointed out that UK authorities themselves admitted that their lab in Porton Down was in possession of the nerve agent that poisoned the Skripals. In fact, many countries have been developing and testing the A-class nerve agents just to have them in their own arsenals or find ways to defend against them, Professor Tour explained.
“Many countries have made it in the past as part of a study of making the nerve agents. And many countries have made nerve agents if you want to study what persistent nerve agent could be like – something that is harder to detect, something that lasts much longer than a typical nerve agent like Sarin, Soman, or GF – then you want to be making these and understanding how they work. Sometimes countries make it just to learn how to defend against it. They might make it to learn how to build an antidote for it.”
See also:
UK, Slovakia, Sweden, Czech Republic among most probable sources of ‘Novichok’ – Moscow
We get impression UK govt is deliberately destroying evidence in Skripal case – Russian Ambassador
Dr Alexander Yakovenko, Ambassador to the UK – RT – May 3, 2018
On 4 March 2018 two Russian citizens Sergei and Yulia Skripal were reportedly poisoned in Salisbury, Wiltshire with the toxic chemical named A-234 under the British classification.
On 12 March Foreign Secretary Johnson summoned me to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and said that Russia was “highly likely” responsible for the attack. He invited us to respond by the next day, whether this had been a direct act by the state or Russia had lost control over this nerve agent.
The incident had international repercussions, including expulsion of 150 Russian diplomats from 28 countries, notwithstanding the fact that the charges were based on assumptions and unverifiable intelligence. The Western countries lost the same number of Moscow-based staff. Meanwhile, the British government provided no evidence either to the public, its allies or Russia. Subsequent events revealed that no proof of Russia’s involvement existed. On 1 May, National Security adviser Sir Mark Sedwill confirmed that (despite a number of previous leaks) no suspect had been identified, a statement that speaks for itself.
Two months have passed since the poisoning and more than a month since Prime Minister May accused Russia of this crime. However, despite our numerous requests, we have not been granted access to the investigation. The FCO and the Metropolitan Police have refrained from contacts.
We have been denied consular access to our citizens in violation of the Vienna Convention on the Consular Relations and the bilateral Consular Convention. We are still unable to verify their whereabouts, health and wishes. Considering all the facts, we now have more reasons to qualify this situation as an abduction of the two Russian nationals. We will continue to seek the truth and demand answers from the British side.
We also get the impression that the British government is deliberately destroying the evidence, classifying all remaining materials and making independent investigation impossible. Sergei Skripal’s pets were incinerated without having been tested for exposure to nerve agents. Then a decontamination of the area was announced, which reportedly included destruction of potentially contaminated objects along with Sergei Skripal’s house, the “Mill” pub and the “Zizzi” restaurant.
The media coverage of the Salisbury poisoning is not as free as it should be. On 8 April it was reported that the National Security Council “had seized control” over the media response to the incident. On 18 April the media regulator Ofcom announced investigations into the RT channel regarding Salisbury. Is it a coincidence that no one has ever seen any photos of the Skripals since the incident, and no attempts have been made by the media to interview them? Hospital privacy and security might be an excuse, but it looks like the Skripals’ privacy is better protected than that of pop stars and even the Royal family.
The UK has also refused to interact with Russia in the OPCW. Instead of using the standard procedures, whereby Britain could have engaged Russia directly or through the OPCW Executive Council, the British government has chosen to cooperate with the OPCW Technical Secretariat under a classified arrangement. On 13 April Russia itself initiated Article IX of the Chemical Weapons Convention procedure to obtain a response to a list of questions to the UK submitted via the OPCW.
Replies received are unsatisfactory and don’t answer our legitimate and reasonable questions and thus don’t help establish the truth. As to the OPCW report, it clearly lacked impartiality as the OPCW-designated laboratories were given only one task, which was to check whether the nerve agent identified by the UK was present in the biomedical samples, and the samples were taken only in the locations designated by the British side.
Meanwhile, the UK is depicted, by the Conservative government, as the “leader” of the Western efforts to “hold Russia to account”. It seems that the Cabinet has no interest in functional bilateral relations, which have reached a new low since the Salisbury poisoning. Russia is again presented as a “cyber threat” and the British public is being prepared for a massive cyber attack against Russia, which would purport to be retaliatory by nature, but in fact would constitute an unprovoked use of force. The Foreign Office has ignored the Russian offer for consultations on cyber-security.
Nevertheless, every day the Embassy receives letters from the British public with regrets over the current official policy towards Russia. People fail to understand how it is possible to blame Russia without any proof or evidence being presented to the international community. This contradicts the British tradition of open and fair work of judiciary. Many believe that this policy is rooted in the anti-Russian sentiment within the current Conservative government.
The Embassy has published a report “Salisbury: a classified case”, which summarizes the sequence of events and Britain’s and Russia’s positions. I invite the British side to give it a thorough consideration. The list of questions to the British government is constantly growing. What we demand in the first place is transparency.
Dr Alexander Yakovenko, Russian Ambassador to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Deputy foreign minister (2005-2011). Follow him on Twitter @Amb_Yakovenko.