In October 2018, Senior Adjunct Fellow of the Federation of American Scientists and former safeguards inspector with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Thomas Shea, unveiled his book Verifying Nuclear Disarmament at the Vienna Center for Disarmament and Non-Proliferation.
A key element of his publication is the establishment of a new international control mechanism for the phased and complete elimination of nuclear weapons by all nuclear powers, which will simultaneously monitor any attempts to re-create such weapons of mass destruction again.
In his book, the 78-year-old author, who began his military career on a US aircraft carrier fitting carrier-based aircraft with nuclear bombs, builds on the provisions of the international Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) adopted in July 2017 by suggesting that a special implementing body be set up, which he calls the International Nuclear Disarmament Agency (INDA), to complement the IAEA should the treaty ever enter into force.
According to the US expert, the INDA would be a key body for controlling the entire process of global nuclear disarmament, it would oversee the dismantling of nuclear warheads and the equipment needed to make them at nuclear weapons facilities, and it would also ensure that nuclear weapons are never made again. The agency would operate in accordance with the principles set out in the text of the TPNW.
Thomas Shea has worked out the organisational structure of the INDA and sets this out in his book, along with the principles of its interaction with nuclear states and the IAEA.
The American researcher believes that the INDA should be headed by a Nuclear Disarmament Council made up of 24 members (one from each country party to the TPNW). The council would have nine permanent committees that would control the process of eliminating nuclear weapons, safeguard weapon-sensitive information, ensure the safety and security of nuclear weapons, and carry out inspections to verify nuclear disarmament agreements, so perform certain supranational functions, in other words. The council would also oversee the day-to-day activities of the new disarmament control agency and help implement all the provisions of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. The INDA’s research work will be provided by its staffed Research Institute and its Center for Research and Development related to the verification of nuclear disarmament.
The book’s author has developed key principles for preventing rearmament following the total elimination of nuclear weapons from the world’s arsenals, including the introduction of a strict inspection regime and the international control of fissile material that could be used to make nuclear warheads. He also suggests converting highly enriched uranium to low-enriched uranium as soon as possible, which could then only be used in nuclear power plants.
The American researcher proposes starting the nuclear disarmament process by determining for each nuclear state the minimum amount of fissile material that could be used to made nuclear warheads. He believes it would then be possible to embark on a reciprocal exchange of information about operationally deployed nuclear warheads, which should be eliminated first, and then information about non-deployed warheads, which should be disposed of second. The next step in the nuclear disarmament process would be an agreement to reduce the amount of fissile material intended for nuclear weapons and place all remaining stocks of fissile material under special international control to rule out future rearmament.
Thomas Shea suggests that nuclear states take ten confidence-building nuclear disarmament measures. In particular, he believes that an important measure to increase the level of trust between nuclear states in the nuclear missile sphere would be their mutual commitment not to be the first to use nuclear weapons against each other or not to use them at all, whether first, second, or third, and he also calls for the signing of bilateral agreements on the gradual reduction of nuclear arsenals.
Referring to the Nuclear Posture Review approved by the Trump administration in February 2018, Thomas Shea criticises Russia, China and North Korea for modernising their nuclear weapons, while ignoring the fact that the nuclear arsenals of the West’s “nuclear troika” (Great Britain, the US and France) have been upgraded, as have those of the de facto nuclear powers – Israel, India and Pakistan.
Thomas Shea expresses support for the eventual entry into force of the international TPNW. This contradicts Washington’s official negative position on general nuclear disarmament, which is the most strongly opposed to the idea being implemented in comparison with the other nuclear-armed states. It is well known that the US has already started making plans to create a completely new strategic nuclear triad over the next seven to eight years, which America’s current military and political leaders envisage will exist right up to the 2080s.
The US researcher does not mention any deadlines in his book for reaching global nuclear zero, recognising that the process for complete nuclear disarmament could take many years due to existing disagreements on the issue between nuclear-armed states. He simply notes more generally that nuclear disarmament can only take place when every legal nuclear power – which is to say the “nuclear five” represented by the five permanent members of the UN Security Council – and the four de facto nuclear powers that are not party to the Non-Proliferation Treaty – namely Israel, North Korea, India and Pakistan – understand that they will not be able to fully safeguard their security with nuclear weapons alone and so will switch to non-nuclear means to protect their defence interests. Thomas Shea believes that “disarmament won’t come quickly, quietly or cheaply”.
It is likely that the book will arouse some interest among those in the field as an example of the author’s development of a global mechanism for verifying complete nuclear disarmament at some point in the future. It is unlikely to become a catalyst for discussions on how to create a world completely free of nuclear weapons, however, given that the level of nuclear missile confrontation in the world has grown significantly thanks to the biggest nuclear power – America – while the threshold for using nuclear weapons has been lowered, particularly given the Pentagon’s readiness to use low-yield nuclear warheads, which is to say nuclear warheads with an explosive power of less than 5 kilotons.
The real situation in the world today shows that there are too many doctrinal and military-technical obstacles preventing the complete and irreversible elimination of all nuclear weapons. Their elimination is also made more complicated by the lack of a global consensus. There has also been no noticeable increase in the level of trust between nuclear-armed states, which all have different views on nuclear arms control and the doctrinal basis for their actual use.
It is important to bear in mind that only two-thirds of UN member states voted in favour of adopting the TPNW and it did not have the support of every nuclear power. The process of joining it is even worse: only a third of UN member states have actually signed it. The ratification process is moving along just as slowly. As of November 2018, it had been ratified by less than half of the 50 countries required.
The difficulties in implementing the TPNW are also reflected in the fact that a large proportion of the global community does not want to retain the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in its current form. This is clearly shown by the results of a UN vote. In October 2018, the First Committee of the United Nations General Assembly, which debates disarmament and international security, unfortunately voted against a draft resolution in support of the INF Treaty. Thirty-one countries voted in favour, 54 countries abstained, and 55 countries, including the US, Great Britain, Canada, France and Ukraine, voted against.
In other words, there is a lack of a global consensus on nuclear disarmament. In fact, it is possible that America’s targeted efforts to unilaterally withdraw from the INF Treaty and its refusal to extend START III could undermine the nuclear non-proliferation regime that has existed for many decades, as well as the entire international legal system for nuclear and conventional arms control that has been established with such difficulty over a long period of time.
The lawyer of the retired Austrian colonel, who is suspected of having passed secret information to Russia for 25 years, insists that his client could have never betrayed state secrets as he had no access to the classified data. According to the local outlet Kronen Zeitung, defender Michael Hofer welcomed the decision of the Salzburg State Court not to arrest the retired colonel.
“My client has assured me that he has not revealed any state secrets. He is very pleased with the decision of the court. He does not feel like a spy,” the lawyer told the media.
The judge dismissed the application for pre-trial detention, citing there’s no danger that the suspect flees. He is said to be optimally socially integrated and has an irreproachable profile. Court spokesman Peter Egger also stated that the accused man has no access to sensitive information anyway since he is retired. Besides, his communications are restricted.
According to the Salzburg prosecutor’s office, the suspect may be sentenced to up to 10 years in prison. The case against the retired officer, who is said to have spied for Moscow between the 1990s and the end of his careers, was made public last week following Kronen Zeitung’s report.
Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz confirmed that a 70-year-old retired Austrian colonel was suspected of spying for Moscow and demanded that Russia provide “transparent” information on the issue. The incident prompted the cancellation of an official visit of Austrian Minister of Foreign Affairs Karin Kneissl to Russia.
Addressing the espionage case, Moscow protested to the Austrian Ambassador to Russia, calling the accusations baseless. In response, General-Secretary of the Austrian Interior Ministry Peter Goldgruber expressed hope that the incident would not undermine Austrian-Russian relations.
In 2017, hundreds of academics in Canada and Australia called for a pre-emptive ban on the development and use of lethal autonomous robotics, a move that became part of the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots.
The development of “killer robot” drones has actively been funded by the British government, which is making public statements that it has no plans to create such unmanned aerial vehicles, according to a leaked report by a UK anti-drone campaign group.
The group, called Drone Wars, published a survey called ‘Off the Leash: The Development of Autonomous Military Drones in the UK’. It specifically claims that Britain’s Defence and Security Accelerator (DASA) is specifically injecting money into the creation of the Taranis drone, as well as dozens of other similar research programmes.
Developed by BAE Systems and the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD), Taranis is capable of autonomously flying, plotting routes and locating targets. The project has cost more than 200 million GBP (259 million USD) so far, according to the Drone Wars report.
Peter Burt, author of the report, referred to “tangible evidence” that the UK MoD is actively engaged in development of “the underpinning technology with the aim of using it in military applications.”
In this vein, Burt cited Taranis as an example of a drone with “advanced autonomous capabilities”, arguing that the development of a “truly autonomous lethal drone” in the foreseeable future was now a “real possibility”.
“The government should be supporting international initiatives to prevent the development and use of fully autonomous weapons, and should be investigating the enormous potential of artificial intelligence to identify potential conflict areas and prevent wars before they start,” Brunt underscored.
The Independentcited an unnamed MoD spokesperson as rejecting reports about the UK government’s plans to create any weapons systems which would operate without input from humans.
The spokesperson pointed out that the MoD’s weapons will “always be under human control as an absolute guarantee of oversight, authority and accountability.”
Last week, The Times reported that during its Saif Sareea-3 military exercise, which wrapped up on November 3, the UK military for the first time engaged in wargames where it practiced fighting countries with more powerful armed forces, including Russia, using unmanned flying drones.Speaking at the Web Summit in Lisbon in 2017, prominent UK physicist Stephen Hawking specifically cited the advent of powerful autonomous weapons, warning that if it is not used properly, artificial intelligence “could be the worst event in the history of our civilization”.
A thinly-veiled threat to unleash the full military power of Israel on residents of the Gaza strip is apparently meant for Arabs only, since its English-language version is now gone from an Israeli military Twitter account.
Amid the latest flare-up of hostilities between Israel and Hamas militants both sides are also battling for hearts and minds online. Part of the Israeli messaging effort was a threat on Twitter, on the account of Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), a defense ministry unit that enacts policies related to civilian issues in occupied Palestinian territories.
The threat said Hamas crossed the red line with its latest attacks and that Israel will be responding with an iron fist. “Residents of Gaza look carefully at the pictures from Operation Protective Edge in 2014 – a picture is worth a thousand words,” said the account, citing a statement by COGAT chief, Major General Kamil Abu Rukon. A composition picture showing the aftermath of airstrikes from the 2014 war in Gaza and a recent retaliation [sic] by the IDF was supplied.
But hours later the entire thread was deleted – even though the original statement on the Arabic version of COGAT’s Twitter feed remained intact. Some commenters suggested that the Israeli officials realized that such thinly-veiled threats to Palestinian civilians are not meant for the English-speaking audiences and erased it. Others suggested Twitter could have deleted it following complaints about threats of violence by other users.
The 2014 Israeli offensive on Gaza claimed almost 1,500 civilian lives, according to a UN count, and caused damage to buildings estimated at some $7.8 billion, with thousands of homes obliterated or severely damaged.
Considering that Gaza Strip is one of the world’s most densely populated areas and Israel maintains a blockade of the area, effectively trapping people inside, many critics see the military campaign as a form of collective punishment of Palestinians. Israel says Hamas is responsible for the civilian suffering, because it allegedly uses civilians as human shields.
Amid the latest violence, the Israeli forces bombed a Hamas-linked TV station, branding it a propaganda outlet that made itself a legitimate military target. The decision indicates the Israeli government’s willingness to stretch it definitions in order to justify attacking non-combatants.
I wrote back here that the Achilles Heel of the door handle theory is Detective Sergeant Nicholas Bailey. When his name was first mentioned publicly, on 8th March, it was widely reported that he had been one of the first responders at the bench in The Maltings. However, this was thrown into confusion the following day by none other than Lord Ian Blair, former Chief Constable of the Metropolitan Police, who stated the following on Radio 4’s Today Programme:
“There are some indications that the police officer who was injured had been to the house, whereas there was a doctor who looked after the patients in the open, who hasn’t been affected at all. So there maybe some clues floating around in here.’”
As I pointed out in that piece, the phrase “some indications” was somewhat disingenuous, as The Metropolitan Police would have known by that time exactly where Mr Bailey had been. And in any case, there was no particular reason for Lord Blair to reveal this information.
The point I went on to make is that if it was known that he had been poisoned, which it was; if it was known that he’d been to the house, which it was; and if it was known that the poisoning didn’t happen at The Maltings, which it was (at least according to investigators who ruled it out with surprising swiftness), then it MUST have been known that he was poisoned AT THE HOUSE. But if this was the case, why exactly was the house not locked down, with forensic scientists all over the house taking swabs? Why did it take nearly two weeks for that to happen?
As far as I can see, there are only two explanations for this. The first is sheer incompetence. That’s possible, I suppose. I mean we are talking about an organisation which somehow managed to put out a formal statement setting out the case against two suspects, which contained the wrong street name, no real details of the suspects’ movements in Salisbury, and the somewhat impossible feat of the men being at Gatwick Airport whilst the plane they were on was still in the air. There is that. But even this seems to be stretching it. As I say, it was known that Mr Bailey was poisoned, it was known that he was in two locations that the Skripals were also in, and one of these had apparently been ruled out. Which means it MUST have been …? Not hard, is it? And yet the house wasn’t swabbed until 22nd March.
The second possibility is that he wasn’t poisoned at the house at all, but it took two weeks when the house wasn’t being swabbed, when the door handle manual hadn’t been discovered, and when the police were still searching for poison in places where Mr Bailey never went, to concoct a narrative that would place the location of his poisoning away from The Maltings.
But I don’t think that Mr Bailey’s role as Achilles Heel stops at the door handle. I think he is, in many ways, the Achilles Heel of everything in this case. Was he really at The Maltings? I’m not sure. Did he really go to the house? Again, I’m really not sure. When did he fall ill and go to hospital? Again, it’s all a bit hazy. And by the way this has nothing to do with me refusing to accept official explanations; on the contrary, it is because every attempt by the authorities to explain Mr Bailey’s role and how he got poisoned have been shrouded in riddles, mysteries and enigmas.
Just in case readers jump to the wrong conclusions, for the record I am quite certain that Mr Bailey had nothing to do with the poisoning itself. I say this on the basis that he is said to have driven himself to Salisbury District Hospital after feeling ill — hardly the actions of a man who was involved in the poisoning itself (had he been involved, he would surely have been taken to a secret decontamination location, not allowed to drive himself to an NHS hospital). But his role, the time and place of his poisoning, and his subsequent disappearance since the incident all stick out like a sore thumb.
One thing that is particularly interesting is the time of Mr Bailey’s admission to Salisbury District Hospital. There are some doubts as to when this was, but since my aim in these pieces is to hold the official narrative up to scrutiny, I will go by the official statement released by The Metropolitan Police on 5th June:
“Detective Sergeant Nick Bailey, a Wiltshire police officer who was amongst the first to respond to the incident, also fell seriously ill after being exposed to the nerve agent and was admitted to hospital on 6 March. Since being discharged from hospital on 22 March, Nick has continued to make good progress but remains off work.”
So according to The Met, it wasn’t until well over 30 hours, and possibly as much as 48 hours after the incident on 4th March, that Mr Bailey was admitted to hospital.
I have to say that the idea of the world’s deadliest nerve agent taking 4 hours to take effect, before acting simultaneously on a 33-year-old woman and a 66-year-old-man, with a drive, a duck-feed, a risotto lunch and white wine in between, is almost more nonsense than I can reasonably cope with. But the idea that the exact same substance contaminated Mr Bailey at approximately 5pm on the same day, but took more than a day-and-a-half to take effect on him, has a strong tendency to make my eye start twitching, and my mouth start jabbering in much the same nervous and maniacal way that Herbert Lom perfected as Commissioner Charles Dreyfus in the Pink Panther films.
Seriously, how likely is it, do you suppose, that Mr Bailey got contaminated by the world’s deadliest nerve agent on a Sunday evening, but was only hospitalised on the Tuesday? It is self-evident nonsense, is it not, but it does of course beg the question as to where he was poisoned then.
Not for the first time, I am indebted to Liane for digging out a piece of information that I had not previously come across. Here’s a report from The Mail on 17th April:
“A multimillion pound operation, involving around 190 specialist military personnel, is expected to start in the coming days, with the process lasting months. The evidence room and a police officer’s lockerinside Bourne Hill police station will be among the first areas to be cleaned, along with two ambulance stations and The Maltings area – where the Skripals were found [my emphasis].”
“Decontamination work at Salisbury’s police station and council offices, carried out after the spy poisoning, has now been completed. After extensive testing and cleaning by specialist teams Defra have handed Bourne Hill back to the Salisbury recovery group stressing it is safe to return to public use. The deep clean focused on two areas of the building, the evidence store used by Wiltshire Police and two lockers[my emphasis].”
I think we can assume that the decontamination of Bourne Hill was as a result of Mr Bailey coming back to the station, having — according to the official story — been contaminated with “Novichok” between 5pm and 6pm on 4th March at the door handle of 47 Christie Miller Road. However, not for the first time in this saga, it’s interesting what was not contaminated. There is no mention of the door at Bourne Hill Police Station being contaminated, or of anyone becoming contaminated after touching it, and yet surely Mr Bailey must have come through the door.
But it might be an automatic door, you say. Yes, it might, but the thing is the station wasn’t open. It was a Sunday, and thanks to the Municipal Department for Spending Taxpayers’ Money on the Wrong Things, it wasn’t open. And so if Mr Bailey went to Bourne Hill that night, he would have had to manually open the door. Yet just as we are asked to believe that the Skripals somehow managed to enter Zizzis and The Mill without contaminating the door handles with their contaminated hands, so we are asked to believe that Mr Bailey somehow managed to open the locked police station door without contaminating it with his contaminated hands.
But notice where the focus of decontamination was. The evidence store and two lockers. That’s very interesting, not least of which because this was not — at that time — a criminal investigation. And so how and why would the evidence store have been contaminated?
There is an obvious explanation, and it is not that Mr Bailey touched it with hands that had been contaminated at Christie Miller Road. As I say, had that been the case, he couldn’t have entered the station without contaminating the door, and perhaps other inner doors as well. No, the obvious explanation is that an item which was contaminated was placed in the evidence store. And given that the official narrative only has Mr Bailey being hospitalised on 6th March, which is the more rational explanation:
That he had been poisoned a day-and-a-half before, at the door handle of 47 Christie Miller Road, with a substance that allegedly took 4 hours to work on the Skripals?
Or that he (or a colleague) took something away from The Maltings, placed it in the evidence store at Bourne Hill, and then became contaminated when examining it on the morning of 6th March?
Yes, yes. I’m well aware that they don’t do rational in this case. But just in case you wondered, the answer is the second of those explanations is the more rational one. I’m not saying it is the explanation; just that it’s more rational than their explanation. But of course it can’t be that, can it, because then it would imply that not just Mr Bailey, but the Skripals too were not poisoned at the door handle, but perhaps by an item passed to them in The Mill or The Maltings.
Let me end with a final observation. Liane (again) recently drew attention to something very peculiar in the statement given by the OPCW Director-General, Ahmet Üzümcü, on 4th April. This was about a fortnight after a delegation from the organisation visited Salisbury to take biomedical and environmental samples. Here is what he said:
“The OPCW experts visited the locations where two of the victimswere reportedly exposed to a toxic chemical and collected several environmental samples. The team also took biomedical samples from these two victims, as well as from a third individual, a police officer reportedly exposed to a toxic chemical [my emphasis].”
Did you get that? Since they only visited the locations where two of the three victims were reportedly exposed to a nerve agent, and since Mr Bailey is not included in these three, it is implicitly stated that Mr Bailey was not poisoned at the same place as the Skripals. And since it is alleged that the Skripals were poisoned at the door handle, then Mr Bailey can’t have been poisoned there, can he?
Could it have been the evidence store or the lockers? Given that these were said to be the focus of decontamination efforts at Bourne Hill, and given that the doors he entered were apparently not contaminated, I’d say it’s a fair chance that this may have been where and how he got poisoned.
NOVICHOK! It just won’t go away – even though it was never there! The Sun reports that twenty vehicles that “came into contact with the killer substance” have now been dismantled and buried in a toxic waste site. Suspend not disbelief yet – at the thought of scrappies in Hazmat suits cutting up police cars. Such Alice in Wonderland deception was nicely detailed by Rob Slane in his latest dissection of the Skripal hoax, pointing specifically at the crucial flaws in the “door-handle theory”.
Slane systematically destroys the UK government’s assertion that the Skripals’ door-handle was the “source of the poisoning”, but without quite following through with the argument – that there was no such poisoning with Novichok at all, – as has been well established from other details of the event.
In fact, as the UK government rests its whole case for Novichok poisoning on that door-handle, and rests its whole case against Russia on her supposed responsibility for smearing the nerve agent on it, the cutting of this Achilles Heel could bring down the whole rotten edifice, just as it felled the great hero of the Trojan War; concentrating our “cyber-warfare” on this weakest point must be our priority.
As I’ve written before about the Skripal poisoning, once it is accepted that it really was a hoax – a cleverly constructed piece of political theatre contrived by the UK government to further its strategic objectives against Russia – some other questions immediately present themselves. It is not simply a case of Russia not being responsible; without Russia there is no Novichok and no case.
Chief of these questions is who knew that this was an “operation”- or conspiracy? Straight away we are confronted with a paradox, as thousands of people directly or indirectly involved in the months-long Salisbury drama must be divided into two groups – those who deceived and those who were deceived.
It’s probably safe to say that those at either extreme of this division may be assumed to belong to these two groups – which may be called the “Porton Down” group and the “Salisbury Citizens” group, belonging to the deceivers and the deceived respectively.
(It is fundamental of course to accept that the story of Novichok was not true – that Novichok was not present in the Salisbury environment nor responsible for the condition of any of its supposed five victims. While this truth may not yet be acceptable to the UK public or media, and may in fact never be acceptable to them, it has been established beyond a shadow of doubt to be the case, and could be easily proven in a fair court. Some “new” confirming evidence has also come to light which I will detail shortly.)
Taking it that Porton Down was the centre of operations for “Operation Nina” as I have called it, we must first dismiss any suggestion that this was a “rogue operation”, pursued by some faction of the intelligence services without the knowledge of others or of Government leaders. The readiness – or rather unseemly haste – with which Theresa May took up the false case against Russia despite its extraordinarily provocative and dangerous consequences denies her any alibi or claim of innocence. Besides, it dovetailed too nicely with her own agenda and that of the UK state to have been a rogue operation.
But it must follow that other leading officials and agents of the state were also fully cognisant of the Operation. Had they not been then serious problems of credibility would have immediately stood in the way, as experienced and knowledgeable staff from Porton Down could not have been taken in by the conflicting and incredible nonsense foisted on to the general public. That some may have been reluctantly complicit and remain in fear of David Kelly’s fate does however seem likely.
In questioning whether this knowledge that the Operation was “theatre” extended to all those unidentified operators in Hazmat and Green-bottle suits, the situation becomes more complicated. These men were obliged to go through some particularly stupid and difficult operations dressed in their colourful encumbrances – motivated by the belief that they were really dealing with a mortal hazard and playing their part in “protecting National Security”. Would they not though have asked the questions that we asked, and particularly “why did the Skripals not die if this stuff is so toxic?”
Or did they know they were just performing for the cameras – so to speak – but then also know that they were collectively involved in a massive and criminal deception, not just of the general public but of other civil servants and members of the various services? At what point for such personnel would moral integrity prevail over duty to “Queen and Country”, if at all?
There are only those two alternatives.
Yet more difficult is the same question applied to the police and emergency services and hospital staff, because the consequences of either option are severe. It is simply impossible to believe that so many ordinary and honest government employees could have all been complicit in this deception, and kept it secret. But the alternative is that they were all deceived by their own government, or by those within their ranks who were “in the room”.
It should be remembered in this discussion that at no point has the UK government given the slightest indication of going soft on its Novichok campaign – quite the opposite. Apparently to gain maximum advantage from the dirty operation, they have drip fed new misinformation to the press over six months, reviving and restating the first lies while creating new ones, and then finally “exposing” the “GRU” culprits and their magic poison perfume bottle.
The more potential whistle-blowers and dissenters there were in the ranks, the harder it would be to keep the lid on their lies.
As I mentioned earlier, some new information has come to light which provides more evidence on the nature of the poison applied to the Skripals, as well as giving us very useful extra insight into the experience of the staff at Salisbury District Hospital who came into contact with them – literally.
Urban went to Salisbury District Hospital around this time, and apparently – though we never see him nor hear his questions – interviewed staff and executives about their treatment of the Skripals and the incident.
There is nothing to suggest that any of these staff disbelieve the “official” story, and the testimony of doctors and nurses is particularly credible I think. While the information they provide about the Skripals’ “surprisingly fast” recovery is significant, the most interesting details concern the first two days following their admission on Sunday afternoon, March 4th.
The Sister in charge of Radnor ward Intensive Care Unit, Sarah Clark describes the situation:
… at that point – the evening – we were led to believe that they had taken an overdose – obviously there was no indication of nerve agent poisoning. They were needing support with their breathing, and support with their cardio-vascular system.”
While Sister Clark likely means that no-one had indicated nerve agent poisoning was a possibility, it is quite clear that there was no sign of any specific symptoms of such a toxin in the two unidentified victims either.
These symptoms are described in the interview with Intensive Care Consultant Dr Stephen Jukes – but he appears to be talking about the typical symptoms that the Skripals would have been expected to show rather than those he had actually observed.
Talk of symptoms is anyway fairly academic for such a toxic substance as A 234 Novichok or VX, as paralysis and death will occur within ten minutes of exposure to a – minuscule – lethal dose. Except in the case of minor accidental contamination, the chief diagnostic symptom of nerve agent exposure is death.
These initial observations obviously cast serious doubt on the subsequent assertions that the Skripals and Detective Inspector Bailey – admitted to hospital on Tuesday 6th March – were suffering the effects of a nerve agent. Had the staff known more, or been told more by the “international experts” who were called in to supervise the Skripals’ treatment, they would surely have also doubted the “nerve agent” theory that conflicted so drastically with their own observations and experience, described by Sister Sarah Clark:
I did have concerns, because obviously when they first came in there was no indication that it was a nerve agent, and therefore we take our normal protection when any patient comes in but would not at that point have taken any extra precautions in terms of protecting ourselves.”
But what she reveals here is crucial to the case – the various staff involved in the admission, triage and treatment of the incapacitated Skripals took only “normal protection” measures, yet reported no side effects from secondary exposure to the toxin. She “had concerns” over this inadvertent exposure, so would have been over-cautious had any staff reported symptoms.
In addition, the record from these first 48 hours indicates that no appropriate treatment was given for nerve agent poisoning; the chance of a real victim of such a toxin surviving even a sub-lethal dose without any antidote is ZERO.
So what of the “surprisingly rapid” recovery, that happened apparently as a result of the use of “untested drugs” prescribed by Porton Down experts? Newsnight again:
Dr Murray: You don’t know the way the agent might act – how long to reach its peak, how long it will last, and the longer term effects of these things, people would have no experience of.
Mark Urban: It’s clear that from the outset, experts from nearby Porton Down played a central role in advising the team. After a couple of weeks there were gradual but distinct signs of progress.
The exact timing of that, and details of drugs given, remain matters of medical confidentiality.
Dr Jukes: We were all exceptionally surprised, pleasantly surprised to see how quickly the recovery happened, at such a pace, and something we can’t easily explain.
It would be “exceptionally surprising” if the Skripal’s rapid recovery following the Porton Down boffins’ special treatment was the only thing Salisbury Hospital Staff found difficult to explain. That the Skripals didn’t die and then recovered from the Novichok attack is something they would surely have found impossible to explain – unless someone was to tell them the truth.
But then they might look for an explanation for something far more incomprehensible – how they, and millions of ordinary honest and well-intentioned people could be so completely and criminally deceived by their own elected government?
This Remembrance Day will doubtless see strenuous efforts by some to justify the fruitless bloodbath that was the First World War. Revisionist commentators have long attempted to rehabilitate the conflict as necessary and just, but the arguments do not stand up. It does no service to the memory of the dead to allow any illusions in the justice or necessity of war, particularly so when the precedents will be used to argue for the next ‘necessary’ conflict. From the causes of the war, to its prosecution and its results, here are the counter-arguments to ten common pro-war ploys.
1 The war was fought in defence of democracy.
This is contradicted by the basic facts. Germany had universal manhood suffrage while in Britain, including Ireland, some 40% of men still did not qualify for the vote. In Germany also, there were attempts to justify the war on the grounds that it was being fought to defend civilised values against a repressive, militaristic state, in the form of Russian autocracy.
2 Britain went to war due to a treaty obligation to defend the neutrality of Belgium.
There was no clear and accepted obligation on Britain to do this, and, in fact, before the Belgian issue appeared, the war party in the cabinet was already pushing for British intervention on the entirely different ground that there were naval obligations to France. These obligations had been developed in secret arrangements between the military of both countries, and were never subject to any kind of democratic accountability. The Germans even offered guarantees over Belgian integrity, which the British government refused to consider at all.
3 German aggression was the driving force for war.
However aggressive the German leadership may have been in 1914, the British establishment was at least as determined to take the opportunity to go to war with its imperial rival. At one point the Foreign Office even seized on imaginary German incursions into France to justify a British declaration of war on Germany. The declaration letter had to be retrieved from the German ambassador and rewritten when it was discovered that the stories were false. The enthusiasm of the British ruling class for war undermines any justification for it based on German aggression.
4 Germany had started a naval arms race with Britain.
Imperialist competition between the two states over markets and resources preceded the arms race in the fifteen years before the war. Britain’s naval power was the vital element in its ability to restrict German access to markets and resources across the world. Unless Britain was willing to allow Germany to expand economically, the logic of capitalist competition meant that Germany was bound to challenge British naval supremacy. The latent violence of the leading imperial nation is always the context for aggressive challenges to the status quo on the part of rising powers.
5 German imperialism was uniquely vicious and had to be challenged.
The atrocities committed against the Herrero people in Namibia were indeed terrible crimes, but were hardly unique compared to the horrors committed by all those involved in the rubber industry in the Belgian Congo, to take but one example. Also, European opinion had only a few years before 1914 been horrified by the brutality of another colonial power when it was engaged in ruthlessly expanding its dominance over independent states in Africa. This was Britain in its wars of aggression against the Boer states in South Africa, during which concentration camps were first used in order to control a civilian population.
6 Public opinion was united in favour of the war, as shown by images of cheering crowds in 1914.
It is now usually admitted that the degree of enthusiasm for the war was strictly limited, and the evidence is that the crowds who gathered at the outbreak of war were by no means united in martial enthusiasm. In fact sizeable and widespread anti-war demonstrations occurred in both Britain and Germany. Had the leaderships of Labour and Socialist parties across Europe not caved into demands to support their national ruling classes in going to war, it is quite possible that the conflict could have been stopped in its tracks.
7 The morale of British troops fighting on the Western Front remained intact to the end of the war.
While Britain may not have suffered quite the same scale of mutinies as in the German and French armies, at times there were whole stretches of the front where troops became so unreliable that generals did not dare order them into combat. The evidence for widespread cynicism about war strategies, contempt for the military leadership, and grave doubts about the purpose of the war, cannot be wished away by the revisionists. In so far as soldiers carried on willingly fighting the war, the explanation needs to be sought in the habituation to obedience, as well as the threat of court-martial executions. There is no need to invoke either fervid nationalism or any kind of deep psychological blood-lust as explanations.
8 The military leadership, notably General Haig, was not a bunch of incompetent ‘donkeys’.
Attempts to rehabilitate the likes of General Haig founder on some of the basic facts about the tactics he relentlessly employed. Repeated infantry attacks on opposing trenches consistently failed to gain any clear advantage, while causing colossal casualties. On the first day of the battle of the Somme, 1st July 1916, 57,000 troops out of 120,000 were killed or wounded. Despite continuing carnage on an incredible scale, Haig carried on ordering further attacks. When any hope of a breakthrough against the German lines was clearly lost, the purpose of the battle was shifted to attrition pure and simple. The plan now was to kill more German troops than the British lost. Since there was no way of reliably measuring the casualties on the other side, Haig relied on estimating it through the losses of his own side. On this basis he began to be angered when the army suffered too few losses, as when he complained that one division in September had lost under a thousand men. There can be no defence for this kind of disregard of human life.
9 The end of the war saw the triumph of liberal capitalism, against collapsing autocratic Empires.
In fact all states involved in the war were deeply destabilised. Even the United States, whose involvement was the most limited, experienced the ‘Red Summer’ of 1919, with unprecedented labour revolts, such as the Seattle general strike, alongside savage repression of socialists and black Americans. Britain saw the beginning of the Irish war of independence, and increasing unrest in India, which marks, in effect, the point at which the Empire began to unravel. Domestically, there was also a wave of radical working-class unrest, particularly in the ‘Red Clydeside’, which culminated in troops being sent into Glasgow to impose martial law.
10 The war achieved anything worthwhile whatsoever.
The war opened up a period of endemic economic dislocation, and outright crisis. In Britain there was a decade of industrial decline and high unemployment even before the Great Depression. In effect, it was only the Second World War which brought the major capitalist powers out of the slump. The First World War saw the point at which capitalism became addicted to war and to a permanent arms economy. The war demonstrated the capacity of capitalism to create industrialised waste, carnage and destruction on a colossal scale. The remembrance of the war is appropriately a time for mourning the horror, the loss and the waste of it all, but it should also provoke a determination to resist our rulers’ insistence on promoting war to further their interests. War can achieve nothing other than to create the conditions for further wars.
Popular opinion has, ever since its ending, remembered the First World War as a time of horrendous and futile misery and slaughter, as epitomising political and military leaders’ incompetence and callous disregard for human life. That popular judgement, which has helped turn common opinion against war in general, was correct, and we must not let the war mongers dismiss this instance of the wisdom of ordinary people.
The specifics for General Haig’s murderous rage can be found in Adam Hochschild, To End All Wars (Pan 2013), p.209 – reviewed on this site by Lindsey German.
Naturalist Sir David Attenborough definitely presents this short documentary on the migration of the Skeptic. This spoof was originally used to open QED 2018.
Written by Matt White, Michael Marshall, and Mike Hall
Directed by Matt White
Edited by Deniz Kavalali
VFX by Joe Pavlo
Audio post-production by Offset Audio
Featuring Adam Diggle as the voice of Sir David Attenborough
What was World War One about? How did it start? Who won? And what did they win? Now, 100 years after those final shots rang out, these questions still puzzle historians and laymen alike. But as we shall see, this confusion is not a happenstance of history, but the wool that has been pulled over our eyes to stop us from seeing what WWI really was. This is the story of WWI that you didn’t read in the history books. This is The WWI Conspiracy.
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TRANSCRIPT
INTRODUCTION
November 11, 1918.
All across the Western front, the clocks that were lucky enough to escape the four years of shelling chimed the eleventh hour. And with that the First World War came to an end.
From 10 o’clock to 11 — the hour for the cessation of hostilities — the opposed batteries simply raised hell. Not even the artillery prelude to our advance into the Argonne had anything on it. To attempt an advance was out of the question. It was not a barrage. It was a deluge.
[…]
Nothing quite so electrical in effect as the sudden stop that came at 11 A. M. has ever occurred to me. It was 10:60 precisely and — the roar stopped like a motor car hitting a wall. The resulting quiet was uncanny in comparison. From somewhere far below ground, Germans began to appear. They clambered to the parapets and began to shout wildly. They threw their rifles, hats, bandoleers, bayonets and trench knives toward us. They began to sing.
And just like that, it was over. Four years of the bloodiest carnage the world had ever seen came to a stop as sudden and bewildering as its start. And the world vowed “Never again.”
Each year, we lay the wreath. We hear “The Last Post.” We mouth the words “never again” like an incantation. But what does it mean? To answer this question, we have to understand what WWI was.
WWI was an explosion, a breaking point in history. In the smoldering shell hole of that great cataclysm lay the industrial-era optimism of never-ending progress. Old verities about the glory of war lay strewn around the battlefields of that “Great War” like a fallen soldier left to die in No Man’s Land, and along with it lay all the broken dreams of a world order that had been blown apart. Whether we know it or not, we here in the 21st century are still living in the crater of that explosion, the victims of a First World War that we are only now beginning to understand.
What was World War One about? How did it start? Who won? And what did they win? Now, 100 years after those final shots rang out, these questions still puzzle historians and laymen alike. But as we shall see, this confusion is not a happenstance of history, but the wool that has been pulled over our eyes to stop us from seeing what WWI really was.
This is the story of WWI that you didn’t read in the history books. This is The WWI Conspiracy.
PART ONE – TO START A WAR
June 28, 1914.
The Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his wife Sophie are in Sarajevo for a military inspection. In retrospect, it’s a risky provocation, like tossing a match into a powder keg. Serbian nationalism is rising, the Balkans are in a tumult of diplomatic crises and regional wars, and tensions between the kingdom of Serbia and the Austro-Hungarian Empire are set to spill over.
But despite warnings and ill omens, the royal couple’s security is extremely lax. They board an open-top sports car and proceed in a six-car motorcade along a pre-announced route. After an inspection of the military barracks, they head toward the Town Hall for a scheduled reception by the Mayor. The visit is going ahead exactly as planned and precisely on schedule.
And then the bomb goes off.
As we now know, the motorcade was a death trap. Six assassins lined the royal couple’s route that morning, armed with bombs and pistols. The first two failed to act, but the third, Nedeljko Čabrinović, panicked and threw his bomb onto the folded back cover of the Archduke’s convertible. It bounced off onto the street, exploding under the next car in the convoy. Franz Ferdinand and his wife, unscathed, were rushed on to the Town Hall, passing the other assassins along the route too quickly for them to act.
Having narrowly escaped death, the Archduke called off the rest of his scheduled itinerary to visit the wounded from the bombing at the hospital. By a remarkable twist of fate, the driver took the couple down the wrong route, and, when ordered to reverse, stopped the car directly in front of the delicatessen where would-be assassin Gavrilo Princip had gone after having failing in his mission along the motorcade. There, one and a half metres in front of Princip, was the Archduke and his wife. He took two shots, killing both of them.
Yes, even the official history books—the books written and published by the “winners”—record that the First World War started as the result of a conspiracy. After all it was—as all freshman history students are taught—the conspiracy to assassinate the Archduke Franz Ferdinand that led to the outbreak of war.
That story, the official story of the origins of World War I, is familiar enough by now: In 1914, Europe was an interlocking clockwork of alliances and military mobilization plans that, once set in motion, ticked inevitably toward all out warfare. The assassination of the Archduke was merely the excuse to set that clockwork in motion, and the resulting “July crisis” of diplomatic and military escalations led with perfect predictability to continental and, eventually, global war. In this carefully sanitized version of history, World War I starts in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914.
But this official history leaves out so much of the real story about the build up to war that it amounts to a lie. But it does get one thing right: The First World War was the result of a conspiracy.
To understand this conspiracy we must turn not to Sarajevo and the conclave of Serbian nationalists plotting their assassination in the summer of 1914, but to a chilly drawing room in London in the winter of 1891. There, three of the most important men of the age—men whose names are but dimly remembered today—are taking the first concrete steps toward forming a secret society that they have been discussing amongst themselves for years. The group that springs from this meeting will go on to leverage the wealth and power of its members to shape the course of history and, 23 years later, will drive the world into the first truly global war.
Their plan reads like outlandish historical fiction. They will form a secret organization dedicated to the “extension of British rule throughout the world” and “the ultimate recovery of the United States of America as an integral part of a British Empire.” The group is to be structured along the lines of a religious brotherhood (the Jesuit order is repeatedly invoked as a model) divided into two circles: an inner circle, called “The Society of the Elect,” who are to direct the activity of the larger, outer circle, dubbed “The Association of Helpers” who are not to know of the inner circle’s existence.
“British rule” and “inner circles” and “secret societies.” If presented with this plan today, many would say it was the work of an imaginative comic book writer. But the three men who gathered in London that winter afternoon in 1891 were no mere comic book writers; they were among the wealthiest and most influential men in British society, and they had access to the resources and the contacts to make that dream into a reality.
Present at the meeting that day: William T. Stead, famed newspaper editor whose Pall Mall Gazette broke ground as a pioneer of tabloid journalism and whose Review of Reviews was enormously influential throughout the English-speaking world; Reginald Brett, later known as Lord Esher, an historian and politician who became friend, confidant and advisor to Queen Victoria, King Edward VII, and King George V, and who was known as one of the primary powers-behind-the-throne of his era; and Cecil Rhodes, the enormously wealthy diamond magnate whose exploits in South Africa and ambition to transform the African continent would earn him the nickname of “Colossus” by the satirists of the day.
But Rhodes’ ambition was no laughing matter. If anyone in the world had the power and ability to form such a group at the time, it was Cecil Rhodes.
Richard Grove, historical researcher and author, TragedyAndHope.com.
RICHARD GROVE: Cecil Rhodes also was from Britain. He was educated at Oxford, but he only went to Oxford after he went to South Africa. He had an older brother he follows into South Africa. The older brother was working in the diamond mines, and by the time Rhodes gets there he’s got a set up, and his brother says “I’m gonna go off and dig in the gold mines. They just found gold!” And so he leaves Cecil Rhodes, his younger brother—who’s, like, in his 20s—with this whole diamond mining operation. Rhodes then goes to Oxford, comes back down to South Africa with the help of Lord Rothschild, who had funding efforts behind De Beers and taking advantage of that situation. And from there they start to use what—there’s no other term than “slave labor,” which then turns in later to the apartheid policy of South Africa.
GERRY DOCHERTY: Well, Rhodes was particularly important because in many ways, at the end of the 19th century, he seriously epitomized where capitalism was [and] where wealth really lay.
DOCHERTY: Rhodes had the money and he had the contacts. He was a great Rothschild man and his mining wealth was literally uncountable. He wanted to associate himself with Oxford because Oxford gave him the kudos of the university of knowledge, of that kind of power.
And in fact that was centered in a very secretive place called “All Souls College.” Still you’ll find many references to All Souls College and “people behind the curtain” and such phrases—”power behind thrones.” Rhodes was centrally important in actually putting money up in order to begin to gather together like-minded people of great influence.
Rhodes was not shy about his ambitions, and his intention to form such a group were known to many. Throughout his short life, Rhodes discussed his intentions openly with many of his associates, who, unsurprisingly, happened to be among the most influential figures in British society at that time.
More remarkably, this secret society—which was to wield its power behind the throne—was not a secret at all. The New York Times even published an article discussing the founding of the group in the April 9, 1902, edition of the paper, shortly after Rhodes’ death.
The article, headlined “Mr. Rhodes’s Ideal of Anglo-Saxon Greatness” and carrying the remarkable sub-head “He Believed a Wealthy Secret Society Should Work to Secure the World’s Peace and a British-American Federation,” summarized this sensational plan by noting that Rhodes’ “idea for the development of the English-speaking race was the foundation of ‘a society copied, as to organization, from the Jesuits.’” Noting that his vision involved uniting “the United States Assembly and our House of Commons to achieve “the peace of the world,” the article quotes Rhodes as saying: “The only thing feasible to carry out this idea is a secret society gradually absorbing the wealth of the world.”
This idea is laid down in black and white in a series of wills that Rhodes wrote throughout his life, wills that not only laid out his plan to create such a society and provided the funds to do so, but, even more remarkably, were collected in a volume published after his death by co-conspirator William T. Stead.
GROVE: Rhodes also left his his great deal of money—not having any children, not having married, dying at a young age—left it in a very well-known last will and testament, of which there were several different editions naming different benefactors, naming different executors.
So in 1902 Cecil Rhodes dies. There’s a book published that contains his last will and testament. The guy who wrote the book, William T. Stead, was in charge of a British publication called The Review of Reviews. He was part of Rhodes’ Round Table group. He at one time was an executor for the will, and in that will it says that he laments the loss of America from the British Empire and that they should formulate a secret society with the specific aim of bringing America back into the Empire. He talks about this a few different times throughout the will, then he names all the countries that they need to include in this list to have world domination, to have an English-speaking union, to have British race as the enforced culture on all countries around the world.
The will contains the goal. The goal is amended over a series of years and supported and used to gain support. And then by the time he dies in 1902 there’s funding, there’s a plan, there’s an agenda, there’s working groups and it all launches and then takes hold. And then not too long later, you’ve got World War one and then from that you’ve got World War two and then you’ve got a century of control and slavery that really could have been prevented.
When, at the time of Rhodes’ death in 1902, this “secret” society decided to partially reveal itself, it did so under the cloak of peace. It was only because they desired world peace, they insisted, that they had created their group in the first place, and only for the noblest of reasons that they aimed to “gradually absorb the wealth of the world.”
But contrary to this pacific public image, from its very beginnings the group was interested primarily in war. In fact, one of the first steps taken by this “Rhodes Round Table” (as it was known by some) was to maneuver the British Empire into war in South Africa. This “Boer War” of 1899-1902 would serve a dual purpose: it would unite the disparate republics and colonies of South Africa into a single unit under British imperial control, and, not incidentally, it would bring the rich gold deposits of the Transvaal Republic into the orbit of the Rothschild/Rhodes-controlled British South Africa Company.
The war was, by the group’s own admission, entirely its doing. The point man for the operation was Sir Alfred Milner, a close associate of Rhodes and a member of the secret society’s inner circle who was then the governor of the British Cape Colony. Although largely forgotten today, Alfred Milner (later “1st Viscount Milner”) was perhaps the most important single figure in Britain at the dawn of the 20th century. From Rhodes’ death in 1902, he became the unofficial head of the roundtable group and directed its operations, leveraging the vast wealth and influence of the group’s exclusive membership to his own ends.
With Milner, there was no compunction or moral hand-wringing about the methods used to bring about those ends. In a letter to Lord Roberts, Milner casually confessed to having engineered the Boer War: “I precipitated the crisis, which was inevitable, before it was too late. It is not very agreeable, and in many eyes, not a very creditable piece of business to have been largely instrumental in bringing about a war.”
When Rhodes’ co-conspirator and fellow secret society inner circle member William Stead objected to war in South Africa, Rhodes told him: “You will support Milner in any measure that he may take short of war. I make no such limitation. I support Milner absolutely without reserve. If he says peace, I say peace; if he says war, I say war. Whatever happens, I say ditto to Milner.”
The Boer War, involving unimaginable brutality—including the death of 26,000 women and children in the world’s first (British) concentration camps—ended as Rhodes and his associates intended: with the formerly separate pieces of South Africa being united under British control. Perhaps even more importantly from the perspective of the secret society, it left Alfred Milner as High Commission of the new South African Civil Service, a position from which he would cultivate a team of bright, young, largely Oxford-educated men who would go on to serve the group and its ends.
And from the end of the Boer War onward, those ends increasingly centered around the task of eliminating what Milner and the Round Table perceived as the single greatest threat to the British Empire: Germany.
DOCHERTY: So in the start it was influence—people who could influence politics, people who had the money to influence statesmen—and the dream. The dream of actually crushing Germany. This was a basic mindset of this group as it gathered together.
Germany. In 1871, the formerly separate states of modern-day Germany united into a single empire under the rule of Willhelm I. The consolidation and industrialization of a united Germany had fundamentally changed the balance of power in Europe. By the dawn of the 20th century, the British Empire found itself dealing not with its traditional French enemies or its long-standing Russian rivals for supremacy over Europe, but the upstart German Empire. Economically, technologically, even militarily: if the trends continued, it would not be long before Germany began to rival and even surpass the British Empire.
For Alfred Milner and the group he had formed around him out of the old Rhodes Round Table society, it was obvious what had to be done: to change France and Russia from enemies into friends as a way of isolating, and, eventually, crushing Germany.
PETER HOF: Yes, well from the British perspective, Germany, after their unification in 1871, they became very strong very quickly. And over time this worried the British more and more, and they began to think that Germany represented a challenge to their world hegemony. And slowly but surely they came to the decision that Germany must be confronted just as they had come to the same decision with regard to other countries; Spain and Portugal and especially France and now Germany.
German finished goods were marginally better than those from Britain, they were building ships that were marginally better than those of Britain, and all of this. The British elite very slowly came to the decision that that Germany needed to be confronted while it was still possible to do so. It might not be possible to do so if they waited too long. And so this was how the indecision crystallize.
I think that Britain might possibly have accepted the German ascendance, but they had something that that was was close at hand, and that was the Franco-Russian Alliance. And they thought if they could hook in with that alliance, then they had the possibility of defeating Germany quickly and without too much trouble. And that is basically what they did.
But crafting an alliance with two of Britain’s biggest rivals and turning public opinion against one of its dearest continental friends was no mean feat. To do so would require nothing less than for Milner and his group to seize control of the press, the military and all the diplomatic machinery of the British Empire. And so that’s exactly what they did.
The first major coup occurred in 1899, while Milner was still in South Africa launching the Boer War. That year, the Milner Group ousted Donald Mackenzie Wallace, the director of the foreign department at The Times, and installed their man, Ignatius Valentine Chirol. Chirol, a former employee of the Foreign Office with inside access to officials there, not only helped to ensure that one of the most influential press organs of the Empire would spin all international events for the benefit of the secret society, but he helped to prepare his close personal friend, Charles Hardinge, to take on the crucial post of Ambassador to Russia in 1904, and, in 1906, the even more important post of Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office.
With Hardinge, Milner’s Group had a foot in the door at the British Foreign Office. But they needed more than just their foot in that door if they were to bring about their war with Germany. In order to finish the coup, they needed to install one of their own as Foreign Secretary. And, with the appointment of Edward Grey as Foreign Secretary in December of 1905, that’s precisely what happened.
Sir Edward Grey was a valuable and trusted ally of the Milner Group. He shared their anti-German sentiment and, in his important position of Foreign Secretary, showed no compunction at all about using secret agreements and unacknowledged alliances to further set the stage for war with Germany.
HOF: He became a foreign secretary in 1905, I believe, and the foreign secretary in in in France was of course Delcassé. And Delcassé was very much an anti-German. He was very passionate about the recovery of Alsace-Lorraine, and so he and the King hit it off very well together. And Edward Grey shared this anti-German feeling with the king—as I explained in my book how he how he came to have that attitude about Germany. But in any case, he had the same attitude with the king. They worked very well together. And Edward Grey very freely acknowledged the heavy role that the King I played in British foreign policy and he said that this was not a problem because he and the King were in agreement on most issues and so they worked with very well together.
The pieces were already beginning to fall into place for Milner and his associates. With Edward Grey as foreign secretary, Hardinge as his unusually influential undersecretary, Rhodes’ co-conspirator Lord Esher installed as deputy Governor of Windsor Castle where he had the ear of the king, and the king himself—whose unusual, hands-on approach to foreign diplomacy and whose wife’s own hatred of the Germans dovetailed perfectly with the group’s aims—the diplomatic stage was set for the formation of the Triple Entente between France, Russia and Great Britain. With France to the west and Russia to the east, England’s secret diplomacy had forged the two pincers of a German-crushing vise.
All that was needed was an event that the group could spin to its advantage to prepare the population for war against their former German allies. Time and again throughout the decade leading up to the “Great War,” the group’s influential agents in the British press tried to turn every international incident into another example of German hostility.
When the Russo-Japanese War broke out, rumours swirled in London that it was in fact the Germans that had stirred up the hostilities. The theory went that Germany, in a bid to ignite conflict between Russia and England, who had recently concluded an alliance with the Japanese, had fanned the flames of war between Russia and Japan. The truth, of course, was almost precisely the opposite. Lord Lansdowne had conducted secret negotiations with Japan before signing a formal treaty in January 1902. Having exhausted their reserves building up their military, Japan turned to Cecil Rhodes’ co-conspirator Lord Nathan Rothschild to finance the war itself. Denying the Russian navy access to the Suez canal and high-quality coal, which they did provide to the Japanese, the British did everything they could to ensure that the Japanese would crush the Russian fleet, effectively removing their main European competitor for the Far East. The Japanese navy was even constructed in Britain, but these facts did not find their way into the Milner-controlled press.
When the Russians “accidentally” fired on British fishing trawlers in the North Sea in 1904, killing three fishermen and wounding several more, the British public was outraged. Rather than whip up the outrage, however, The Times and other mouthpieces of the secret society instead tried to paper over the incident. Meanwhile, the British Foreign Office outrageously tried to blame the incident on the Germans, kicking off a bitter press war between Britain and Germany.
The most dangerous provocations of the period centered around Morocco, when France—emboldened by secret military assurances from the British and backed up by the British press—engaged in a series of provocations, repeatedly breaking assurances to Germany that Morocco would remain free and open to German trade. At each step, Milner’s acolytes, both in government and in the British press, cheered on the French and demonized any and every response from the Germans, real or imagined.
DOCHERTY: Given that we’re living in a world of territorial aggrandizement, there was a concocted incident over Morocco, and the allegation that Germany was secretly trying to take over the British/French influence on Morocco. And that literally was nonsense, but it was blown up into an incident and people were were told “Prepare! You had better prepare yourself for the possibility of war because we will not be dictated to by that Kaiser person over in Berlin!”
One of the incidents —which I would need to make reference to to get the date perfectly right—referred to a threat. Well, it was portrayed as a threat—it was no more of a threat than a fly would be if it came into your room at the present moment—of a gun boat sitting off the coast of Africa. And it was purported that this was a sign that in fact Germany was going to have a deep water port and they were going to use it as a springboard to interrupt British shipping. When we researched it, Jim and I discovered that the size of that so-called gunboat was physically smaller than the king of England’s royal yacht. What? But history has portrayed this as a massive threat to to the British Empire and it’s “masculinity,” if you like—because that’s how they saw themselves.
Ultimately, the Moroccan crises passed without warfare because, despite the best efforts of Milner and his associates, cooler heads prevailed. Likewise the Balkans descended into warfare in the years prior to 1914, but Europe as a whole didn’t descend with them. But, as we well know, the members of the Round Table in the British government, in the press, in the military, in finance, in industry, and in other positions of power and influence eventually got their wish: Franz Ferdinand was assassinated and within a month the trap of diplomatic alliances and secret military compacts that had been so carefully set was sprung. Europe was at war.
In retrospect, the machinations that led to war are a master class in how power really operates in society. The military compacts that committed Britain—and, ultimately, the world—to war had nothing to do with elected parliaments or representative democracy. When Conservative Prime Minister Arthur Balfour resigned in 1905, deft political manipulations ensured that members of the Round Table, including Herbert Henry Asquith, Edward Grey and Richard Haldane—three men who Liberal leader Henry Campbell-Bannerman privately accused of “Milner worship”—seamlessly slid into key posts in the new Liberal government and carried on the strategy of German encirclement without missing a step.
In fact, the details of Britain’s military commitments to Russia and France, and even the negotiations themselves, were deliberately kept hidden from Members of Parliament and even members of the cabinet who were not part of the secret society. It wasn’t until November 1911, a full six years into the negotiations, that the cabinet of Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith started to learn the details of these agreements, agreements that had been repeatedly and officially denied in the press and in Parliament.
This is how the cabal functioned: efficiently, quietly and, convinced of the righteousness of their cause, completely uncaring about how they achieved their ends. It is to this clique, not to the doings of any conspiracy in Sarajevo, that we can attribute the real origins of the First World War, with the nine million dead soldiers and seven million dead civilians that lay piled in its wake.
But for this cabal, 1914 was just the start of the story. In keeping with their ultimate vision of a united Anglo-American world order, the jewel in the crown of the Milner Group was to embroil the United States in the war; to unite Britain and America in their conquest of the German foe.
Across the Atlantic, the next chapter in this hidden history was just getting underway…
Last week we saw how Baroness Jenny Tonge was cruelly maligned in the House of Lords by Lords Pickles and Polak. Pickles invited the minister and the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) to join him in condemning Jenny for “suggesting that the murders in Pittsburgh were caused by the actions of the Israeli Government”. He accused her of causing “great pain in Pittsburgh” and (horror of horrors) falling foul of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of anti-Semitism.
Jewish News reported that Pickles and Polak, both high-ranking figures in the Israel lobby, slammed her “callous inflammatory” remarks which, they claimed, were “in clear violation of the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism adopted by the UK Government. For a Member of the House of Lords to publish such hateful thoughts brings Parliament into disrepute.” Polak, according to this report in The Guardian, appears to work pretty much full-time for Israel and has abused the privilege of peerage. Many might think that brings the British Parliament into far greater disrepute.
So what did Baroness Jenny say on her Facebook page to warrant such a nasty personal attack? “Absolutely appalling and a criminal act, but does it ever occur to Bibi and the present Israeli government that its actions against Palestinians may be reigniting anti-Semitism? I suppose someone will say that it is anti-Semitic to say so?”
The PSC issued a statement complaining she “suggested Israel’s policies and its treatment of the Palestinians could be contributing to a rise in anti-Semitism generally” and the PSC regarded her post as “deeply troubling… and risked being read as implying that anti-Semitism can only be understood in the context of a response to Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. Such a view risks justifying or minimising anti-Semitism.”
As if their snottiness towards one of its founders and patrons wasn’t enough the PSC told Jewish News they were considering “further steps.”
Baroness Jenny is a founder and long-time member of the PSC and a courageous fighter for Palestinian rights. At that point, given the PSC Management’s uncalled-for hostility, she thought it best to spare her many friends embarrassment and resign.
Now a petition is being put to the PSC by members expressing outrage that instead of defending her the PSC’s Executive joined in the Zio attacks. It insists that nothing she said was anti-Semitic, adding that “it is perfectly reasonable to link Israel’s murderous behaviour with attacks on Jews”. It calls for the Executive to apologise and ask Jenny to reconsider her decision to resign.
But would she? Jenny Tonge might do better hitching her wagon to a reinvigorated, turbocharged BDS movement, at least until the PSC is purged of its head office idiots.
‘The Inquisition rules’
Two weeks earlier the Jewish Chronicle and the British Medical Journal reported another craven act against the Baroness, this time by the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine which withdrew its invitation to Jenny to be a panellist at a meeting on maternal health. The reason? Because of “very recent media reports and allegations of anti-Semitic sentiment which are contradictory to our organisational ethos, and which we do not feel are complementary to this event.” What sort of organisational ethos confuses anti-Semitism with maternal health issues in developing countries?
Jenny said: “I was un-invited after complaints from an unknown source, claiming that my presence would disrupt the meeting. I was not allowed to know who the complainant was… How they thought I could bring criticism of the government of Israel into maternal health I do not know.
“Criticise the Israeli government and you are excluded from other things too. The inquisition rules.”
The Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine subsequently told the BMJ : “There was external concern that a successful debate… would be sidetracked by public questions related to the extensive anti-Semitic issues linked to the Labour Party that were dominating the UK media at the time of the event.”
Feeble excuse. It doesn’t say much for whoever chairs their meetings if they cannot stop the discussion from being sidetracked and going off-topic.
How many anti-Semitism claims have a legal basis?
Hugh Tomlinson QC recently warned that if a public authority did decide to adopt the IHRA definition (though it wasn’t obliged to) then it must interpret it in a way that’s consistent with its statutory obligations and doesn’t cut across the European Convention on Human Rights, which provides for freedom of expression and freedom of assembly. Freedom of expression applies not only to information and ideas that are favourably received or regarded as inoffensive, but also to those that “offend, shock or disturb the State or any sector of the population”. Unless, of course, they amount to a call for violence, hatred or intolerance.
A further obligation put on public authorities is “to create a favourable environment for participation in public debates for all concerned, allowing them to express their opinions and ideas without fear, even if these opinions and ideas are contrary to those defended by the official authorities or by a large part of public opinion, or even if those opinions and ideas are irritating or offensive to the public”. A public authority seeking to apply the IHRA definition to prohibit or punish such expressions “would be acting unlawfully.”
Pickles and Polak should remember this next time they rise to speak in the House of Lords or anywhere else.
Retired Lord Justice of Appeal, Sir Stephen Sedley, pointed out that the 1986 Education Act established an individual right of free expression in all higher education institutions “which cannot be cut back by governmental policies”. He called for the Government to retreat from its “naively adopted” stance.
So according to top legal opinion the IHRA Definition does not make calling Israel an apartheid state or advocating boycott, divestment or sanctions (BDS) against Israel anti-Semitic. Also, Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights includes “the freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers”.
As for the ghastly truth about Israel on top of all the other evidence, the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA) produced a report establishing that Israel, beyond a shadow of a doubt, is a thoroughly vile apartheid regime. Such was the fuss kicked up when it appeared that it has been withdrawn from UN websites.
The authors urge the United Nations to implement this finding by fulfilling its international responsibilities in relation to international law and the rights of the Palestinian people as a matter of urgency, for two reasons.
First, the situation addressed in the report is ongoing….. In the case of Israel-Palestine, any delay compounds the crime by prolonging the subjugation of Palestinians to the active practice of apartheid by Israel. Prompt action is accordingly imperative….
Secondly…. since the 1970s, when the international campaign to oppose apartheid in southern Africa gathered momentum, apartheid has been considered in the annals of the United Nations and world public opinion to be second only to genocide in the hierarchy of criminality.
This report accordingly recommends that the international community act immediately, without waiting for a more formal pronouncement regarding the culpability of the State of Israel, its Government and its officials for the commission of the crime of apartheid….
The prohibition of apartheid is considered ‘jus cogens’ in international customary law. States have a separate and collective duty (a) not to recognize an apartheid regime as lawful; (b) not to aid or assist a State in maintaining an apartheid regime; and (c) to cooperate with the United Nations and other States in bringing apartheid regimes to an end. A State that fails to fulfil those duties could itself be held legally responsible for engaging in wrongful acts involving complicity with maintaining an apartheid regime.
No wonder it was hushed up.
What next?
Miko Peled, in my recent interview with him, underlined the need for activists to shift up a gear and accelerate from solidarity to full-on resistance. This means wider involvement, better co-ordination, revised targeting and sharper strategy. In effect a BDS Mk2, turbocharged. And it involves treating Zionism and those who promote or support it with far less tolerance. As Miko said on another occasion, “If opposing Israel is anti-Semitism then what do you call supporting a state that has been engaged in brutal ethnic cleansing for seven decades?”
Indeed. And what do you call people in public life who adore and defend that state and intimidate anyone who voices disapproval?
Things are changing. The Stop the War Coalition last weekend brought together a number of experts in a conference about “re-framing the debate” on Palestine. That whole discussion is long overdue and I’m waiting to hear what came out of it. For example, robust measures must be put in place to counter bogus accusations of anti-Semitism stifling free speech
It would be no bad thing if someone came forward with a proposal for a centralised legal unit to reprimand the Zio-extremists who overstep the mark and use false accusations of anti-Semitism to pour hatred on the likes of Jenny Tonge. Efforts must be made to ensure public institutions like Parliament don’t provide a platform for such odious behaviour. It would also be the unit’s task to launch into the public domain a working definition of anti-Palestinian racism similar to the one recently proposed by Jewish Voice for Labour.
UK ministers relied on questions from a tortured terror suspect to make their case for the Iraq War, the Middle East Eye (MEE) has claimed. British spies fed questions to the suspect even though they knew of his mistreatment.
According to redacted documents, seen by the MEE, an MI6 officer knew that Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi was placed inside a sealed coffin by the CIA at a US-run Afghanistan based prison. Al-Libi – alive inside the coffin – was then taken, aboard a truck, to an aircraft that was to fly to Egypt.
The MI6 officer and his colleagues reported the incident to their department’s London HQ, stating that they “were tempted to speak out” on behalf of al-Libi, but failed to do so, adding: “The event reinforced the uneasy feeling of operating in a legal wilderness.”
Once al-Libi was in Egypt, a country with a well-documented history of human rights abuses, both MI6 and MI5 fed questions to the detainee, receiving reports from his Egyptian interrogators.
Al-Libi, under torture, told his jailers that Osama Bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda had links to Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s nuclear weapons program. The claim was cited as fact by US President George W. Bush as he made the case for war.
Upon being returned to the CIA, al-Libi stated that he had lied to avoid further torture. By that point the US, along with the UK, had already invaded Iraq.
As well as Bush, al-Libi’s false information was cited by then-US Secretary of State Colin Powell in his infamous speech advocating for war at the UN Security Council on February 5 2003. On the same day, then-UK Prime Minister Tony Blair told parliament there were “unquestionably” links between Al-Qaeda and Iraq.
“There is evidence of such links. Exactly how far they go is uncertain. However… there is intelligence coming through to us the entire time about this,” Blair said.
The US had been keen to link Iraq to Al-Qaeda in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. In evidence disclosed to the Chilcot Inquiry, Bush had raised the issue in a phone call with Blair, who is said to have replied that he couldn’t accept it without seeing compelling evidence.
The true scale of the workload facing Russia’s foreign intelligence agents has been revealed by a London based think tank, which estimates half of all Russian expats in the British capital are spies or informants.
I’m no mathematician, but that seems like a hell of lot of work to get through. In essence, the report from the right-wing Henry Jackson Society – never one to exaggerate scant evidence to justify its existence – suggests that anywhere up to 75,000 Russians are providing intelligence to around 500 spy runners. The paperwork must be a nightmare and the lunches on expenses a massive drain on the Russian budget.
The Henry Jackson Society has collected quotes from all the usual suspects (in this report they’re called Russia-watchers) added in some facts that appear to be dug up from a Google news search, and titled its report ‘Putin Sees and Hears It All’. It’s the perfect subject for this kind of think tank, because they can say almost anything they want.
Before I saw this report, I thought it was unacceptable to attempt to incite suspicion towards an entire community. I thought that a professional organization might look at an outlandish claim that 50 percent of an entire group of people are involved in espionage and conclude that the estimate seems a little top heavy and not include it. I thought when including an estimate that could potentially inflame an already tense situation, at least the sources would be on the record, not anonymous, and there would be more than 16 of them. Well, this report has taught me a lot.
I’ve actually noticed signs of outrage in London’s Russian expat community following this airtight, not at all speculative report. If 50 percent of them are spies, that means 50 percent of them aren’t, and that half want to know what’s wrong with them – why haven’t they been chosen?
There are also signs of relief though, because in my experience, expat Russians have already adapted to the fact that everyone thinks they’re spies anyway, so this report actually offers some kind of relief – at least now only 50 percent of them pose a risk to the local population. A new kind of Russian roulette.
This is the line which is causing most of the fuss: “Perhaps reflecting the level of paranoia within London’s Russian community, interviewees and interlocutors suggested that anywhere between a quarter and a half of Russian expats were, or have been, informants.”
That phrase “Interviewees and interlocutors suggested,” certainly sounds like a legit source of information to include in a report which seeks to target 50 percent of an entire community, doesn’t it?
Vladimir Ashurkov, the Russian expat quoted in the report just before this line, actually responded after publication by saying that actually he thought it was probably closer to 5 percent. The one Russian expat named in the report disputed the claim. Author Dr. Andrew Foxall said on Twitter that Ashurkov was not one of the “interviewees and interlocutors” who suggested that half of all Russian expats are informants, only the unnamed anonymous ones did that. Again, seems legit.
I have a wide circle of Russian friends, all of them so far have told me how ridiculous they think this report is, but then, they would wouldn’t they?! All I can do is applaud their training and try not to let any state secrets slip in front of them.
Is there any advice on how to spot these foreign agents? The report says some “will be Russian nationals living openly in Britain under their real identities, but with few (if any) links to Russia’s intelligence and security agencies (so-called ‘non-official cover’). Yet more still will travel to the UK on short operational visits, either under their own names or with false identities, using standard immigration routes.”
So to paraphrase, suspect all Russians, even the ones just on holiday with no links to Russia’s security agencies.
Some argue that inciting this kind of suspicion towards any other group of people would be dismissed as xenophobia, in fact some Russians have suggested that, but they’re probably just spies aren’t they?
The true value in this report can be seen in Andrew Foxall’s defence of his findings online, where he admits he’s played fast and loose with his figures. He estimated that there are 150,000 Russians in London because that’s what a Guardian article said in 2014.
Foxall admitted that more recent official statistics say it’s more like 70,000. Whoever is funding this think tank (check that out, you’ll be amazed who it is) is paying its analysts to copy and paste from newspapers.
I have decided to put together a little report of my own, using this think tank’s own methods. I’ve asked five Russians living in London whether they are informants, they’ve all said no, so I estimate that this report from the Henry Jackson Society is bulls***. Full findings will be released soon.
On 25 May, famous US actor Mark Ruffalo tweeted an apology for suggesting that Israel is committing “genocide” in Gaza.
“I have reflected and wanted to apologise for posts during the recent Israel/Hamas fighting that suggested Israel is committing ‘genocide’,” Ruffalo wrote, adding: “It’s not accurate, it’s inflammatory, disrespectful and is being used to justify anti-Semitism, here and abroad. Now is the time to avoid hyperbole.”
But were Ruffalo’s earlier assessments, indeed, “not accurate, inflammatory and disrespectful”? And does equating Israel’s war on besieged, impoverished Gaza with genocide fit into the classification of “hyperbole”? … continue
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