Skripal: The West should study chemistry.

in #russia7 years ago

It's been a few days since that March 4 in which Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were found in a square in the English city of Salisbury passed out. According to Downing Street, Skripal and his daughter were attacked with "Novichok", an organophosphorus nerve agent developed and produced by the USSR. British foreign relations secretary Boris Johnson said the attack was ordered directly by the president of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin. This attack generated a diplomatic incident in which the United Kingdom expelled 23 diplomats, generating the same response from Russia that also expelled 23 diplomats. And today the president of the United States, Donald Trump, ordered the expulsion of 60 Russian diplomats and the closure of their consulate in Seattle. However, outside of conventional media circles, such as the BBC, the New York Times, The Daily Mail, etc., several experts have drawn attention to certain irregularities in the incident.

The victim

Sergei Skripal served in the GRU, the Central Intelligence Department (military intelligence) and acted as a double agent for the British intelligence services during the nineties and early 2000s. In 2004, he was arrested by the FSB, the Federal Intelligence Service, and sentenced to 13 years in prison. In 2010 he was exchanged with the United Kingdom for Russian spies and since then he lived in the country. If he had been living in the United Kingdom for 8 years, what threat did he pose for Russia? and if he was a threat, why was he not dealt with when they had him in custody? Why wait 8 years to get rid of him? And after 8 years out of service, who can believe that he still had information that had not been relegated to the British?

The statements of the British government

The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Theresa May, stated in the House of Commons that it was "highly probable" that Russia was behind the chemical attack and gave the Kremlin 24 hours to present evidence of the opposite (guilty until proven otherwise?). Many pointed to this statement as a clear violation of the Chemical Weapons Convention, which states that the United Kingdom must give Russia a sample of the nerve agent used, in addition to all the evidence concerning the case, giving Russia 10 days to respond after making the necessary studies. The United Kingdom refused to do such thing.
The foreign secretary went a step further and directly accused Vladimir Putin of ordering the chemical attack against the ex-spy. No evidence of this has yet been presented, just as no evidence was presented that Vladimir Putin ordered the hacking of the National Democratic Committee (DNC) servers, which experts[1] have called attention to this being a leak and not a hack as the American corporate media says. Other countries that joined the United Kingdom to accuse Russia of the incident include a joint statement by Presidents Trump, Merkel and Macron, from the United States, Germany and France, respectively.

A Wikipedia article.

A quick reading of the article about Wikipedia agent Novichok allows the reader to begin to doubt about various parts of the story. According to Wikipedia, this nerve agent is an organophosphorus compound that inhibits acetylcholinesterase, an enzyme that degrades acetylcholine. By stopping the functioning of this enzyme, the concentration of acetylcholine increases generating involuntary spasms, respiratory arrest, cardiac arrest and, finally, death. In addition it can be read that this nervous agent is one of the most powerful ever created. Is it possible that a nervous agent that generates uncontrolled spasms and is extremely lethal to leave a person comatose? and if the answer is affirmative, how much is necessary to produce this effect? The amounts used by the attackers must have been extremley small to generate such a response.
Another thing that raises doubts and suspicions is the fact that they have not yet shown images of the victims of the alleged attack. It is said that he is in a comatose state in the hospital, seriously injured but stable, but still we have not seen a confirmation that this is so. I ask the reader to excuse my cynicism, but one must remember that the British government was part of the disinformation campaign of the weapons of mass destruction that led to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. We all know today that the campaign was false and the terrible consequences it had on the region.

Powell UN anthrax.jpg
United States Ambassador to the UN Collin Powell with a vial of "anthrax" evidence that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, in the United Nations Security Council prior to the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Only Russia?

The fact that agent Novichok was developed and produced in the Soviet Union is the support of the whole plot. According to the British government because the nervous agent has its origins in the USSR (produced in Uzbekistan) does not mean that the Kremlin are the only ones that currently produce it and there are three facts that should be marked in this regard:
~According to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), an international body charged with implementing the Chemical Weapons Convention, it stated that on September 27, 2017 that Russia had eliminated all of its chemical weapons.[2]
~Although the nervous agent was developed in the USSR, the formula is public knowledge and its synthesis is so easy to achieve that it is found in the Wikipedia article:

Novichok synthesis.png
Synthesis of the novichok compound. Source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novichok_agent

~An article published in the New York Times by Judith Miller[3] on May 25, 1999, stated that the United States and Uzbekistan negotiated an agreement to provide US assistance to dismantle and decontaminate one of the chemical weapons development centers, the largest development center in the world for the Novichok chemical agent. Could not the Americans have obtained samples in this way to analyze the agent? In no way am I accusing the United States of having generated a chemical attack against the United Kingdom, but if this is so, it is not Russia the only state with access to the agent.

More of the same

This is not the first chemical attack that does not tolerate the slightest objective analysis. A similar event that came to my mind when I saw all this was the sarin attack in the village of Khan Sheikhoun. In the video that was the evidence that led Donald Trump to order the attack with 59 Tomahawk missiles (of which only 23 hit the target, if a runway is considered as a key target of the attack) to the military airport of Shayrat, you can see a group of people on the ground, the victims of the attack, but there are several things that do not make sense. Sarin is a chemical people similar to Novichok, it is an organophosphate that inhibits acetylcholinesterase. It is an extremely dangerous gas that once entered into the system can only be stopped with an antidote, however the White Helmets (humanitarian branch of Al-Qaeda) used water to treat the wounded. To make matters worse, these same White Helmets are seen with chinstraps in the attacked zone, which are useless in those situations. Many have worked to unmask this "humanitarian organization" as well as many aspects of the Syrian war. For more information, I recommend that you read the works of Vanessa Beeley and Eva Bartlett.

It should also be noted the following response from a Stephen Davies, consultant in emergency medicine, who responded to the note entitled "Poison exposure leaves almost 40 needing treatment." In this response, he points out that of the Salisbury people who attended the hospital for fear of having been exposed to the chemical agent, none showed symptoms of it. The only people affected seem to have been the Skripal and the policeman who found them. Evidently it is a highly selective agent.

Novichok newspaper.jpg

The possible intentions

Suppose now that the chemical attack is a false flag, I think that at this point there are enough reasons to doubt that it is not. Suppose the United Kingdom caused this commotion, what for? The choice to blame Russia is no coincidence, Russia has long been used as a scapegoat and the same problem is always hidden behind: internal conflicts and the crisis of neoliberalism. Social, economic and political conflicts are the product of Russian hackers and trolls. President Putin has been demonized for years, creating the conditions for people to believe anything that is said about him, and fake news quickly come in.
This incident allows the United Kingdom to attack Russia in an important month for them, since the elections were held in Russia on March 18. It also gives them the opening to boycott the World Cup (which the royal family has already confirmed that they wil not attend) that will take place this year in Russia and finally is an excuse to worsen diplomatic relations with Russia after its actions in the Syrian war that it frustrated the West's plans for regime change, especially now that the liberation of the Eastern Guta from the Islamist proxies armed by the West is imminent.
Finally, there is the motive for attacking Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the Labor Party. Corbyn has an anti-war position, a position that does not sit well with the Establishment, as does his growing popularity. The British MSM (BBC, The Daily Mail, The Sun, etc.) daily attack him for his positions that are similar to Bernie Sanders' or other socialists in the world. After the attack Corbyn called for calm on the part of the authorities and for the necessary investigations to be carried out in accordance with the Chemical Weapons Convention. For this reason he was called, like many other voices on the left, a Putin "puppet" and the BBC presented this image in one of his programs that highlights the impartiality of the media:

Corbyn BBC.jpg

An operation so easily refutable by these people shows only one thing: they are afraid. The public does not trust the media, they no longer trust their economic system, they no longer trust their rulers. People are waking up to reality. Those who have power take care of themselves and their businesses and those businesses are harmful to other human beings and our planet. That's why people like Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn are gaining more and more popularity. Winds of change in the world are blowing. Let's hope it's not too late ...

[1]https://consortiumnews.com/2017/07/24/intel-vets-challenge-russia-hack-evidence/
[2]https://www.opcw.org/news/article/opcw-director-general-commends-major-milestone-as-russia-completes-destruction-of-chemical-weapons-stockpile-under-opcw-verification/
[3]http://www.nytimes.com/1999/05/25/world/us-and-uzbeks-agree-on-chemical-arms-plant-cleanup.html

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Most likely it was a US provocation (80%), or maybe the revenge of former colleagues from GRU to traitor (20%). The likelihood that this has to do with Putin is =zero, IMO.

If I had to guess, I would say it is a joint effort from both the US and the UK. But I don't know, we might never know for sure. Most likely scenario is this doesn't go anywhere and everything was done for the newspaper headline. Thank you for reading!

Not a big fan of Bernie's or Corbyn's but very good job w/this article! Putin is always taking the blame lately. Most I think will come around and realize this is little more than a empire, in it's death throws, witch-hunt. Let's hope it's not too late!

Thank you! It is indeed a dying empire. It's the whole reason why this is happening. They see their power shrinking and they are desperate.

very good article and analysis with many arguments!

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