Steve Topple, one of the great people behind the Canary, posted this video as far back as April 8 2018. However, it’s only just come up on my search through YouTube.
We’ve all had profound doubts about Marr’s impartiality, as several times it’s been very clear that there is a profound anti-Labour bias there. Or at least anti-Corbyn. This raised the issue again.
Topple asks the question because, on his Sunday morning politics programme, Marr was discussing the Skripal poisoning with a couple of female journalists. One of them is the notoriously biased Julia Hartley-Brewer. In the piece of the programme Topple shows here, they’ve obviously been talking about Boris Johnson’s claim in a German interview that the Russians were responsible. Marr, however, denies it. He says he’s not trying to speak for Johnson, but states that he thinks Johnson only identified the toxin as Novichok. He then goes on to say that the Russians were oversensitive, and so declared that Boris had accused them.
This is followed by a piece from the German interview, where BoJo is shown saying exactly the opposite of what Marr has just said. Boris declares very firmly that the Russians are responsible.
You could be charitable, and say that Marr or his researchers were simply mistaken, and didn’t remember properly what our great Foreign Secretary really said. After all, Marr said ‘I think’ before making his statement to excuse Boris of blaming the Russians, which suggests he wasn’t sure.
But as there is a strong and pervasive Tory bias on the Beeb’s news programming, and there really does seem a concerted effort by this country’s military-industrial complex to drive us into a war with Putin’s Russia, I am not convinced.
It might be an honest mistake, but it looks to me like more government misinformation on behalf of the Tories and the war party.
Craig Murray was our ambassador to Uzbekistan, before he fell foul of the government and establishment for standing up and recommending that we shouldn’t do deals with them because it was an oppressive dictatorship. Murray’s been fiercely criticising the official line that the substance used to poison the Skripals was manufactured in Russia. In this short interview with RT, which is just over five minutes long, he further tears apart the government’s accusations of Russian responsibility.
Murray states that he was told by people in the Foreign Office two weeks ago that they couldn’t say that Russia manufactured the poison. He talks about how there was pressure on Porton Down to say it was Russian, but the latest statement by the government slightly amending their stance is nothing more than information management. The government was aware that the International Chemical Weapons Authority were going to issue a statement that there is no evidence the Russians were responsible, and so modified their own statements about it accordingly. The RT interviewer asks him about the poison, and whether it is so complex and difficult to manufacture that it requires the resources of a state. Murray replies that there are at least half a dozen states that could manufacture the Novichoks nerve agent. As for it being too complicated for anyone, he cites Prof. Collum in New York, a chemist, who said that any of his postgraduate students could have made it.
He also talks about a film that has been broadcast stating the government’s opinion on the poisoning. He observes that the end of the film looks like it has been tacked on. It is as though the film makers were also pressured to add a bit more to their film in order for it to support the government’s line.
The RT interviewer then mentions that Murray was an ambassador to Uzbekistan, and asks if the Uzbeks could have manufactured the poison. Murray repeats that half a dozen states could, and says that there was indeed a chemical weapons plant in Uzbekistan. This was dismantled by the Americans, and he attended the party that was held when they had finished the job. The materials were then taken back to America, so the Americans certainly have the ability to manufacture the poison. The facility, however, was soviet, not Russian, and there were people of many nationalities working in it, including Ukrainians. They have now returned to the Ukraine, so that country now possesses the knowledge and ability to manufacture the poison.
He also tears apart the statement of one other country, which denied that they produced the poison. He notes that they didn’t say that they couldn’t make it, only that it wouldn’t have come from them, because their security was too tight.
Murray states that what is needed in Salisbury poisoning is a proper criminal investigation with all the resources these have. But this has not been done. Instead, the government has leapt in, with little thought or evidence, to accuse the Russians in order to increase the Cold War tensions with Russia and create a confrontation with them.
The news yesterday that a number of EU countries had followed Britain’s lead and expelled Russian diplomats is alarming. This is ratcheting up the tension with Russia to Cold War levels. Despite the lack of definitive evidence that the Russians were behind the poisoning of the Skripals, May and nearly the rest of the countries in the EU have decided that Putin is responsible. And I’m afraid that the tensions they’re fomenting will ultimately lead to war.
Killary began all this nonsense about Russia interfering in western elections as a way of diverting blame from herself for his massive failure to convince Americans to vote her. She’s a horrible candidate – a massively privileged, neoliberal corporatist, who has absolutely no sympathy for the working class, and whose policies on drugs with her husband actively damaged the Black community. She took working class votes for granted and didn’t even bother to campaign in many traditional Democrat states. Instead, she did what Blair did over here and went chasing the upper and upper-middle classes. As a result, she alienated many voters, who would otherwise have voted Democrat. She did get a million or so votes more than Trump, but lost through the machinations of the Electoral College, a very undemocratic institution that was originally set up to allow slave-holding states to count their slaves as less than human so they would have voting equality with free states. She could have blamed the electoral and demanded its abolition. Many others have. But she didn’t. Obviously, she’s quite happy with that very undemocratic part of the American electoral system.
Unable to accept her responsibility for losing the election, and a strong supporter of the status quo, she turned to blaming Russia. In doing so, she joined a number of far right organisations, including eugenicist groups founded by former Nazis, who believed that the poor and Blacks are biologically unfit and so should be denied state welfare. And even before she lost the election, she showed a very strong hostility to Russia.
From reading articles in Counterpunch, it appears that the current policy in the White House and the Pentagon is for ‘full spectrum dominance’. That means that America should be the world’s only superpower, with an unchallenged military dominance of the rest of the world. What America, and its elite leader, including Hillary Clinton, fear is the rise of the multipolar world. They cannot tolerate the emergence of political and economic rivals, such as Russia, or China, or India, for that matter. Hence the massive increase in military spending. Under Obama’s administration, Hillary’s foreign policy towards Russia and China was militantly hostile and she seemed keen to ramp hostility to both these nations to dangerous levels.
And on this side of the Pond, various NATO generals also forecast war with Russia. One of them, a deputy-head of NATO, actually had a book published a couple of years ago entitled 2017: War with Russia, in which he predicted last year that Russia would invade Latvia, and this would spark a war between Russia and NATO. He predicted it would all happen last May. Fortunately, the month came and went and Russia didn’t. But NATO troops were massing on Russia’s borders, which would serve as a provocation to the Russians. Russia is encircled by NATO bases, and has sent military advisers to the Fascist regime in Ukraine.
As I’ve blogged many times before, much of this renewed American hostility to Russia has nothing to do with concerns about democracy and human rights. It’s purely economic. The American multinationals that poured millions into backing Yeltsin at the end of the Cold War did so in the expectation that the ensuing massive privatisation of Russian state assets would allow them to dominate the Russian economy. But Putin has stopped that. Thus the massive corporate anger against Putin’s Russia. Putin is a thug, who has his critics and opponents beaten and killed, but that’s not the reason the American political elite and their counterparts over here hate him.
I’m very much afraid that this latest round of expulsions will end by creating more tension, in a cycle that will end in a war with Russia, perhaps using a manufactured incident as a pretext for invading them. The pressure the government placed on Porton Down to state that the chemical used to poison the Skripals was definitely Russian is very, very similar to the pressure Blair and his cronies put on MI6 to ‘sex up’ the dodgy dossier and claim that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction that he could launch within 45 minutes. He didn’t. The British and American publics were lied to, and despite massive opposition the west invaded Iraq. And the result has been nearly two decades of chaos and carnage.
And I’m afraid the same process is going on here to create another war for the benefit of the American military-industrial complex and big corporations desperate to get their hands on Russian resources and industries.
It needs to be stopped. Now. Before war really does break out, a war that could see millions die, and our beautiful planet turned into an irradiated cinder.
Mike over at Vox Political has put up a very interesting post, wondering if the Skripals weren’t poisoned with a Novichoks nerve agent, but something far more prosaic: weedkiller. He notes that if a nerve toxin had been used, far more people would have been affected, and points out that the effects of the two types of poison are similar. It’s therefore possible that, far from being the victims of an assassination attempt by the Russian government, they were instead accidentally poisoned by a gardener.
One of his commenters, Wanda Lozinska, argues on the other hand that it is too much of a coincidence that the only victims of this poisoning were the Skripals. Sergei Skripal was a double agent, who’d betrayed a number of Russian spies to British intelligence and was therefore an enemy of the Russian state. However, she did state that weedkiller was also an ingredient of the Novichoks poison.
Reading this, I wonder if the Skripals were deliberately poisoned, but with weedkiller by somebody they had crossed, rather than Vladimir Putin. Sergei Skripal had many enemies, including the spies, whose identities he’d betrayed. It’s possible that one of them could have made the poison and then secretly administered it to them. As for Putin’s involvement in this affair, it’s been pointed out that Skripal served time in jail in Russia for his treachery. If Putin had wanted him killed, he surely would have done it there, rather than wait until the man was free and living in Britain.
Of course, it’s possible that the Skripals were killed on Putin’s orders, and you can probably think up a number of reasons why this should be so. Perhaps it wasn’t because of something he did, but because of what Putin feared he was going to do. But this is just speculation. We don’t know if Putin was responsible, and as more evidence appears, the less certain the Tories’ assertion that he was becomes. If the toxin was weedkiller, rather than nerve poison, then its far more likely that the Skripals were poisoned by a private individual, rather than a Russian agent with their arsenal of chemical weapons.
In any case, Jeremy Corbyn is right to demand more evidence before jumping to conclusions and ramping up tension with Russia.
As for the newspapers currently repeating these allegations uncritically, there’s an article attacking them and there cynical use of British jingoism in today’s Counterpunch. This notes a study of the newspapers in five European countries, which found that the Daily Mail and the Scum were the worst for their demonization of immigrants and asylum seekers. In any other nation, that would most probably be a badge of shame. But over here, I can imagine the hacks and corporate managers at these papers actually being proud of it.
My thanks to Michelle, one of the great commenters on this blog, for pointing this out.
Craig Murray, formerly our man in Uzbekistan, before he was thrown out and smeared for having a conscience about dealing with dictators, has an important post up at his blog. And it contradicts what Boris Johnson is trying to tell us all that the Russians are definitely responsible for the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal. Porton Down have submitted their evidence at the court case, which was to decide if they could be permitted to take further blood samples from the Skripals for testing. Their evidence states
The Evidence
16. The evidence in support of the application is contained within the applications themselves (in particular the Forms COP 3) and the witness statements.
17. I consider the following to be the relevant parts of the evidence. I shall identify the witnesses only by their role and shall summarise the essential elements of their evidence.
i) CC: Porton Down Chemical and Biological Analyst
Blood samples from Sergei Skripal and Yulia Skripal were analysed and the
findings indicated exposure to a nerve agent or related compound. The samples
tested positive for the presence of a Novichok class nerve agent OR CLOSELY RELATED AGENT.
The emphasis is Murray’s. He points out that this means that Porton Down have not positively identified the toxin used as a Novichok, as it could be a closely related agent. And even if it were a Novichok, this would still not mean that it was necessarily manufactured in Russia. The poison could have been produced by any number of states or terrorist/ criminal organisations. This contradicts what Johnson has been telling the rest of the world, including the journos at the German magazine, Deutsche Welle, where he told them that the poison was very definitely Russian.
He concludes
This constitutes irrefutable evidence that the government have been straight out lying – to Parliament, to the EU, to NATO, to the United Nations, and above all to the people – about their degree of certainty of the origin of the attack. It might well be an attack originating in Russia, but there are indeed other possibilities and investigation is needed. As the government has sought to whip up jingoistic hysteria in advance of forthcoming local elections, the scale of the lie has daily increased.
On a sombre note, I am very much afraid the High Court evidence seems to indicate there is very little chance the Skripals will ever recover; one of the reasons the judge gave for his decision is that samples taken now will be better for analysis than samples taken post mortem.
Murray also states that for the last few days he’s come under a Denial Of Service cyberattack, as well as some form of ‘ghostbanning’ for his posts on Facebook and Twitter. He therefore asks people to reblog and repost his article, for which he waives all copyright.
Quite a few people have put up pieces tearing great, raw chunks out of the government’s story that the Russians are responsible for the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal and Salisbury. Last week, Leftwingnobody, one of the great commenters on this blog, posted up a link on his blog to a piece in the Irish Times, which stated that it was unlikely the Russians were responsible. Leftwingnobody’s link is at https://leftwingnobody.wordpress.com/2018/03/14/unlikely-that-vladimir-putin-behind-skripal-poisoning/?wref=tp. Go to it, and follow the link for more information.
Craig Murray, who was formerly our man in Uzbekistan, before being kicked out because he had moral objections to our dealing with a corrupt, repressive tyrant, has also cast doubt on the government’s story. And Mike has also posted up continuing developments, which add more questions. Today he put up a piece quoting the Russians, who said that if they had used military grade nerve agents, then far more people would have been affected than the Skripals and the poor cop, who was poisoned. And they would all be dead, not incapacitated. Which is how it struck me. Furthermore, the Russians couldn’t use their original stocks of the Novichoks poison, because this would have decayed after 27 years. Quite apart from the fact that the international chemical weapons authority confirmed the Russians had destroyed them. But as the scientist, who developed the toxin revealed, the knowledge of how to manufacture it is now out in the public sector, and so any number of countries or individuals could be behind the attack. Porton Down has refused to confirm that the Russians were responsible, and stated only that the nerve agent was of ‘Russian manufacture’.
But as far as May and the Tories, and their lapdogs in the Beeb are concerned, the Russians are responsible, and we’re facing a new threat from Putin. Who, according to BoJo, is now like Hitler. At least in the way he’s going to use next year’s world cup in Moscow, which will be like the Berlin Olympics in 1938.
I caught May pontificating on the Six O’clock News about how the Russians were threatening us and our European allies. The report also said she was trying to persuade the other European leaders to join her. Queue a shot of Angela Merkel going down a corridor, looking grim and serious. Then it moved on to Boris, saying that he wasn’t trying to stoke tensions with his wild comparison with Hitler. And on the local news this evening, they were also talking about the Salisbury poisoning and described the chemical used as ‘the Russian nerve agent’, although this is still open to doubt. Back to the Six O’clock News, the Beeb showed an Estonian diplomat talking about the Russian threat.
This is dangerous talk, whatever nonsense BoJo might try to bluster in order to justify his absurd comments. The Russians lost 20 million people fighting Hitler during the War. Millions of their squaddies were starved and worked to death as slave labourers after being captured as P.O.W.s by the Nazis. It’s therefore highly offensive for BoJo to make this stupid, insulting comparison. Also, as Simon Reeve showed in his documentary series about Russia a few months ago, the Russians are genuinely proud of their armed forces and the way they defended their homeland during the Great Patriotic War. Their equivalent of Remembrance Day/ Veteran’s Day is far more like a party, with food and drink, as well as marches and speeches, than the very solemn and austere ceremonies we go through every November 11.
I don’t doubt that Putin will try to exploit the World Cup to promote his government and his country, but the accusation that he will is more than a little hypocritical. Every government uses international sporting events like the World Cup, or the Olympics, to promote themselves. I can still remember the Americans at the Atlanta Olympics in the 1980s. As for Russia threatening Europe, in many cases it’s the other way. Russia is ringed by NATO bases right along its borders. This was after the original treaty with Gorbachev pledged NATO not to expand up to its borders in return for Gorby withdrawing all their troops from eastern Europe and allowing the former satellites to go their own way. I’m sympathetic to the fears of the Baltic States, who were reincorporated into the USSR after a brief period of independence when Stalin threw the Germans back in World War II. But at the same time, the Estonians are building monuments to Nazi collaborators as national heroes. And the supposedly democratic government of the Ukraine includes real, uniformed Nazis, who are now out on the streets of Kiev to keep order. But you won’t find that mentioned on the news, because obviously, the vast majority of people in this country will not want to support a blatantly Fascist regime.
So once again, we’re being fed lies by the Tories and the media, lies which could take us to war. And who benefits? Well, May and the Tories, obviously. She was seven points behind Labour in the polls, and the Tories are looking at being wiped out in London. Thus, she’s trying to copy Thatcher, and act like a ‘bargain-basement Boadicea’, rattling her sabre furiously. The real reason for this tension is less a military threat from Russia, and far more the fact that the American multinationals, who thought they would get to control the Russian economy under Yeltsin, have found themselves stymied by Putin. It’s like the Iraq invasion all over again: dodgy claims of weapons of mass destruction, and economic motives – western corporate interests – disguised as an attack, or resistance to, an evil tyrant.
Putin is a thug, and a real enemy of democracy. Journalists and opposition politicians in Russia have been arbitrarily arrested, jailed, beaten and murdered by his thugs. And I don’t doubt that at least some of the 14 Russians, who’ve died over here in suspicious circumstances, have been assassinated by him. But Corbyn is right about the Salisbury poisoning. It isn’t clear that he’s behind it, and we need far more proof before stoking up international tensions.
But the Tories are doing it anyway, for their own cynical electoral advantage, and those of their corporate financers. And if there is a war, the people who will pay the price will be ordinary working people. When Bush invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, the Republican Neocon leadership were very careful to make sure that none of their sons or daughters were likely to be posted to the conflict zone. As opposed to the poor and working class, whose districts were targeted by the recruiting sergeants.
As for Boris, looking at the way he has conducted himself as foreign secretary, I can only agree with the Russians. It is amazing that he is the spokesman of a nuclear power. Actually, it’s downright terrifying.
For all our sakes, we need the media to hold May and the rest to account, to ask the hard questions that Laura Kuenssberg and the rest of the Beeb’s pro-Tory lackeys aren’t asking. Before the Tories start another war for the benefit of multinational capital.
More fun from the video madhouse that is Alex Jones’ Infowars programme. In this short clip from Sam Seder’s Majority Report, Seder and his fellow producers and presenters comment on a fine bit of lunacy from one of Jones’ co-presenters. The man rants about how he was lied to by established historians and history textbooks – about JFK and Adolf Hitler. Who, he then states, is still alive.
Er, no. I think it’s fairly well established that Hitler blew his brains out in the Berlin bunker in 1945 after losing the Second World War. And through fear of what would happen to him, if Stalin got hold of him. Hitler was already in poor health by that staged. His hair was greying and he had to walk with a stick. Some of this was due to the Fuhrer being poisoned by the quack cures prescribed by his homeopathic healer, which contained such great curative compounds like strychnine. Also, I think Hitler was born in 1889. Which means that if he was alive today, he’d be 128.
Which is clearly impossible, but perhaps not incredible to that section of the conspiracy milieu which believes that the Nazis were super-scientists, and that Hitler and the other high-ranking Nazis have really been cloned at a secret Antarctic UFO base. That theory also says that the cloning has gone wrong, and the new incarnations of the Nazi elite are all three foot tall. Like really nightmarish, totalitarian versions of Doctor Evil’s Mini-Me.
The programme also shows the photograph, taken in the 1950s, which is often touted as showing that Hitler escaped to South America. It shows someone with what looks like his moustache, taken in somewhere like Buenos Aires. Seder and his team joke about how Hitler obviously wouldn’t shave of his moustache, even if he was being hunted and it was obviously his most recognisable feature. He would clearly have tried to hide in plain sight by going up to people, shouting at them that he was indeed Hitler, so that they’d just wave him away as ‘just that guy, who keeps on that he’s Hitler’, and so not take him seriously.
There was a piece about the rumours that the Nazi leader had escaped in the Fortean Times a few years ago. This was a very sceptical treatment of the myth, and described how, after the War, so many people were convinced of this that they saw Hitler everywhere. There were even letters to the FBI by people claiming that they’d seen him serving behind the counter at their local shops or burger joints.
Now it seems that Alex Jones’ merry team have joined these paranoids, which is another very good reason why no-one should take him or his station seriously. Along with all the rubbish about Obama being demon-possessed, Hillary Clinton being a demon-possessed, devil-worshipping alien cyborg, gay rights being a globalist plot to reduce us all to genderless cyborgs, and Obama and the Democrats conspiring to take Americans’ guns away and incarcerate them all in FEMA camps in a false emergency. And kill all White people.
More scaremongering from the right-wing press. This time it isn’t the tabloids, but the august Times. In this clip from RT, the station reports how the Times has accused them of exploiting the Grenfell fire to foment a class war, as well as misreporting some of the facts about the £10 million cladding. This provoked an angry response from George Galloway. Galloway states that this was a fire that killed 71 poor people in the richest borough in Britain. They died because the cladding used to coat the building also used arsenic, so that if people didn’t burn in the fire, they were poisoned. Galloway himself lives and works in the borough, and is a governor of one of the schools. Every day he sees the results of the fire, and indeed, smells it. He rightly describes it as ‘beyond offensive’ and ‘obscene’ to claim that people are angry about it because of Vladimir Putin.
He’s absolutely right. You only have to read Mike’s comments about the fire to realise that people were talking about it, and expressing their anger without reference to RT. Vladimir Putin has nothing to do with the anger people feel about the incident, and the way the Tories are constantly lying and fiddling around with the inquiry to avoid incriminating themselves and their fellows on the council.
But the British media and Conservative establishment is just following what Killary and the Americans are doing, and trying to blame RT and alternative media generally for their own failures. RT is a threat because an increasing audience is turning away from the Conservative press and media, and tuning into it, both here and in America. This is because the network is covering the issues that the mainstream media doesn’t like to show too much – the poverty, homelessness, debts and the crisis in healthcare caused by decades of Thatcherism/Reaganism, privatisation and welfare cuts. I’m not denying that the mainstream media don’t cover these, but they don’t do so in as much detail, nor tackle these issues from a left-wing perspective. And they really, really don’t want to tackle the unjust, illegal imperialist wars we’re fighting in the Middle East.
Once upon a time, when it was edited by Harold Evans in the ’70s, the Times was a genuinely respected newspaper. Then it was bought up, against the advice of people who knew better, by Murdoch. And it’s been a right-wing propaganda rag ever since. A friend of mine buys it, and whenever I’ve looked inside there’s always been at least one piece written by an entitled, upper-middle class windbag rubbishing Corbyn. ‘Cause he represents a real threat to Murdoch and the rest of the corporate elite causing mass poverty so they can enjoy more tax cuts and power over their workforce. The Times readership has fallen dramatically, to the point where, if it was a normal paper, it would have been wound up. But as it’s Britain’s ‘paper of record’, Murdoch keeps it going as it allows him a place at the table with Britain’s great and good in government.
And so it, and the rest of the press and mainstream media, feel threatened by RT and other alternative news outlets. Thus they try to combat them by spreading lies and smears about evil, subversive Russian influence. It’s not Russia that’s tearing this country apart, as Chunky Mark observed in his video on the Heil attacking social media. It’s them. And if you want a deeper view of what’s really going on in Britain, then you’re better off watching some of the material on RT than reading the Times, Torygraph or other right-wing news sheets, or watching the Beeb with its very blatant, pro-Tory bias.
As for ‘class war’, the best quote about that comes from Stanley Baldwin during the General Strike: it’s class war, and we started it. But you ain’t going to hear such a frank admission from this government or its shills in the media.
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