The US/ Ukraine Biological Weapons Controversy By Richard Miller (London)
The existence of biological research facilities, once said by the mainstream media to be Russian war propaganda, has now been confirmed by the US administration. They are denying that biological weapons were being researched, even though the bugs being researched, including anthrax, are just the sort that are used in biological weapons. It seems that all the super powers have numerous labs preparing doomsday bugs, which could escape. That is more of a threat than a nuclear exchange, as the exchange has always been governed by mutually assured destruction, but the accidental or intentional release of a doomsday virus depends upon lab security. Frightening indeed.
“The Foreign Ministry of Russia claimed on Tuesday that the nation’s military had “confirmed” the existence of American-funded biological laboratories in Ukraine used for developing “biological weapons.”
Russian troops reportedly found “documentation” showing Ukrainian scientists destroying evidence of “plague, anthrax, rabbit-fever, cholera and other lethal diseases” studied in the country’s laboratories on February 24, according to a statement from Foreign Ministry spokesman Maria Zakharova, as part of their ongoing assault on the country. Russian leader Vladimir Putin ordered a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in late February that he claimed was necessary to “de-Nazify” the country. Russia initially invaded Ukraine in 2014 and has been illegally occupying its Crimean Peninsula since.
The government of communist China rapidly began publicizing the alleged Russian findings, demanding that Washington reveal all classified information on its biological military research. The official stance of the Chinese government is that the Chinese coronavirus pandemic – which began in Wuhan, China, in 2019, was triggered by a laboratory leak in Maryland and covered up using cases of e-cigarette injuries. Beijing has yet to explain how the virus began spreading in Wuhan before it spread in the United States if this theory is accurate, or how non-contagious injuries could secretly be cases of highly infectious Chinese coronavirus transmission.
Wuhan is home to one of China’s top biological facilities, the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), which itself has been the subject of much speculation as it had reportedly been studying bat coronaviruses shortly before the pandemic began. World Health Organization (W.H.O.) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus demanded further investigation into the WIV last year after an official W.H.O. study declared a laboratory leak as highly unlikely to have caused the pandemic. Tedros described his own agency’s report as not “extensive enough.”
“We confirm that, during the special military operation in Ukraine, the Kiev [sic] regime was found to have been concealing traces of a military biological programme implemented with funding from the United States Department of Defence,” Zakharov’s statement on Tuesday read. “Documentation on the urgent eradication of highly hazardous pathogens of plague, anthrax, rabbit-fever, cholera and other lethal diseases on February 24 was received from employees of Ukrainian biolaboratories.”
U.S. Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland confirmed in a Congressional hearing on Tuesday that Ukraine was home to “biological research facilities” and that the State Department was “quite concerned” Russia would seize them as part of its military campaign in the country.
“Ukraine has biological research facilities which, in fact, we are now quite concerned Russian troops, Russian forces may be seeking to gain control of,” Nuland said in response to a question from Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), “so we are working with the Ukrainians on how they can prevent any of those research materials from falling into the hands of Russian forces should they approach.”
Nuland added she would have “no doubt” that Russian forces would be responsible in the event of any biological attack in Ukraine.
Zakharova did not disclose where, exactly, these alleged documents came from or how Russia concluded that evidence of a biological laboratory studying infectious diseases necessarily meant Ukraine was developing biological weapons. It also did not detail America’s alleged involvement in the matter.
Nonetheless, Zakharova declared, “we can conclude that components of biological weapons were being developed in Ukrainian laboratories in direct proximity to Russian territory.”
The Russian spokeswoman did not link the alleged discovery to the Chinese coronavirus pandemic. The Chinese government, while enthusiastically seizing on the alleged discovery – also did not, though it clearly implied that laboratories in Ukraine should raise pandemic concerns. In remarks on Wednesday, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian – the first to claim without evidence that the Chinese coronavirus pandemic began at the Fort Detrick, Maryland, U.S. army facility – called Moscow’s allegations the “tip of the iceberg” and again mentioned Fort Detrick.
“Using such pretexts as cooperating to reduce biological safety risks and strengthening global public health, the US has 336 biological labs in 30 countries under its control. 336, you heard me right,” Zhao said. “It also conducted many biological military activities at the Fort Detrick base at home.”
“What is the true intention of the US? What has it done specifically? The international community has long-held doubts,” Zhao continued. “However, the US has kept stonewalling, and even dismissing the international community’s doubts as spreading disinformation.”
Zhao concluded by demanding that the Pentagon release all confidential information regarding “biological military activities.”
Zhao and other spokespeople at the Foreign Ministry have repeatedly demanded access to confidential American military research allegedly to explore the potential origins of Chinese coronavirus. In May 2021, for example, Zhao demanded America “immediately launch a virus origins-tracing study on itself” and let Chinese scientists into military facilities for that purpose.
The Russian government has supported China’s demands to investigate American biological research, often pointing to Ukraine as home to key laboratories. Moscow has not, however, called for similar investigations into the Wuhan Institute of Virology and has condemned American officials for requesting them.
“We consider it not a proper time, being somewhere in the middle of a severe crisis, an unprecedented crisis, to try to blame everything on the international health organization (the World Health Organization) or, the next day, on China,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in May 2020. Peskov claimed that any suggestion the WIV was involved in the pandemic was “non-diplomatic” and that American officials needed “proof” for such “very, very serious” allegations.
Top Russian virologist Viktor Zuev has similarly dismissed accusations that the virus originated in the WIV by asserting no proof exists that the virus was genetically modified – which is not a claim that American officials under President Donald Trump had made regarding the WIV.
Outside of the Kremlin, Russian politicians have agreed with the Chinese government that the Chinese coronavirus pandemic began in America.
“The US laboratories where scientists study, explore and maybe even create new biological weapons are now located in Georgia, in some counties of Eastern Europe. That must be taken under control,” Vyacheslav Volodin, chairman of Russia’s Lower Parliament House the State Duma, the top lawmaking body, said in April 2021, claiming that the virus came from a “leak from one of those laboratories that they [the Americans] have opened around the world.”
Here is Tucker Carlson breaking this story:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AugzqXPYaOc
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/victoria-nuland-ukraine-has-biological?s=w
“Self-anointed "fact-checkers” in the U.S. corporate press have spent two weeks mocking as disinformation and a false conspiracy theory the claim that Ukraine has biological weapons labs, either alone or with U.S. support. They never presented any evidence for their ruling — how could they possibly know? and how could they prove the negative? — but nonetheless they invoked their characteristically authoritative, above-it-all tone of self-assurance and self-arrogated right to decree the truth, definitively labelling such claims false.
Claims that Ukraine currently maintains dangerous biological weapons labs came from Russia as well as China. The Chinese Foreign Ministry this month claimed: "The US has 336 labs in 30 countries under its control, including 26 in Ukraine alone.” The Russian Foreign Ministry asserted that “Russia obtained documents proving that Ukrainian biological laboratories located near Russian borders worked on development of components of biological weapons.” Such assertions deserve the same level of skepticism as U.S. denials: namely, none of it should be believed to be true or false absent evidence. Yet U.S. fact-checkers dutifully and reflexively sided with the U.S. Government to declare such claims "disinformation” and to mock them as QAnon conspiracy theories.
Unfortunately for this propaganda racket masquerading as neutral and high-minded fact-checking, the neocon official long in charge of U.S. policy in Ukraine testified on Monday before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and strongly suggested that such claims are, at least in part, true. Yesterday afternoon, Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), hoping to debunk growing claims that there are chemical weapons labs in Ukraine, smugly asked Nuland: “Does Ukraine have chemical or biological weapons?”
Rubio undoubtedly expected a flat denial by Nuland, thus providing further "proof” that such speculation is dastardly Fake News emanating from the Kremlin, the CCP and QAnon. Instead, Nuland did something completely uncharacteristic for her, for neocons, and for senior U.S. foreign policy officials: for some reason, she told a version of the truth. Her answer visibly stunned Rubio, who — as soon as he realized the damage she was doing to the U.S. messaging campaign by telling the truth — interrupted her and demanded that she instead affirm that if a biological attack were to occur, everyone should be “100% sure” that it was Russia who did it. Grateful for the life raft, Nuland told Rubio he was right.
But Rubio's clean-up act came too late. When asked whether Ukraine possesses “chemical or biological weapons,” Nuland did not deny this: at all. She instead — with palpable pen-twirling discomfort and in halting speech, a glaring contrast to her normally cocky style of speaking in obfuscatory State Department officialese — acknowledged: “uh, Ukraine has, uh, biological research facilities.” Any hope to depict such "facilities” as benign or banal was immediately destroyed by the warning she quickly added: “we are now in fact quite concerned that Russian troops, Russian forces, may be seeking to, uh, gain control of [those labs], so we are working with the Ukrainiahhhns [sic] on how they can prevent any of those research materials from falling into the hands of Russian forces should they approach” — [interruption by Sen. Rubio]:
Nuland's bizarre admission that “Ukraine has biological research facilities” that are dangerous enough to warrant concern that they could fall into Russian hands ironically constituted more decisive evidence of the existence of such programs in Ukraine than what was offered in 2002 and 2003 to corroborate U.S. allegations about Saddam's chemical and biological programs in Iraq. An actual against-interest confession from a top U.S. official under oath is clearly more significant than Colin Powell's holding up some test tube with an unknown substance inside while he pointed to grainy satellite images that nobody could decipher.
It should go without saying that the existence of a Ukrainian biological “research” program does not justify an invasion by Russia, let alone an attack as comprehensive and devastating as the one unfolding: no more than the existence of a similar biological program under Saddam would have rendered the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq justifiable. But Nuland's confession does shed critical light on several important issues and raises vital questions that deserve answers.
Any attempt to claim that Ukraine's biological facilities are just benign and standard medical labs is negated by Nuland's explicitly grave concern that “Russian forces may be seeking to gain control of” those facilities and that the U.S. Government therefore is, right this minute, “working with the Ukrainians on how they can prevent any of those research materials from falling into the hands of Russian forces.” Russia has its own advanced medical labs. After all, it was one of the first countries to develop a COVID vaccine, one which Lancet, on February 1, 2021, pronounced was “ safe and effective” (even though U.S. officials pressured multiple countries, including Brazil, not to accept any Russian vaccine, while U.S. allies such as Australia refused for a full year to recognize the Russian COVID vaccine for purposes of its vaccine mandate). The only reason to be “quite concerned” about these "biological research facilities” falling into Russian hands is if they contain sophisticated materials that Russian scientists have not yet developed on their own and which could be used for nefarious purposes — i.e., either advanced biological weapons or dual-use “research” that has the potential to be weaponized.
What is in those Ukrainian biological labs that make them so worrisome and dangerous? And has Ukraine, not exactly known for being a great power with advanced biological research, had the assistance of any other countries in developing those dangerous substances? Is American assistance confined to what Nuland described at the hearing — “working with the Ukrainians on how they can prevent any of those research materials from falling into the hands of Russian forces” — or did the U.S. assistance extend to the construction and development of the "biological research facilities” themselves?
For all the dismissive language used over the last two weeks by self-described “fact-checkers,” it is confirmed that the U.S. has worked with Ukraine, as recently as last year, in the “development of a bio-risk management culture; international research partnerships; and partner capacity for enhanced bio-security, bio-safety, and bio-surveillance measures.” The U.S. Embassy in Ukraine publicly boasted of its collaborative work with Ukraine “to consolidate and secure pathogens and toxins of security concern and to continue to ensure Ukraine can detect and report outbreaks caused by dangerous pathogens before they pose security or stability threats.”
This joint US/Ukraine biological research is, of course, described by the State Department in the most unthreatening way possible. But that again prompts the question of why the U.S. would be so gravely concerned about benign and common research falling into Russian hands. It also seems very odd, to put it mildly, that Nuland chose to acknowledge and describe the "facilities" in response to a clear, simple question from Sen. Rubio about whether Ukraine possesses chemical and biological weapons. If these labs are merely designed to find a cure for cancer or create safety measures against pathogens, why, in Nuland's mind, would it have anything to do with a biological and chemical weapons program in Ukraine?
The indisputable reality is that — despite long-standing international conventions banning development of biological weapons — all large, powerful countries conduct research that, at the very least, has the capacity to be converted into biological weapons. The work conducted under the guise of “defensive research” can, and sometimes is, easily converted into the banned weapons themselves. Recall that, according to the FBI, the 2001 anthrax attacks that terrorized the nation came from a U.S. Army Research scientist, Dr. Bruce Ivins, working at the U.S. Army's infectious disease research lab in Fort Detrick, Maryland. The claim was that the Army was "merely” conducting defensive research to find vaccines and other protections against weaponized anthrax, but to do so, the Army had to create highly weaponized anthrax strains, which Ivins then unleashed as a weapon.
A 2011 PBS Frontline program on those anthrax attacks explained: “in October 2001, Northern Arizona University microbiologist Dr. Paul Keim identified that the anthrax used in the attack letters was the Ames strain, a development he described as ‘chilling’ because that particular strain was developed in U.S. government laboratories.” Speaking to Frontline in 2011, Dr. Keim explained why it was so alarming to discover that the U.S. Army had been cultivating such highly lethal and dangerous strains in its lab, on U.S. soil:
We were surprised it was the Ames strain. And it was chilling at the same time, because the Ames strain is a laboratory strain that had been developed by the U.S. Army as a vaccine-challenge strain. We knew that it was highly virulent. In fact, that’s why the Army used it, because it represented a more potent challenge to vaccines that were being developed by the U.S. Army. It wasn’t just some random type of anthrax that you find in nature; it was a laboratory strain, and that was very significant to us, because that was the first hint that this might really be a bioterrorism event.
This lesson about the severe dangers of so-called dual-use research into biological weapons was re-learned over the last two years as a result of the COVID pandemic. While the origins of that virus have not yet been proven with dispositive evidence (though remember, fact-checkers declared early on that it was definitively established that it came from species-jumping and that any suggestion of a lab leak was a “conspiracy theory,” only for the Biden White House in mid-2021 to admit they did not know the origins and ordered an investigation to determine whether it came from a lab leak), what is certain is that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was manipulating various coronavirus strains to make them more contagious and lethal. The justification was that doing so is necessary to study how vaccines could be developed, but regardless of intent, cultivating dangerous biological strains has the capacity to kill huge numbers of people. All of this illustrates that research that is classified as "defensive” can easily be converted, deliberately or otherwise, into extremely destructive biological weapons.”
Comments