UK has no proof of Russia’s role in Skripal poisoning - Page 19 - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#14919635
Potemkin wrote:Gavin Williamson is living proof of the Peter Principle. :lol:

I didn't know what the 'peter principle' is so I followed the link. I then hit play on the 2018.5.11 episode of Shobox The New Generation, and not 30 seconds later a commentator used the term "The Peter Principle" to introduce a fighter (saying the guy had been knocked out when he stepped up in class) :eek:

So, thanks for making the commentating on Shobox more pertinent I suppose?
#14922123
While Skotland Yard still declines to give any details on the ongoing investigation, new facts continue to appear in the press. What agent was used? Where it could have been produced? There are so many questions and no evidence that it was Russia. Some experts believe that it could have been a dirty trick perpetrated by MI5 and/or MI6 in conjunction with other NATO intelligence services. In this scenario MI5/6 may have instructed the Dr Strangeloves at Porton Down to manufacture a tepid dose of Novichok laced with a small dose of BZ. Once Skripal came into contact with it, he would collapse due to the BZ and then conveniently ‘come to the attention’ of whoever was around him. Assuming he was kept under close surveillance by the dirty-tricks team behind the plot, his collapse would provide them with the opportunity to ensure he was ‘rescued’. Conveniently, MI5/6 had deposited Skripal in a housing estate a mere ten miles away from Porton Down. Hence, the scientists there were able to rush to his rescue and ‘save’ him and his daughter ‘just in the nick of time’ with a perfectly matched antidote. https://villagemagazine.ie/index.php/20 ... -novichok/
#14922136
The German government finds itself in an embarrassing position since it has let itself be pressured into diplomatic measures against Russia by its Nato ally UK without a thread of evidence.

The German public TV channel ARD reports that the German government is still waiting for London to provide evidence and that the German intelligence service has found no information implicating Russia in the poisoning.

Machine translation by DeepL:

Skripal case

Berlin continues to wait for evidence
Updated: 07/06/2018 04:57

The federal government has not yet received any evidence from London on the Skripal case. The German intelligence services have no knowledge that Russia could be responsible for the poison attack.

By Michael Götschenberg, ARD capital city studio

The German government is waiting in vain until today: As the rbb Inforadio learned from parliamentary sources, the British government has still not presented any evidence to the German government that would prove that Russia is responsible for the poison attack on the former double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter.

Yesterday, the federal government informed the secret parliamentary control committee of the Bundestag about this. So far it had only been known that the poison was Novichok - a chemical warfare agent that had been produced in the Soviet Union.

No findings in Germany either

Furthermore, the British government has not presented anything so far. Neither could the British government prove that the poison used came from Russia, nor that the Kremlin was responsible for the attack. According to rbb information, the German intelligence services have not gained any information from their own sources that would allow such a conclusion to be drawn.

Father and daughter survive attack

After Julia Skripal, her father Sergej has left the hospital again. Julia Skripal made a brief statement to the camera in the UK in recent days: she still finds it hard to believe that she and her father were attacked in this way, she explained. Her recovery had been slow and painful.

The doctors at the hospital in Salisbury said the recovery of the Skriptals was a miracle, assuming that they would not survive.

Massive diplomatic consequences

The Skripal case had led to a dramatic deterioration in diplomatic relations between Russia and numerous Western states. After the British government declared that it was convinced that Russia was responsible for the poison attack on Skripal and his daughter, more than 140 Russian diplomats from 26 European countries, the USA, Canada and NATO had been expelled - a unique incident of this magnitude.

Germany had also participated and expelled four Russian diplomats. In return, Russia had expelled the same number of diplomats from these countries.

Other countries also had Novichoks

The fact that the poison alos existed outside Russia has been reported by the media. According to media reports from NDR, WDR, "Süddeutsche Zeitung" and "Die Zeit" a Russian scientist offered the Federal Intelligence Service a Novichok sample in the 1990s.

Since then it has been known that the neurotoxin had been exported from Russia - at least to the West. It is unclear into which other hands it may have fallen. The behaviour of the British government is also putting the German government in increasing need of explanation.

Beyond the fact that the poison was identified as Novichok, there is no trace leading to Russia, let alone the Kremlin. The decision to participate in the expulsion of Russian diplomats thus seems more than questionable.

Fall Skripal - Berlin wartet weiter auf Beweise


After their diplomatic attack on Russia, the British have grown conspicuously quiet about the Skripal affair. No doubt they would rather forget all about it just to pull it from the archives sometimes in the future as reference for the next provocation against Russia.

But not everybody is prepared to forget about it. The ARD TV channel is equivalent to the BBC and doesn't publish fringe news. The massive political pressure the UK has put on its allies without a thread of evidence will come to haunt the British in the future, since nobody is going to take them seriously any longer.

When will the British government offer its apologies to Russia and its allies?

The very least we should do now is to drop the sanctions against Russia and work for close relations between the EU and Russia.
#14931647
'Curiouser and Curiouser': Salisbury, the Skripals & the epic failure of the British Fairy Tale
"Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast" – Alice in Wonderland. The problem for the British narrative in the Skripal case is that one would have to believe way more than six things.

Let me start with the latest: the taxpayer-funded purchase for more than one million pounds of the homes in Salisbury of the British spy Sergei Skripal and the police officer Detective Sergeant Nick Bailey. This purchase is explained as necessary on security grounds and – some suspect – may be followed by the destruction of both houses and all the evidence therein.

This is difficult to explain in the absence of a state purchase of the Zizi's Pizza Restaurant where Skripal and his daughter Yulia ate what could have very well ended up being their last meal, and where they spent at least as much time as DS Bailey could have been in touch with the pair. Ditto the pub the Skripals visited before repairing for lunch. And anywhere else they went after leaving their door handle on which was smeared in gel form the strangely innocuous Novichok(ish) which killed none of the people who ingested it.

This presupposes that DS Bailey was never in the Skripal house but was – oddly, given his rank – merely a first responder on the park bench where the Skripals slumped at exactly the same time and in the same form, despite their differences in age, height, and physical form – itself difficult to understand if both were affected by the Novichok(ish) several hours before from the doorknob.

Neither Skripal showed any signs of having been affected in the pub, or wherever else they visited en route to Zizi's, or in the restaurant, or even in the only short piece of CCTV footage seen in the public domain after they had left the restaurant but before they reached the park bench on which they slumped five hours after leaving their doorknob.

IF all of the foregoing is a truthful account of what happened, then one thing is now the settled will of the majority of thinking people in the United Kingdom – even in Salisbury – whatever else was on the doorknob it was not a "deadly military grade nerve agent... of a type developed by Russia."

Because, if it had been, they would have both been dead in the short walk from the doorknob to the car or certainly before they had driven to the end of their street. They would have been found dead either on the garden path or slumped behind the wheel of their car, not five hours later on a park bench – very unwell but now thankfully apparently well again – and in Yulia's case looking the very picture of health.

Sergei, of course, we have not seen, but given his discharge from hospital just a few days after Yulia's, it is logical to infer that he too has made the same Lazarus-like resurrection from what we had been told was his imminent deathbed just the day before Yulia's now famous telephone call with her cousin in Moscow.

But IS what we have been told about the chain of events the truth? I have met no one, literally no one, who believes so.

And NO evidence, none whatsoever, has been produced by the government or any state authorities which gives the slightest justification to Theresa May's rush to judgment and blame issued peremptorily against the Russian Federation and – in the mouth of both the foreign secretary and the defense secretary – against President Putin himself.

It is established by the very fact the Skripals survived that what struck them was not Novichok.

Even if it had been, it is untrue that the family of nerve agents called Novichok was "developed by Russia." It was developed by the USSR, and not in Russia but in other republics, including the now-Western ally Ukraine and Uzbekistan. Its stockpiles were certified, destroyed by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW). Former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray attended a reception for the UN chemical weapons watchdog in Uzbekistan as they celebrated the successful conclusion of this work.

One of the leading Russian scientists in the Soviet-era Novichok team moved to the United States where he published a book containing the exact chemical formula needed to make Novichok. The book was available on Amazon. One eminent US scientist I interviewed on my radio show by phone from the United States told me that ANY of his undergraduate students could make Novichok and so could any university chemistry student anywhere in the world.

But it was not Novichok or any "military-grade nerve agent" which struck the Skripals – if it had been, they would be dead. I repeat that for emphasis.

But the other parts of Mrs. May's narrative haven't fared any better.

It was claimed by the PM that "only Russia had the motive" to attack Sergei Skripal. But this is clearly ridiculous as I said at the time. On the principle of Cui Bono, i.e. who benefits from this crime, obviously Russia, days before its presidential election and exactly 100 days before the World Cup opening ceremony, had the least to gain from carrying out this crime – certainly at that time.

Russia could have attacked Sergei Skripal at any time, with no collateral damage to his daughter or a passing policeman, either long before or alternatively after the World Cup. Simple logic demanded at least the consideration that the crime may have been carried out by someone or some state which sought to damage Russia. The faked murder of the Russian journalist Babchenko in Ukraine in May being such a case in point.

Moreover, the whole principle of spy swaps would have been gravely undermined by a Russian state attack on Skripal, if not rendered otiose entirely. After all, what spy is going to agree to be swapped if his fate is sealed in an agonizing demise even many years down the line? For that reason, Russia has never attacked any foreign agent released in a spy swap.

But such simple logic was never deployed in Mrs. May's rush to judgment.

Now that could have been mere incompetence – full disclosure, having known personally every British prime minister since Harold Wilson, I generally lean to the cock-up rather than the conspiracy theory of politics – or it could have a predetermined plot to justify the deliberate escalation of tensions with Russia either unilaterally as a diversion or in cahoots with the cowboys of the US deep state currently utterly mesmerized by the Russian Bear. Either way, it hasn't worn well.

Not the least of the reasons so few people in Britain are sold on the state narrative of what happened in Salisbury is the complete absence of any journalistic enquiry – an absence entered into either voluntarily or by compulsion. No pressure by the press on the hospital, on Porton Down, on the security services, on the government, on Whitehall. Just a deep, silent and growing chasm.

Again full disclosure, I broadcast sometimes daily on a Rupert Murdoch-owned national radio station – TalkRadio – and I have often raised the Skripal case on my radio shows and have never been asked, let alone told, not to. But I am the only one. Perhaps the government knows that any attempt to serve a so-called D-Notice on me would occasion my mounting the plinth in Trafalgar Square to defy it. Or perhaps they have other plans, I don't know. But apart from my own regular exposure of my doubts and now certainties on the Skripal case there has been absolutely no "mainstream" radio, television or newspaper discussion questioning the state narrative by any other commentator.

The British people are not fools, far from it. They are used to a raucous media, screaming tabloid enquiry and a fading but still extant tradition of investigative journalism. In its absence, the public have drawn the obvious conclusion.

So what did poison the Skripals and DS Bailey, who carried out this attack, and why? And why are we paying such a high price to own their houses?

To take the last point first, it seems overwhelmingly likely that these houses are being bought to purchase the silence of the parties involved. There can be no "security" reason for doing so in the absence of the destruction of Zizi's (who might well have welcomed it!). We must assume that DS Bailey – uniquely for a police hero who has been attacked in the course of his duty – has settled not for the reward of a grateful nation and a place on the pantheon as a public defender, but for lifelong obscurity, and a half million pounds or so.

Equally, it seems unlikely that Yulia's cousin will be hearing from her again.

As to who, what and why – perhaps, we will never know. But last week on RT, the most plausible theory from the most credible source I've yet heard finally emerged.

I have worked with Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist Seymour Hersh before and closely, almost 30 years ago. That work is worth retelling on another occasion. Suffice to say that Hersh is no journalistic trifle. He is of impeccable, near Olympian, standards.

Hersh claimed last week that the Skripals were attacked by Russians, just not the Russians identified by Mrs. May. But by Russian criminals, organized criminals, Russian Mafia criminals. The reason? Well, Hersh believes because the British security services had reactivated the bored (or broke) Sergei Skripal to begin working again, this time in cracking down on the nest of oligarchs and their often criminal money and enterprises operating in London.

I don't know this to be true, but it has the ring of truth. A far clearer ring of truth than anything I've heard from the British government
https://www.rt.com/op-ed/431630-uk-skri ... e-failure/
#14933871
The Holes in the Official Skripal Story
In my last post I set out the official Government account of the events in the Skripal Case. Here I examine the credibility of this story. Next week I shall look at alternative explanations.

Russia has a decade long secret programme of producing and stockpiling novichok nerve agents. It also has been training agents in secret assassination techniques, and British intelligence has a copy of the Russian training manual, which includes instruction on painting nerve agent on doorknobs.

The only backing for this statement by Boris Johnson is alleged “intelligence”, and unfortunately the “intelligence” about Russia’s secret novichok programme comes from exactly the same people who brought you the intelligence about Saddam Hussein’s WMD programme, proven liars. Furthermore, the question arises why Britain has been sitting on this intelligence for a decade and doing nothing about it, including not telling the OPCW inspectors who certified Russia’s chemical weapons stocks as dismantled.

If Russia really has a professional novichok assassin training programme, why was the assassination so badly botched? Surely in a decade of development they would have discovered that the alleged method of gel on doorknob did not work? And where is the training manual which Boris Johnson claimed to possess? Having told the world – including Russia -the UK has it, what is stopping the UK from producing it, with marks that could identify the specific copy erased?

The Russians chose to use this assassination programme to target Sergei Skripal, a double agent who had been released from jail in Russia some eight years previously.

It seems remarkable that the chosen target of an attempt that would blow the existence of a secret weapon and end the cover of a decade long programme, should be nobody more prominent than a middle ranking double agent who the Russians let out of jail years ago. If they wanted him dead they could have killed him then. Furthermore the attack on him would undermine all future possible spy swaps. Putin therefore, on this reading, was willing to sacrifice both the secrecy of the novichok programme and the spy swap card just to attack Sergei Skripal. That seems highly improbable.

Only the Russians can make novichok and only the Russians had a motive to attack the Skripals.


The nub of the British government’s approach has been the shocking willingness of the corporate and state media to parrot repeatedly the lie that the nerve agent was Russian made, even after Porton Down said they could not tell where it was made and the OPCW confirmed that finding. In fact, while the Soviet Union did develop the “novichok” class of nerve agents, the programme involved scientists from all over the Soviet Union, especially Ukraine, Armenia and Georgia, as I myself learnt when I visited the newly decommissioned Nukus testing facility in Uzbekistan in 2002.

Furthermore, it was the USA who decommissioned the facility and removed equipment back to the United States. At least two key scientists from the programme moved to the United States. Formulae for several novichok have been published for over a decade. The USA, UK and Iran have definitely synthesised a number of novichok formulae and almost certainly others have done so too. Dozens of states have the ability to produce novichok, as do many sophisticated non-state actors.

As for motive, the Russian motive might be revenge, but whether that really outweighs the international opprobrium incurred just ahead of the World Cup, in which so much prestige has been invested, is unclear.

What is certainly untrue is that only Russia has a motive. The obvious motive is to attempt to blame and discredit Russia. Those who might wish to do this include Ukraine and Georgia, with both of which Russia is in territorial dispute, and those states and jihadist groups with which Russia is in conflict in Syria. The NATO military industrial complex also obviously has a plain motive for fueling tension with Russia.

There is of course the possibility that Skripal was attacked by a private gangster interest with which he was in conflict, or that the attack was linked to Skripal’s MI6 handler Pablo Miller’s work on the Orbis/Steele Russiagate dossier on Donald Trump.

Plainly, the British governments statements that only Russia had the means and only Russia had the motive, are massive lies on both counts.

The Russians had been tapping the phone of Yulia Skripal. They decided to attack Sergei Skripal while his daughter was visiting from Moscow.

In an effort to shore up the government narrative, at the time of the Amesbury attack the security services put out through Pablo Miller’s long term friend, the BBC’s Mark Urban, that the Russians “may have been” tapping Yulia Skripal’s phone, and the claim that this was strong evidence that the Russians had indeed been behind the attack.

But think this through. If that were true, then the Russians deliberately attacked at a time when Yulia was in the UK rather than when Sergei was alone. Yet no motive has been adduced for an attack on Yulia or why they would attack while Yulia was visiting – they could have painted his doorknob with less fear of discovery anytime he was alone. Furthermore, it is pretty natural that Russian intelligence would tap the phone of Yulia, and of Sergei if they could. The family of double agents are normal targets. I have no doubt in the least, from decades of experience as a British diplomat, that GCHQ have been tapping Yulia’s phone. Indeed, if tapping of phones is seriously put forward as evidence of intent to murder, the British government must be very murderous indeed.

Their trained assassin(s) painted a novichok on the doorknob of the Skripal house in the suburbs of Salisbury. Either before or after the attack, they entered a public place in the centre of Salisbury and left a sealed container of the novichok there.

The incompetence of the assassination beggars belief when compared to British claims of a long term production and training programme. The Russians built the heart of the International Space Station. They can kill an old bloke in Salisbury. Why did the Russians not know that the dose from the door handle was not fatal? Why would trained assassins leave crucial evidence lying around in a public place in Salisbury? Why would they be conducting any part of the operation with the novichok in a public area in central Salisbury?

Why did nobody see them painting the doorknob? This must have involved wearing protective gear, which would look out of place in a Salisbury suburb. With Skripal being resettled by MI6, and a former intelligence officer himself, it beggars belief that MI6 did not fit, as standard, some basic security including a security camera on his house.

The Skripals both touched the doorknob and both functioned perfectly normally for at least five hours, even able to eat and drink heartily. Then they were simultaneously and instantaneously struck down by the nerve agent, at a spot in the city centre coincidentally close to where the assassins left a sealed container of the novichok lying around. Even though the nerve agent was eight times more deadly than Sarin or VX, it did not kill the Skripals because it had been on the doorknob and affected by rain.

Why did they both touch the outside doorknob in exiting and closing the door? Why did the novichok act so very slowly, with evidently no feeling of ill health for at least five hours, and then how did it strike both down absolutely simultaneously, so that neither can call for help, despite their being different sexes, weights, ages, metabolisms and receiving random completely uncontrolled doses. The odds of that happening are virtually nil. And why was the nerve agent ultimately ineffective?

Detective Sergeant Bailey attended the Skripal house and was also poisoned by the doorknob, but more lightly. None of the other police who attended the house were affected.

Why was the Detective Sergeant affected and nobody else who attended the house, or the scene where the Skripals were found? Why was Bailey only lightly affected by this extremely deadly substance, of which a tiny amount can kill?

Four months later, Charlie Rowley and Dawn Sturgess were rooting about in public parks, possibly looking for cigarette butts, and accidentally came into contact with the sealed container of a novichok. They were poisoned and Dawn Sturgess subsequently died.

If the nerve agent had survived four months because it was in a sealed container, why has this sealed container now mysteriously disappeared again? If Rowley and Sturgess had direct contact straight from the container, why did they not both die quickly? Why had four months searching of Salisbury and a massive police, security service and military operation not found this container, if Rowley and Sturgess could?

I am, with a few simple questions, demolishing what is the most ludicrous conspiracy theory I have ever heard – the Salisbury conspiracy theory being put forward by the British government and its corporate lackies.

My next post will consider some more plausible explanations of this affair.
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives ... pal-story/
#14933932
I am, with a few simple questions, demolishing what is the most ludicrous conspiracy theory I have ever heard


:roll:

In real news

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/h ... 53931.html

Police have reportedly identified the suspected perpetrators of the nerve agent attack on the Russian ex-spy Sergei Skripal.

Detectives believe several Russians were involved in the attempted assassination of the former MI6 double agent and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury in March.
#14933936
layman wrote:real news

No, a government sanctioned 'leak'.

There are no security cameras covering the Skripal's front door.

In real news, Russians pass through UK airports, coming and going, every day.

Press Association wrote:They are sure they are Russian,” said the source, adding security camera images had been cross checked with records of people who entered the country.


:)
#14939326
SpecialOlympian wrote:Atlantis and Rich, finally posting together. Two great posting styles that mix well together. Like peanut butter and chocolate. Can't wait until Rich implicates the Jeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeews in this.

I said right off the bat, that this was almost certainly Mossad.

I do not blame the Jews for Banking crises, the collapse of traditional morality, the corruption of artistic standards, starting the 1812 war, starting WWI, causing Germany's defeat in WWI. But I do think that Jews have massive outsized influence on western foreign policy as demonstrated by the Balfour declaration and the UN partition plan and post world war 2, I do think Jewish intellectuals have had an outsized influence in the manufacture of the White guilt lie and the push for multiculturalism and open borders.
#14939552


layman wrote:Galloway is a paid agent (via rt) of the Russian empire.


Nonsense, but unsurprising coming from you since your posts usually display that you believe everything you read from TV news channels.

Will await any evidence of a connection.


There remains to be no evidence Russia was involved in the Skripal poisoning, very likely because there is no connection.
#14944646
layman wrote:real news

Scotland Yard has issued doctored CCTV images.

Image

Note the time stamp.

The CCTV images released by Scotland yard allegedly show Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov both occupying exactly the same space at Gatwick airport at precisely the same second. 16.22.43 on 2 March 2018.


:lol:
#14944667
This is doing the rounds on Russian propaganda channels and via troll factory’s.

The police confirmed they were separate filter corridors and gates.

Because obviously if you were doctoring images you couldn’t change times and dated :roll:

I remember earlier in the thread the police were not part of the conspiracy. I guess they are now. #deepstate
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