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Transcript of Interview with Emanuel Pastreich

Sputnik: What is your personal assessment of the new leaks concerning the origins of COVID-19? Specifically, we are referring to the Wall Street Journal article reporting US intelligence sources suspect a leak from a Chinese bio lab. Why this? Why now? Do you see anything special about the timing of these allegations? 

Emanuel Pastreich: There are several issues at play here. The first is that the entire COVID-19 project, and the medical and general policy enacted in the United States and around the world using COVID-19 as an excuse is increasingly subject to question. A lot of the policies are now being criticized, and all sorts of legal actions are being taken.

There’s a need to try and pin this mess on somebody. And China, the “rising threat” in Washington establishment chatter, is a perfect place to pin it on.

The second factor is what is happening in Ukraine and the numerous reports about US- funded bio labs. I’m not expert enough to judge the accuracy of those reports, but Russia has released considerable information concerning bio labs in Ukraine that they have captured.

There’s been a lot of discussion out there, the information is not classified, about DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) and other private corporations developing both viruses and vaccines, as well as working together, in a corrupt manner, with the World Health Organization and with multinational drug companies.

So clearly there is an incentive to try and pin all of this mess, this transnational global finance mess spilling over from the pandemic, to pin it all on China, and specifically on the Chinese Communist Party.

Sputnik: Michael Gordon played a central role in disseminating false allegations that Iraq possessed the weapons of mass destruction in 2003. Why might it be that the intelligence community turns to him this time again? And how trustworthy, in your view, is his reporting?

Emanuel Pastreich: I am not all that interested in individual operatives. Most of them don’t write the material that they put out. The larger question should be what exactly is this “intelligence community?”

I think there has been some transformation since the Iraq Invasion in 2003. Intelligence is increasingly privatized, run for the profit of multinationals.

Anyone with deep pockets these days can get these organizations to promote their storyline, and they’re extremely closely connected with the media now, even more deeply than was the case before. Intelligence represents multinational pharmaceutical companies and weapons manufacturers, etc.

What specifically was Gordon pushing here? I think there were two goals. To take attention away from the central role of multinational corporations, the World Health Organization, the United Nations, and the United States government in the push for a corona pandemic.

Blaming China is now a popular approach. There’s a recent discussion by Mike Gallagher, a Republican from Wisconsin who sits on the House Intelligence Committee. He wrote at length about how this intelligence report must be credible, that somehow COVID-19 came out of a lab in China, i.e. China is an aggressive power attacking the United States,  the leader of democracy.

There is a problem with this argument. I don’t rule out the possibility that China was involved at some level. There’s corruption in China, as there is in the United States, and around the world. But, it’s clear that the push for mandates, for lockdowns, for vaccines, and for masks did not come from China, although China followed the guidelines.

Clearly the United States, led by the nose by the global capital and technology nexus, was at the core of this operation.

I think we can look at Gordon as being the one selected to convey the message.

I wouldn’t blame him personally, but this move is similar, as you suggested, to the buildup for the war with Iraq. They want to create a false narrative.

They express this narrative in every possible media format. Perhaps in the back of the minds of those people deep in DARPA, in DoD, and at Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, and military intelligence contractors, they’re thinking they’ll use this as the lead up for some sort of major confrontation with China, which will allow them to kill two birds with one stone.

On the one hand, they will be able to pin all this stuff which originated with American-flavored multinational corporations, private equity, and multinational banks on China.

The second point is use it as a means to create some sort of new Cold War, or even some sort of actual military conflict, with China, which will allow them to stimulate the economy by creating demand for weapons, and that will save the asses of all these people who are potentially risk for how they tore the United States apart, by shifting to a military economy.

Sputnik: Jake Sullivan said on Sunday that there are a variety of views in the U.S. intelligence community about whether or not the virus originated naturally, or in the lab, and that he can’t confirm or deny according to The Wall Street Journal report. What do you think that “variety” could mean?

Why was he so reluctant here, do you think?

Emanuel Pastreich: There’s a variety of these “intelligence” organizations that have been radically privatized over the last 15 years. So, increasingly, it’s not the government that’s engaged in the collection of information, the analysis of the information, and the pushing of information (propaganda).

It’s a for-profit process in most cases. That said, within the larger intelligence community, including the Department of Energy in this case (which is what was quoted by Sullivan), there are individuals, or even groups, who are honestly trying to give an accurate story.

I would not dismiss all intelligence reports as being inaccurate. Sometimes people bravely state truths that have to be said and they can be more accurate than the media.

Not in this case. In this case, I think the “variety” is not a variety of interpretations, but a variety of propaganda strategies.

Different people are thinking, how are we going to solve this problem?

But the “problem” is what to do if the responsibility for the  COVID-19 pandemic might ultimately be pinned on American-affiliated multinational corporations and wealthy individuals. So they’re trying to come up with some storyline, but they can’t agree on it.

I think one of the major reasons is that the intelligence community, or the American military, is itself split. We have some Republicans who hate China and push for war with China. We have Democrats who hate Russia and are pushing for war with Russia.

And then we have all sorts of people in between, and people who are at war with everybody. They all have different interests.

I think there’s clearly a split within the establishment, the military defense establishment, as to how to deal with this COVID-19 crisis.

Those looking for a solution ranges from those who want to pin it on the Chinese Communist Party, or who prop up the experts who say we need even more vaccines. And there are other people who are saying on the inside that this story is just not going to hold, that it has come time to clean house.

All of this is going on beneath the surface. There are internal struggles taking place within the Pentagon and the CIA, and elsewhere, that we can’t really see directly.

Sputnik: The intel community is manipulating the public both here and abroad. Who knows what to believe anymore?

Emanuel Pastreich: The first thing I would say to people is be skeptical of everything. I would say that, for that matter, about the alternative media too.

We must be very skeptical about reports from the United States. But the same, about European sources and, for that matter, about Chinese, Russian or Iranian sources. They may be a little bit better, but each one of them has their own biases.

I recommend waiting to make any judgments about what’s an accurate story. I think that the scale of the deception that has taken place, and has involved all national governments in the world, is so large that moving to the next stage of sorting through the facts and finding out what really took place will be extremely difficult for us.

I think there is good reason to believe that there was an initial conspiracy between the United States and China to push in the COVID-19 narrative.

There is a “New Cold War” narrative presented in the media that is not without basis. But, at a higher level, between certain corrupt parts of sort of military industrial complex in the United States and in China, there is collaboration taking place that that is based not on national interest, but on class interest, on the interests of the super-rich and the small groups invested in private equity firms who want to make a fortune and to create a totalitarian system wherein these seemingly legitimate global organizations like the World Health Organization will be able to dictate medical practice for everyone in the entire world.

I think what we’re seeing is that this bid, that incredibly ambitious bid to take over the entire medical system and to corrupt it, although it was remarkably successful the first few years, ultimately was not successful. We are seeing some real push back now.

So Jake Sullivan and that whole team, are running around trying to find something to patch over the extremely high risk position they find themselves in.

There have been several reports out about bio labs found in the Ukraine disclosed. We do not know the details, but the possibility that this “Corona Pandemic” will ultimately come back to bite the United States itself, and for that matter, Israel, the U.K., and other affiliated countries, is quite real.

It’s best to see this move as a proactive attempt to cut off the possibility of a critique of, and investigation of, the United States and its allies, multinational corporations, and multinational global governance organizations. The best way to cut off that possibility is to go on the attack first.

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This article was originally published on Fear No Evil.

Emanuel Pastreich served as the president of the Asia Institute, a think tank with offices in Washington DC, Seoul, Tokyo and Hanoi. Pastreich also serves as director general of the Institute for Future Urban Environments. Pastreich declared his candidacy for president of the United States as an independent in February, 2020.

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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