Global Research

In a case of what must be called incriminating timing – the facts established after official conclusions and reprisals were declared – the scientists and experts of Porton Down, the UK’s leading chemical weapons research facility, declared their extensive investigations in to the nerve agent used in the attempted murder of double agent Skripal and his family in Salisbury have concluded the country of origin is unidentifiable. By now most people have realised that, by proxy, the government, its agents in the media, are decidedly wrong, and not unintentionally, deliberately misleading the public in order to justify escalating a diplomatic crisis with Russia, the centre of which are punitive sanctions including the expulsion of 60 diplomats.

And consider the fact the subsequent day’s BBC bulletin at six o’clock made no attempt to redress its consistent, manifold errors reporting on the Skripal case and instead featured, to diversionary fanfare, a routine hip operation for Prince Phillip as a leading story. I roll my eyes every time every tragedy is declared a false flag by theorists who generate more fear and confusion than knowledge, more heat than light, but history tells us government conspiracies are real, and it’s beginning to look solid that this was one of them.

The government and its agents in media built their analysis dominantly on a foundation of selective hearing and selective presentation of cherry picked intelligence combined with sabrerattling rhetoric of anti Russian snarking; the hallowed mutual detente between Russia and the West following the downfall of the USSR isn’t sacred enough in May and Johnson’s eyes to be deemed untouchable.

Their behaviour decidedly has violated a norm which has kept international relations more stable, more peaceable since 1991 and which, having been forfeited by this government now for whatever cynical, narrow, self serving reasons, is fast being supplanted by the old norm of aggression and retrenchment of diplomacy.

Of course much of detente is public show and we, as the saying goes, kept up the Cold War through diplomacy, “warfare by other means.” We spar with Putin often, but this time, something is different. This time we took aim at a state and government who, regardless of how brutal, how thoroughly rotten its methods to propel and sustain the position of its political star, is still innocent and in the early stages itself of dealing with and investigating a crime and trauma against one of its citizens through whom the UK, itself known to deploy gruesome, underhanded tactics against declared enemies, strategic threats, has launched a sabrerattling campaign based on no credible knowledge.

Through Skripal’s case the UK state has slung dirt at an easy target who, media savvy, laugh at and welcome these stories and get them under their own thumb because it helps Putin’s own propaganda. You only need basic knowledge of international relations to know that Putin will do everything to be seen, either through genuine terror or desperately through the illusion of it, as a fearful, omnipotent dictator leading the chase followed by the West, who can cow anyone standing in opposition to his cause.

The government and media’s vacation from the truth was deeply disturbing, and its hasty action to impose sanctions without recourse to due process of allowing time to mature facts and conclusions indicative of a preplanned affair on the books for some time. This was a false flag and time may vindicate the Russians, for the facts, as they blossom, have ever more incriminated the UK as the predictable cardboard cutout villains.

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