Interview with Craig Murray on RT this pm.
The BBC haven’t seen fit to put the Porton Down statement on the 6 o clock news. The D of E’s upcoming hip operation is more important.
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Think the head of PD did say it was military grade.
What difference would it ake eiter way round. Either Russia did it (or allowed it to be done) as a warning to other Russian agents with the side effect that their agent network has a teporary blip and at the sae time bringing Trump back into the post war status quo (NATO et al) or,
Someone else framed Russia in order to bring Trump back into the… etc
Either way our Foreign policy aim of focussing America back on Russia is acheived.
Concrete evidence either way will never be available, you always have to act on an incomplete picture. Unless, of course, you decide to do nothing, ever.
On RT, might as well broadcast that from the bloody Kremlin.
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Given the BBC aren’t even covering it, who’s editorialising our news today? Russia?
And whoever made it would only have needed a tiny amount. It’s not as if they were trying to flush soldiers out of the trenches on an enormous battlefield or wipe out a whole village full of peasants from the air as an example to the rest of the province. One killer with a small paintbrush and a few drops of liquid or sticky powder could have done the whole job. Knocking up a small amount of something is a good deal easier than mass-producing it (says a man who as a student once made several cc of liquid ozone before lunch, using kit we had around the lab).
What does ‘military grade’ mean ? Unusually pure (how would they know - it’ll be mixed with everything else on the door handle plus whatever’s blown past in the day or so before they got round to tenting the door plus whatever the assassin might have added to confuse the picture) ? Chemically very specific (could still have been made by any graduate chemical synthesist - look at the Chinese guys cooking up designer cannabinoids or the Canadian university group which rebuilt the 200,000 base pairs of an entire extinct horsepox virus from chemicals) ?
VB
Same as any other day
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48 murders in London so far this year. But rather than interrogating the home secretary about what the hell is going on, let’s hope that the media instead focusses on Corbyn spending the evening with some left leaning Jews.
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Nothing to do with the home sec it’s that bloody Mayors fault.
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Bloody villains and murderers! They should have cut their numbers in line with the drop in police numbers. It’s not a level playing field other wise. Inconsiderate bunch of cunts.
I think that this is very much about the US’s (and the UK’s) impotence in Syria.
Because porton down said so.
It’s a weapon of mass destruction with no other uses. Doesn’t that make it all “Military Grade?”
More politics than science in the Porton Down statements. They tell the media what they are instructed to tell them.
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But if you only need a little bit and you want to make it look like Russia did it then you can afford to waste a lot purifying it. Purifying isn’t hard. What’s hard is purifying while keeping most of the stuff you’ve made.
I’d have said so. What other grades are there ? Food grade ? For Garden Use Only ?
VB
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The government will be disappointed that they wouldn’t say it was made in Russia. If the OPCW come out with similar tomorrow (which they likely will) I suspect that holding the diplomat expelling allies together may start to become difficult. Some are already asking for more than ‘Putin seemed a bit smug’ as evidence.
I’m sure the Civil Service won’t allow them to actually lie. Look at the trouble we got into when MI6 lied about Saddam’s WMDs.
I would assume the PD scientists know what is involved in the manufacturing process and could say whether or not it was made in a state lab or not.
I severely doubt that PD would ever compromise their international reputation by bullshitting or reading out a govt written statement that doesn’t reflect their findings.
It was originally designed as a pesticide so garden use only could be valid (although illegal to use in the garden)
To be honest I am more concerned that nobody can prove that the Russians did it. Now we face further rounds of tit-for-tat expulsions and have eroded further goodwill with our allies. We’re all too old and cynical to believe any Government which claims they have reliable evidence of weapons of mass destruction, let alone this Government which has an unparalleled record of mendacity, misrepresentation, disloyalty and dishonesty.
An awful lot of political capital has been depreciated in the last fortnight that might be needed in the future.
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The scientists didn’t lie, the govt did.
It’s suspected that David Kelly committed suicide because of the pressure he was under to lie (or change) about his findings.
Chemical analysis really isn’t that clever. You can tell what something is, how pure it is, and what the impurities are. That’s about it. Unless a lab deliberately adds something to identify the lab, no chance.