Skripal poison saga just another episode in West’s propaganda campaign to corral Russia
Finian Cunningham
SputnikNews.com
28 Mar, 2018
There are many reasons for doubting the official British position blaming Russia for the Sergei Skripal poisoning. This week’s ‘diplomacy dramatics’ of mass Russian expulsions are just too contrived to be taken seriously.
Two factors raising doubt stand out in particular: the unseemly, impossible rush to judgment and carnival of reaction; and, secondly, the immediate, concerted follow-up demand being made on Russia to “change its behavior.”
The cause-and-effect sequence here is just too neat to be left to random events. Within days of former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia having apparently been poisoned in a public space in the English city of Salisbury on March 4, senior British government officials were accusing Russia of attempted assassination.
The whirlwind British media campaign to find Russia guilty and the rapid international response to expel over 100 Russian diplomats from more than 25 countries this week – all mounted in a matter of three weeks – inevitably betray a premeditated public relations operation.
As Anatoly Antonov, Russia’s ambassador to the US, said this week: “The scale of inflicted damage and the preceding information campaign speak of the fact that it had been planned beforehand – simply postponed for the right moment.”
We should recall that Britain’s top investigators at Scotland Yard were initially saying that it would take weeks to establish the facts of the apparent crime committed against the Skripals. Britain’s most senior chemical warfare expert, Professor Alastair Hay, went as far as advising media it could take “months” to confirm suspicions of a nerve agent.
Yet, the British government preempted by claiming its scientists had identified the poison apparently used on the Skripals as ‘Novichok’ – “of a type developed by the Soviet Union.”
Former British ambassador Craig Murray has contested serious flaws in official claims about the alleged nerve agent. Murray points to the sly wording used by the British government inferring authoritative knowledge implicating Russia when in fact, he contends, there is a paucity of hard information.
Russia has also categorically denied any involvement or being in possession of the hypothetical chemical weapon.
The British government has yet to produce any verifiable evidence to back up its claims about the “Soviet-era” nerve agent and how that incriminates Russia – despite British media headlines suggesting it has.
“Britain divulged ‘unprecedented levels of intelligence’ to convince other countries that Russia carried out attack,” according to The Independent.
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