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Skripals
Poisoned with Fentanyl, Initial Report Redacted
23
May, 2018
Dilyana
Gaytandzhieva reports…
Former
double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Julia were poisoned with
the drug Fentanyl,
not the Novichok nerve agent, the initial report on the incident
reveals.
After
I published this report on my Twitter account the information was
immediately redacted and the drug Fentanyl was deleted from the
original version.
Alex
Thomson, chief correspondent and presenter of Channel 4 News tweeted
about a D notice issued by the UK government to prevent media from
publishing further sensitive information on 12 March:
Salisbury rolls on with the authorities saying nothing about the nerve agency and everything about public health...
On
26 April I published on my social media accounts the initial report
(dated 5 March) on the incident in Salisbury. It indicated the drug
Fentanyl as the source of the poisoning which had taken place on 4
March.
The #Skripals were allegedly exposed to the drug #Fentanyl, not the #Novichok nerve agent, according to information obtained from the UK Clinical Services Journal clinicalservicesjournal.com/story/25262/re…
According
to the report published by Clinical
Services Journal: Salisbury
District Hospital declared a “major incident” on Monday 5 March,
after two patients were exposed to an opioid […] It followed an
incident hours earlier in which a man and a woman were exposed to the
drug Fentanyl in the city centre. The opioid is 10,000 times stronger
than heroin.
Few
hours later (27 April) after the article was publicized on social
media, the content was surprisingly changed:
The #Skripals were exposed to #Fentanyl, not #Novichok. After I published this information yesterday (26.04.) the Clinical Services Journal redacted it today clinicalservicesjournal.com/story/25262/re…
The
second line of the redacted article now reads: “It followed an
incident hours earlier in which a man and a woman were exposed to a
substance in the city centre.”
The
drug Fentanyl is deleted in the redacted version of the report.
Here
is the retrieved
version of the report (as it appeared on 26 April) before
the opioid Fentanyl was deleted and changed with “a
substance”. Clinical Services Journal has not responded yet to
the request for a comment on the reason for such a redaction more
than a month after the incident took place and after the initial
report was published on social media.
***
Craig Murray describes the terrible Luke Harding from the Guardian
Where
They Tell You Not to Look
30
April, 2018
At
the very beginning of the of the Skripal incident, the security
services blocked by D(SMA)
notice any
media mention of Pablo Miller and told the media not to look at Orbis
and the Steele dossier on Trump, acting immediately to get out their
message via trusties in the BBC and Guardian. Gordon Corera, “BBC
Security Correspondent”, did not name the source who told him to
say
this, but helpfully illustrated his tweet with a nice picture of MI6
Headquarters.
.
MI6’s most important media conduit (after Frank Gardner) is Luke Harding of the Guardian.
A
number of people replied to Harding’s tweet to point out that this
was demonstrably untrue, and Pablo Miller had listed his employment
by Orbis Business Intelligence on his Linkedin profile. That profile
had just been deleted, but a google search for “Pablo Miller”
plus “Orbis Business Intelligence”, without Linkedin as a search
term, brought up Miller’s Linkedin profile as the first result
(although there are twelve other Pablo Millers on Linkedin and the
search brought up none of them). Plus a 2017 forum discussed Pablo
Miller’s Orbis connection and it both cited and linked to his
Linkedin entry.
You
might think that any journalist worth his salt would want to consider
this interesting counter-evidence. But Harding merely tweeted again
the blank denials of the security services, without question., but
helpfully illustrated his tweet with a nice picture of MI6
Headquarters.
This is an
important trait of Harding. Last year we both appeared, separately,
at the Jaipur Literature Festival. Harding was promoting a book and
putting the boot into Wikileaks and Snowden. After his talk, I
approached him in an entirely friendly manner, and told him there
were a couple of factual errors in his presentation on matters to
which I was an eye-witness, and I should be very happy to brief him,
off the record, but we could discuss which bits he might use. He said
he would talk later, and dashed off. Later I saw him in the author’s
lounge, and as I walked towards him he hurriedly got up and left,
looking at me.
Of course,
nobody is obliged to talk to me. But at that period I had journalists
from every major news agency contacting me daily wishing to interview
me about Wikileaks, all of whom I was turning down, and there was no
doubt of my inside knowledge and direct involvement with a number of
the matters of which Harding was writing and speaking. A journalist
who positively avoids knowledge of his subject is an interesting
phenomenon.
But
then Harding is that. From a wealthy family background, privately
educated at Atlantic College and then Oxford, Harding became the
editor of Oxford University’s Cherwell magazine without showing any
leftwing or rebel characteristics. It was not a surprise to those who
knew him as a student when he was employed at the very right wing
“Daily Mail”. From there he moved to the Guardian. In 2003
Harding was embedded with US forces in Iraq and filing breathless
reports of
US special forces operations.
Moving to
Moscow in 2007 as the Guardian’s Moscow correspondent, others in
the Moscow press corps and in the British expatriate community found
him to be a man of strongly hawkish neo-con views, extremely
pro-British establishment, and much closer to the British Embassy and
to MI6 than anybody else in the press corps. It was for this reason
Harding was the only resident British journalist, to my knowledge,
whose visa the Russians under Putin have refused to renew. They
suspected he is actually an MI6 officer, although he is not.
With
this background, people who knew Harding were dumbfounded when
Harding appeared to be the supporter and insider of first Assange and
then Snowden. The reason for this dichotomy is that Harding was not –
he wrote books on Wikileaks and on Snowden that claimed to be insider
accounts, but in fact just carried on Harding’s long history of
plagiarism, as Julian
Assange makes clear.
Harding’s books were just careful hatchet jobs pretending to be
inside accounts. The Guardian’s historical reputation for
radicalism was already a sham under the editorship of Rusbridger, and
has completely vanished under Viner, in favour of hardcore Clinton
identity politics failing to disguise unbending neo-conservatism. The
Guardian smashed the hard drives containing the Snowden files under
GCHQ supervision, having already undertaken “not to even look at”
the information on Iraq and Afghanistan. The fact the hard drives
were not the only copies in the world does not excuse their
cravenness.
We know, of
course, what MI6 have fed to Harding, because it is reflected every
day in his output. What we do not know, but may surmise, is what
Harding fed back to the security services that he gleaned from the
Guardian’s association with Wikileaks and Snowden.
Harding
has since made his living from peddling a stream of anti-Assange,
anti-Snowden and above all, anti-Russian books, with great commercial
success, puffed by the entire mainstream media. But when challenged
by the non-mainstream media about the numerous fact free assertions
on behalf of the security services to be found in his books, Harding
is not altogether convincing. You can watch this video, in which
Harding outlines how emoticons convinced him someone was a Russian
agent, together with this fascinating analysis which really is
a must-read
study of
anti-Russian paranoia. There is a similar analysis here.
Perhaps
still more revealing is this 2014
interview with
his old student newspaper Cherwell,
where he obvously felt comfortable enough to let the full extent of
his monstrous boggle-eyed Russophobia become plain:
His analogies span the bulk of the 20th century and his predictions for the future are equally far-reaching. “This is the biggest crisis in Europe since the Cold War. It’s not the break-up of Yugoslavia, but the strategic consensus since 1945 has been ripped up. We now have an authoritarian state, with armies on the march.” What next?
“It’s clear to me that Putin intends to dismember Ukraine and join it up with Transnistria, then perhaps he’ll go as far as Moldova in one way or another,” Harding says. This is part of what he deems Putin’s over-arching project: an expansionist attempt to gather Russo-phones together under one yoke, which he terms ‘scary and Eurasian-ist’, and which he notes is darkly reminiscent of “another dictator of short stature” who concocted “a similarly irredentist project in the 1930s”.
But
actually I think you can garner everything you want to know about
Harding from looking at his twitter
feed over
the last two months. He has obsessively retweeted scores of stories
churning out the government’s increasingly strained propaganda line
on what occurred in Salisbury. Not one time had Harding ever
questioned, even in the mildest way, a single one of the multiple
inconsistencies in the government account or referred to anybody who
does. He has acted, purely and simply, as a conduit for government
propaganda, while abandoning all notion of a journalistic duty to
investigate.
We still have
no idea of who attacked Sergei Skripal and why. But the fact that,
right from the start, the government blocked the media from
mentioning Pablo Miller, and put out denials that this has anything
to do with Christopher Steele and Orbis, including lying that Miller
had never been connected to Orbis, convinces me that this is the most
promising direction in which to look.
It never
seemed likely to me that the Russians had decided to assassinate an
inactive spy who they let out of prison many years ago, over
something that happened in Moscow over a decade ago. It seemed even
less likely when Boris Johnson claimed intelligence showed this was
the result of a decade long novichok programme involving training in
secret assassination techniques. Why would they blow all that effort
on old Skripal?
That the
motive is the connection to the hottest issue in US politics today,
and not something in Moscow a decade ago, always seemed to me much
more probable. Having now reviewed matters and seen that the
government actively tried to shut down this line of inquiry, makes it
still more probable this is right.
This does not
tell us who did it. Possibly the Russians did, annoyed that Skripal
was feeding information to the Steele dossier, against the terms of
his release.
Given
that the Steele dossier is demonstrably in large degree nonsense,
it seems to me more probable the idea was to silence Skripal to close
the danger that he would reveal his part in the concoction of this
fraud. Remember he had sold out Russian agents to the British for
cash and was a man of elastic loyalties. It is also worth noting that
Luke Harding has a bestselling book currently on sale, in large part
predicated on the truth of the Steele Dossier.
Steele, MI6
and the elements of the CIA which are out to get Trump, all would
have a powerful motive to have the Skripal loose end tied.
Rule number
one of real investigative journalism: look where they tell you not to
look.
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