In the second stage of a false flag attack, facts go out the window and the sole issue becomes “are you for us or against us.” Our media and National Party politicians are well into this stage in the Skripal affair. But as questions mount and skeptics proliferate from all sides, it may well be that Jacinda Ardern and Winston Peters may well be wiser than media advisers by not following blindly the western herd. 26 countries is not the whole world. Update: Porton Down unable to establish Novichok of Russian origin.
While the media herd behaves like reef fish, many others, far from left-wingers, are asking questions for which there are as yet not clear answers. As Tom Swizer in the Lowy Institute’s Interpreter asks, “The Skripal case escalates, but where is the proof?” He says:
Moreover, what is so wrong with establishing proof before the West escalates a very dangerous international situation? As the Chilcot Inquiry into Britain’s role in the Iraq war recommends, governments should carefully investigate serious crimes before coming to conclusions. Indeed, governments should always make evidence-based pronouncements rather than relying on assertion and bombast, which is what has happened in the Skripal case. We should bear that in mind during this month’s fifteenth anniversary of the Iraq invasion, which was based on Western intelligence that purportedly showed Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction.
And one doesn’t have to be a Putin fan to have serious doubts about this affair. Rod Liddle opines thus in the UK Spectator in an article headlined “Our response to the nerve gas attack has been an act of self-harm”:
I do not necessarily smell a conspiracy here. It is simply that the urgency with which our government wished to point the finger of blame was a case of jumping the gun, to our own eventual detriment. And perhaps, allied to that, a certain penchant for cherry–picking the available expert evidence in order to support an at least questionable thesis which already existed in the mind of the government and, I daresay, the military. We have been there before, of course, with those ‘dodgy dossiers’ which led us into an illegal and catastrophic war in Iraq.
For those who would like to delve into the details, Moon of Alabama and Professor Tim Hayward’s “Doubts about Novichoks” are worth checking for the comprehensive amount of information they provide.
For a view from the public, this comment from today’s Independent:
The police now say that the Skripals were poisoned at their home. This means that after ingesting a “military grade nerve agent” they toddled about for over 3 hours, went for lunch etc before finally succumbing to this poison which is supposedly more deadly than VX. Does anyone believe this nonsense?
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