Since 1984 – that’s 37 years – the difference between a slice of meat between two buns and truth-telling by the President of the United States has been thin.
That’s why the Wendy’s Company of Dublin, Ohio, became famous with the line that distinguishes between propaganda and truth, between the beef and the buns. The line is “Where’s the beef?” It made its debut in Wendy’s hamburger advertisement (lead image); it was weaponised by Walter Mondale against Gary Hart in the Democratic presidential nomination campaign of 1984; it was revived last year when, on account of the Covid-19 pandemic, supplies of beef patties began to run out at US hamburger outlets.
When President Joe Biden (left) meets President Vladimir Putin (centre) in Geneva next Wednesday, June 16, the White House has promised a tirade of attacks on Russia, including last week’s a cyber hack on meat processor JBS; last month’s Colonial fuel pipeline hack; and last year’s SolarWinds hack on every secret the US government thinks it is keeping.
Remember that if the SolarWinds allegation is true, there’s only one secret Biden has left – this is that there aren’t any US secrets he can keep from Putin, including how much beef there is in US hamburgers and petrol in US gas tanks.
In an act of over-confidence and carelessness on March 30, the British coroner appointed in January to investigate the cause of death of Dawn Sturgess, ex-judge and secret service advisor Baroness Heather Hallett has created a truth trap. The truth is Cremation Form Number 6 (lead image). This is the trap into which Hallett and the two lawyers advising her, Andrew O’Connor QC and Martin Smith, have now dropped themselves.
This three-page form permitted and registered the funeral and cremation of Sturgess; according to the British government, she is the only person in the world to have been killed by the Novichok nerve agent. She was released to her family after Form 6 was signed by Wiltshire county coroner David Ridley and copies handed to Chris White Funeral Directors who collected the body for the funeral ceremony on July 30; and to the Salisbury Crematorium for official authorisation to cremate the body later the same day. The signed form was passed from Ridley’s files to Hallett’s files when she replaced him as the coroner in charge of the Sturgess case last January.
Form 6 is the first official record of what caused Sturgess’s death, according to the autopsies which Coroner Ridley authorised between Sturgess’s recorded death on July 8 and July 17; only the autopsy on that date has been recorded by the press, by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), and by Hallett.
On March 30, this year, Hallett released publicly for the first time the cause of death record signed by Home Office pathologists, Philip Lumb and Guy Rutty, in what the Hallett hearing was told was a report dated November 29, 2018. That was four months later than Ridley’s Form 6. Since Ridley had ordered Lumb and Rutty to carry out their post-mortem investigation, what was the difference between the cause of death Ridley signed and the November 29 report which Hallett selected for public release? The question is the truth trap.
Hallett has now exposed the difference between Form 6 and the Lumb-Rutty report. This is the difference between life and death — but not for Sturgess.
On the two papers, revealed for the first time this month, depends the truthfulness of the British government’s story of Novichok and of the Russian state agents whom the British accuse of carrying the nerve agent into England; attacking Sergei and Yulia Skripal with it; and then abandoning it in a leftover bottle which later — the British charge — killed Sturgess.
Hallett refuses, however, to say there is no contradiction between Form 6 and the later pathologists’ report; she refuses to release Form 6 for verification in the courtroom or in the press.
The British Government is preparing to halt the coroner’s court inquest into allegations that Novichok caused the death of Dawn Sturgess in Salisbury on July 8, 2018.
After replacing the Salisbury coroner in January of this year, and after a single hearing on March 30 by secret service advisor and ex-judge Baroness Heather Hallett, briefings by the Cabinet Office and the security services have led to the decision that the only way of preserving the government’s narrative of a Russian nerve agent attack, first against Sergei and Yulia Skripal, then against Sturgess, is to introduce Defence Ministry and MI6 evidence in secret session.
Hallett and the lawyers advising her inadvertently allowed secret medical evidence to slip into the public record on March 30. This revealed that two leading English pathologists could not agree to sign their findings on the cause of Sturgess’s death after holding two autopsies in July of 2018; they then delayed signing their final post-mortem report for almost five months. That report, dated November 29, 2018, the medical records of the first and second autopsies, along with ambulance paramedic logs, hospital admission records, and ward medical notes remain top secret. Together with the papers of MI6 agents, Porton Down nerve agent experts, and Sir Mark Sedwill, the Cabinet Office official in charge, this classified evidence is inadmissible in coroner’s court proceedings under English law; they are allowable in closed-door session if a public inquiry is substituted.
The switch from open coroner’s inquest to secret public inquiry, which Hallett and her predecessor Wiltshire county coroner David Ridley have forewarned, is planned to be announced later this month, or in July.
For the time being Hallett’s office declines to say when she will resume hearing the case.
“Vladimir Putin is not the president of my choice”.
This is how the daughter of a powerful apparatchik in Tatarstan begins the book she has just written from London, at a think-tank leading the propaganda war against Russia. The problem for Gulnaz Sharafutdinova (lead image, right), inside her mind, is “the gap between how many of my schoolmates, friends and family back home perceive Putin’s leadership, and how I perceive it.” The problem outside Sharafutdinova’s mind is that she is on the other side in the war against Russia, and she doesn’t want to admit it.
So she has produced the book her employers at King’s College Russia Institute and the Oxford University Press require. Could it be any other way? Could Sharafutdinova keep her job and publishing contract if she explained current anti-Western, in particular anti-American and anti-British sentiment in Russia, as the outcome of the war those two states and the NATO alliance launched against Moscow since 2014?
If, instead, her book had come to the conclusion that all Russians from President Vladimir Putin on down believe everyone would be better off if the Anglo-American warmakers left Russia to evolve on its own, Sharafutdinova, her institute, and her printing press would be impoverished — out of jobs, out of power, out of money. That’s not a judgement they can afford.
The watershed year, Sharafutdinova acknowledges, was 2014. But she blames Putin, not only for having instigated the war against the West, but for expanding and exploiting it for his own schemes of domestic re-election, compensation for his own insecurities, enrichment of his supporters, and “to forge the new Russian collective identity and his own image as a great leader of the Russian nation.”
Inside a university on the upper west side of Manhattan island sits Timothy Frye (lead image, right), a professor who still likes to talk of the good times he had in the Soviet Union when he was a young agent in a propaganda touring show for the US Information Agency; and then, during the first post-Soviet years, when he was a broadcaster of good news at the US outlet, Radio Free Europe.
He is still making his living broadcasting the news about Russia. This is no less a product of the same US government money trail as his early efforts, although Frye’s title, those of his sources, and of the think-tanks and academic units which pay their salaries and finance their research are more highfalutin than they were.
There is also no change in the source of this news about Russia. It comes second hand and by hearsay from US and British journalists in the mainstream media; from Russian reporters on stipend to US sponsors; and academic researchers on either side of the Atlantic, quoting each other.
In this world, all the warfighting objectives of toppling the Putin administration, defeating the Russian Army in the Donbass and Syria, and recovering Crimea for the Kiev regime, are endorsed by Frye. All charges of cyber attacks, media trolling and US election campaign intervention by Russian military intelligence agents; poison attacks against Alexander Litvinenko, the Skripals, and Alexei Navalny; the shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17; the deaths of Anna Politkovskaya, Boris Nemtsov, and Sergei Magnitsky – in short, every evil Russian deed reported for the past decade is accepted by Frye as the truth, together with the regime-change narratives of William Browder, Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Navalny.
But Frye’s book is more than a hackneyed replay. It is evidence of what is in the mind of Frye himself, and of the Anglo-American academic establishment, as they work away at their war against Russia. Theirs is a virtuous cause, Frye thinks, because he and his peer group believe they are being scientific about the Russian enemy, and are certain they know the enemy better than he knows them.
New evidence has surfaced from interviews with sources at the Salisbury undertaker and crematorium in charge of the obsequies for Dawn Sturgess, whose death at Salisbury District Hospital on July 8, 2018, is the only death officially recorded from the Novichok nerve agent. Their testimony raises fresh doubts that Novichok was the cause of her death, and suspicion that the two state coroners and two state pathologists responsible for the investigation have been concealing material evidence of timing and records in the case.
Why would Orthodox Christian Russia, led by a believer, ally itself with Protestant America and Catholic Europe to encourage the Israeli Jews to liquidate a rebellion of Palestinian Arabs, mostly Moslem, after they tried to defend one of their Holy Places from Jewish invasion, and counter-attacked with more military resourcefulness than the Crusader Alliance has seen for many years?
Holy Places mean to believers what red lines mean to soldiers. Crossing them is an immediate reason to open fire. Since ancient times there has been an invariable rule of war on the territory of Palestine – set the locals at war with each other but never allow one to be strong enough to challenge imperial rule. The red lines have been drawn accordingly. From the Greeks to the Romans, Byzantines, Caliphs, Ottomans, and then the Soviets, the rule was never to allow Israel to become too strong; the red line in Palestine was the one Israel’s forces should never dare to cross.
As the Israelis have been breaking the rule by crossing the red lines to expand their territory, the Russians have broken the rule by accepting and giving ground. The first time was by Boris Yeltsin, who was never his own master outside Russia’s borders or inside; and now, in the past month, by Vladimir Putin. For this reason, disallowing Israel from becoming too strong has been the dividing line between the Russian General Staff, Defence Ministry, the intelligence services, and lately the Foreign Ministry, who have stuck to the rule and the red line; and Putin who has not. Although this rule is a strategic one, a reason of state, not an article of religion, Putin’s position – unexplained in public – is one of personal conviction endorsed by the Church and Patriarch Kirill.
Understanding that this has happened before requires a historical reference. For today, the point of comparison is the “Concordat” negotiated by Napoleon and Pope Pius VII between 1800 and 1801. Comparing doesn’t require taking the side of the Pope as he plotted war against Napoleon; signed an agreement on terms for the subordination of the church to the state; was taken prisoner of war as he tried to break the pact to the Church’s advantage when Napoleon was losing his power on the battlefields of Russia and Waterloo.
What these histories 220 years apart tell us – the history of the Concordat signed on July 14, 1801, and Article 67.1 of the Russian Constitution, signed on July 3, 2020 — is the same. Religion is not only the belief of the people (some of them), it is an ideology of rule in which religiosity is the camouflage for a campaign of territorial conquest and economic enrichment. Documenting this is a new book by Ambrogio A. Caiani, just published by the Yale University Press, which claims to demonstrate how, between 1800 and 1812, Napoleon of France, impious revolutionary, committed secularist, cruel imperialist, was defeated by Pius VII, representative of the superior church of the true God.
The author, a confessing believer, displays his partisanship for the Pope against Napoleon; this should not detract from the value of the parallels with the story in Russia today, as the Palestinians celebrate their moral victory over Israel; as Putin celebrates the birthdays of the Pacific Fleet and of Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu, but keeps his silence on Palestine.
It has been eleven years since the Levada Centre, the independent national polling organisation in Moscow, reported a survey of Russian attitudes towards the Palestinians and the Israelis. “We had such a poll in 2010,” Denis Leven, a Levada sociologist, said yesterday. “I can’t say exactly if we are going to make another one in the near future. Now we focus on the events in Russia and neighbouring countries.”
This isn’t true; in recent weeks, Levada has polled Russians on their attitudes towards Turkey, the US, the European Union, China, as well as the states which Russians regard as enemies — Great Britain, Poland, the Baltic states, Germany, France, Japan, and Canada.
Speaking for the rival national pollster, the All-Russian Centre for the Study of Public Opinion (VTsIOM), Diana Osyanina says “we aren’t planning to make a poll about this [Palestine-Israel] conflict because now we focus mostly on the domestic issues.” VTsIOM’s last published poll on the conflict appeared in January 2018; it focused on Russian views of whether Tel Aviv or Jerusalem should be the capital of Israel. The majority couldn’t say.
Since the fighting began at the start of May, the mainstream Russian media report no public demonstrations anywhere in the country in support of either the Palestinians or the Israelis. The domestic media have not sent reporters to the areas of fighting; their news bulletins have been perfunctory and compiled from non-Russian sources. Military media such as Colonel Cassad and Krasnaya Zvezda (Red Star) have reported little. Vzglyad, reflecting Russian intelligence agency thinking, has published one hostile piece against the Palestinians, one neutral situation report, and one technical military assessment of the drones which Hamas has been using at sea, off the Israeli coast, and against land targets, as well as the start of Iranian drone firing from Syria.*
The Russian Orthodox Church which has long maintained pilgrimage sites, churches and monasteries in Israel, Palestine, and Jordan, said through its press spokesman Vladimir Legoida that it has issued no press release on the conflict or official statement from the Patriarch himself; Metropolitan Hilarion, head of the department for external church relation; or the Church’s organs in Jerusalem.
The Palestine state ambassador to Moscow, Abdel Hafiz Nofal, was reported by Tass on Tuesday (May 18) as calling for direct talks between Palestine and Israel in Moscow “at any time…even tomorrow because we are confident in Russia.” The next day he was asked how he explains the lack of public support for the Palestinians in Russia. He refuses to say.
In the 50-year history of the nerve agent Novichok, no human being has died from it with the exception of Dawn Sturgess in Amesbury, Wiltshire, on July 8, 2018. Only Sturgess didn’t.
The cause of her death, according to the post-mortem performed the next day, July 9, 2018, by Philip Lumb (lead image, right), was “post cardiac arrest hypoxic brain injury and intracerebral haemorrhage”, according to the report he signed. This means that Sturgess suffered from a heart attack, which then stopped the flow of oxygen to her brain (hypoxia). An unfortunate, but also very common cause of death, according to the medical research. Lumb did not report what caused Sturgess’s heart to stop.
Lumb is a career pathologist registered with the Home Office for suspicious death forensic investigations in the northwest England and Wales, and a consultant at Sheffield’s Medico-Legal Centre, one of the leading medical forensic centres in the UK. He is also current president of the British Association in Forensic Medicine, the standard-setter for the country. Lumb has a sharp sense of his professional and ethical duty. “If you make a mistake,” he has told a press interview, “somebody could go to prison for 20-odd years.”
Lumb didn’t make a mistake with the sequence of events which killed Sturgess – heart failure, then loss of oxygen to the brain, then brain death. But this wasn’t what the British government (lead image, left) wanted to hear. So a second pathologist was called in to conduct a second post-mortem on July 17. His name is Guy Rutty (centre), once a colleague of Lumb’s at Sheffield and also a professor. But Rutty didn’t sign his name to his report on the cause of Sturgess’s death until November 29. The interval was four and a half months.
That second report, kept secret for another two and a half years, was revealed in the Wiltshire coroner’s court on March 30 of this year. The cause of Sturgess’s death, which Rutty signed and which was sworn to by the counsel for the coroner, was read out in court: “Ia post cardiac arrest hypoxic brain injury and intracerebral haemorrhage; Ib Novichok toxicity”.
Semi-colons are punctuation; they have no medical or logical meaning. British toxicologists and pathologists consulted for the interpretation of Rutty’s cause of death report say it is highly unusual for its lack of precision on sequence, cause and effect; and for the order Ia/Ib which Rutty signed. The toxicologists believe that paralysis of the lungs leading to asphyxiation is the usual trigger for death by nerve agents.
No toxicologist, forensic pathologist or registered Home Office post-mortem investigator can be found who will explain why after the two post-mortems on July 9 and July 18, a delay would be required to produce the November 29 finding. Lumb and Rutty refuse to provide details of their roles in the two post-mortems or to explain the delay between them and the official report.
Rutty referred his questions to Martin Smith, the newly appointed solicitor to the new inquest and a veteran of politically sensitive inquests in the past. “As you have no formal role in the inquest proceedings,” Smith has responded, “it would not be appropriate to provide you with the information that you have requested.”
These details of the only Novichok fatality in history are the nails in the proverbial horseshoe for loss of which the battle was lost, then the kingdom.
There are a few kilometres of flat country between the Golan border of Palestine, occupied by Israel, and Damascus, capital of Syria – perfect visibility, no cover, optimum for Israeli air and artillery attack, and also for Syrian and Iranian drone counterattack.
Between the occupying Israelis and the occupied Palestinians on the Israel side of the line, the Kremlin and the Russian General Staff, victors in the Syria War, say they are unable to see daylight; that’s to say, they can’t distinguish between attacker and defender. For Russians at daily war themselves defending against the encroaching attacks of the NATO allies not to see this, but instead to accuse the Palestinian defenders of provoking their victimisation and losses, as well as to deny the Palestinians their rights of state sovereignty and national liberation with whatever forces they have – this is the contradiction of President Vladimir Putin.
It’s a contradiction the General Staff, the intelligence agencies, the Defence and Foreign ministers are acutely aware of right now.
