The Skripals Are Gone, Either Imprisoned Or Murdered By UK – Eric Zuesse

On 8 March 2018, the brilliant geostrategic analyst who anonymously writes the “Moon of Alabama” blog headlined “Poisoned British-Russian Double-Agent Has Links To Clinton Campaign”, and documented that Sergei Skripal had been a UK/Russia double agent who reported to Pablo Miller, who reported to Christopher Steele of UK’s MI6. Steele, in turn, had privately been hired by the U.S. Democratic Party’s Hillary Clinton campaign to find evidence they could use to persuade America’s voters that Trump was secretly a Russian agent. (Maybe Sergei had been used in that operation, but if he’s prevented from communicating to the public, the public won’t ever know.) “MoA” continued: “If there is a connection between the [Steele] dossier [on Trump] and Skripal, which seems very likely to me, then there are a number of people and organizations with potential motives to kill him [Skripal]. Lots of shady folks and officials on both sides of the Atlantic were involved in creating and running the anti-Trump/anti-Russia campaign. There are several investigations and some very dirty laundry might one day come to light. Removing Skripal while putting the blame on Russia looks like a convenient way to get rid of a potential witness” (who might pose a threat to America’s Democratic Party, if he were to testify against Steele, or to implicate Steele’s U.S. employer).

MI6’s Steele had, after all, served the Democratic Party very well against Trump and Russia (even though his ‘dossier’ offered no solid evidence). Sergei Skripal was a demonstrated turncoat who thus might yet turn again, but, this time, turn against MI6 and the Democratic Party. He had even been able to be cheaply bought: “Skripal’s reward for nine years of spying [for Britain, against Russia] was a surprisingly modest $100,000.” The service that he had provided to the Brits for that “modest” sum was huge: “Skripal and Miller came to an agreement: in exchange for money, Skripal provided information to the British about at least 300 of his colleagues in Russian intelligence.” (And that assertion comes from an anti-Putin Russian website.)  For MI6 to have tried to kill Skripal and to blame it against Russia would therefore have seemed to MI6 like the best solution to multiple possible dangers to MI6 (by getting rid of their trash while simultaneously turning it into gold). (Furthermore: if Skripal really did have as his own sources “at least 300 of his colleagues in Russian intelligence,” then not only might he have endangered all of them, but, also, before burning them, he might have probed the likeliest of them for leads that Steele could possibly use to help the Democratic Party against Trump. And, since Skripal was already a condemned traitor, probably none of that ‘information’ would have been true. Of course, Hillary might not have even cared whether any of it was true.)

The UK Government definitely has been lying about the Skripals — Sergei and his visiting-from-Russia daughter Yulia Skripal, both of whom (father and daughter) were poisoned on 4 March 2018 — by lying about what the evidence in the attempted alleged poison-murder of Sergei showed. The Skripals (but only Yulia, not also her father, Sergei) last were (or was) presented to the public in a video taken at some time in May 2018 when Yulia Skripal was filmed actually at a U.S. military base in UK, as was first reported on 8 December 2019, in the great investigative journalist John Helmer’s online article, “The Skripals Under US Control at a USAF Nuclear Bomber Base in Fairford, Gloucestershire”. (Why she was being filmed at a U.S. nuclear base wasn’t explained by Helmer, who had needed to do considerable research in order merely to determine that that was the location where her brief pre-written speech was actually filmed.) That video of Yulia delivering that speech was presented, described, and analyzed, on 24 May 2018, by “MoA,” under the headline, “British Hostage Video Of Yulia Skripal Released”. Also shown by “MoA” there was the Russian original draft of her speech, in someone’s handwriting.

The UK’s Government lied in order to attribute to being definitely from Russia, the specific poison that was used so as to, presumably, attempt to kill the Russia-UK double agent, Sergei. One rare exception to the West’s lying about this key matter occurred in Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post, headlining on 4 April 2018, “Britain’s Boris Johnson accused of misleading public over Skripal poisoning evidence”. It reported that the soon-to-become Prime Minister had lied when Mr. Johnson alleged that UK’s definitive Government lab’s study of the poisonous chemical had been able to pin down the poison’s source as being Russia, by opening:

Dozens of countries have sided with Britain against Russia after Moscow was accused of using a military-grade nerve agent to poison former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in England last month. Boris Johnson, Britain’s foreign secretary, now stands accused of publicly misrepresenting the evidence in the case.

Britain’s top military laboratory said Tuesday that it cannot verify the nerve agent in the March 4 poisoning came from Russia.

Gary Aitkenhead, chief executive of the Defense Science and Technology Laboratory at Porton Down, told Sky News that although the substance used in the attack had been identified as Novichok — a class of chemical weapons developed in the former Soviet Union and Russia — it was not clear whether it had been made in Russia. …

These comments appear to contradict remarks Johnson made in an interview with German broadcaster Deutsche Welle on March 20. Asked how the British government could be so sure Russia was behind the attack, Johnson deferred to “the people from Porton Down,” who he said were “absolutely categorical.”

“I asked the guy myself, I said, ‘Are you sure?’ And he said there’s no doubt,” Johnson said.

Here is how Wikipedia’s article on “Poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal” (mis)handled that crucial information from Porton Down:

Porton Down

On 3 April 2018 Gary Aitkenhead, the chief executive of the Government’s Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl) at Porton Down responsible for testing the substance involved in the case, said they had established the agent was Novichok or from that family but had been unable to verify the “precise source” of the nerve agent and that they had “provided the scientific info to Government who have then used a number of other sources to piece together the conclusions you have come to”.[193][194] Aitkenhead refused to comment on whether the laboratory had developed or maintains stocks of Novichok.[194] He also dismissed speculations the substance could have come from Porton Down: “There is no way anything like that could have come from us or left the four walls of our facility.”[194] Aitkenhead stated the creation of the nerve agent was “probably only within the capabilities of a state actor”, and that there was no known antidote.[193][153]

Skripals murdered by UK
Military personnel wearing protective suits remove a police car and other vehicles from a public car park as they continue investigations into the poisoning of Sergei Skripal on March 11, 2018 in Salisbury, England.

That phrase “precise source” was left undefined there, as regards what it meant: did it mean the national source, the chemicals from which the chemical had been derived, or maybe even something else? Wikipedia didn’t say. Their entire passage was written so as to distract its readers away from that question — not to focus them toward it. “the phrase “precise source” was skillfully left there as a meaningless phrase, in order to prevent the reader from learning that Boris Johnson — the UK’s Government — had lied about this matter. But his having lied about the Porton Down report was the key fact there. Wikipedia just hides it

That footnote “153” there (the passage’s last-numbered footnote) is referencing the WP’s article, but carefully omits to include that article’s core fact, of the UK Government’s having lied about what their own definitive lab had reported to them, regarding the poison’s national source. Furthermore, as the meticulously careful and honest independent investigative journalist Craig Murray reported on 14 March 2018:

To summarise:

1) Porton Down has acknowledged in publications it has never seen any Russian “novichoks”. The UK government has absolutely no “fingerprint” information such as impurities that can safely attribute this substance to Russia.

2) Until now, neither Porton Down nor the world’s experts at the Organisation for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) were convinced “Novichoks” even exist.

3) The UK is refusing to provide a sample to the OPCW.

4) “Novichoks” were specifically designed to be able to be manufactured from common ingredients on any scientific bench. The Americans dismantled and studied the facility that allegedly developed them. It is completely untrue only the Russians could make them, if anybody can.

5) The “Novichok” programme was in Uzbekistan not in Russia. Its legacy was inherited by the Americans during their alliance with Karimov, not by the Russians.

With a great many thanks to sources who cannot be named at this moment.

So: Porton Down was simply being honest to say they didn’t know from where that poison had originated. But readers at Wikipedia are left uninformed about any of these crucial facts, or even about the Porton Down lab’s having publicly denied what UK’s Government was publicly saying about what their lab had asserted.

This is, sadly, normal operating procedure for the CIA-edited and written Wikipedia, which blacklists (blocks from linking to) sites (such as “MoA,” Helmer, and Murray) that aren’t CIA-approved. Wikipedia has furthermore been rather thoroughly exposed to be an international Deep State “disinformation” operation (an operation to slant ‘information’ in favor of global billionaires), and to be fundamentally corrupt, selling out cheaply to a large number of billionaires, instead of relying upon only a few big-dollar donors like most big non-profits do (having fewer and bigger owners). Using this method, they claim to have “annual revenues in excess of US$109.9 million. By means of excluding any links to sources such as you probably now are reading this article at, here, and by selectively warping, whenever necessary, what has been reported in the sources that they have approved to link to, they hide the crucial facts, such as (in this case) that the source of the poison wasn’t able to be identified, and that the UK’s Government lied about that.

Promptly after Johnson’s having lied to identify not only Russia, but Russia’s Government, as having been the source of the poison, UK’s Prime Minister, Theresa May, ordered additional sanctions imposed against Russia, and the UK and its allies promptly expelled 153 Russian diplomats (60 of whom were expelled from America); this was done on the basis of no evidence. As a consequence, Russia retaliated by expelling 189 diplomats from those countries.

To this day, there has been no legal case presented by the UK/U.S. side, that Russia had actually planned or executed the incident. Even more amazing is that both Yulia and Sergei Skripal have been blocked by the UK’s Government from answering any questions from the public, or from Russia’s Government, or from friends, or even from family-members of the Skripals. Both Sergei and Yulia simply disappeared, never been allowed to communicate to the public — and never allowed to testify in any legal proceeding.

On 19 March 2019, Britain’s Independent had the remarkable courage to headline “One year on, the Skripal poisoning case is still riddled with questions that no one wants to answer”; but, now, most of the questions that were listed there have, in fact, been answered, as will be documented here in the links. The results (as will be seen) are damning against the UK Government and against its allies (mainly the U.S.), all of whom expelled Russia’s diplomats based (as is now clear) only on manufactured lies against Russia regarding the Skripal case. The biggest scandal of all, however, is actually the Western press itself, which continues, to this day, to hide this scandal — a scandal now against themselves, as being not an authentic journalistic institution in an authentic democracy, but, instead, their own regime’s propaganda-agencies, mere cynical deceivers of their own public. This incident will go down in history — honest retrospective accounts of important public events — if such even still exists in the West (which may be seriously doubted, if one considers the present case as an example), as having been the operation of the West’s dictatorships: as having been propaganda, instead of journalism.

On March 16th of 2020, Helmer reported that “The Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL) at Porton Down, the principal chemical warfare testing unit of the British Ministry of Defence, has acknowledged it was producing and testing the organophosphate nerve agent Novichok from 2014.” He had provided the full details in his 26 February 2020 article “Secret US Chemical Warfare Contracts at the UK Porton Down Lab”. That introduction of evidence, from Porton Down’s experiments, for the U.S. Government’s chemical-warfare program, actually provides the clincher to Helmer’s masterful book on the subject, Skripal in Prison, which was published on 13 February 2020.

Previously, the UK Government had denied all of this. That fact should have rocked the Western press, and produced multiple mea culpas from them, but they have instead been hiding all of it from the public. If novichok can be produced anywhere, and had been produced at Porton Down, then the UK Government’s consistent allegations to the contrary have been mere lies.

The liberal neoconservative (or pro-imperialist fake-‘progressive’) British Guardian headlined on 13 April 2018 “Russia tested nerve agent on door handles before Skripal attack, UK dossier claims”, and reported

Russia had tested whether door handles could be used to deliver nerve agents and had targeted the email accounts of Sergei and Yulia Skripal since at least 2013, according to previously classified intelligence over the Salisbury attack that has been made public.

The UK released the intelligence on Friday linking Russia to the attack on the former double agent and his daughter.

The door handle and email claims were made in a letter from Sir Mark Sedwill, the UK’s national security adviser, to the NATO secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg. It is extremely rare for the UK to make such intelligence public. …

Sedwill said Russia regarded at least some of its defectors as “legitimate targets for assassination”, with the suggestion that they could include Skripal, …

Again, the propagandists were using “suggestion,” instead of unambiguous assertion, just to cover themselves. It’s another example of a verbal curve ball.

That article quoted Sedwill as alleging “It is unlikely that novichoks could be made and deployed by non-state actors.” No evidence for any of his allegations was offered. The Guardian’s ‘journalism’ was pure stenographic spreading of the Government’s allegations, just like had happened regarding “Saddam’s WMD.”

Of course, whomever used novichok, or anything like it, on Sergei Skripal, was aiming to assassinate him so that Skripal wouldn’t be publicly available to testify about the circumstances which had led up to his poisoning. However, not only did he survive this botched assassination-attempt, but also his daughter — collateral damage in it — did. This created a crisis within the UK regime, which now had to cover up what it had done, and so they have since that event been imprisoning both Skripals and keeping them incommunicado away from the public and especially away from any opportunities by which they might be able safely to speak frankly to the press about the circumstances which had led up to the attempted murder of Mr. Skripal. Nor is there any court-case in that regime attempting to identify and punish individuals whom the Skripals, if freed from their British captors, would publicly and freely accuse as having participated in it. One interesting aspect of their imprisonments is that, at least a portion of it (if not all of it) has been spent at the U.S. Air Force Nuclear Bomber Base in Fairford, Gloucestshire, as was revealed in Helmer’s article, and in his 2020 book, Skripal in Prison.

On 6 April 2022, Helmer headlined “BRITISH GOVERNMENT ENGAGES SECRET LAWYER TO REPRESENT SERGEI SKRIPAL AND YULIA SKRIPAL IN PUBLIC INQUIRY”, and reported that “The government’s payment to Chapman to act for the Skripals makes it appear they are alive and not in prison.” However, Chapman refused to answer any questions from Helmer. Helmer noted:

Sergei Skripal has not been seen in public since the day of the first alleged Novichok attack, March 4, 2018. He has not been heard on the telephone by family members since June 26, 2019 [6]. Yulia Skripal was last seen in a British and US-directed interview at a US bomber base in May 2018; [7] her last telephone call was heard on November 20, 2020 [8]. In the seventeen months since then, there has been no independent evidence [9] [after 26 June 2019] that they are alive.

Then, on 21 July 2022, Helmer headlined “SEVEN SKRIPAL SECRETS THE SECRET INTELLIGENCE SERVICE DIDN’T WANT TO LET OUT”, and he reported that Chapman refused even to answer any questions that the judge in the case had asked, such as: “Did he have anything to say to the court for Sergei and Yulia Skripal, Chapman was asked. ‘Nothing’, Chapman replied”:

Chapman’s silence, his refusal to say he had communicated directly with the Skripals to verify they are alive, capable of giving him instructions, and not in prison or otherwise under duress, is the third of the Skripal secrets the government has allowed to slip out. By naming Chapman, the British government and the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), which was responsible for Sergei Skripal since he had arrived in England, had made Chapman the first and only source of public evidence of their fate.  

The British press have not investigated this for more than four years. …

Either both Skripals were murdered by UK’s Government (presumably after 26 June 2019) in order to prevent UK’s guilt to be able to become known to the public, or else they had been given new identities and sent to New Zealand, as the UK rumor-mill has alleged. However, even if they are in another country, are they still in prison? Why does the public accept the UK’s — and Western media’s — constant lies? Whom is The West actually serving, in this matter? Is it ONLY the armaments firms, who sell to these Governments?

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