Republicans have politicized intelligence to push the Wuhan Lab leak theory – but Biden has called their bluff
Scott Ritter
is a former US Marine Corps intelligence officer and author of 'SCORPION KING:
America's Suicidal Embrace of Nuclear Weapons from FDR to Trump.' He
served in the Soviet Union as an inspector implementing the INF Treaty,
in General Schwarzkopf’s staff during the Gulf War, and from 1991-1998
as a UN weapons inspector. Follow him on Twitter @RealScottRitter
28 May, 2021 15:22 / Updated 9 hours ago
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The president ordered that a politicized State Department probe
into whether Covid-19 came out of a Chinese lab be halted, turning the
matter over to US intelligence. Cover up? No – just a search for truth
in a toxic environment.
On May 26, 2021, CNN broke a story
which claimed that the Biden administration terminated a State
Department investigation, launched in the fall of 2020 by former
President Trump and his Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, the intent of
which was to prove a controversial and disputed theory that Covid-19
originated in a lab in Wuhan, China. While the CNN report calls the
State Department-run investigation “discreet”, the State Department did release a “Fact Sheet”
on January 15, 2021, less than a week before President Joe Biden was
sworn in, entitled “Activity at the Wuhan Institute of Virology”. This
not only called for “a credible and thorough investigation” into the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic, but made clear the State Department was, in fact, taking the lead in this effort.
According
to CNN, the decision to shut down the investigation was made sometime
in March of 2021, after the State Department’s Bureau of Arms Control
and Verification Compliance (AVC) was fully briefed on its work.
Concerns were raised about both the quality and integrity of the
investigation, especially when it came to the release of cherry-picked
intelligence information for the exclusive purpose of blaming China by
seeking to breathe new life into a theory that claims the Covid-19 virus
originated not in nature, which is the consensus of the vast majority
of the scientific communities worldwide, but rather from a leak at the
laboratory of the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
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The politicization of intelligence
While individuals involved with the probe claim it started as a “genuine
attempt to investigate if China’s biological weapons program may have
played a larger part in the pandemic’s emergence in Wuhan,” it devolved into something more akin to the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans.
That investigation, which took place in the lead-up to the 2003
invasion and occupation of Iraq, sought to cherry pick intelligence
which sustained the notion that Iraq possessed weapons of mass
destruction. According to CNN, the State Department effort focused on
scientific research and information from the US intelligence community
which backed the lab leak theory for the purpose of shining more light
on how it could have emerged from the Wuhan lab.
The State
Department, in a possible effort to head off any embarrassing
comparisons between its activities and those of the disgraced Office of
Special Plans, noted in a statement provided to The Hill
that the CNN report was incorrect. Rather than shutting down the State
Department’s investigation into the origin of the Covid-19 pandemic, the
investigation ended on its own volition upon its conclusions and
findings being briefed to the responsible parties in the State
Department.
In any event, while the decision to terminate Pompeo’s
rogue intelligence operation was made and executed in March, the
decision to disclose this to the press was made on May 26, three days
after someone decided to leak sensitive information allegedly obtained
from a so-called “previously undisclosed intelligence report” to the Wall Street Journal
on May 23, 2021. It stated that three researchers at the Wuhan
Institute of Virology (WIV) were so sick in November 2019 that they had
to be hospitalized. The intelligence, said to have been sourced from a “partner nation” and of “exquisite quality”,
could not, however, say what made the three researchers ill, noting
that they could have been stricken by the common flu. This finding would
be in keeping both with Chinese denials that any lab personnel were
stricken by Covid-19, and the serological test results of all lab
workers that were provided to the WHO as part of their investigation.
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Now even Fauci accepts
the lab leak theory of Covid-19 is 'possible.’ Will the fact-checkers
admit they were wrong? Of course not
So, what’s new?
According to the Wall
Street Journal, what gives this “new intelligence” credence is the
specificity it provides, which expands upon the claims put forth in the
State Department’s “Fact Sheet” from January 15, 2021, which reported
that “[t]he US government has reason to believe that several
researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019, before the first
identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both
COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses.”
Any intelligence
professional looking at the State Department “Fact Sheet” and the
information contained in the Wall Street Journal would be able to say
with absolute confidence that it came from the same source which, if
CNN’s reporting was correct, was cherry picked by Pompeo’s State
Department team to promote the theory of a “lab leak” out of Wuhan,
making the information problematic by association.
But there was
an even bigger problem with the intelligence. In the intelligence
community, reporting that originates from a friendly intelligence
service is treated with great sensitivity, out of fear that its
unauthorized release would cause that service to stop sharing reports of
a sensitive nature. Moreover, the data itself is treated with
circumspection, especially when it comes to briefing senior policy
makers, given that the source and methods involved in its collection are
not US-controlled, and as such is subject to suspicion out of concerns
that an outside party or agency may be seeking to influence US policy
making. In a case such as the State Department’s decision to cite
foreign-sourced intelligence in a public report, permission would have
been sought prior to publication, and any information which could
provide hints as to the source of the intelligence would have been
scrubbed clean – such as the number of infected workers and the specific
timing of the hospital visit.
The reality is that the publication
of this “new intelligence” does nothing to further the viability of any
argument in favor of a “lab leak” theory. The US Intelligence
Community’s (IC) official position regarding the origin of Covid-19, per
an April 30, 2020, press release, stated that it concurred “with the wide scientific consensus that the COVID-19 virus was not manmade or genetically modified.” The IC declared that it “will
continue to rigorously examine emerging information and intelligence to
determine whether the outbreak began through contact with infected
animals or if it was the result of an accident at a laboratory in
Wuhan.”
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Having shut down Trump’s Covid-19 origin probe, Biden now entrusts it to same spies who gave us ‘Russiagate’
Sources for courses
The irony is that,
by publishing the “previously undisclosed” details of the intelligence
concerning the hospitalization of three workers affiliated with the
Wuhan laboratory, the Wall Street Journal (and whoever leaked the
information) all but guaranteed that the US IC would not be able to
exploit that source of information again in any effort to further an
IC-based investigation into the origins of Covid-19. The country of
origin, having established that the information excised to permit the
original release back in January 2021 was of such sensitivity that its
release could endanger the source, would now be extremely reticent to
open the source up to renewed risk by cooperating with the US – if
indeed the source still existed after the leak.
But even if the
source had not been compromised in such an egregious fashion, the fact
remains that the intelligence analysts responsible for assessing its
value had already determined that it was of little practical use – void
of any specificity as to what specific illness had stricken the three
workers in question (even the State Department “Fact Sheet” notes that
it could have been a simple case of “common seasonal illnesses”), and in the face of the Chinese serological data provided to the WHO
that directly refutes any suggestion of a Covid-19 infection among
laboratory staff, the intelligence did nothing to give credence to the
theory of a “lab leak.”
The US IC conclusion was reached well
before the decision was made by the Mike Pompeo-run State Department to
publish the intelligence in the January 2021 “Fact Sheet”. Indeed, the
State Department action was of a purely political nature, designed to
shape public perception and tie the hands of a Biden administration
which might be more inclined to follow the analysis of the US IC, and
not the cherry-picked conclusions of a secretary of state gone rogue.
The decision to leak the full extent of the intelligence underpinning the “Fact Sheet” appears to have been made after a briefing by the Director of National Intelligence, Avril Haines, given to Congress on April 14, 2021. She stated, “It
is absolutely accurate the intelligence community does not know exactly
where, when, or how Covid-19 virus was transmitted initially,” noting that the community had “coalesced around two alternative theories”. One being that the virus “emerged naturally from human contact with infected animals,” the other that “it was a laboratory accident.”
She did not, however, say anything which contradicted the conclusions
published in the April 2020 press release which rejected the laboratory
accident scenario.
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The Covid-19 lab leak theory is back, but it’s a poor man’s ‘Iraq anthrax vial’ for China at best
Never mind ‘lab leaks’, what about information leaks?
While
no one has taken responsibility for the leaks, obvious candidates
include Republican Representatives or their staff serving on the House
Intelligence Committee. On May 19, 2021, the committee’s ranking member,
Devin Nunes, released a report which appeared to be lifted directly from the State Department’s January 15, 2021 “Fact Sheet”, highlighting “significant circumstantial evidence” which raised “serious concerns that the COVID-19 outbreak may have been a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.” This “circumstantial evidence”
appears to be the intelligence concerning the three sick lab workers
back in November 2019. The goal in releasing this report seems to be the
same as in leaking the information to both CNN and the Wall Street
Journal – to generate domestic political pressure on the Biden
administration to revive the discontinued Pompeo investigation.
Faced
with this obvious effort to politicize intelligence for the purpose of
obtaining an outcome not reflective of the facts, President Biden
responded by upping the ante – on May 27, 2021, he directed his Director of National Intelligence
to launch an inquiry into the origins of the Covid-19 outbreak which
would be delivered to him within 90 days. A spokesperson for the Office
of the Director of National Intelligence, in a statement issued after
President Biden’s announcement regarding the new inquiry, echoed the
April 14, 2021, testimony of Director Avril Haines about the existence
of two schools of thought regarding the origins of the Covid-19 virus,
those being natural occurrence or a laboratory accident, before
mirroring the statement made by the US IC in April 2020, declaring “[t]he
intelligence community continues to examine all evidence, consider
different perspectives and aggressively collect and analyze new
information to identify the virus’s origin.”
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China furious as new report suggests Wuhan lab staff sought hospital care weeks before Covid-19 outbreak was disclosed
In short, Biden, to divert attention away from a deliberate
attempt by House Republicans to politicize intelligence in order to
paint China as the party solely responsible for the Covid-19 pandemic,
has ordered his Director of National Intelligence to investigate an
issue about which the US IC has already made up its mind. Haines will
direct her officers to scour their sources for new information or,
lacking that, take a new look at existing information to see if there
was anything missed during previous analytical exercises.
Odds are
that there is no new source of intelligence, no “magic bullet” to
compel a radical departure from the fact-based conclusions that the US
IC has already reached regarding the origin of Covid-19 – namely that it
most likely did not come from a laboratory. If there were, it would
have already been leaked to the press, and the best the press currently
has is the old intelligence about three sick workers back in November
2019, which is nothing. The “blame China” crew has shot its bolt, and
Biden has called their bluff.
