Glenn Greenwald Swings And Misses On Ukraine Biolabs

The framing for this comes courtesy of Sage Hana's excellent series decrying The Intercept's multiple journalistic failures, including TI founder Glenn Greenwald's odd refusal to delve into the metastasizing scandal of the COVID-19 “vaccines”. To Greenwald's odd absence from the signature aspects of that story we can add another failure arising from his recent takedown of the “fact-checkers” who dismissed the furor over Ukrainian biolabs as “conspiracy theories”. What's even more bizarre is that Glenn actually presents several of the important dots that need to be connected, then fails to connect them.

Greenwald's “Slaying" Of The “Fact-Checkers” Veers Off Course

In taking PolitiFact and other fact-checkers to the woodshed over Ukraine (which is richly deserved) Glenn veers off course fairly quickly, as early as the second paragraph.

Claims that Ukraine currently maintains dangerous biological weapons labs came from Russia as well as China. The Chinese Foreign Ministry this month claimed: "The US has 336 labs in 30 countries under its control, including 26 in Ukraine alone.” The Russian Foreign Ministry asserted that “Russia obtained documents proving that Ukrainian biological laboratories located near Russian borders worked on development of components of biological weapons.” Such assertions deserve the same level of skepticism as U.S. denials: namely, none of it should be believed to be true or false absent evidence. Yet U.S. fact-checkers dutifully and reflexively sided with the U.S. Government to declare such claims "disinformation” and to mock them as QAnon conspiracy theories.

Nor is this the first time that Glenn has been over the target yet failed to hit it, as his earlier story on Fauci's involvement with the Wuhan Institute of Virology demonstrates:

Why was the U.S. government creating exotic and extraordinarily deadly infectious bacterial strains and viruses that, even in small quantities, could kill large numbers of people? The official position of the U.S. Government is that it does not engage in offensive bioweapons research: meaning research designed to create weaponized viruses as weapons of war. The U.S. has signed treaties barring such research. But in the wake of the anthrax attacks — especially once the FBI’s own theory was that the anthrax was sent by a U.S. Army scientist from his stash at Fort Detrick — U.S. officials were forced to acknowledge that they do engage in defensive bioweapons research: meaning research designed to allow the development of vaccines and other defenses in the event that another country unleashes a biological attack.

What Glenn overlooked both times is that there is nothing exactly “secretive” about this research. While not the stuff of headlines for the New York Times, military, arms-control, and science media outlets have reported on these research programs for years.

For example, Arms Control Today reported back in 2005 on the expansion of US sponsorship of Ukraine-based research into dangerous pathogens (arguably bioweapons research):

U.S. cooperation with Ukraine under the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR) program was expanded Aug. 29 with an agreement to use U.S. CTR funds to improve security for pathogens stored at biological research and health facilities in the former Soviet republic.

The 2005 article even trumpets that CTR funding will be used to pay bioweapons researchers (emphasis mine) .

Cooperation under the new agreement will not be limited to physical security over pathogens. Funds also will be available for the peaceful employment of scientists whose skills and financial insecurity could render them potential targets for states or independent groups looking to acquire bioweapons capabilities. In addition, the agreement includes provisions for cooperation between U.S. and Ukrainian epidemiological laboratories in diagnosing disease outbreaks. Toward that end, pathogens from Ukrainian health and research facilities will be shared with U.S. partner laboratories. Under a CTR agreement with Azerbaijan, the United States last month also received a transfer of pathogens from similar facilities in that former Soviet republic.

It is hardly a leap of logic to conclude that scientists whose skills would be of interest to groups wanting bioweapons are bioweapons researchers, and that if CTR funds are being used to pay these people they are being paid to study bioweapons (but “defensively”, supposedly using their powers for good).

That the Ukrainian labs had ties to bioweapons was implicitly conceded by The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists last month while decrying “Russian misinformation” about them.

The labs at issue are part of a network of facilities with links to the Biological Threat Reduction Program, an element of a US government effort that began in the 1990s to reduce  the threat of the former Soviet Union’s weapons of mass destruction programs, including in countries like Ukraine that had once been a part of the communist country. The Soviet Union maintained a massive bioweapons program and part of the role of the US-linked labs is to take custody over left-over supplies, as is the case with a central reference laboratory in Kazakhstan. Disease surveillance and public health have since become the major focus of labs in the network.

Sidebar: If you follow The Bulletin's link on the Biological Threat Reduction Program guess what appears? COVID-19.

The first case of COVID-19 identified outside of China occurred on January 13, 2020, in Thailand. This early detection can in large part be credited to a little-known yet essential U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) program, the Biological Threat Reduction Program (BTRP), which equipped partners in Thailand with disease surveillance technologies and trained experts on their use.

Yes, the “national security” and foreign policy wonks took a victory lap over COVID-19. Let that sink in. Now, back to the story….

Glenn never mentions the BTRP or CTR by name. He completely overlooks the documented reality that these labs have never been denied by the US government, merely rationalized away as “threat reduction”.

To be fair, Glenn does point out that the BTRP is mentioned on the US Embassy in Ukraine website, but only in a round about fashion and with no follow-up.

For all the dismissive language used over the last two weeks by self-described “fact-checkers,” it is confirmed that the U.S. has worked with Ukraine, as recently as last year, in the “development of a bio-risk management culture; international research partnerships; and partner capacity for enhanced bio-security, bio-safety, and bio-surveillance measures.” The U.S. Embassy in Ukraine publicly boasted of its collaborative work with Ukraine “to consolidate and secure pathogens and toxins of security concern and to continue to ensure Ukraine can detect and report outbreaks caused by dangerous pathogens before they pose security or stability threats.”

The reality is that the US has been working with Ukraine and other countries on these matters pretty much since Ukraine regained its independence following the collapse of the Soviet Union. That's how long the CTR has been around.

Politifact Provides More Information Than Greenwald

Where Glenn should really be embarrassed is that PolitiFact gave more detail on the labs than he did.

PolitiFact's rating of the “bioweapons” claim as false rests not on the non-existence of the labs but on the dubious distinctions that they a) are not “bioweapons” labs, and b) are not “US run" (just US funded, which by Murphy's Golden Rule amounts to the same thing).

Even Snopes (Snopes!) gives a better summary of the background on the labs than Glenn.

Conspiracy theories are often fashioned from a small morsel of truth. In this case, the rumors are a distortion of the fact that the Ministry of Health of Ukraine and the Department of Defense of the United States of America entered into an agreement in 2005, while Republican U.S. President George W. Bush was in office, to “stem the threat of bio-terrorism by placing safeguards on deadly pathogens dating from a Soviet-era biological weapons program,” according to a contemporaneous news article in the Chicago Tribune. While the U.S. Defense Department’s Biological Threat Reduction Program provided some funding to upgrade biolabs in the Ukraine, these facilities are operated by the Ukrainian government under guidelines set under Ukrainian law.

Snopes, like PolitiFact, pretends that US funding via the DoD does not indicate that the US military “installed” bioweapons labs in Ukraine. In true fact-checker fashion, Snopes, like PolitiFact, points out the very facts it purports to debunk. Any parent who's caught their ten year old in a lie should recognize that juvenile rationalization for what it is—pure crap. Yet both manage in spite of themselves to detail the facts.

Faucism Weaponizes Science

Glenn Greenwald's failure in this is that he does not recognize the full scope of the cognitive dissonance at play regarding government programs like CTR and BTRP, which is where a real counter to the fact-checkers should focus. The failure is odd because Glenn provides the key argument, but only as an aside, not as the focus.

The indisputable reality is that — despite long-standing international conventions banning development of biological weapons — all large, powerful countries conduct research that, at the very least, has the capacity to be converted into biological weapons. The work conducted under the guise of “defensive research” can, and sometimes is, easily converted into the banned weapons themselves. Recall that, according to the FBI, the 2001 anthrax attacks that terrorized the nation came from a U.S. Army Research scientist, Dr. Bruce Ivins, working at the U.S. Army's infectious disease research lab in Fort Detrick, Maryland. The claim was that the Army was "merely” conducting defensive research to find vaccines and other protections against weaponized anthrax, but to do so, the Army had to create highly weaponized anthrax strains, which Ivins then unleashed as a weapon.

The 2001 anthrax attacks are indeed significant, but the significance goes beyond the government doublespeak decried by Glenn. Consider Dr. Paul Keim's statement in his 2011 Frontline interview about those attacks (cited by Glenn):

We were surprised it was the Ames strain. And it was chilling at the same time, because the Ames strain is a laboratory strain that had been developed by the U.S. Army as a vaccine-challenge strain. We knew that it was highly virulent. In fact, that’s why the Army used it, because it represented a more potent challenge to vaccines that were being developed by the U.S. Army. It wasn’t just some random type of anthrax that you find in nature; it was a laboratory strain, and that was very significant to us, because that was the first hint that this might really be a bioterrorism event.

Dr. Klein plainly and even casually acknowledges that the US military develops (“weaponizes”) dangerous pathogens, purportedly just so it can study them. To him, deliberately creating even more dangerous versions of already dangerous pathogens is of no concern.

Dr. Klein makes another important off-hand acknowledgement later on in the interview: scientists keep their samples as a matter of routine.

Yeah, I’ve been portrayed as a real hero for saving the sample, but it’s just what we do. We save samples; we collect them; we keep track of them. They’re of course very well protected and locked.

They create dangerous pathogens, and then keep those dangerous pathogens, as a matter of daily routine. It's normal.

This is the aspect of ”threat reduction” research that Glenn completely overlooks--the "normality” of it all, and the apparent obliviousness of researchers to the real (and really obvious) ethical questions the very existence of their research poses. As I noted in my own earlier survey of Anthony Fauci's serial ethical lapses:

The banality of Fauci’s evil is his seeming indifference to the suffering his choices can cause and have caused, regardless of the scientific benefits sought or gained. The banality of Fauci’s evil is his seeming indifference to the disrepute and opprobrium his ethical lapses bring on NIAID, NIH, as well as the FDA and CDC by extension. The banality of Fauci’s evil is his contempt for the notion that public trust in public health agencies is damaged and even destroyed by his misconduct.

What Dr. Klein unwittingly demonstrates, what the existence of the Ukrainian biolabs unequivocally prove, is that Faucism, the ideological perversion of science that is front and center in every aspect of the manifold COVID-19 scandals, is by no means limited to COVID-19, or even to the NIH/NIAID/CDC/FDA. While Fauci anointed himself as the “representative” of science, and so has earned the opprobrium of having his name permanently identified with scientific bastardy, that bastardy did not begin with Fauci. Arguably, it did not even begin with Fauci's ignominious predecessor as the acme of scientific malfeasance, Trofim Denisovich Lysenko.

Faucism begins in that moment when scientists forget that all action has consequences—or as Jeff Goldblum's character Dr. Ian Malcolm pithily states in the movie Jurassic Park:

Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.

It is this scientific bastardy that connects the CTR, the BTRP, and the Ukrainian biolabs to the still-ongoing pandemic panic and paranoia over COVID-19. It is this cavalier mindset that research is somehow its own justification that is the connective tissue between whatever evils have taken place in those Ukrainian biolabs and the Wuhan Institute of Virology. It is this casual weaponization of science to pursue personal, political, and/or ideological agendas, consequences be damned, that is the Faucist thread running through all these things.

The heart of the scandal of the Ukrainian biolabs, of Fort Detrick, of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and of the increasingly discredited Big Pharma “vaccines” is not that lives were lost and are being lost. The heart of the scandal is not even that the tenets of the Nuremberg Code and the Declaration of Helsinki have been almost completely ignored by all these myriad malefactors.

The heart of the scandal is that not one of these individuals even now appears even remotely aware of the human suffering they have caused. They are insensate to the ramifications of the diseases they have manufactured, and of the injuries and deaths arising from their research into and handling of dangerous and deadly pathogens.

We can see this in their words. We know this by the corporate media coverage which has lionized them. We may fairly convict them on the basis of their own evidences, of which I have presented here but a small fraction.

Glenn Greenwald has (or has access to) all of this same material but makes absolutely no use of it. This story was his for the writing but he did not write it.

The question must be asked: “Why not?”