Novichok… or fentanyl? No proof of a crime points to Skripal poisoning hoax

As far as the undermining of the British Government’s accusation of Russian culpability in the Skripal poisoning case goes, everyone thinks that the most damning piece of information is that presented by (ex-) Establishment man (a former senior diplomat) Craig Murray. He writes:

I have now received confirmation from a well placed FCO source that Porton Down scientists are not able to identify the nerve agent as being of Russian manufacture, and have been resentful of the pressure being placed on them to do so.

The problem with this is that it does nothing to challenge the British Government’s narrative whereby Sergei and Yulia Skripal were poisoned. This information only introduces doubt about the method of the attempted murder, and it doesn’t really affect the ramifications of the attempted murder because the Government is acting on information signed off by Porton Down; Murray also reveals that

Porton Down would only sign up to the formulation “of a type developed by Russia” after a rather difficult meeting where this was agreed as a compromise formulation.

The Government has made no direct accusation; all the language used that implicates Russia is always couched in words expressing grades of possibility “highly likely”, “overwhelmingly likely”, etc.  Any after-the-fact grousing by Murray’s sources makes little or no difference to the process that they have set in motion.

This is not to say that Murray’s information isn’t useful. In a previous article on the subject, the author suggested that the release to the public of many different hypotheses about the manner of the poisoning was for buying time:

While the nature of the weapon has been chosen to best incriminate Russia, it might not be the weapon that was actually used. Indeed, it was first thought that the Skripals were suffering from exposure to an opoid, fentanyl. When the weapon is not publically declared immediately, it buys breathing space in the execution of the ongoing psyop for a decision to be made on whether or not to proceed along a given course (in this case, to blame Russia). While any decision remains unmade, a number of scenarios can be floated and presented to the public, so that when the narrative can be settled on, the specifics of the crime can be chosen to best fit the weapon that can best frame the intended fall-guy.

If Murray is to be believed, it turns out that Porton Down scientists were at loggerheads with other Government people who were looking to make Russia the fall-guy. How long any haggling to come to a compromise went on for is not known, but compliance could not have been instant if at least one “difficult meeting” was involved. Murray’s story appears to confirm that the Government was treading water in its presentation of the “facts” of the case – thus, and possibly for the first time, we have been able to connect the public-facing management of a hoax to the inner machinations of Government.

What Murray’s information doesn’t do is cast doubt on the supposed fact of a crime perpetrated, using Novichok or any other nerve agent (or not), against the individual persons of Sergei and Yulia Skripal. In the foot notes of the previous FBEL article, the author published data pertaining to the Russian inability to acquire any information regarding the condition of Yulia Skripal. As such, the Russians have no proof that a crime has been committed – as indicated yet again in a 15th March Sputnik interview with a veteran of the Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (a colonel whose name was not revealed):

By the way, [we still don’t know] if Skripal and his daughter really were poisoned. If so, let them show that! Poisoned with what? What if all this is just a lot of hot air, nothing else?

It perhaps doesn’t strike the reader how very significant this all is. In the usual false flags or hoaxes perpetrated by Government upon the British people where a corrupt justice system writes a fake reality into the record books with impunity, there is no way that Government can be held accountable for its crime. However, this event involves the participation of a powerful player, in the shape of the Russian Government, who is completely independent of the British Government for the purposes of interpreting the evidence and preserving a conclusion that might be contrary to the official position of the UK Establishment. Moreover, international courts and forums are open to Russia for challenging the British Government. Thus, it is a very important aspect of this case that the Russians are not being furnished with very basic evidence. There is a risk in this hoax for the British Government that doesn’t usually feature. If basic evidence is not being demonstrated in a climate where there may be repercussions for not doing so, it strongly suggests that the evidence does not exist.

As far as evidence for the poisoning agent goes, it has been supposed in other places in alternative media other than FBEL that the British Government’s failure to produce is because there is none:

Under the terms of the CWC [Chemical Weapons Convention], the UK was obligated to provide Russia with a sample of the nerve agent used, along with all related evidence uncovered in the course of the investigation. After that, the treaty gives Russia 10 days to respond. Instead, May provided no evidence, and gave Russia 24 hours to respond. When Russia formally requested to see the evidence, this request was refused. We can only guess at why she refused, but one reasonable supposition is that there is no evidence.

If the British Government cannot produce a sample of the agent that supposedly injured the Skripals, then what does that say for the activity at Porton Down? Theatre, most likely.

To reiterate, the crucial evidence missing to date is that which proves that Yulia and Sergei Skripal were even targeted in an assassination attempt. Now, it is true that witness testimony does tell of two people displaying signs of being unwell on that now infamous Salisbury shopping centre bench just after 4pm on Sunday 4th March. A much quoted piece of witness material is that which was published by the BBC on 8th March:

Meanwhile, a doctor who was one of the first people at the scene has described how she found Ms Skripal slumped unconscious on a bench, vomiting and fitting. She had also lost control of her bodily functions.

The woman, who asked not to be named, told the BBC she moved Ms Skripal into the recovery position and opened her airway, as others tended to her father.

She said she treated her for almost 30 minutes, saying there was no sign of any chemical agent on Ms Skripal’s face or body.

The doctor said she had been worried she would be affected by the nerve agent, but added that she “feels fine”.

While this account informs of two people, a man and a woman, being ill, it also suggests that the illness was caused by a substance that isn’t easy to transmit from a body already infected or exposed to it. Note, the doctor appears to have been looking for a causal chemical agent, and was unable to find one. This suggests that the poison was not ingested by contact with the skin, but was instead introduced into the body via the mouth, or by some other method. This could be why the very first accounts told of the suspected substance being fentanyl, an opoid and an extremely potent synthetic drug (up to 10,000 times more powerful than heroin) which “when prescribed by a physician… is often administered via injection, transdermal patch, or in lozenges.” (From here).

Now consider the conversation that took place between Theresa May, and a paramedic called Ian, when she lately visited Salisbury.

The man, named Ian, said he had been in the first ambulance service response car on the scene.

Mrs May asked him: “At that stage you could only treat for what you can see?”

Salisbury MP John Glen interjected to say he had heard initial reports the incident was drug-related.

To which the paramedic replied: “Absolutely that’s what I was treating for, that’s what we treated them for initially.”

Here is confirmation that the incident was believed to have been drug related, and that first responders were treating the patients according to sight appraisals that governed the approach. At this point, then, all we know is that two people were discovered suffering with the sort of symptoms that could have been induced by powerful drugs. No proof that a crime had taken place.

Moving swiftly on to the next point of argument, there is reason to believe that the woman who was discovered in this predicament was not Yulia Skripal. In previous articles here at FBEL (and here), many examples were provided in which the corporate-media was happy to identify two people in a still from CCTV footage as Sergei and Yulia Skripal.  The image in question was caught by a camera owned by Snap Fitness 24/7 (a gym), and time-stamped 15:47; it showed a man with a blonde woman who was the owner of a distinctive red bag.

However, FBEL showed that when it was discovered that the woman could not be Yulia, there was an attempt in corporate-media to identify a group of three people in other CCTV footage as an expanded Skripal party. FBEL skewered this particular evolution of the corporate-media’s evidence, which attempted to maintain that the Skripals were in Salisbury city centre at the time the crime was said to have taken place. Additionally, FBEL also floated the notion that the British Government had made other efforts to create associations in the public consciousness between this couple and other Russians who had supposedly left the country – in other words, to further decouple the image of the two individuals in the CCTV image from the identities of Sergei and Yulia Skripal.

The corporate-media has now become absolutely averse to mentioning the Skirpals travelling on foot through the city in the same paragraph as the phrase “CCTV footage”.  The author believes that as it stands, there is no CCTV footage showing the Skripals walking through Salisbury, and the corporate-media does not continue to claim there is. The corporate-media has now resorted to barefaced lying to deal with the thorny issue of the Skirpals caught on the ground by CCTV. This is an example from the Guardian:

It would be usual in a case of a double attempted murder for police to issue details such as CCTV footage of the victims. They have not even issued images of the Skripals – the only ones seen have been found and published by the media. One of the earliest images to emerge was of a couple – a man and woman – in Market Walk shortly before the Skripals collapsed, but police have not said if they are believed to be the Skripals or anyone else connected with the investigation. There are still many more questions about what happened than there are answers.

Unfortunately for the ever-diminishing reputation of the Guardian, the fact of the matter is that the image in question was not discovered by the corporate-media as is claimed, but rather by the police:

Snap Fitness manager Cain Prince, aged 28, said: “Police had a good look at the footage and were interested in these two people.

“It was the only image they took away.”

The fact that the corporate-media then published the image along with an insistence that it did show the Skripals suggests that the police released it for that purpose – meaning that British Government wanted to have the British public believe that the two individuals in the image were Yulia and Sergei Skripal.

After it was discovered that the blonde could not be Yulia because of her darker colouration, and the corporate-media started to rearranging reality to explain, FBEL featured some very important information that had been provided in witness testimony by local woman Freya Church, to wit, the woman on the bench had a red bag.

As far as the author is concerned, Freya Church’s finishing work [Snap Fitness 24/7] at 4pm was the arrow in Achilles’ heel.  The behaviour of corporate-media  also leads the author to strongly suspect that the people shown in the CCTV footage are the people who were found on the bench. This would mean that Yulia Skripal was not one of the two individuals discovered suffering from the ill effects of a powerful drug. It would then be a safe bet to make that the male individual was therefore not Sergei Skripal. In turn, this would mean that the people discovered on the bench were actors either putting on a very good show, or patsies being double crossed with an actual poisoning at the scene. This is the conclusion that the author must make.

And such a conclusion would mean that the police sergeant, Nick Bailey, who was supposedly poisoned by residue from the main attack, must have actually been injured separately in order to create an impression of a wider threat, or to reinforce the impact of the main poison attack.

From detail that has emerged in the last few days, we now know that Nick Bailey went home after his shift (and notice, in the fiollowing extract, the change in the storyline: Bailey now appears to have been poisoned by contact with Skripal’s car).

DS Bailey, who was among the first to attend to Mr Skripal and his daughter Yulia, before possibly examining their red BMW, where it is thought the nerve agent Novichok may have been placed, was initially discharged from hospital after a check up.

He later admitted to Accident and Emergency at Salisbury District Hospital feeling extremely unwell.

This information makes it very hard to believe that Nick Bailey was contaminated with a lethal nerve agent on the 4th March. Indeed, the first mention of a policeman in hospital didn’t appear in the corporate-media until the evening of the 7th March. By the next morning, he was being identified as Nick Bailey, and interestingly, he was already being reported as recovering; i.e. he was able to talk, and able to sit up in bed. We don’t know when Bailey was admitted to hospital, but potentially it could have been a matter of days after the incident.

In a previous piece, the author passed on a misapprehension about the VX nerve agent having “a quality whereby it poses a small risk of creating immediately obvious affects in collateral victims – it has ‘low volatility’.”

The confusion was created by a conflation of a number of pieces of data, one of them being from the New Scientist:

VX is usually the nerve agent of choice for targeted assassinations because its low volatility means it’s less dangerous to the attacker, as long as they can spray it without getting it on their own skin.

The second piece was this:

In chemical weapons terms, persistent means that the agent has a low volatility. In turn, this means that it can be used in relatively confined spaces (such as an airport terminal) with less risk of obvious adverse effects on bystanders or the perpetrators.

In the intervening period, the author has seen many a report by commentators with expertise who state that even a very small dose of nerve agent is extremely hazardous, and has come to understand its continued lethalness having once been introduced. VX’s low volatility actually means that it “persists in environments where it is dispersed”. This is according to Wikipedia, which goes on:

The danger of VX, in particular, lies in direct exposure to the chemical agent persisting where it was dispersed, and not through its evaporating and being distributed as a vapor (i.e., it is not a “vapor hazard”).

Furthermore, “VX fatalities occur with exposure to tens of milligram quantities via inhalation or absorption through skin”. In short, once VX has been introduced to an environment, it persists there, and continues to be a lethal hazard.

It is understood that Novichok, if it exists, is meant to be 5 to 8 times more powerful than VX. Thus, if Novichok is the substance with which Nick Bailey came into contact, it really is astonishing that he could survive. Moreover, it is very surprising that he was able to return home after his shift. Potentially (depending on data that we don’t have) he may not have suffered any ill effects for anything up to the third day after the incident. How could any of this have happened if he had been poisoned on 4th March? There is nothing in the information pertaining to Bailey that does not rule out his being injured in a poisoning incident separate to the one supposedly targeted at the “Skripals”.

As for the Skripals, they are supposed to be in the Salisbury District Hospital where, on the 5th March, a major incident was declared:

Fire-fighters from the city’s station were called to decontaminate the area and a green tent has been erected outside the front of the Accident and Emergency department.

Two ambulance vehicles marked “incident response unit” are also in attendance.

Putting aside the question as to whether or not this sounds like a competent reaction to a couple of cases of nerve agent poisoning, why was it that a major incident was not declared until the day after the supposed occurrence of the event? Maybe on admittance of the patients, the hospital – like the paramedics who transported them – thought it was dealing with something relatively harmless in terms of public risk: “Police could not confirm whether the patients had been exposed to fentanyl, a dangerous heroin substitute” reported the London Standard.

So, it definitely appears to be true that a couple were brought to the hospital; but there is no proof positive, that the author can see (considering also the objections being made by the Russian) , that this couple were the Skripals. If Salisbury hospital has currently got beds taken up by a couple of decoys suffering from exposure to fentanyl, then for one thing, it makes redundant all the speculation about which nerve agent was used and how unhappy Porton Down scientists are about it, but more pertinently it perhaps means that we should expect to hear, by and by, about the patients’ sad demise. Would it mean, at the same time, that the Skripals had passed on? [In such a scenario, with all the trouble gone to to have them substituted, logic dictates that they would get “witness protection” treatment]. With such events in the past, one would always sign off an article like this one with the resignation “we’ll never know what happened”, but this time an re-emerging superpower has a stake in the outcome. Maybe this time, we will find out.

But we can’t end without a disclaimer; while this article proposes that Salisbury has been the victim of a grand psychological operation, we will in no way leave ourselves open to accusations that we have irresponsibly led people to believe that there has never been any health risk attached to the events that have occurred in the city. Sergeant Bailey is in hospital, and that isn’t being denied.