{"id":25298,"date":"2018-03-14T22:55:19","date_gmt":"2018-03-15T02:55:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/?p=25298"},"modified":"2018-03-14T22:55:19","modified_gmt":"2018-03-15T02:55:19","slug":"the-novichok-story-is-indeed-another-iraqi-wmd-scam","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/2018\/03\/14\/the-novichok-story-is-indeed-another-iraqi-wmd-scam\/","title":{"rendered":"The Novichok Story Is Indeed Another Iraqi WMD Scam"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Craig Murray has posted the article <a href=\"https:\/\/www.craigmurray.org.uk\/archives\/2018\/03\/the-novichok-story-is-indeed-another-iraqi-wmd-scam\/\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">The Novichok Story Is Indeed Another Iraqi WMD Scam<\/a>.<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>As recently as 2016 Dr Robin Black, Head of the Detection Laboratory at the UK\u2019s only chemical weapons facility at Porton Down, a former colleague of Dr David Kelly, published in an extremely prestigious scientific journal that the evidence for the existence of Novichoks was scant and their composition unknown.<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>In recent years, there has been much speculation that a fourth generation of nerve agents, \u2018Novichoks\u2019 (newcomer), was developed in Russia, beginning in the 1970s as part of the \u2018Foliant\u2019 programme, with the aim of finding agents that would compromise defensive countermeasures. Information on these compounds has been sparse in the public domain, mostly originating from a dissident Russian military chemist, Vil Mirzayanov. No independent confirmation of the structures or the properties of such compounds has been published. (Black, 2016)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>To further attest to Craig Murray&#8217;s bona fides, he wrote the following:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\nAnd finally \u2013 Mirzayanov is an Uzbek name and the novichok programme, assuming it existed, was in the Soviet Union but far away from modern Russia, at Nukus in modern Uzbekistan. I have visited the Nukus chemical weapons site myself. It was dismantled and made safe and all the stocks destroyed and the equipment removed by the American government, as I recall finishing while I was Ambassador there. There has in fact never been any evidence that any \u201cnovichok\u201d ever existed in Russia itself.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Read the Wikipedia article on <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Craig_Murray\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Craig Murray<\/a> for verification.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Craig Murray has posted the article The Novichok Story Is Indeed Another Iraqi WMD Scam. As recently as 2016 Dr Robin Black, Head of the Detection Laboratory at the UK\u2019s only chemical weapons facility at Porton Down, a former colleague of Dr David Kelly, published in an extremely prestigious scientific journal that the evidence for [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[166],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-25298","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-stevegsposts","7":"czr-hentry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25298","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25298"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25298\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25299,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25298\/revisions\/25299"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25298"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25298"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25298"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}