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'Only the small secrets need to be protected. The big ones are kept secret by public incredulity' -- McLuhan. Mostly tweets about the Skripal incident. Mostly.
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Feb 18 8 tweets 3 min read
An interesting detail from the #dawnsturgess inquiry relates to the supposed visit that the #Skripals made to Salisbury's London Road cemetery early in the morning of the day they were allegedly poisoned. It was sealed off and searched by officers in full PPE four days later. 1/8 Image The cemetery visit is a problem for the narrative because 1. If the #Skripals went out that morning, there's no evidence they went back to the house where they were allegedly poisoned and 2. The Russians who allegedly poisoned them didn't arrive in Salisbury until much later. 2/8 Image
Dec 3, 2024 10 tweets 5 min read
There is so much deception, distraction and lies in this part of the #DawnSturgess inquiry -- the closing statements of Lisa Giovannetti KC -- that a thread is required to address them. The timestamp for her statement in the inquiry YT stream is here. 1/10 Image Giovannetti begins with a lone accurate statement addressing Lord Hughes. "You may consider you can't place... weight on [Charlie Rowley's] account [because his memory is very poor]," she says.

This is true. Rowley's account is totally unreliable and should be dismissed. 2/10
Nov 23, 2024 5 tweets 2 min read
Interesting testimony was given by the anonymous Porton Down expert "MK26" on Day 16 of the #DawnSturgess inquiry, when there was no YT feed: only a transcript was published. MK26 is asked about these remarks President Putin made back in 2018, after the #Skripal poisonings. 1/5 Putin is of course suggesting that the poison the #Skripals were exposed to was not in fact a "military grade" neurotoxin as the UK claimed, because if it had been they would have died instantly or very shortly after exposure; this suggestion is recorded in the transcript. 2/5 Image
Nov 22, 2024 5 tweets 3 min read
To address this photograph of the #Skripals. I think it was taken in Zizzi's restaurant but it wasn't taken on the day the Skripals were poisoned; it's from an earlier visit Yulia made to Salisbury with her brother. He is the photographer, not Skripal's handler Pablo Miller. 1/5 Image It should be clear that this picture was not taken on the day the Skripals were poisoned because here they are wearing different clothes to those we see them wearing on CCTV from that day; Yulia's hair is also completely different in this photograph. 2/5
Nov 15, 2024 4 tweets 2 min read
As we know a problem with the fake #novichok bottle allegedly used to poison the #Skripals is that Charlie Rowley said it was boxed and sealed in plastic, with the pump dispenser unattached inside. While assembling it he spilled the deadly neurotoxin on himself, but survived. 1/3 Sceptics of the #Skripal story have joked that the two Russians in Salisbury must have brought with them a portable heat sealing device, with which they re-sealed the bottle (after the suicidally dangerous process of taking it apart for no reason) before dumping it somewhere. 2/3 Image
Nov 2, 2024 7 tweets 4 min read
An interesting side-effect of the #DawnSturgess inquiry is how it is slowly but significantly undermining the credibility of @MarkUrban01. Urban is the BBC reporter who did most to establish the official narrative about the #Skripals with his book 'The #Skripal Files' (2018) 1/7 Image Urban was seemingly interviewing #Skripal for a book (ostensibly about the "Illegals Program" spies) *before* the poisoning. He was initially unwilling to admit this connection to Skripal, referring to "people who've met him" in his early reports. 2/7 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegals_…
Nov 1, 2024 8 tweets 4 min read
The testimony of Dr Stephen Cockroft is perhaps the most interesting of the #DawnSturgess inquiry so far; he was an excellent witness. He tells us Yulia #Skripal woke up after another doctor ordered a "sedation hold" (a pause in her sedation). This is routine as he explains: 1/7 Dr Cockcroft says he was "gobsmacked": what amazed him was how "neurologically intact" Yulia was when she woke up. He expected her to have suffered catastrophic brain damage, but this was clearly not the case. She was "looking at me, nodding... crying, she was... terrified". 2/7
Oct 31, 2024 6 tweets 3 min read
Like the BBC hacks reporting on the #DawnSturgess inquest The Guardian's @stevenmorris20 would make a terrible court reporter, here getting the name of a key witness wrong. But there are other facts he gets wrong in this story. 1/6 theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/o… x.com/timtron2020/st… Image Morris has already lied about atropine, the drug he reports was given to #Skripal "by accident". Morris once reported that Rowley was given a "nerve agent antidote" that had "never been used before", but later changed this to atropine, a common drug. 2/6
Oct 11, 2024 18 tweets 8 min read
'Unleashed' by Boris Johnson has undeniable style. Johnson has an irreverent and amusing tone to his writing, just as he does in his TV interviews. Chapter 28 is about #Skripal so I'll review it here, noting the omissions and falsehoods along with some general observations. 1/18 Image The chapter opens with the death of Dawn Sturgess, showing how deeply amoral and unprincipled Johnson is beneath his affable facade. He surely knows the public inquiry the Sturgess family have spent years fighting for will hide the truth from them. 2/18
Sep 30, 2024 10 tweets 5 min read
It is important to recognise that what we will see with the #DawnSturgess #novichok inquiry in the coming weeks is the culmination of a deliberate strategy by the UK establishment to frustrate the Sturgess family's years-long battle to find out what really happened to Dawn. 1/10 Image When Dawn was taken to hospital on 30 July 2018 -- almost four months after the alleged poisoning of the #Skripals -- the family were initially told she had suffered a heart attack. This was reported in a Daily Mail article that was later deleted. 2/10 web.archive.org/web/2018070715…
Sep 29, 2024 11 tweets 3 min read
This piece about the #Skripals by @Abul_Taher, the "security correspondent" for the Mail on Sunday, is an object lesson in lying by omission and sloppy, deceptive writing: an example of how journalism is debased by fake "reporters". Let's take a look. 1/11 dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1… Taher begins: "The targets of the Salisbury poisonings will not be called to give evidence at the forthcoming public inquiry over fears Russian spies would attack them again."

So the main witnesses will never, ever give evidence? Taher doesn't see anything wrong with this. 2/11
Jan 19, 2024 18 tweets 10 min read
I looked at the book 'We Are #Bellingcat' by Eliot Higgins. It's full of falsehoods and lies of omission about the #Salisbury #Skripal #novichok incident. It's weakest around the sequence of events when the #Skripals were actually poisoned, as we'll see.

A longish thread: 1/18 Image Higgins opens with the #Skripals in hospital, "pumped full of atropine". Atropine is toxic and generally given in large doses only if organophosphate poisoning is diagnosed. Higgins omits that there was *no such early diagnosis* at the hospital.

2/18

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Dec 10, 2023 12 tweets 5 min read
I've read several books dealing with the case of the #Skripals so you don't have to: '#Skripal Files' ; 'Russians Among Us' ; 'Killer in Kremlin' ; 'Toxic' . But I'd missed this one: 1/12


'From Russia With Blood' by @HeidilBlake. Like the other books it's full of falsehoods; they're mostly in the intro. I'll deal with them briefly.

When the #Skripals were admitted to hospital after being found on the bench, Blake says: "Doctors were initially perplexed". 2/12
Jun 28, 2023 9 tweets 4 min read
This Ch4 "fact check" article from 2018 about the #Skripal case is a great example of how fake journalists serve power instead of democracy: here defending then-foreign sec Boris Johnson after he lied to the world about #novichok.

Let's take a look. 1/10 channel4.com/news/factcheck… The journalist, @martinrw, now works for @openDemocracy and has contributed to @TBIJ, haunt of the Integrity Initiative-linked @jamesrbuk. . Like Ball and Cadwalladr, Williams affects concern about "creeping authoritarianism". 2/10 https://t.co/wAVvbFI5o8pdf-archive.com/2018/12/13/ski…
tcij.org/person/martin-…
Dec 5, 2022 8 tweets 3 min read
The lack of WMD in Iraq was a disaster for the organised criminals calling themselves British intelligence. They destroyed a sovereign nation and hundreds of thousands of civilians, but they also destroyed their reputation. To stop this happening again, they needed a plan. 1/8 Image The plan was to use a third party to launder their lies into the press via client journalists. That way, if the lies were later exposed, the organised criminals calling themselves British intelligence would not be directly implicated. They soon found a candidate: Bellingcat. 2/8 Image
Dec 3, 2022 4 tweets 2 min read
A list of former US ambassadors, ex-senators, ex-presidents of the World Bank, Atlantic Council types. One of them, Simon Clark, is chair of the "Center for Countering Digital Hate", cited in a BMJ article calling for censorship of covid "disinformation". fp4america.org/our-leadership Clark is among other things a member of the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab. He "trained at Price Waterhouse" and "built the original internet presence for Reuters". He is - it is no surprise to discover - essentially an investment banker. atlanticcouncil.org/expert/simon-c…
Jul 24, 2022 6 tweets 6 min read
NO-ONE WAS KILLED BY #NOVICHOK IN #SALISBURY (1/6)

How can say this? Three reasons.

1. The chemical was not confirmed to be "novichok". Porton Down said it had found novichok in the #Skripal blood samples, but in court PD's expert wouldn't confirm this. The #OPCW was careful not to explicitly identify #novichok in its analysis of the blood samples it received from the UK. It hedged its language in a strange way, merely saying it "confirmed" the UK's findings relating to the identity of the chemical. (2/6)
Mar 13, 2022 11 tweets 9 min read
#CaroleCadwalladr, seen here with her friend, the "ex-spy" Christopher Steele, has evidently been ordered to re-heat the #Skripal #Salisbury #novichok story (which Steele was involved with) because of the "biolabs" found in #Ukraine. So let's deconstruct her #disinformation. 1/11 Image #CaroleCadwalladr has long been known to be associated with UK intelligence. Documents reveal her connection to the discredited 'Integrity Initiative', a project intended to build a network of client journalists to promote the establishment's agenda. 2/11
Sep 11, 2021 8 tweets 4 min read
20 years after the 9/11 attacks, the results of my modest Twitter poll show 72% of respondents do not believe the US govt account of 9/11 at all, while 92% believe it is at least partially false. I wonder what the consensus on the least believable element of the story might be. One element that was met with scepticism even as it was reported live by CNN anchorman Garrick Utley was the news that a hijacker's passport had been recovered from the rubble of the Twin Towers' destruction. "If you can believe that" was certainly not on Utley's teleprompter.
Aug 20, 2021 5 tweets 3 min read
'Flat Earth News' @Bynickdavies is a classic analysis of how propaganda works by a great investigative journalist; I was lucky to meet him once at a @NUJofficial event. His remarks about the #Skripal case are essential so I'm uploading them here (video clips in three parts). 1/3 "Big question. What has Mr #Skripal been doing with his time [in Salisbury]?" 2/3
Aug 15, 2021 26 tweets 15 min read
@dankaszeta omitted significant facts and distorted aspects of the #Skripal case in his recent talk for @edskeptics, as I will show in this thread.

Kaszeta's talk is here. It's over an hour long but I'll give ~time reference points with my remarks.

1/25 Kaszeta blocked me on Twitter long ago.

This was after I asked him how it was possible that two people as physically different as Sergei and Yulia #Skripal could be *almost simultaneously overcome* by the effects of a nerve agent they had allegedly touched hours before.

2/25