Peaceful Research or Biowarfare? US Gov't Knows Ukraine Pathogens are Weapons, Observers Say
18:56 GMT, 2 February 2023
An independent investigation into the US government's overseas biolabs is long overdue, investigative journalists told Sputnik, stressing that dangerous pathogens are bioweapons, no matter what euphemisms one is using.
SputnikNational Security Council strategic communications coordinator John Kirby made a rather contradictory statement concerning the Pentagon's support to Ukrainian bioresearch facilities recently.
While denying that "there are no bioweapons labs, there is no bio weapons work being done by or with the United States with Ukraine in Ukraine," Kirby nonetheless acknowledged that the US "had been working with the Ukrainians on some pandemic prevention research." He further added that "all those research facilities were vacated and safely deactivated before" the beginning of the Russian special military operation.
"John Kirby has little credibility with the American public," John Cullen, a US investigative journalist and founder of #IamJohnCullen podcast, told Sputnik. "The US government is using 'word-smithing' to dance around the facts. They refuse to call them bio-warfare labs. However, if you look at what Ray Kurzweil, senior fellow at Google said in 2005, 'This is extremely foolish. The genome is essentially the design of a weapon of mass destruction' – when talking about the resurrection of the 1918 pandemic H1N1 strain. The US government knows these viruses are weapons, but refuses to call them that (…) Clearly the US had funded research at these labs. Semantics about what is biowarfare and what is not, is how they dance around the truth."
1 February 2023, 16:46 GMT
What US Gov't Has Revealed So Far
In March 2022, Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland admitted that Ukraine has biological research facilities and that the US government had been concerned that "materials" from these facilities could fall into the hands of the Russian military.
In June 2022, the Pentagon
stated that over the last 20 years, the US "worked collaboratively to improve Ukraine’s biological safety, security, and disease surveillance for both human and animal health,
providing support to 46 peaceful Ukrainian laboratories, health facilities, and disease diagnostic sites."
An analogy I’ve been making is this, let’s presume a screwdriver factory was constructed. It makes screwdrivers and claims to be a tool manufacturer. If I come over to your house and fix the door with one of their screwdrivers it is indeed a tool. If on my way home from your house, I stab someone in the neck with that screwdriver, the tool has become a weapon. A 'biological facility' conducting classified research on pathogenic material can be both a vaccine research facility and a bioweapon laboratory at the same time.
Jason Goodman
US investigative journalist and founder of CrowdSource the Truth
According to the fact sheet, the Pentagon had to deal with a broad range of biological pathogens left from the Soviet era in biolabs of former USSR.
"The US Departments of Defense and State funded programs to help transition such former Soviet weapons facilities into peaceful public health facilities," claimed the document.
However, judging from a February 25, 2022, interview of Robert Pope, the head of the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program at the Pentagon, at least some of the aforementioned pathogens had not been destroyed, but preserved in freezers for "research purposes."
A 2010 BioPrepWatch article preserved in web archives and the US Armed Forces' Counterproliferation Centre indicated that America had maintained
bioresearch cooperation with Kiev since at least 2005.
Even though the Pentagon's fact sheet is insisting that the US government-backed bioresearch activities in Ukraine and other post-Soviet Republics were "consistent with international norms for safety, security, nonproliferation, and transparency," the US Embassy in Ukraine scrubbed all information about their collaborative bio-research from its website for some unknown reasons.
John Cullen conducted research utilizing the well-known “Wayback Machine” website hosted at archive.org. This allowed him to restore deleted webpages and associated documents that had been removed from the US Embassy in Ukraine’s official site.
"That allowed me to 'go back in time' to captures of the site," the US investigative journalist said. "That's where I found the documents."
According to Cullen, the evidence that he found at the US Embassy's website indicated that "there is a very high probability" that the US government's funding of Ukraine labs was one of the key reasons for Russia launching a special military operation in Ukraine – "to find evidence of such activities, and destroy these labs." If so, Dr. Anthony Fauci and former Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute Francis Collins "are directly responsible" for what is going on in Ukraine, Cullen argued.
Judging from the documents unearthed by Cullen, the US Department of Defense was listed as a "donor" for a number of Ukraine biolabs and requested "copies of dangerous pathogens" collected in Ukraine from the nation's Health Ministry "for cooperative biological research in the centralized laboratories in Ukraine and in US Department of Defense designated laboratories in the US for prophylactic, protective or other peaceful purposes."
Another research paper dated November 23, 2015, and titled "The Evolution of Cooperative Threat Reduction: Issues for Congress" revealed that between 1997 and 2015, "Congress appropriated to the US Department of Defense (DoD) around $2.4 billion for biological threat reduction projects, with large increases in the amount of both the request and the appropriation in recent years."
The increase in funding was largest between 2007 and 2008, "when DoD planned to expand US biosafety and biosecurity assistance at facilities in [former Soviet Republics, ed.] Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Georgia," according to the paper.
Washington Covering Its Tracks in Ukraine
Another glaring example of "transparency" surrounding the US bio-research in Ukraine is an
alleged order issued by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on the day of the beginning of Russia's special military operation to demilitarize and de-Nazify Ukraine.
The alleged decree, cited by US investigative journalists, instructed Ukrainian government officials to destroy all information on the Ukrainian Research Anti-Plague Institute, Mechnikov Institute of Health of Ukraine, and the Zhytomyr Regional Laboratory Centers of the Ministry of Health of Ukraine, which all worked with Metabiota Inc. scientists.
According to open sources, Metabiota is a San Francisco startup that compiles data from around the world to predict disease outbreaks and partners with PREDICT and PREVENT programs by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
The firm was mentioned by the Russian Ministry of Defense's (MoD) March report concerning the US' alleged biowarfare research in Ukraine last year. According to the MoD, the Rosemont Seneca investment fund, co-founded by Hunter Biden, the US president's son, participated in the funding of Ukrainian biolabs in cooperation with Metabiota, a subcontractor to the Pentagon's principal contractor Black & Veatch.
Separately, a British newspaper on March 25, 2022, acknowledged that the MoD's findings are "at least partially true" and presented evidence that the younger
Biden had "helped secure millions of dollars of funding" for Metabiota that specialized in researching pandemic-causing diseases "that could be used as bioweapons". Reportedly, Hunter's Rosemont Seneca had a 13.4% stake in the company in 2014.
In addition, judging from a letter emanating from Hunter's infamous laptop from hell, Metabiota also started partnering at the time with Ukrainian energy firm Burisma. During his father's vice presidential tenure, Hunter worked on Burisma's board (while having zero experience in energy matters) and received a hefty $83,000+ per month.
Meanwhile, Metabiota's collaboration with the Pentagon's contractor Black & Veatch also raises questions. According to Goodman, neither he nor John Cullen has ever heard about B&V before: "But they are a sophisticated company that claims to have over 100 years of experience servicing the US government," Goodman noted.
The Russian MoD revealed last spring that Black & Veatch has been working in the interests of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) in Ukraine since 2008, carrying out a number of controversial biological projects, which, according to the Russian military,
could be aimed at creating components of biological weapons.
"US Contractor Black & Veatch is named in a number of documents," said Cullen, referring to the trove of US Embassy documents. "Metabiota has a 'Pandemic Tracking System'. If the US Congress doesn't investigate all of these connections, the [US] government is completely compromised. Why not investigation so far? Most of them were in it. Went to Ukraine. Took photos. Got contributions."
Speaking to Sputnik in March 2022, Francis Boyle, a professor of international law at the University of Illinois College of Law, highlighted that
the Pentagon's alleged biowarfare programs in Ukraine violate both the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) and the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989 (BWATA). Boyle, who drafted BWATA, explained that any American citizens who participated in these apparent programs
could get a life sentence under law.
In this context, Zelensky's decree to destroy all information about Metabiota as well as the US Embassy's hasty move to erase information on Ukraine biolabs from its site appears exceptionally suspicious, according to Wall Street analyst Charles Ortel.
"Corrupt elements in the US (and elsewhere) have much to continue hiding – exposing underlying truths will, in time, mean that these same elements will find themselves in jail or subject to the death penalty for treason. So, they have been fighting fiercely to protect themselves and to resist exposing their long-standing criminal enrichment for decades," Ortel told Sputnik.
30 January 2023, 12:45 GMT
Is Reckoning Coming?
"Globalists in both political parties are addicted to lying and to promoting self-serving false narratives because they have enriched and empowered themselves for decades doing so time after time," Ortel said. "Clearly, dynastic political families have corruptly enriched themselves by selling their actual and perceived influence for money. Yet, with 17 known security services and the IRS, no one has been able to prosecute the Bush, Clinton, Obama or Biden families for obvious charity fraud, bribery or tax evasion? There is every reason to suspect that corrupt foreign interests have been blackmailing many DC insiders for decades, especially including the Bidens."
According to Ortel, "the only good news here is that Americans across the political spectrum do not and will not allow criminals in league with the military-industrial complex to develop, test or use bioweapons in bold contravention of treaty obligations."
The Wall Street analyst expressed confidence House Republicans "are already looking seriously into Biden family corruption and hopeful that they and real investigative journalists will push hard to expose the contours of this ongoing criminal conspiracy."
Still, lots of important and damning information concerning top US establishment officials remains either overlooked or swept under the rug, according to Sputnik's interlocutors. At the same time, the US mainstream media's disinformation campaigns discourage Americans from questioning more.
"Sadly, far too many Americans have been drugged, propagandized, and poisoned by toxic food, air and water to even understand what is presented to them," said Jason Goodman. "This is not true of all Americans, but there is a sinister 'disinformation industrial complex' that has emerged over the past five years or perhaps longer that is acutely focused on deceiving the majority of America and the world at large."