April 15, 2020
A Gazette Editorial
In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, W Bush faced a political dilemma: accept responsibility for failing to protect America or find a scapegoat to blame. The choice was easy. He quickly calculated that a manhunt for the alleged perp, OBL, wouldn’t be enough of a distraction and looked elsewhere. Since he and members of his admin were already eager to depose Iraq’s ruler, Saddam Hussein was substituted in the villain’s role. Suddenly reams of evidence were produced to justify an invasion. Yellow cake, crop dusters, mobile WMD labs, etc were all spoon fed to a credulous mass media which dutifully amplified the lies. And from W Bush’s perspective, it worked. Not only did it shift the harsh spotlight of blame onto a scapegoat, it actually drove his approval ratings higher. The boost was enough to temporarily reset his downward trend and power him across the finish line to secure re-election a year later. Ultimately, no WMDs were found.
Fast forward to the present and we find another Republican President under pressure because of a different attack, this time a virus that’s already taken 20,000 lives. That’s more than 6x more Americans than we lost on 9/11 (and 5000x more than we lost in Benghazi). The need for a scapegoat to deflect blame is urgent because there’s much less time before the next election thn W Bush had in 2002. The Trump administration seems to have settled on China as the fall guy this time. Not only has Trump railed against China since long before COVID-19, he has imposed tariffs in a trade war and taken to calling the Novel Coronavirus the “Chinese Virus.”
Long story short, we’re feeling very déjà vu about this. We’re one CIA “finding” away from deeming COVID-19 a WMD attack by China. Already the notion is being seeded, much as it was with Iraq, into the national conversation via a credulous mainstream media. This time instead of Colin Powell’s Powerpoint presentation at the U.N. we’re liable to see the President himself make the accusation and dare anybody to take China’s side against America. All of this is straight out of the GOP’s 9/11 playbook: “Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.“
In support of the blame China argument, reports of work on bat coronaviri in a Wuhan lab are being cited. The Gazette offers, for your consideration, the following article from the November 2015 issue of The Scientist entitled, “Lab-Made Coronavirus Triggers Debate.” It warns of moving “this virus from a candidate emerging pathogen to a clear and present danger.”
“Ralph Baric, an infectious-disease researcher at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, last week (November 9) published a study on his team’s efforts to engineer a virus with the surface protein of the SHC014 coronavirus, found in horseshoe bats in China, and the backbone of one that causes human-like severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in mice. The hybrid virus could infect human airway cells and caused disease in mice, according to the team’s results, which were published in Nature Medicine.”
Since this 2015 warning predates the pandemic by nearly 5 years it’s concrete evidence that the virus, or a similar one, was present here long before any of the Wuhan lab citations being tossed around. We’re providing both a link to the article and a screenshot in the event the webpage becomes unavailable for National Security or other reasons. Please take the time to read this and bear it in mind if we are called upon to support a new war.
And here’s another, this one from 2012:
Wisconsin. North Carolina. These are just a couple of the U.S. labs working on Novel Coronaviri that we know about from easily discovered open sources. Our point is simply this: any accusation that China attacked us with COVID-19 must been examined carefully, and given the GOP’s history of dishonesty about Iraqi WMDs, very skeptically.
