Ron Unz, Ukraine and Biowarfare Conspiracy Theories

by Ron Unz

Several days ago a mainstream policy analyst dropped me a note mentioning that the Russians were claiming to have discovered the existence of a network of biowarfare labs in Ukraine, funded by the American Pentagon and allegedly working with anthrax and plague. Given that much of my focus over the last two years had been on America’s biowarfare program and its possible deployment, he wondered what I thought about the matter.

I’d seen some of the same Russian accusations swirling around the Internet, and hadn’t paid much attention. On the one hand, over the decades America had spent over $100 billion dollars on “biodefense,” the euphemistic term for biowarfare development, and we had the world’s oldest and largest such program, one of the few ever deployed in real life combat. So allocating a few millions or even tens of millions to labs in Ukraine would hardly be implausible.

But on the other hand, even if we hadn’t, the Russians might certainly say we had, with those charges being almost stereotypical examples of the “black propaganda” used by an invading army to justify its attack to the world. Since I don’t read Ukrainian, the documents the Russians claimed to have found would mean nothing to me, and except for zealous partisans on each side, I doubted whether anyone else would be convinced.

However, the situation drastically changed on Tuesday, due to the Congressional testimony of Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, chief architect of our Ukraine policy. She seemed not only to acknowledge the existence of those Ukrainian biolabs but was also apparently concerned that their dangerous contents might fall into enemy hands, thereby seeming to completely confirm those shocking Russian accusations. I’ve never regarded Neocons as particularly bright, but the game-ending own-goal she scored on an issue of the greatest international importance may have set a new record for total incompetence.

I was hardly the only person to notice the massive implications of Nuland’s apparent disclosure. Glenn Greenwald ranks as one of the world’s highest-profile journalists, and he quickly released a lengthy column yesterday morning laying out the facts, and noting that our official media fact-checkers had spent a couple of weeks denouncing and ridiculing accusations that now seem to have turned out to be true.

Tucker Carlson devoted his top-rated show on cable to the same issue, emphasizing the shame of having to quote official Russian and Chinese government propagandists on the matter because our own American government officials had been lying.

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