Independent87548
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This article is long on western bullshit and goes to great lengths to paint Western criminals in the nicest possible light eg "incorrect intelligence" as opposed to an intentional fabricated lies to start a war against Iraq. However, the main point is true. The American "secret sources" cannot be trusted. These people are known liars who cannot and should not ever be trusted. You have to be insane to believe anything that comes from the us state department.
Australian concern over US spreading unfounded claims about Wuhan lab
For our free coronavirus pandemic coverage, learn more here.
Eryk Bagshaw
May 7, 2020 — 5.00am
Multiple diplomatic and political sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age the suggestions by our biggest ally that Chinese lab experiments on bats had unleashed the new coronavirus would undermine Australia’s calls to ban the sale of exotic live animals at wet markets around the world.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison wants to focus on banning exotic wildlife sales in wet markets but US President Donald Trump's administration is pushing the theory the COVID-19 coronavirus started in a Wuhan laboratory.Credit:Alex Ellinghausen
"We can’t repeat the mistakes of the past. The WMDs fiasco was not that long ago," one former security official said, referring to the incorrect intelligence claims of huge Iraqi weapon stockpiles that formed the basis for the Iraq War in 2003.
It is impossible to pinpoint the exact moment concerns within local security and intelligence circles morphed into genuine anxiety, but an April 14 article in The Washington Post is regarded by some as a turning point. The article quoted leaked diplomatic cables detailing how US officials had in March 2018 raised concerns about the Wuhan Institute of Virology "conducting risky studies on coronaviruses from bats". Shortly afterwards President Donald Trump began raising the "lab theory" during his press briefings.
The Australians became even more anxious on Saturday when a similar sequence of events played out closer to home. News Corp Australia tabloid The Daily Telegraph ran a lengthy front-page story about a 15-page "dossier" that laid "the foundation for the case of negligence being mounted against China". The Telegraph story, which alleged China destroyed evidence at Wuhan research facilities, was soon being quoted by national security experts and commentators in the US.
Pinning the source of COVID-19 on something or someone has become a key front in the Sino-US propaganda war that broke out during the crisis. The belief among some Trump officials that research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology or the Wuhan Centre for Disease Control and Prevention was the source of the coronavirus runs counter to the broadly accepted view – that the virus originated from a wet market where live exotic animals were sold. The lab theory has not been disproved but nor has the US intelligence community provided any evidence to support it.
1:08
'Prejudiced': Wuhan lab responds to conspiracy theories
The Chinese laboratory at the centre of conspiracy theories and a US government investigation over the origin of the novel coronavirus says it hopes "everyone will put aside their prejudices and biases" in the search for answers.
The Telegraph had been devoting attention to the theory since mid-March, when it began running stories suggesting some advice to the Australian government had suggested a Wuhan lab could have been the source. The emphasis was perplexing to senior members of the government and intelligence agencies because the weight of the coverage contradicted their own advice, which was that there was no evidence to suggest a Wuhan lab was the likely source of the outbreak. They were not sure who was encouraging the stories.
Senior MPs and bureaucrats worried the US campaign was hampering efforts by Prime Minister Scott Morrison to establish an independent review into the origins of the pandemic, while also undermining government attempts to ban the sale of exotic live animals at wet markets around the world.
Mr Morrison has said since April that Australia’s position was consistent.
"We know it started in Wuhan," he said last week. "The most likely scenario that has been canvassed relates to wildlife wet markets."
The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age had earlier revealed that Mr Morrison had privately questioned the Wuhan lab claim and that Australian intelligence had found no evidence to back up the theory. While it was too difficult to rule it out, the notion that there was an official Five Eyes investigation into the theory has been disputed by senior government sources.
1:44
Pompeo's contradictions on the Wuhan lab virus claim
In an interview, US Secretary of State Michael Pompeo agrees fully with two contradictory statements about whether or not the coronavirus was man-made or has occurred naturally. Footage: ABC America.
When the Telegraph splashed with the story based on the 15-page "dossier" on Saturday, the newspaper said it was a Western government report, suggesting it was from the Five Eyes network. Five Eyes is an intelligence-sharing alliance involving security agencies in Australia, New Zealand, Britain, Canada and the US.
In response to questions from The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, the Telegraph journalist who wrote the story, Sharri Markson, said the document laid the foundation for the case against China’s cover up of COVID-19.
"Two Western governments contributed to it, but I will not reveal my sources," she said.
Senior members of the Morrison government and Australian intelligence agencies at first had trouble finding the document. Eventually they found a research report, based on publicly available information including news reports, which appeared to fit the description. The research paper contained no information that was generated from intelligence gathering, according to people who have read it.
Labor MP Anthony Byrne, the deputy chair of the influential intelligence and security committee, was "incensed" by the report of the dossier. Mr Byrne, one of Parliament’s biggest supporters of the US alliance, directly raised his concerns with senior members of the Morrison government and intelligence agencies, saying Australia shouldn’t accept intelligence that doesn’t exist and fall for a "tricked-up document".
There are now widespread suspicions within senior ranks of the Australian government and the intelligence community that the document was leaked to The Daily Telegraph by a staff member in the US embassy in Canberra. This suspicion, whether true or not, underlines how the positions between sections of Canberra and Washington national security circles have diverged over the claim. Some senior officials clearly believe the US embassy is pushing a narrative in the Australian media that could be counter to the beliefs and interests of its hosts.
Given the close relationship between the two countries, there are deep sensitivities about the suspicions. The Australian government is not expected to pursue the matter further. But the involvement of Australia in the US campaign highlights the politicisation of the intelligence community under Mr Trump as well as the increasingly fractious global diplomatic environment driven by the coronavirus and Chinese expansionism.
Firm intelligence on the coronavirus lab theory would help bolster US claims of a cover-up by the Chinese Communist Party, shift diplomatic sentiment and put global relations with China on an increasingly hostile trajectory.
The New York Times revealed last month that senior Trump administration officials, including Deputy National Security Adviser and former Wall Street Journal Beijing correspondent Matthew Pottinger, have been pushing American spy agencies since January to hunt for evidence to support the theory. The agenda was given new momentum in April by Steve Bannon, the ex-chairman of far-right website Breitbart and a former adviser to Mr Trump, who promoted the theory throughout the month as part of a campaign demanding compensation from China for the outbreak.
On April 30, the US Office of the Director of National Intelligence said it concurred with the wide scientific consensus that the COVID-19 virus was not man made or genetically modified but could not rule out any connection with a Wuhan lab.
"The [intelligence community] will continue to rigorously examine emerging information and intelligence to determine whether the outbreak began through contact with infected animals or if it was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan," the office said in a statement.
Two days later, the Telegraph story suddenly vaulted the theory back into prime time. After it broke on Saturday, Fox News, the highest-rating cable broadcaster in the US, said this was "the most substantial confirmation of what we have suspected so far".
"Because it is a multinational document I think it would be hard to dismiss it as a political document," Fox News host Tucker Carlson told millions of viewers of the News Corp-owned network on Tuesday. As he prepared to interview Markson, Carlson suggested China had plans to rule the world.
"For the West the coronavirus has been a bewildering disaster that we will be recovering from for a long time, but for the Chinese government, the whole thing has been a blessing," he said. "In fact they think it is going to be the beginning of the Chinese century."
The allegations were backed up by a rolodex of US national security hawks on the same network. Mr Trump’s trade adviser, Peter Navarro, said China "spawned" the virus. Former US ambassador to China Jon Huntsman said "we should not be surprised" if China lied to the world.
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Monday claimed there was "enormous evidence" linking the Wuhan lab to the virus. China’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying challenged Mr Pompeo to "show us" the evidence in Beijing’s first official response to the escalation on Wednesday.
The episode highlights the danger of mischaracterising the work of intelligence agencies. Some of the footnotes in the document contained references to US media reports that were based on unsubstantiated assertions from the US government – the same kind of circular intelligence which resulted in the "children overboard" affair in 2001.
One source said they believed the research document was produced by a US author and was not an official Five Eyes collaboration. Intelligence figures in the UK, the second largest of the Five Eyes partners, have also become increasingly frustrated. This week they briefed reporters that there was nothing to indicate that a lab leak had triggered the pandemic.
Despite the prevalence of that view, the challenge for the intelligence community has been proving the virus did not come from a Wuhan lab, amid wider obfuscation from the Chinese government.
While Australian intelligence agencies have not ruled out the Wuhan lab theory, they have no evidence which suggests it is the likely source. On the best available intelligence, the Australian government believes the virus most likely started in the city’s Huanan seafood market.
The US government’s top infectious disease expert, Anthony Fauci, said on Tuesday that there was no scientific evidence the virus came from a laboratory.
"[The evidence] is very, very strongly leaning toward this could not have been artificially or deliberately manipulated," he said.
China, for its part, has been engaging in its own increasingly aggressive form of diplomacy in a bid to limit transparency and downplay its role in the crisis.
1:09
China accuses Pompeo of telling lies over its handling of coronavirus
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo accused China of withholding virus samples he said were needed for global vaccine research, and he demanded transparency. China said on Thursday (May 7) it supports the World Health Organisation (WHO) in trying ...
At the same time as China’s embassy in Canberra accused Australia of being a US puppet, its foreign missions have been shoring up support across the developing world. China has repeatedly dismissed Australia’s push for a global independent inquiry into the origins of the coronavirus as a witch hunt.
The US ramped up pressure on the European Union to back Australia’s probe call on Wednesday. The EU had prepared a draft motion for an inquiry that would begin only after the pandemic had passed and focus broadly on the "lessons learnt from the international health response to COVID-19".
In contrast, the Australia-led probe would examine China’s role in the origins of the outbreak and begin before the coronavirus is suppressed around the world. Beijing is fully aware of the risks of the sharper Australian and US-backed inquiry. If passed it would have to examine what role, if any, the Wuhan lab had in the initial outbreak.
The US embassy declined to comment.
https://www.smh.com.au/politics/fed...d-claims-about-wuhan-lab-20200506-p54qhp.html
Australian concern over US spreading unfounded claims about Wuhan lab
For our free coronavirus pandemic coverage, learn more here.
Eryk Bagshaw
May 7, 2020 — 5.00am
- Send via Email
Multiple diplomatic and political sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age the suggestions by our biggest ally that Chinese lab experiments on bats had unleashed the new coronavirus would undermine Australia’s calls to ban the sale of exotic live animals at wet markets around the world.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison wants to focus on banning exotic wildlife sales in wet markets but US President Donald Trump's administration is pushing the theory the COVID-19 coronavirus started in a Wuhan laboratory.Credit:Alex Ellinghausen
"We can’t repeat the mistakes of the past. The WMDs fiasco was not that long ago," one former security official said, referring to the incorrect intelligence claims of huge Iraqi weapon stockpiles that formed the basis for the Iraq War in 2003.
It is impossible to pinpoint the exact moment concerns within local security and intelligence circles morphed into genuine anxiety, but an April 14 article in The Washington Post is regarded by some as a turning point. The article quoted leaked diplomatic cables detailing how US officials had in March 2018 raised concerns about the Wuhan Institute of Virology "conducting risky studies on coronaviruses from bats". Shortly afterwards President Donald Trump began raising the "lab theory" during his press briefings.
The Australians became even more anxious on Saturday when a similar sequence of events played out closer to home. News Corp Australia tabloid The Daily Telegraph ran a lengthy front-page story about a 15-page "dossier" that laid "the foundation for the case of negligence being mounted against China". The Telegraph story, which alleged China destroyed evidence at Wuhan research facilities, was soon being quoted by national security experts and commentators in the US.
Pinning the source of COVID-19 on something or someone has become a key front in the Sino-US propaganda war that broke out during the crisis. The belief among some Trump officials that research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology or the Wuhan Centre for Disease Control and Prevention was the source of the coronavirus runs counter to the broadly accepted view – that the virus originated from a wet market where live exotic animals were sold. The lab theory has not been disproved but nor has the US intelligence community provided any evidence to support it.
1:08
'Prejudiced': Wuhan lab responds to conspiracy theories
The Chinese laboratory at the centre of conspiracy theories and a US government investigation over the origin of the novel coronavirus says it hopes "everyone will put aside their prejudices and biases" in the search for answers.
The Telegraph had been devoting attention to the theory since mid-March, when it began running stories suggesting some advice to the Australian government had suggested a Wuhan lab could have been the source. The emphasis was perplexing to senior members of the government and intelligence agencies because the weight of the coverage contradicted their own advice, which was that there was no evidence to suggest a Wuhan lab was the likely source of the outbreak. They were not sure who was encouraging the stories.
Senior MPs and bureaucrats worried the US campaign was hampering efforts by Prime Minister Scott Morrison to establish an independent review into the origins of the pandemic, while also undermining government attempts to ban the sale of exotic live animals at wet markets around the world.
Mr Morrison has said since April that Australia’s position was consistent.
"We know it started in Wuhan," he said last week. "The most likely scenario that has been canvassed relates to wildlife wet markets."
The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age had earlier revealed that Mr Morrison had privately questioned the Wuhan lab claim and that Australian intelligence had found no evidence to back up the theory. While it was too difficult to rule it out, the notion that there was an official Five Eyes investigation into the theory has been disputed by senior government sources.
1:44
Pompeo's contradictions on the Wuhan lab virus claim
In an interview, US Secretary of State Michael Pompeo agrees fully with two contradictory statements about whether or not the coronavirus was man-made or has occurred naturally. Footage: ABC America.
When the Telegraph splashed with the story based on the 15-page "dossier" on Saturday, the newspaper said it was a Western government report, suggesting it was from the Five Eyes network. Five Eyes is an intelligence-sharing alliance involving security agencies in Australia, New Zealand, Britain, Canada and the US.
In response to questions from The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, the Telegraph journalist who wrote the story, Sharri Markson, said the document laid the foundation for the case against China’s cover up of COVID-19.
"Two Western governments contributed to it, but I will not reveal my sources," she said.
Senior members of the Morrison government and Australian intelligence agencies at first had trouble finding the document. Eventually they found a research report, based on publicly available information including news reports, which appeared to fit the description. The research paper contained no information that was generated from intelligence gathering, according to people who have read it.
Labor MP Anthony Byrne, the deputy chair of the influential intelligence and security committee, was "incensed" by the report of the dossier. Mr Byrne, one of Parliament’s biggest supporters of the US alliance, directly raised his concerns with senior members of the Morrison government and intelligence agencies, saying Australia shouldn’t accept intelligence that doesn’t exist and fall for a "tricked-up document".
There are now widespread suspicions within senior ranks of the Australian government and the intelligence community that the document was leaked to The Daily Telegraph by a staff member in the US embassy in Canberra. This suspicion, whether true or not, underlines how the positions between sections of Canberra and Washington national security circles have diverged over the claim. Some senior officials clearly believe the US embassy is pushing a narrative in the Australian media that could be counter to the beliefs and interests of its hosts.
Given the close relationship between the two countries, there are deep sensitivities about the suspicions. The Australian government is not expected to pursue the matter further. But the involvement of Australia in the US campaign highlights the politicisation of the intelligence community under Mr Trump as well as the increasingly fractious global diplomatic environment driven by the coronavirus and Chinese expansionism.
Firm intelligence on the coronavirus lab theory would help bolster US claims of a cover-up by the Chinese Communist Party, shift diplomatic sentiment and put global relations with China on an increasingly hostile trajectory.
The New York Times revealed last month that senior Trump administration officials, including Deputy National Security Adviser and former Wall Street Journal Beijing correspondent Matthew Pottinger, have been pushing American spy agencies since January to hunt for evidence to support the theory. The agenda was given new momentum in April by Steve Bannon, the ex-chairman of far-right website Breitbart and a former adviser to Mr Trump, who promoted the theory throughout the month as part of a campaign demanding compensation from China for the outbreak.
On April 30, the US Office of the Director of National Intelligence said it concurred with the wide scientific consensus that the COVID-19 virus was not man made or genetically modified but could not rule out any connection with a Wuhan lab.
"The [intelligence community] will continue to rigorously examine emerging information and intelligence to determine whether the outbreak began through contact with infected animals or if it was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan," the office said in a statement.
Two days later, the Telegraph story suddenly vaulted the theory back into prime time. After it broke on Saturday, Fox News, the highest-rating cable broadcaster in the US, said this was "the most substantial confirmation of what we have suspected so far".
"Because it is a multinational document I think it would be hard to dismiss it as a political document," Fox News host Tucker Carlson told millions of viewers of the News Corp-owned network on Tuesday. As he prepared to interview Markson, Carlson suggested China had plans to rule the world.
"For the West the coronavirus has been a bewildering disaster that we will be recovering from for a long time, but for the Chinese government, the whole thing has been a blessing," he said. "In fact they think it is going to be the beginning of the Chinese century."
The allegations were backed up by a rolodex of US national security hawks on the same network. Mr Trump’s trade adviser, Peter Navarro, said China "spawned" the virus. Former US ambassador to China Jon Huntsman said "we should not be surprised" if China lied to the world.
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Monday claimed there was "enormous evidence" linking the Wuhan lab to the virus. China’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying challenged Mr Pompeo to "show us" the evidence in Beijing’s first official response to the escalation on Wednesday.
The episode highlights the danger of mischaracterising the work of intelligence agencies. Some of the footnotes in the document contained references to US media reports that were based on unsubstantiated assertions from the US government – the same kind of circular intelligence which resulted in the "children overboard" affair in 2001.
One source said they believed the research document was produced by a US author and was not an official Five Eyes collaboration. Intelligence figures in the UK, the second largest of the Five Eyes partners, have also become increasingly frustrated. This week they briefed reporters that there was nothing to indicate that a lab leak had triggered the pandemic.
Despite the prevalence of that view, the challenge for the intelligence community has been proving the virus did not come from a Wuhan lab, amid wider obfuscation from the Chinese government.
While Australian intelligence agencies have not ruled out the Wuhan lab theory, they have no evidence which suggests it is the likely source. On the best available intelligence, the Australian government believes the virus most likely started in the city’s Huanan seafood market.
The US government’s top infectious disease expert, Anthony Fauci, said on Tuesday that there was no scientific evidence the virus came from a laboratory.
"[The evidence] is very, very strongly leaning toward this could not have been artificially or deliberately manipulated," he said.
China, for its part, has been engaging in its own increasingly aggressive form of diplomacy in a bid to limit transparency and downplay its role in the crisis.
1:09
China accuses Pompeo of telling lies over its handling of coronavirus
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo accused China of withholding virus samples he said were needed for global vaccine research, and he demanded transparency. China said on Thursday (May 7) it supports the World Health Organisation (WHO) in trying ...
At the same time as China’s embassy in Canberra accused Australia of being a US puppet, its foreign missions have been shoring up support across the developing world. China has repeatedly dismissed Australia’s push for a global independent inquiry into the origins of the coronavirus as a witch hunt.
The US ramped up pressure on the European Union to back Australia’s probe call on Wednesday. The EU had prepared a draft motion for an inquiry that would begin only after the pandemic had passed and focus broadly on the "lessons learnt from the international health response to COVID-19".
In contrast, the Australia-led probe would examine China’s role in the origins of the outbreak and begin before the coronavirus is suppressed around the world. Beijing is fully aware of the risks of the sharper Australian and US-backed inquiry. If passed it would have to examine what role, if any, the Wuhan lab had in the initial outbreak.
The US embassy declined to comment.
https://www.smh.com.au/politics/fed...d-claims-about-wuhan-lab-20200506-p54qhp.html
