MSM Peddling Fake News & Diverting Public Attention with Russia-Bashing Stories – Jon Gaunt

Yes, I know this is RT, but this is an interview with a popular British journalist who would never be allowed to speak the truth on Main Stream Media

Jon Gaunt - Despite the Media Establishment’s current reticence, Jon is undeniably one the UK’s most decorated Talk Show hosts and has won numerous broadcasting awards including being the only presenter to win three Sony Gold Awards (The Oscars of the Industry) in one night.

Freedom of speech rally © imago stock&people / Global Look Press

The BBC and other mainstream media outlets have been slammed by a leading British journalist, who claims all they do is peddle the government’s “fake” narrative.

Speaking to RT’s Bill Dod, radio host and journalist Jon Gaunt said he fears that disinformation is being spread by mainstream media outlets on a daily basis.

When Dod asked him whether he personally feared the spread of fake news, Gaunt responded affirmatively, saying he “sees it every day on the BBC.”

"The idea that the BBC and the government of Britain are preaching on fake news, come on, behave! They are up to it too,” Gaunt said, citing both the Salisbury spy case and the alleged chemical-weapons attack on the Syrian town of Douma in April.

“No one knows the truth of either of those but if you read a British newspaper or watched BBC or Sky you will believe that Vladimir Putin did both.”

The journalist, who has himself featured regularly on the BBC and Sky, appeared on RT UK to comment on Defense Secretary Gavin Williamson’s appeal on Tuesday for journalists and those with IT skills to join the armed forced to counter fake news and cyber-propaganda.

Gaunt branded the appeal “a load of nonsense” and said: “To counter fake news we get new people to make more fake news. It’s just ridiculous.”

He added it was no coincidence that less than 24 hours after Home Secretary Amber Rudd’s resignation over the Windrush scandal, the defence secretary “comes out” with yet another Russia-bashing story.

“What they are trying to do is divert the public’s attention away and make us believe that the Russians are our enemy. It’s not working, it’s pathetic,” Gaunt said.

“The BBC, Sky News and every single mainstream media outlet just pump out the government narrative constantly,” he concluded.

And it is not just in the UK, but most countries in the western world are swallowing the garbage being poured out by governments with regard to Russia and Syria. These are two countries with some serious issues, but neither are guilty of all the things that MSM and western governments have attributed to them. This is Deep State in control.

video 4:10

UK's Claims Questioned: Doubts Voiced About Source of Salisbury Novichok

Former British Ambassador questions his government's

and NATO's actions

Porton Down scientists revealed it cannot confirm Russia was behind the attack

on ex-agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia

Ewen MacAskill Defence correspondent
The Guardian

Theresa May with Wiltshire police’s chief constable, Kier Pritchard, in Salisbury on Thursday. Photograph: Daniel Leal-Olivas/AFP/Getty Images

Russia's chemical weapons destroyed

It was a historic moment largely ignored at the time by most of the world’s media and might have remained so but for the attack in Salisbury. At a ceremony last November at the headquarters of the world body responsible for the elimination of chemical weapons in The Hague, a plaque was unveiled to commemorate the destruction of the last of Russia’s stockpiles.

Gen Ahmet Üzümcü, the director general of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), which works closely with the UN, was fulsome in his praise. “This is a major achievement,” he said. The 192-member body had seemingly overseen and verified the destruction of Russia’s entire stock of chemical weapons, all 39,967 metric tons.

Where did novichok come from?

The question now is whether all of Russia’s chemical weapons were destroyed and accounted for. Theresa May – having identified the nerve agent used in the Salisbury attack as novichok, developed in Russia – told the Commons on Wednesday that Russia had offered no explanation as to why it had “an undeclared chemical weapons programme in contravention of international law”. Jeremy Corbyn introduced a sceptical note, questioning whether there was any evidence as to the location of its production.

The exchanges provoked a debate echoing the one that preceded the 2003 invasion of Iraq over whether UN weapons inspectors had overseen the destruction of all the weapons of mass destruction in the country or whether Saddam Hussein had retained secret hidden caches.

On social media, there were arguments that the novichok could have come from some part of the former Soviet Union other than Russia, such as Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan or Ukraine, or some non-state group, maybe criminals.

The years following the fall of the Berlin Wall were chaotic, with chemical weapons laboratories and storage sites across the Soviet Union abandoned by staff who were no longer being paid. Security was almost non-existent, leaving the sites at the mercy of criminal gangs or disenchanted staff looking to supplement their income.

“Could somebody have smuggled something out?” Amy Smithson, a US-based biological and chemical weapons expert, said to Reuters. “I certainly wouldn’t rule that possibility out, especially a small amount and particularly in view of how lax the security was at Russian chemical facilities in the early 1990s.”

It took almost a decade before order was restored, in part through stockpiles being transferred to Russia from other parts of the former Soviet Union and in part through help from US and other western experts.

Novichok was developed at a laboratory complex in Shikhany, in central Russia, according to a British weapons expert, Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, and a Russian chemist involved in the chemical weapons programme, Vil Mirzayanov, who later defected to the US. Mirzayanov said the novichok was tested at Nukus, in Uzbekistan.

British Diplomat questions premature blaming of Russia

The former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, who visited the site at Nukus, said it had been dismantled with US help. He is among those advocating scepticism about the UK placing blame on Russia.

In a blog post, he wrote: “The same people who assured you Saddam Hussein had WMDs now assure you Russian ‘novichok’ nerve agents are being wielded by Vladimir Putin to attack people on British soil.”

A Russian lawyer, Boris Kuznetsov, told Reuters he was offering to pass to the British authorities a file he said might be relevant to the Salisbury case. It details an incident when poison hidden in a phone receiver killed a Russian banker and his secretary in 1995. The poison came from an employee at the state chemical facility who sold it through intermediaries – in an ampule placed in a presentation case – to help reduce his debts.

The UK government case rests not just on its argument that novichok was developed in Russia, but what it says is past form, a record of Russian state-sponsored assassination of former spies.

Murray, in a phone interview, is undeterred, determined to challenge the government line, in spite of having been subjected to a level of abuse on social media he had not experienced before.

“There is no evidence it was Russia. I am not ruling out that it could be Russia, though I don’t see the motive. I want to see where the evidence lies,” Murray said. “Anyone who expresses scepticism is seen as an enemy of the state.”

"Your either with us or your against us!" Remember that line as the US martialled support for the invasion of Iraq. When you are trying to propagandize something, dissenters are treated as enemies, even though those perpetrating the propaganda know very well the dissenters are right to question the lies and the premature conclusions.

Murray went on to say, (admittedly to RT):

“a fortnight ago sources inside the Foreign and Commonwealth Office told him they were 'under pressure' to say it was made in Russia" but they knew they were unable to do so.

He said: "What we have seen today is news management because the Government had to get over the hurdle the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons will shortly be telling people there is no evidence this came from Russia.

"The Government decided for damage limitation it was best Porton Down came out and said that first. We will see careful news management over the next day or two.”

Porton Down scientists said “a state” was likely to be behind the attack, because of the complexity of the agent. However, Murray said there is evidence to the contrary.

He said: “The probably in the statement is very important, there are many people including David Colum, professor of organic chemistry at Cornell University, who says it’s just not true it has to be a state and any of his senior students could make it.”

“If you watch the interview, the sentence where he says it would probably need a state to make it is tacked on to the end. If you look closely, not only has the shot changed, the camera and tripod have actually moved. I strongly suspect government handlers who would have been in that room watching him were unhappy with his interview and wanted something which implicated Russia more, so added a bit onto the end.”

Murray said a minimum of a couple of dozen states could make it. He also said this “ought to be an investigation into a serious crime” investigated appropriately to find proof.

He said: “We are told probably this and likely that, well that is not the way criminal verdicts are found.

“This quite simply feeds into a desire by NATO members in particular to step up the cold war and enhance confrontation with Russia. This has to be seen in a wider geopolitical context. Within that context the last thing the politicians care about is the truth about what happened in Salisbury.”

'The UK and its NATO friends have attempted to

“step up the Cold War” with Russia and have failed'

Unlikely Bedfellows: Corbyn Finds a Fan in Mail Columnist Peter Hitchens Over His Russia Stance

And not just Hitchens

Peter Hitchens(C), Jeremy Corbyn(R) © Facebook / AFP

As unlikely as these two are for bedfellows, add my name to the list, and, I think, the Chancellor of Austria. There is reason to suspect any operation that casts a country or its leader into a bad light. False flag operations are an easy way to manipulate governments, media, and gullible people into demonizing players on the international stage. The race to condemn leads to actions that are premature, may be completely in error and extremely dangerous. 

I don't believe for a minute that Syria's Assad had anything to do with chemical weapons being used in Khan Sheikhoun. Not that he is not capable of such evil, but that it would have been colossally stupid of him to do so. Assad is many things, but stupid is not one of them. It was easily a false flag operation to turn the US against Assad, but that aspect has never been investigated because nobody wants to know the truth. It doesn't fit with western ambitions.

As the Russian spy poisoning saga rages on, Jeremy Corbyn has found an unlikely ally amongst the media establishment... Mail columnist Peter Hitchens, who leapt to defend Corbyn’s cautious approach.

Corbyn has copped considerable flak from both sides of the House over his unwillingness to blame Russia in the poisoning that left ex-Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in intensive care. At least 16 Labour MPs have signed a motion backing PM Theresa May’s hard-line stance against the Kremlin, in defiance of their own party leader.

In an op-ed for Mail on Sunday, Hitchens backed Corbyn’s position that the UK should go through the appropriate avenues of international law before proportioning blame. He reminded readers of the danger of rushing into conflict – just as the UK has done in the past.  

“The treatment of Jeremy Corbyn, both by politicians and many in the media, for doing what he is paid for and leading the Opposition, seems to me to be downright shocking,” Hitchens wrote.

“Mr Corbyn has earned the right to be listened to, and those who now try to smear him are not just doing something morally wrong. They are hurting the country. Look at our repeated rushes into foolish conflict in Iraq, Libya, Syria and Afghanistan. All have done us lasting damage.”

Hitchens also called into question the UK’s infatuation with hating Russia, pondering if it is the fear – or mystery – of the unknown that fuels the negativity. Or perhaps Brexit has something to do with it?

“I sense an even deeper and more thoughtless frenzy over Russia, a country many seem to enjoy loathing because they know so little about it,” he wrote. “I have already been accused, on a public stage, of justifying Moscow’s crime in Salisbury. This false charge was the penalty I paid for trying to explain the historical and political background to these events. I wonder if the bitterness also has something to do with the extraordinarily deep division over the EU, which has made opponents into enemies in a way not seen since the Suez Crisis.”

Over the weekend, Corbyn addressed Labour’s regional conference at Newcastle University on Saturday. He reiterated his call for a de-escalation of tensions with Moscow as the spiraling diplomatic disaster enters its second week.

Evidence before accusations:

Austria asks for full-fledged Skripal investigation

Police officers get dressed in protective suiting at a car recovery depot in Norton Enterprise Park,

where Sergei Skripal's car was originally transported, in Salisbury, Britain, March 13, 2018.

© Henry Nicholls / Reuters

It’s premature to pin the blame in the Skripal poisoning case without first conducting a proper investigation, Austria’s foreign minister has said. The UK has already picked Russia as a boogey man in the incident.

Speaking in Brussels on Monday, Karin Kneissl said that she viewed the poisoning of former double-agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury, England, as “abhorrent.” However, unlike its British counterparts, Austria wants to have the full picture before casting blame on someone specifically.

"Our position is: First there is the need to establish a full picture of events in joint cooperation with the Chemical agency [Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW)] and all those involved” the foreign minister said.

Kneissl’s cautionary remarks come less than a week after a French government spokesperson said it was too early to discuss retaliatory measures against Russia, as its involvement in the case has yet to be established.

“We don't do fantasy politics. Once the elements are proven, then the time will come for decisions to be made,” the spokesperson told a press conference shortly after British Prime Minister Theresa May announced she would be expelling 23 Russian diplomats over the poisoning.

The French government's position on the matter quickly took a U-turn, however, with the Elysee Palace releasing a follow-up statement declaring Russia’s culpability in the attack. "France shares Britain's assessment that there is no other plausible explanation and reiterates its solidarity with his ally," the statement said.

One wonder what kind of arm-twisting went on for that to happen so quickly?

On Monday, the EU’s Foreign Affairs Council released a statement hailing the UK’s “commitment” to work closely with the OPCW, and calling on Russia to “provide immediate, full and complete disclosure of its Novichok program” to the organization.

Novichok is a Soviet-era nerve agent allegedly used in the March 4 incident. The UK has so far failed to send a formal inquiry to Moscow about the case, although Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson said that London will soon provide the OPCW with samples of the nerve agent used in the case. Johnson had earlier accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of personally ordering the attack.

Moscow has countered that view. “The fact, that they [UK officials] categorically reject to file an official request and deliberately and arrogantly fan anti-Russian rhetoric in the public sphere bordering on hysteria, indicates that they clearly understand they have no formal pretext to go down a legal road,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Friday.

On Monday, Johnson doubled down on his inflammatory rhetoric, describing Russian denials of responsibility in the nerve agent attack as "increasingly absurd."

This absurd anti-Russia hysteria has one goal and one only - to sell weapons! And, perhaps, to give NATO a raison d'être. NATO has forgotten its mandate to ensure peace with Russia and has instead become the aggressor causing a spectacular arms build-up and threatening peace the likes of which we haven't seen in more than half a century.