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February 26, 2022

SWPA's Own Wendy Bell Spreads Russian Misinformation

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Earlier today, an astute reader emailed me one of Jon's tweets:

And this is what Wendy said:

Should we be able to ask, Why, why do we need 13 bio terrorism labs?

'Bio research labs' I should say - just in Ukraine.

Why, why is it that Vladimir Putin has been upset about this, so much in fact, he and China asked in 2015 the United Nations to look into this?

Hm. Interesting, isn't it?

What if, ladies and gentlemen - what if, in fact, Donald Trump called Vlad Putin's moves into Ukraine "genius" - and the whole planet went apoplectic. Oh what a monster! - what if Donald Trump knows exactly what is going on?

What if Donald Trump is calling out on the world's stage that Putin is doing something [long pensive pause] different than what we're told?

When was the last time Donald Trump tweet out something or said something that didn't turn out to be true?

And why would it be that Putin would say that anybody, any country that tried to deter him would suffer consequences the likes of which have never been known in history before?

Lots of Wendy-bullshit here but let me start with the easiest:

When was the last time Donald Trump tweeted out something or said something that didn't turn out to be true?

I can't tell you the last time Trump said something "that didn't turn out to be true" but I can tell you a recent utterance by the great orange vulgarity that certainly isn't true. In late January, MSNBC reported that he said:

“The left is now rationing live-saving therapeutics based on race, discriminating against and denigrating, just denigrating, white people to determine who lives and who dies,” Trump said. “If you’re white, you don’t get the vaccine or if you’re white, you don’t get therapeutics.”
Wendy, what Donald Trump said in January just isn't true. No one is being denied the vaccine or therapeutics based on race. Donald Trump is wrong. 

But that was the easy part. 

Let's look at Wendy's Russian misinformation about those labs.

Long story short, it's also not true. Here's now I know:

  • Politifact:
    Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has brought false claims on social media that Russian President Vladimir Putin is targeting U.S.-run biological weapons labs in his neighboring country. 
    False claims from Russia alleging bioweapon use by the U.S. aren’t new, and allegations of a network of such labs along Russia’s border were shared in state-run media in the weeks before the invasion.

  • Snopes:
    In sum, there’s no evidence that Russia was targeting “U.S. biolabs” when they launched a full-scale attack on Ukraine in February 2022. This claim was just the latest iteration in a long-running disinformation campaign by the Kremlin and its supporters.

If we took a look at that second Politifact link, we'd see how, a few weeks ago Matt Field of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists traced the misinformation bit back to the Kremlin via a YouTuber named Tim Kirby:

Tim Kirby is a host on RT, the Russian state-owned media network. But that’s just one of the jobs the Ohio native says he’s had in Russia. According to his LinkedIn profile, he’s also a tight-end on the semi-professional Moscow Spartans football team, a prolific YouTuber, and a former drive-time radio host (or, as he puts it, the “#2 microphone” on a morning radio show called Sergey Stillavin and His Friends). On his YouTube channel, he recently divulged what would be a shocking revelation, if it were true: The United States is developing biological weapons in a network of labs right next door to Russia in Ukraine.

“Someone I’ve known for a few years has come forward,” Kirby told the almost 60,000 viewers who’ve watched the video so far, “to put together a picture of a network of bioweapons laboratories in Ukraine, that is very large and very Washington-supported that could be quite dangerous for us all.”

Far from representing simply his own personal musings, Kirby’s unsubstantiated allegations are being echoed at the highest levels of the Russian government. State media are repeating similar claims. The Kremlin’s alleged proxy media outlets are writing about them, and after President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping met recently, their two countries issued a joint statement decrying US bioweapons activities.

Anyway back to the labs. Field states some actual facts about them:

The labs at issue are part of a network of facilities with links to the Biological Threat Reduction Program, an element of a US government effort that began in the 1990s to reduce  the threat of the former Soviet Union’s weapons of mass destruction programs, including in countries like Ukraine that had once been a part of the communist country. The Soviet Union maintained a massive bioweapons program and part of the role of the US-linked labs is to take custody over left-over supplies, as is the case with a central reference laboratory in Kazakhstan. Disease surveillance and public health have since become the major focus of labs in the network.
Snopes has more actual facts:

Conspiracy theories are often fashioned from a small morsel of truth. In this case, the rumors are a distortion of the fact that the Ministry of Health of Ukraine and the Department of Defense of the United States of America entered into an agreement in 2005, while Republican U.S. President George W. Bush was in office, to “stem the threat of bio-terrorism by placing safeguards on deadly pathogens dating from a Soviet-era biological weapons program,” according to a contemporaneous news article in the Chicago Tribune. While the U.S. Defense Department’s Biological Threat Reduction Program provided some funding to upgrade biolabs in the Ukraine, these facilities are operated by the Ukrainian government under guidelines set under Ukrainian law.

And Snopes has some more actual facts about the misinformation:

The rumors in the aftermath of the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine by Russia were just the latest iterations of an ongoing disinformation campaign that has been waged by the Kremlin for years. Sophie Gelava of the Tbilisi-based Media Development Foundation (MDF), an organization that monitors Russian statements, said that the Kremlin has been “actively spreading black propaganda against the laboratory since the day it was established.”

See that? Wendy Bell, SWPA's own Angel of Death, is spreading Russian misinformation.

The only way out of this conundrum of hers would be if Wendy were to furnish some us with some actual facts to support her charge that Putin invaded Ukraine to shut down the US bio labs there.

Hahahaha! Yea, I know. I made a funny.

It's funny because nothing about Wendy's story is actually true.

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