Wuhan Lab 'Leak' Yarn Returns: How US Reporter Pours Gasoline Into Washington's War Machine

The US Energy Department has claimed that the COVID pandemic most likely stemmed from a laboratory leak, the Wall Street Journal broke on Sunday, citing a classified intelligence report provided to the White House and US lawmakers.

"It is becoming clearer by the day that the government of the United States has become so delusional with its own lies that it is becoming violent against anyone exposing them," Scott Bennett, former US Army psychological warfare officer and US State Department counterterrorism analyst, told Sputnik.

"It is becoming so toxic that every nation which in the past enjoyed friendship with the United States is now disconnecting all association, like someone backing away from a snarling, rabid dog about to bite," he continued.

The US Energy Department and the FBI have alleged that the coronavirus spread "via a mishap at a Chinese laboratory," according to the US media report co-authored by Michael R. Gordon.

However, US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said on Sunday that there’s "a variety of views" in the US intelligence community about whether the virus originated naturally or in a lab and he "can’t confirm or deny" the Wall Street Journal report.

"Jake Sullivan, along with the other practiced and professionally polished liars and propagandists from the US intelligence community, is attempting to obfuscate, confuse, and shuffle the 'shell game' of facts concerning the COVID-19 issue," Bennett remarked.

US Media Flip-Flopping on COVID Origins

Meanwhile, the coverage of the pandemic's origins has prompted a lot of controversy in the US mainstream media over the past three years. It was then-President Donald Trump who attempted to pin the blame on China for the COVID outbreak, specifically pointing the finger at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).

The Chinese government rubbished the claim at the time, with Wang Yanyi, an immunologist and director of the institute, revealing that WIV first received a clinical sample of the unknown virus that later became known as SARS-CoV-2 on December 30, 2019.

For his part, Trump's COVID czar Dr. Anthony Fauci resolutely rejected the notion that the coronavirus was created in a lab during a White House press conference on April 17, 2020. He insisted that available evidence on the origins of the virus is "totally consistent with a jump from a species from an animal to a human."

When Secretary of State Mike Pompeo claimed in May 2020 that there is "enormous" evidence that the virus came from a virology laboratory in Wuhan, US Democratic lawmakers subjected him to criticism and demanded that he unveil proof. Otherwise, they insisted, the Trump administration should quit hyping questionable information. The US mainstream media ridiculed Trump's Wuhan lab theory as a conspiracy story, as no evidence had been presented to corroborate the allegations.

However, when Joe Biden assumed office, the Democrats and Dr. Fauci made a sudden U-turn, and called for an investigation into the alleged lab leak version. Thus on May 11, 2021, Fauci told US lawmakers that the possibility of the virus having escaped from the Chinese lab "certainly exists." The US Big Media and Big Tech followed the suit and shifted the goalposts on what previously they claimed to be a crackpot idea.

On June 8, 2021, Gordon co-authored a WSJ article citing a May 2020 classified study by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California that alleged that the hypothesis claiming the virus leaked from a Chinese lab in Wuhan was "plausible" and deserved further investigation.

On June 20, 2021, Jake Sullivan threatened China with "international isolation" if it failed to allow a "real" investigation into the origins of the virus. However, China's Foreign Ministry denounced the probe and accused Washington of "political manipulation and blame shifting."

The then-Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson, Zhao Lijian, said that Sullivan's statement was nothing short of a "blatant threat," which China objected to and wouldn't accept.

If the US really wants to get to the bottom of the pandemic outbreak, Zhao continued, it should shed light on a National Institutes of Health (NIH) report suggesting coronavirus existed in the US as early as December 2019 and disclose the real situation of the biological lab at Fort Detrick, Maryland. The Chinese have also repeatedly urged Washington to lift the veil of secrecy on what exactly is going on in hundreds of US overseas bio-laboratories supervised by the Pentagon.

"While I agree that the COVID virus originated in a lab, I remain unconvinced that the lab was in China," Philip Giraldi, former CIA station chief, now an executive director of the Council for the National Interest, told Sputnik. "The argument that it originated in the US military's chemical and biological weapons facility at Fort Detrick Maryland and was deliberately weaponized and released in China to weaken that country's economy and military is somewhat compelling."

Meanwhile, on September 2, 2021, the Washington Post broke that the US intelligence community’s probe into the origins of COVID-19 produced "no detectable insight into how the pandemic started."

Judging from the August 27, 2021, intelligence summary, four intelligence community elements said the outbreak occurred naturally (up from two in May) while just one agency maintained, "with moderate confidence," that a lab accident was to blame. The media outlet said it was unclear whether it was the FBI or the Defense Intelligence Agency that believed that the virus escaped the Wuhan lab. "It doesn’t matter. The bottom line is, our spies have no idea what happened in Wuhan," the report pointed out.

Gordon's Record: Untrustworthy Militarist?

Remarkably, Gordon's latest "bombshell" has failed to produce any evidence of SARS-CoV-2 origins from the Chinese lab even though it claims that the Energy Department’s conclusion is the result of "new intelligence." However, US officials declined to give details on "the fresh intelligence," the report added.

What apparently is more important is that the Energy Department made its judgment with "low confidence." Moreover, over the past two years, the US intelligence community has not changed its views on the pandemic's origins.

According to Gordon's report, only one intelligence agency – the FBI – still maintains that the lab leak was to blame, while four agencies along with a national intelligence panel are still saying that the pandemic was likely the result of a natural transmission. It appears that nothing has changed much in the perception of the issue by the US intelligence community despite the emergence of "fresh intelligence."

Sputnik's interlocutors, who have monitored the development of the US media COVID origins saga from the start, draw attention to the fact that Washington is using the Wuhan lab leak theory as nothing short of a tool to exert pressure on Beijing.

"The main reason the US intelligence-military-government complex is using Michael R. Gordon is simply because he is a dependable, convenient and loyal propagandist," said Bennett. "Gordon was a military and diplomacy correspondent for The New York Times for 32 years, and during the invasion of Iraq was the only newspaper reporter embedded with the allied land command under General Tommy Franks; and wrote about Iraq President Saddam Hussein's alleged nuclear weapons program in September 2002."

Remarkably, it seems that it's not the first time that Michael R. Gordon has "broken" news in the interests of the US establishment.

On September 8, 2002, Gordon co-authored the frontpage New York Times story hyping up the idea that Iraq was trying to get special aluminum tubes for its nuclear weapons program. The story relied on some intelligence sources and Iraqi defectors and created an atmosphere of gloom and doom. According to his critics, Gordon's piece came in handy for the Bush administration’s advertising intervention in Iraq.

Later, however, it turned out that the Iraq WMD story was utterly false and aluminum tubes were actually meant for artillery, not for nuclear centrifuges. Interestingly enough, Gordon was up in arms about the US withdrawal from Iraq: he particularly criticized the policy in his November 2006 article titled "Get Out of Iraq Now? Not So Fast, Experts Say."

According to some reports, Gordon used to be the "mouthpiece" for the US military faction in Iraq, led by Gen. David H. Petraeus, that promoted the escalation. In 2007, the US reporter peddled speculations, relying heavily on US anonymous sources, that the Iranian government was allegedly sending weapons to Iraq.

Gordon's name is also associated with the NYT’ botched "vector analysis" of September 17, 2013, that traced the flight paths of two rockets, recovered in the suburbs of Damascus after the August 21, 2013 gas attack, back to a Syrian government forces' base 9.5 kilometers away. However, the story fell apart after rocket scientists analyzed the rockets and determined that they had a maximum range of about 2 km. Still, the botched "bombshell" almost pushed the Obama administration into yet another Mideast conflict.

In April 2014, Gordon was at it again, claiming that the population of Donbass, which was disgusted by the February 2014 military coup d'etat in Kiev and protested against the violent overthrow of democratically elected Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich on February 22, 2014, was "directed" by Russia's armed "green men" and intelligence forces. To back his claims the journalist showed grainy photographs provided by the Kiev neo-Nazi caretaker regime.

However, the media piece co-authored by Gordon and his colleagues Andrew Higgins and Andrew E. Kramer obviously played into the hands of the post-coup authorities in Kiev which sought justification for the forthcoming violent attack on the eastern Ukrainian protesters, as US investigative journalists stressed at the time. In the following eight years, the Kiev regime ruthlessly shelled Donbass, killing peaceful civilians including elderly, women and children under the false premise that it was fighting against the "Russian military."

Timing of Gordon's Article

"I believe most Americans who are following the COVID story after all this time are very skeptical of anything the White House says relating to the issue. The first priority of the government is, after all, to protect itself and it might well be lying just as it is lying about Nord Stream," Giraldi noted.

The timing of Gordon's latest peace deserves special attention. He released his new Wuhan lab article exactly at the time when China made public its peace proposals for Ukraine. It appears that the Ukraine peace deal does not fit the plans of the Biden administration, the US military and defense contractors, who are said to have capitalized enormously on Washington's proxy war in the Eastern European state. In addition, Washington is still trying to force China into severing its strategic partnership with Russia in a failed bid to isolate Moscow.

What's more, the attempts to peddle the Wuhan origins of COVID coincide with a series of stories about Team Biden's role in the Nord Stream sabotage by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh, who is allegedly not done with his reporting yet.

The Russian Defense Ministry's investigation into the Pentagon's experiments with deadly viruses and dangerous pathogens in Ukraine and post-Soviet space is also underway. Indeed, it appears that Washington has a lot to answer.

"It is becoming increasingly clear that all elements of the United States government, the Congress, the military, the intelligence community, and the Biden administration are becoming nervous - if not fearful - as they are backed into a corner by the continual emergence of evidence confirming the connection between the COVID-19 issue and the United States in general. Materials and documents obtained since Russia’s [special military operation in] Ukraine has essentially served as evidence of crimes against humanity and violations of the bioweapons convention, which Russia has submitted to the United Nations and demanded an open and transparent investigation," Bennett concluded.