Three California Democrats are formally proposing a 9/11-style commission to probe what they see as federal foot-dragging during a critical time-frame before the coronavirus problem erupted into a national crisis.
The three -- Rep. Adam Schiff and Senators Diane Feinstein and Kamala Harris -- all have intelligence oversight responsibilities.
Though the 9/11 commission never did investigate an "inside job" scenario, the panel was appointed as a result of a tidal wave of suspicion that the intelligence system had set up the 9/11 attacks as part of a massive power grab. And, indeed, tax money began copiously flowing into the Dark Side after nearly a decade of post-Cold War retrenchment and belt-tightening.
But, the spook system nevertheless was forced to fight an intensive rearguard action against "conspiracy theorists."
Even now, the official system has been busy trying to put down conspiracy theories that link the Covid pandemic with U.S. bioweapons programs or with the massive increase in electromagnetic radiation associated with the government-approved 5g internet system.
Would such a panel look into the intelligence system to see whether an inside job occurred? Possibly, in that President Trump would likely appoint the chairperson and some of the commissioners. And everyone knows how he feels about the inside job pulled off by security system insiders to "get something on" Trump that could be used to oust him from the presidency.
Just today it was revealed that the "Russia witch hunt" group at the FBI and Justice Department were doing more than making a few understandable errors in their "Crossfire Hurricane" investigation of the Trump campaign. Redacted material showed that sources told them that material in the notorious Steele dossier was based in part on apparent Kremlin disinformation provided by Russian agents.
Schiff, Feinstein and Harris are all associated with intelligence oversight and may be expected to have information not available to others.
In any case, the situation suggests the possibility of a bipartisan clampdown on the intelligence-security system.
After Robert Mueller's FBI wrapped up the anthrax case, many Democrats expressed frustration and suspicion, though their efforts to reopen the matter were thwarted by President Barack Obama, who wanted the case off his agenda and out of his way.
Further embroiling matters is a conspiracy theory touted by leftist journalist Chris Hayes to the effect that a sinister group behind the scenes -- which he refers to as "They" -- is maneuvering to exploit the pandemic for political gain. Hayes's theory is on the same wavelength as the belief of a number of libertarian and alt-right activists that a cabal of left-leaning oligarchs is preparing to remold America into a globalist and socialist tyranny, using the emergency social controls as the "new norm" for a straitjacketed America.
Even well-known voices on the right are attacking authoritarian measures. Tucker Carlson of Fox News lit into "mindless" authoritarianism that he said is based on very little science. Carlson spotlighted Dr. Anthony Fauci, a White House Covid expert, speaking well of the idea of immunity identity cards and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer ordering store aisles cordoned off if they held what she construed as nonessential goods. The Texas libertarian Ron Paul has repeatedly warned that freedom is in peril as officials overreact to what he sees as inflated Covid numbers.
And the former congressman's libertarian son, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., Friday told Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear to “take a step back” after the governor warned residents that they would be forced to self-quarantine for 14 days if they attended an in-person Easter church service.
“Taking license plates at church? Quarantining someone for being Christian on Easter Sunday? Someone needs to take a step back here,” the senator tweeted.
The left is similarly worried, as a headline from the socialist-backing OpEd News shows:
Covid-19 is bringing us into a hyper-surveilled, highly policed fascist dystopia.
A scientist who writes for that periodical, Josh Mitteldorf, reports that the virus genome has
at least 4 gain-of-function mutations (if they are mutations) compared to the ancestor bat virus. Gain-of-function mutations are rare compared to loss-of-function, and usually the virus makes its leap when there is one gain-of-function.
About a fourth of the genome looks nothing like a coronavirus, and must have arrived via genetic recombination. The recombined part bears a resemblance to HIV. Viral genome recombinations do occur in nature, but this one is particularly hard to explain, since HIV is a fragile virus that can't survive outside human blood. How would it get into a bat virus?
Covid has some pathological effects never before seen in a coronavirus, including attack on the GI tract and on artery walls. There are some reports that the virus's lethality comes from its attack on hemoglobin, the red blood molecule that carries oxygen around the body.
Mitteldorf echoed concerns that the virus actually came from a U.S. bioweapons facility, though others have strenuously put down this suspicion as Chinese propaganda. Mitteldorf is a physicist turned expert on aging.
[See article link in the sidebar.]
The laboratory at the center of scrutiny over the pandemic has been carrying out research on bats from the cave which scientists believe is the original source of the devastating outbreak.
Documents obtained by The Mail on Sunday show the Wuhan Institute of Virology undertook coronavirus experiments on mammals captured more than 1,000 miles away in Yunnan – funded by a $3.7 million grant from the U.S. government.
Sequencing of the Covid-19 genome has traced it to bats found in Yunnan's caves.
Many knowledgeable people were astonished to learn that a vital Army pathogens laboratory has only recently emerged from bureaucratic limbo to join the desperate fight against the Covid pandemic. Army scientists had been sidelined because bureaucrats were slow in lifting a shutdown of their lab, which months ago had been slapped with safety violations. Officials permitted a partial restart in November, but it took indignant pleas from Maryland politicians to get the lab going at full speed as the crisis worsened across America.
Last July the Army lab at Fort Detrick, Md., was ordered shut down after federal inspectors found major safety violations at the facility, which studies the world's deadliest pathogens, such as Ebola, anthrax and smallpox. The mission of military scientists is to develop defenses against bioweapons that might be unleashed by adversaries. The United States is a signatory to the treaty banning germ war weapons.
The lab reported that the shutdown was due to problems with wastewater decontamination, though the Centers for Disease Control declined to provide the reason for its shutdown order, citing national security.
In January, ABC7 News in Maryland reported on CDC documents outlining violations CDC inspectors discovered during several visits to the lab last year, some of which were labeled "serious."
Before the shutdown, the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) had announced an experiment that would involve infecting rhesus macaque monkeys with active Ebola virus to test a cure researchers were developing.
Several of the laboratory violations the CDC noted in 2019 concerned "non-human primates" infected with a "select agent." The pathogen's identity was redacted in all documents obtained by ABC7 on ground that disclosing the identity and location of the agent would endanger public health or safety.
Select agents are defined by the CDC as “biological agents and toxins that have been determined to have the potential to pose a severe threat to public health and safety, to animal and plant health, or to animal or plant products.”
Here are some of the violations the CDC observed during inspections of Fort Detrick:
OBSERVATION 1
Severity level: Serious
The CDC reported that an individual partially entered a room multiple times without the required respiratory protection while other people in that room were performing procedures with a non-human primate on a necropsy table.
“This deviation from entity procedures resulted in a respiratory occupational exposure to select agent aerosols,” the CDC wrote.
OBSERVATION 2
Severity level: Serious
The CDC reported that the lab did not ensure that employe training was properly verified when it came to toxins and select agents.
“These failures were recognized through video review of laboratorians’ working in BSL3 and ABSL3 labs,” the report said. “[These] indicate the [lab]’s means used to verify personnel understood the training had not been effective, leading to increased risk of occupational exposures.”
The CDC went on to specify that a laboratory worker who was not wearing appropriate respiratory protection was seen multiple times “partially entering” a room where non-human primates that were infected with [redacted] were “housed in open caging.” They also observed a lab worker disposing of waste in a biohazardous waste bin without gloves on.
OBSERVATION 3
Severity level: Moderate
In this violation observation, the CDC went into more detail on the incident of the worker not wearing gloves while disposing of biohazardous waste, writing that “biosafety and containment procedures must be sufficient to contain the select agent or toxin.”
The corrective action they recommended was to confirm that relevant personnel have been trained to wear gloves to prevent exposure to hazardous materials.
OBSERVATION 4
Severity level: Serious
In this observation, the CDC notes that the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases had “systematically failed to ensure implementation of biosafety and containment procedures commensurate with the risks associated with working with select agents and toxins.”
The violation specifically observed involved “entity personnel [...] propping open” a door while removing “large amounts of biohazardous waste” from an adjacent room, “[increasing] the risk of contaminated air from [the room] escaping and being drawn into the [redacted]” where the people working “typically do not wear respiratory protection.”
OBSERVATION 5
Severity level: Moderate
The CDC reported that the laboratory failed to safeguard against unauthorized access to select against. They wrote that personal protective equipment worn while decontaminating something contaminated by a select agent had been stored in open biohazard bags, in an area of the facility that the CDC has redacted for security reasons.
“By storing regulated waste in this area, the entity did not limit access to those with access approval,” they wrote.
OBSERVATION 6
Severity level: Moderate
The CDC reports that someone at the lab did not maintain an accurate or current inventory for a toxin.
OBSERVATION 7
Severity level: Low
The CDC reports that a building at the Fort Detrick laboratory didn’t have a “sealed surface to facilitate cleaning and decontamination.” This included cracks around a conduit box, cracks in the ceiling, and a crack in the seam above a biological safety cabinet.
