General Milley Says China is not an Enemy

It was 2017 when General Milley said China is not an enemy.

Well let’s go back to some facts shall we?

Has General Milley even met FBI Director Chris Wray?

The counterintelligence and economic espionage efforts emanating from the government of China and the Chinese Communist Party are a grave threat to the economic well-being and democratic values of the United States.

The Chinese government is employing tactics that seek to influence lawmakers and public opinion to achieve policies that are more favorable to China.

At the same time, the Chinese government is seeking to become the world’s greatest superpower through predatory lending and business practices, systematic theft of intellectual property, and brazen cyber intrusions.

China’s efforts target businesses, academic institutions, researchers, lawmakers, and the general public and will require a whole-of-society response. The government and the private sector must commit to working together to better understand and counter the threat.

Then, the New York Times publishes an article on April 13, 2021 titled: ‘China Poses Biggest threat to U.S., Intelligence Report Says’

Sure, it is several years later but and after Milley says he has known his CCP counterpart for 5 years…there is this –>May be an image of text that says 'Milley reportedly made the calls before the 2020 presidential election on Oct. 30, 2020, and two days after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, on Jan. 8, 2021, and assured Zuocheng of the stability of the American government. He also allegedly assured the Chinese general that he would contact him regarding any imminent attack from the U.S. in the waning days of Trump's presidency.'

and this –>

May be an image of text that says 'Four #ChineseWarships, including a Chinese destroyer, have sailed into the United States' exclusive economic zone. Chinese state-run media says this is a warning to the United State about China's naval capabilities.'

The Annual Threat Assessment of the Intelligence Community published on April 9, 2021 is here in full. 

The 112th Congress held a hearing (House Foreign Affairs Committee) on May 28, 2012 titled: Investigating the Chinese Threat, Part I: Military and Economic Aggression. 

How about APT 40 (Advanced Persistent Threat) published by CISA? Can we really safeguard our trade secrets, intellectual property and infrastructure from the Chinese cyber war? Did General Milley discuss any of this in any other phone calls with his Chinese Communist Party counterpart?

China hacked Microsoft. Chinese hacking goes back several years. How about NASA, the World Bank, the State Department (East Asia Division), the Commerce Department, the Naval War College or the Lockheed Martin F-35 fighter program?

Remember when President Obama removed all CIA operatives from China? That was because the Chinese military was killing our operatives in country. How did they know?

CHINA USED STOLEN DATA TO EXPOSE CIA OPERATIVES IN AFRICA AND EUROPE
The discovery of U.S. spy networks in China fueled a decadelong global war over data between Beijing and Washington. 

Around 2013, U.S. intelligence began noticing an alarming pattern: Undercover CIA personnel, flying into countries in Africa and Europe for sensitive work, were being rapidly and successfully identified by Chinese intelligence, according to three former U.S. officials. The surveillance by Chinese operatives began in some cases as soon as the CIA officers had cleared passport control. Sometimes, the surveillance was so overt that U.S. intelligence officials speculated that the Chinese wanted the U.S. side to know they had identified the CIA operatives, disrupting their missions; other times, however, it was much more subtle and only detected through U.S. spy agencies’ own sophisticated technical countersurveillance capabilities.

In part:

More than a thousand visiting researchers from China working at US universities have left the country since the summer, according to John Demers, chief of the Department of Justice’s national security division. This exodus comes as the Department of Justice has intensified its investigations of espionage by scientists at US institutions who are secretly affiliated with the Chinese government or military.

This summer, the Department of Justice has had at least five researchers from China arrested. They all had US visas but hadn’t disclosed their affiliations with the Chinese Communist party or military in their visa applications, Demers explained at a 2 December virtual summit of the Aspen Institute, a global non-profit think tank based in Washington DC. Those handful of arrests were ‘just the tip of the iceberg’, Demers stated.

‘Between those five or six arrests, and the dozens of interviews that the [FBI]  did with individuals who were here under similar circumstances … more than 1000 [People’s Liberation Army]-affiliated Chinese researchers left the country,’ he claimed.

It appears that those departures were in addition to about a thousand Chinese graduate and postgraduate students whose visas were revoked by the State Department back in September under a ‘proclamation’ announced by outgoing President Trump. That directive prohibited individuals from studying or conducting research in the US if they were found to have links with the Chinese government or its military.

Bill Evanina, the US government’s top counterintelligence official, said at the summit that of the 1000-plus Chinese researchers who left the US he is ‘most concerned about the graduate-level students’. These researchers all came to the US ‘at the behest of the Chinese government and intelligence services’, and are going to particular universities to study specific fields that are expected to benefit China, he claimed.

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CHICAGO (WLS) — The spy case against a former U.S. Army reservist and student at Illinois Institute of Technology wasn’t a one-man espionage show, according to federal investigators.

Ji Chaoqun’s federal court appearance in Chicago on Thursday is routine, in an anything-but-normal case. Chaoqun is charged against the backdrop of a possibly wider Chinese scheme to siphon intelligence information overseas.

Chaoqun and a similarly-accused spyman in Cincinnati, Ohio, shared the same foreign connection according to authorities, what’s known in intelligence circles as a “handler.” That link is pointed out in federal court records examined by the I-Team.

Chinese national Chaoqun, 30, is charged with providing intelligence officials in China with background check information on eight American citizens including defense contractors, federal investigators say. He had arrived in Chicago in 2013 with a student visa to study electrical engineering at IIT on the South Side but since being arrested has been locked up at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in the Loop for allegedly violating America’s Foreign Agents Registration Act.

In the Cincinnati case, Yanjun Xu is being held on charges he tried to steal trade secrets from GE Aviation, the giant military contractor and manufacturer. Xu, 40, is accused of downloading GE Aviation records onto his personal laptop and then smuggling them on a flight to China. As part of the charged scheme, federal authorities said Xu had posed as a technology association official and invited a GE Aviation employee to travel to China for a presentation. Xu became the first suspected Chinese intelligence official ever extradited to the U.S. He was arrested in Belgium and is now being detained at the federal penitentiary in Milan, Michigan.

So, what’s the connection between Cincinnati’s Xu and Chicago’s Chaoqun? While there is no indication the men were actual associates, commiserated in crime, or even ever met, the alleged link is buried in a Chicago court file.

Chaoqun’s criminal complaint cites a “clandestine and overt human source collection” used by Chinese officials to recruit spies and gather stolen intelligence.

“Chinese intelligence services conduct extensive overt, covert, and clandestine intelligence collection operations against U.S. national security entities, including private U.S. defense companies, through a network of agents within and outside of China,” states FBI Special Agent Andrew K. McKay.

According to the FBI, Chaoqun and Xu shared the very same covert, Chinese handler. U.S. authorities say the Chinese man assigned to secretly oversee both assignments, met with each alleged operative separately. They would get together in secret locations, frequently hotel rooms, but for the same alleged purpose: provide “information as a benefit to the Chinese government.”

Did General Milley discuss of of this with Li Zuocheng? Remember it is said that China was a little rattled at the potential instability of the United States and needed hand holding before and after the election of 2020 and the January 6 chaos in Washington DC. Seems, we Americans need hand holding from the woke Joint Chiefs of Staff and Pelosi.

Calls are routine? But the subject matter is hardly routine much less loyal to the homeland and the Constitution. Joint Chiefs spokesperson confirms Milley calls with China, defends them as routine Greg Nash

Joint Chiefs of Staff spokesperson Col. Dave Butler on Wednesday confirmed that Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley called his Chinese counterparts after the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol but said those calls were routine.

Butler said in a statement that Milley “regular communicates with Chiefs of Defense around the world, including China and Russia. These conversations remain vital to improving mutual understanding of U.S. national security interests, reducing tensions, providing clarity and avoiding unintended consequences or conflict.”

The statement comes in response to reports that a forthcoming book says Milley once told his Chinese counterpart that he would give a heads up before any attack on China by the U.S.

“You and I have known each other for now five years. If we’re going to attack, I’m going to call you ahead of time. It’s not going to be a surprise,” Milley said, according to an excerpt from a new book by veteran journalist Bob Woodward and The Washington Post’s Robert Costa.

“All calls from the Chairman to his counterparts, including those reported, are staffed, coordinated and communicated with the Department of Defense and the interagency,” Butler said in Wednesday’s statement.

 

 

Was it Eco-Health, NIH or Wuhan and the Money that Killed so Many?

The US-based, non-profit research group EcoHealth Alliance in 2014 received a US$3.1 million, five-year NIH grant to understand the risk of a novel bat virus spilling into humans in China, as had happened in the Sars outbreak in 2002.

“It would have been irresponsible of us if we did not investigate the bat viruses and the serology to see who might have been infected in China,” Fauci, whose institute was responsible for the grant, testified at a congressional hearing in May.

Research was undertaken in partnership with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, with a budget of between US$120,000 and US$150,000 a year under the grant, according to documents released by The Intercept.

Part of the work included exploring whether newly discovered bat viruses had the potential to infect people, and it is this aspect of the research which has come under scrutiny.

Wei Jingsheng, in a new report about his upcoming book called “What happened in Wuhan,” stated that he first heard about the Coronavirus at the World Military Games in Wuhan in October 2019. source

Chinese defector Wei Jingsheng tried to warn US officials.

source

Alerted by the news, he returned to the US and notified the CIA and FBI about what he had heard. The Agencies already knew him because he defected to the United States back in 1997 after leaving the Chinese communist party. Mr. Jingsheng said that he also alerted US politicians with connections to Trump and then alerted the Chinese human rights activist Dimon Liu.

Mr. Wei said that he found out more about the virus from one of his contacts in Beijing. He also noted that through Chinese activist Dimon Liu he spoke to politicians in the house about the dangers of the outbreak and that he also expressed his concerns to people in the Trump white house in 2019.
Wei said he would not reveal what politicians with ties to Trump he spoke with but states that the politicians could have reached the President immediately.

Chinese Human rights activist Demon Liu revealed that Mr. Lei told her about the virus at a dinner with her husband, a retired CIA agent, on November 22, 2019.
Liu said in a statement, “I couldn’t quite believe what he was saying,” Liu went on to say. “At that time, I had thought that the Coronavirus could not be worse than SARS. And SARS, as we knew from experience, was not that contagious, and it could be contained. I thought at the time that was the case. Okay, there was an outbreak, but the authorities and the advance of medical sciences would be able to contain the spread of it.”
Liu states that she wanted to pass the information that Mr. Wei gave her to Trump’s deputy National security advisor Matt Pottinger but decided against it because, as she puts it – “I didn’t send it to him because so many things were so incredulous,” she said. “I wrote it, but I didn’t send it because I decided it was better if Wei talks directly to Matt Pottinger.”

China hits back at Wuhan lab leak 'conspiracy' after Biden ...

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KEY POINTS

  •  27 scientist published a letter in The Lancet last March denouncing lab-leak theories.
  • 26 of the 27 scientists have ties to Wuhan Institute funders or researchers.
  • Lead scientist says letter was written for “our collaborators” in China for a “show of support.”

In March of last year, 27 scientists wrote a letter to medical journal The Lancet denouncing claims that COVID-19 could have originated in a lab. It’s now been revealed that 26 of those 27 scientists have ties to the Wuhan Institute of Virology – that’s what we call a conflict of interest.

In The Lancet letter, the scientists stated, “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin.” But, according to the Daily Mail, “The orchestrator of the letter, British zoologist Peter Daszak, [had] a conflict of interest through him being president of the US-based EcoHealth Alliance, which has funded research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”

Additionally, the Telegraph is reporting that a February 8th email released under an FOIA request reveals Mr. Daszak wrote The Lancet letter after being asked by “our collaborators” in China for a “show of support.”

That tanks Mr. Daszak’s credibility – and the other scientists don’t fare much better.

“Other signatories…include Prof Kanta Subbarao, who spoke at a conference in Wuhan – part organised by the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Dr John Mackenzie, of Curtin University of Technology in Australia, [also] put his name to the letter, but failed to mention he was still listed as a committee member of the Scientific Advisory Committee of Centre for Emerging Infectious Diseases at the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” the Telegraph reports.

The list goes on and on until…

“Dr Ronald Corley, a microbiology expert from Boston University – has been found to have no links back to funders or researchers at the Wuhan institute,” according to the Daily Mail.

When all is said and done, 26 of the 27 Lancet letter scientists have ties to funders or researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Even members of the scientific community don’t believe Daszak & Co. wrote the article in good faith.

“I was a little perplexed and a little bit upset with five very good scientists, some of whom I know well, who I thought stepped way out beyond what they should have been saying, based on the data available to all of us,” said David Welman, a professor who advises the U.S. government on biological threats and risks.

“These were not scientific papers, they did not present scientific evidence, they did not analyse and support scientific data, they were presenting opinion, they did not belong in scientific journals,” said Richard Ebrigh, chemistry professor at Rutgers University.

Since its publishing, the Lancet letter has been instrumental in slapping down lab-leak “conspiracy theorists.” Now, it won’t be so easy.

Blame Begins With Obama for the New Taliban Government

The Biden administration is waiting for good behavior by the Taliban before it officially recognizes the Taliban as the official government in Afghanistan, that is while China already has.

FB: Chinese diplomats relegated Biden climate czar John Kerry to a Zoom conference the same day China joined Taliban leaders in a photo-op to pledge “friendly relations” with the terror group.

Kerry was denied face-to-face interactions with senior Chinese officials such as Foreign Minister Wang Yi and Vice Premier Han Zheng. China instead dispatched a junior-level climate official to meet with the former secretary of state in the city of Tianjin. Kerry’s bungled visit coincided with Beijing’s open-arms embrace of Taliban leadership at an in-person visit in Qatar, affirming China’s interest in furthering “friendly relations” to fill the vacuum in Afghanistan left by America’s withdrawal.

Kerry met separately with Yi and Zheng over Zoom. The Chinese officials reportedly bristled at Kerry’s suggestions to decouple climate change from other issues fraught with tensions between China and the United States, leaving no immediate results from the meetings. One expert told Voice of America the Taliban received a better welcome than Kerry. The Biden climate czar, however, said the meetings proved “very constructive and detailed,” but deferred to Secretary of State Antony Blinken and President Joe Biden to set a timetable for further talks with the Chinese.

The White House did not return a request for comment about their plans for future climate talks with Beijing. The State Department declined to comment.

FB: A Taliban spokesman on Tuesday announced the appointment of a terrorist on the FBI’s most-wanted list to a cabinet-level position in its new government.

Sirajuddin Haqqani, who is a senior leader in the al Qaeda-aligned Haqqani network of terror groups, will serve in the Taliban’s government as minister of the interior. He is wanted by federal authorities for his involvement in a 2008 bombing in Kabul that killed Thor Hesla, a U.S. citizen. The State Department is offering up to $5 million for information leading to Haqqani’s arrest.

Haqqani authored an op-ed in the New York Times in February 2020, which expressed the demands of the Taliban ahead of talks with U.S. officials in Qatar.

The Taliban leader said his organization would work to protect human rights for all Afghans and work toward “mutual respect” with foreign powers. The claims run counter to reports of atrocities the Taliban have committed against Afghans, many of whom assisted the United States during its 20-year war in Afghanistan.

Haqqani’s op-ed ran four months before a now-infamous New York Times editorial by Sen. Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) that argued federal forces should be deployed to quell violence and restore order in America’s cities during the summer’s riots. Whereas some employees said Cotton’s views put black journalists at the newspaper “in danger,” no Times employees said publishing a known terrorist’s words in their opinion pages put any subgroup of U.S. citizens at risk.

United Nations-sanctioned terrorist Mohammad Hasan Akhund will lead the newly installed Taliban government. A 2020 report from the United Nations Security Council said the Taliban’s senior council of 20 members—including Akhund—maintained close ties with al Qaeda during negotiations with the West.

***

JTN: The new interior minister is Sirajuddin Haqqani, who led the Haqqani network, has a $5 million bounty out on him by the FBI for being on their most-wanted list, and is believed to be still holding an American hostage, The Associated Press reported. The American, a civilian contractor named Mark Frerichs, has not been heard from since being abducted by the network in January 2020.

The Haqqani network, which controls much of eastern Afghanistan, has been blamed for coordinating kidnappings, often of Americans, and attacks in Kabul over the last 20 years.

Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid explained in announcing the cabinet that the appointments were temporary, but did not say how long they would last or what would be the reason for a change, according to the AP. The Taliban has not indicated that they plan on holding elections.

Mullah Hasan Akhund, the interim prime minister, led the Taliban government during the final years of its previous rule. One of his two deputies, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, led talks with the U.S. and signed the deal leading to the withdrawal. The other deputy, Abdul Salam Hanafi, is a long-time Taliban member, the AP reported.

The new defense minister is Mullah Mohammad Yaqoob, who is the son of Taliban founder Mullah Mohammad Omar.

Amir Khan Muttaqi is the foreign minister, and was also a prominent figure from the Taliban’s last rule.

***

FNC: Four out of five Guantanamo detainees whom former President Barack Obama released in exchange for former U.S. Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl in 2014 now hold senior positions in the interim government created by the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Thomas Joscelyn, a senior fellow for the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), noted that Fazl will also return to his role as deputy defense minister. “U.S. officials found that Fazl worked with senior al Qaeda personnel, including Abdel Hadi al Iraqi, one of Osama bin Laden’s chief lieutenants,” Joscelyn wrote in a tweet. “Al Iraqi is still held at Guantanamo.”

Late last month, following the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan, the Taliban announced that Mohammad Nabi Omari, another former Guantanamo Bay Naval Base (GTMO) detainee with close ties to al Qaeda, would govern Khost Province.

In 2011, a Washington, D.C., district court judge found that Khairkhwa “was, without question, a senior member of the Taliban both before and after the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001.”

The court also denied Khairkhwa’s petition for a writ of habeas corpus, concluding that he “has repeatedly admitted that after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, he served as a member of a Taliban envoy that met clandestinely with senior Iranian officials to discuss Iran’s offer to provide the Taliban with weapons and other military support in anticipation of imminent hostilities with US coalition forces.”

Sirajuddin Haqqani, the head of the militant group known as Haqqani Network, now serves as acting interior minister for the Taliban government. The U.S. has put a $10 million bounty on Haqqani’s head. Since 2016, Haqqani has served as one of two deputy leaders of the Taliban.

Nebraska GOP Sen. Ben Sasse released a statement on Tuesday regarding the Taliban’s formation of the government, insisting that the trust President Joe Biden and U.S. officials placed in the Taliban is “pathetic.”

“President Biden still clings to an insane fantasy that the Taliban is kinder and gentler,” Sasse said. “It’s nonsense. Haqqani is the Taliban’s new interior minister for precisely the same reason the FBI’s got a $5 million bounty on his head: he’s a bloodthirsty terrorist. He’s armed, dangerous, and running a country we just abandoned.”

More Terrifying Details on the Bagram Prison Release

Fox News’ Pentagon reporter Jennifer Griffin asked the Department of Defense press director Admiral Kirby how many prisoners were at the prisons at Bagram. Kirby’s answer was merely thousands, and nothing more specific. To be candid, the military knows precisely how many were there and their full militant criminal backgrounds. This all was until Bagram was turned over to the Afghan forces and subsequently to the Taliban which released all prisoners. In January 2002, the U.S. government began detention operations in Afghanistan at Bagram Air Field in Parwan province. For many years, detainees were held at the Bagram Theater Internment Facility, a converted Soviet aircraft machine plant.

So, what about more details? Well, that prison system was known as Gitmo Part 2 and what pressured to be closed for years. After some open source investigations, there are some interesting details as follows:

  • In 2014, the BBC was finally granted access to a Bagram prison. The Afghan Review Board (ARB), is/was the committee responsible for the prisoner issue, had announced that it would be releasing some of the inmates.

    The ARB said these men could not be prosecuted because of a lack of evidence.

    The Nato-led international peacekeeping force (Isaf) quickly came out and slammed the decision, saying the detainees were dangerous terrorists and had “blood on their hands”.

  • Afghan President Hamid Karzai told me Bagram is a “Taliban-making factory” where innocent people are indiscriminately mixing with extremists and being indoctrinated.

    Now that some of these prisoners have been released – some of them to the most troubled regions where the Taliban hold sway – the question is, will American fears be realised?

  • Before the prison break, Bagram Air Base, including its prison, which holds 5,000 inmates, surrendered to Taliban control, the Associated Press reported.

    Bagram district chief Darwaish Raufi said the former U.S. base that held both Taliban and Islamic State group fighters was taken over on Sunday. Other Taliban gains include Afghanistan’s capital city of Kabul after the government collapsed.

  • The other large prison was located in Kabul and those prisoners have been released as well. Thousands of inmates, including former Islamic State and al-Qaeda fighters, were released from a prison on the outskirts of Kabul — Pul-e-Charkhi — as well as another facility at Bagram airbase as the Taliban called for a “peaceful transition” of power. sourcePrisoners run free in Afghanistan
  • Many liberal groups packaged as human rights organizations have long mobilized to close not only Guantanamo but all the prisons in Afghanistan. Now, they seem to have fallen silent given the present conditions in Afghanistan. However, the most disgusting organization advocating for closures of terror prisons which I found somewhat unexpectedly was old man George Soros and his Open Society. Yup….that guy.

Could this be the very reason that the prisons were handed over to the Taliban….George Soros? Could it be that Open Society operatives are driving part of the Biden White House decisions on Afghanistan?

Open Society in 2012 issued a white paper titled ‘Remaking Bagram‘. Could it be that Soros et.al waited for Biden to reintroduce that objective and is now successful?

In part for the opening summary of the white paper is:

The United States has been using internment in Afghanistan for many years, where detainees are “preventatively detained” for “imperative security reasons,” rather than accused of a crime and tried in a court. In order to facilitate the transfer of the detainees interned by the U.S. military, the Afghan government created its own internment regime, closely resembling the U.S. system. Though the Afghan government has chosen to transfer many of the detainees to a criminal court, more than 50 are now being held by the
Afghan government without charge or trial through this new internment power. Senior Afghan officials have told the Open Society Foundations that they believe the new system is unconstitutional.

Though numerous Afghan officials have told Open Society Foundations researchers that they believe Afghan internment will come to an end in September 2012, when they assume the detention transition will be complete, U.S. statements and actions suggest otherwise. U.S. forces have continued to capture individuals in military operations and detain them on the “U.S. side” or part of the DFIP since the transition process began in March 2012.

Read the full document here.

As the top government leader Ashraf Ghani bailed out with millions and millions of dollars from his job and duties in Afghanistan, Hamid Karzi has chosen to stay. One little detail is Karzai has been collaborating with Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar who is the co-founder of the Taliban for quite sometime. It was Karzai that demanded Baradar’s release from prison because once upon a time Baradar saved Karzai’s life. Baradar was released under the Taliban’s demand that started the peace talks between the United States (NATO) and the Taliban. It was Baradar that took a meeting(s) with CIA director William Burns and it is Baradar that continues to collaborate operations in Afghanistan which is why the CENTCOM leader, General McKenzie. Baradar is a busy man as weeks before, he met with Chinese leaders.

China’s foreign minister has met a Taliban delegation, signalling warming ties as the United States-led foreign forces continue their withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Wang Yi on Wednesday told the nine visiting Taliban representatives, which included the group’s co-founder Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, that Beijing expected it to “play an important role in the process of peaceful reconciliation and reconstruction in Afghanistan”, according to a readout of the meeting from the foreign ministry. source

Taliban co-founder Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, left, and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi pose for a photo during their meeting in Tianjin, China, on Wednesday, July 28.

During a meeting with Taliban’s co-founder Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, who heads the group’s political committee, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi described the Taliban as an important military and political force in Afghanistan, and said he expected the Taliban to play an important role in the country’s “peace, reconciliation and reconstruction process,” according to China’s Foreign Ministry. source

The doubling of enemies against the West including the United States is manifesting.

 

 

France Warned the US About the Wuhan Lab Often

Will this Biden ordered investigation within 100 days include anything from the past including what France warned us about regarding the Wuhan Lab? You be the judge…read on.

In part:

The U.S. federal government should have stopped funding research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in 2015 when China reduced its cooperation with the French in building and operating the lab, according to the leader of an investigation into COVID-19’s origins by the State Department under the Trump administration.

In 2015, French intelligence officials warned the U.S. State Department and their own foreign ministry that China was cutting back on agreed collaboration at the lab, former State official David Asher, now a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute think tank, told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

By 2017, the French “were kicked out” of the lab and cooperation ceased, leading French officials to warn the State Department that they had grave concerns as to Chinese motivations, according to Asher.

The State Department alleged in January 2021, at the end of the Trump administration, that the Wuhan lab had engaged in classified research on behalf of the Chinese military since at least 2017.

Between October 2009 and May 2019, the U.S. Agency for International Development provided $1.1 million to the U.S.-based EcoHealth Alliance for a sub-agreement with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, according to USAID. EcoHealth Alliance also received funding from the Department of Defense’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency that was subcontracted to the Wuhan lab, New York magazine reported. National Institutes of Health grants to EcoHealth Alliance totaling $600,000 between 2014 and 2019 were subcontracted to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

The NIH, Defense Department and USAID should have stopped sending U.S. federal funding to the Wuhan lab back when the French warned the State Department in 2015, Asher said. More here.

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Stephen Mosher, a REAL China expert and previous radio guest on my radio show (several times) had this piece in the NY Post in part:

  • China had only one Level 4 lab that can “handle deadly coronaviruses,” and that lab just happened to be located in Wuhan at the very “epicenter of the epidemic.”
  • Underlining China’s shoddy lab-safety record, Xi Jinping himself had, in the early days of the crisis, warned about “lab safety” as a national-security priority.
  • Following Xi’s guidance, “the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology released a new directive titled: ‘Instructions on strengthening biosecurity management in ­microbiology labs that handle advanced viruses like the novel coronavirus.’ ”
  • As soon as the outbreak began, China’s military was put in charge, with the PLA’s top biowar expert, General Chen Wei, dispatched to Wuhan to deal with it.

Even at the time there was other evidence available, which likewise pointed to the lab — and to the PLA’s involvement:

  • The authorities ordered all of the early samples of the coronavirus collected by private and university labs in China — vital for tracing the origin and early spread of the disease — to be destroyed.
  • China’s civilian Center for Disease Control was completely shut out of the picture in favor of the PLA, suggesting a classified military program was involved.
  • Military academies and installations in and around Wuhan were closed around January 1, well before the Chinese public was notified that there was a problem.
  • China lied about human-to-human transmission, leaving the US and other countries unprepared for the rapid spread of the virus, ensuring that more lives would be lost.

The evidence was circumstantial, to be sure, but I was fairly certain by that point that I could have convinced a jury of China’s culpability. Even so, while I waited for more facts to surface, I was careful to call the “lab origin” just a possibility.

Facebook, however, didn’t wait. It quickly moved to suppress the column as “False Information,” refusing to unblock it until April 17. The mainstream media likewise piled on, slamming The Post for publishing the writings of a “conspiracy theorist.” Others who raised questions about the pandemic’s origins were heavily censored as well — if not “canceled” entirely.

 Security personnel keep watch outside the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Security personnel keep watch outside the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Thomas Peter/REUTERS

China locked down the Wuhan lab, and the US virology establishment closed ranks, both denying that gain-of-function research — or a PLA bioweapons research program — had anything to do with the pandemic.

It has taken over a year, but the attempted cover-ups on both sides of the Pacific have gradually unraveled.

During that time China has burned through a half-dozen increasingly implausible cover stories. After the collapse of the Wuhan Wet Market fable, China tried to pin the blame on a wild succession of animals — bats and pangolins and raccoon-dogs, oh my! — for harboring the virus. We seem now to be back to bats, and are being told that many years ago, in a cave far away from the Wuhan lab, minors fell ill from being peed upon, pooped upon, and even bitten by those same nasty, virus-harboring creatures.

But the wildest tale by far being bandied about by the Chinese authorities is that CoV-2 was a US bioweapon, created in the U. Army’s research labs in Fort Detrick, Maryland. As to how the “American Virus” — as they unabashedly call it — got to China, they have an answer for that too: it was secretly released on the unsuspecting Chinese population of Wuhan by the American soldier-athletes who participated in the October 2019 Military World Games in that city.

Biological science specialists, background, wear biosafety protective clothing for handling viral diseases at U.S. Army Medical Research and Development Command at Fort Detrick in Frederick, Md.
Biological science specialists, background, wear biosafety protective clothing for handling viral diseases at US Army Medical Research and Development Command at Fort Detrick in Frederick, Maryland.
Andrew Harnik/AP

Who makes up such bat-sh*t crazy stories about secret bioweapons and superspreading soldiers? The same people, it seems, whose fever dream for decades has been to do exactly the same thing. There are numerous scientific publications that prove Chinese labs were engaged in dangerous gain-of-function research, along with new evidence that these techniques were being used in an active bioweapons program that included the Wuhan lab. As China defector Dr. Yan Limeng has taught us, the PLA itself isolated the original bat coronavirus that served as the “backbone” or “template” for CoV-2. Additional genetic material was then spliced into this virus to make it more infectious and deadly to humans. This is not speculation.

Those doing the splicing left “signatures” behind in the genome itself. To boost a virus’ lethality, for example, those doing gain-of-function research customarily insert a snippet of RNA that codes for two arginine amino acids. This snippet — called double CGG — has never been found in any other coronaviruses, but is present in CoV-2. Besides this damning evidence, there are other indications of tampering as well.

The dwindling ranks of lab “deniers” continue to insist that the vast laboratory of nature is capable of infinite surprises. Of course that’s true. And it’s also true that if you have enough monkeys typing the four DNA bases A, C, G, and T on enough computer keyboards they will eventually produce a complete and accurate copy of the human genome, which is 6.4 billion such bases long. But what are the odds?

And what are the odds that the virus passed naturally from animals to humans?

Volunteers in protective suits disinfect a factory with sanitizing equipment, as the country is hit by an outbreak of the novel coronavirus, in Huzhou, Zhejiang province, China February 18, 2020.
Volunteers in protective suits disinfect a factory with sanitizing equipment in China on Feb. 18, 2020.
China Daily via REUTERS

Dr. David Asher, who headed the now-canceled State Department investigation, put that very question to a biostatistician, and was told that the odds were roughly … 1 in 13 billion. In the face of that vanishingly small probability, Asher remarked, “to say this came out of a zoonotic situation is sort of ridiculous.”

What we do know, as former Deputy National Security Advisor (DNSA) Mathew Pottinger pointed out in a February interview, is that the PLA had been “doing secret classified animal experiments in that same laboratory [Wuhan Institute of Virology]” as early as 2017. While the Wuhan lab poses as a “civilian institution,” Pottinger said, US intelligence has determined that the lab has collaborated with China’s military on publications and secret bioweapons projects.

That’s David Asher’s opinion as well. “The Wuhan Institute of Virology is not the National Institute of Health,” he says. “It was operating a secret, classified program. In my view, and I’m just one person, my view is it was a biological weapons program.”

Dr. David Asher
Dr. David Asher believes the Wuhan Institute of Virology was running a biological weapons program.
Rod Lamkey/CNP

A Chinese book that recently fell into the hands of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) further confirms that Chinese military scientists have been focused on what they called the “new era of genetic weapons” since at least 2015. They begin by asserting that World War III would be fought with biological weapons, and go on to describe how viruses can be collected from nature and “artificially manipulated into an emerging human disease virus, then weaponized and unleashed.”

Sound familiar?

In fact, the scientists even singled out coronaviruses as a class of viruses that can be readily weaponized, and they suggest that the ideal candidate for a bioweapon would be something like the coronavirus that causes Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS. It is worth noting that the virus that causes COVID-19 is a type of SARS virus, which is why the World Health Organization insists that we call it SARS-CoV-2. As in, the “second” SARS virus.

Peter Jennings, the executive director of ASPI, said the new document “clearly shows that Chinese scientists were thinking about military application for different strains of the coronavirus and thinking about how it could be deployed. It begins to firm up the possibility that what we have here is the accidental release of a pathogen for military use.”

Wuhan Huanan Wholesale Seafood Market before its closure in Hankou, Wuhan city, central China's Hubei province, 31 December 2019.
After the collapse of the Wuhan Wet Market fable, China tried to pin the blame on a wild succession of animals — bats and pangolin.
Alamy

The document, he went on to say, is the closest thing to a “smoking gun as we’ve got.”

Is it really that surprising that the same murderous regime that has brought us forced abortion and sterilization, forced organ harvesting, and genocide in real time would also be developing deadly bioweapons to release upon the world?

China had both the intention and the capability to take a harmless bat virus, turn it into a deadly pathogen, and then release it upon the world. And the evidence suggests that it did just that.

More than half of all Americans — including 59 percent of Republicans and 52 percent of Democrats — now believe the virus was made in a lab and released either accidentally or intentionally. Indeed, there has been a massive hardening of public opinion against the communist giant across the board, with 89 percent of adults now seeing the country as hostile or dangerous.

By killing 600,000 Americans, China has proven that it is both.

But whether the Biden administration makes China pay for its crimes is another question.

Steven W. Mosher is the author of the forthcoming “Politically Incorrect Guide to Pandemics” (Regnery Press).