I suppose I'd better get around to pointing out the gullibility (and complete lack of interest in details) of Trump supporting conservatives in the US, and Australia, about the idea that American would be carrying out bio-weapons programs in Ukraine. As Allahpundit notes:
The “debate” over U.S. bioweapons in Ukraine isn’t a debate about bioweapons at all, of course. It’s not even a debate about how much you should trust the U.S. government, the only source for information on what’s happening in these labs. Any conservative worth his salt when asked how much the federal government should be trusted would say, “Not much.”
The actual “debate” here is this: Should you trust the U.S. government more than you trust the Russian government? Carlson’s answer, implicitly and characteristically, is no. Griffin’s answer, and the answer most Americans would give, is yes.
The Dispatch has a nice explainer today about the Ukrainian labs. They’re not new and they’re not secret.
There are laboratories in Ukraine that receive funding from the U.S. government as part of the defense threat reduction program. The USSR had a massive secret biological weapons program known as Biopreparat, and when the USSR collapsed the scientists and facilities did not just evaporate. The U.S. program, run as part of the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program under the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, provides funding to prevent the proliferation of bioweapons and make sure that the next plague does not emerge accidentally from an old Soviet lab. This involves helping make sure scientists with the skills that could be used to create bioweapons stay at home and work on important medical research instead (so they are less likely to get poached by higher-paid gigs in China, or Iran, or North Korea, for example). This program involves upgrading the facilities in the former USSR where the remnants of the Soviet bioweapons program might lay in order to ensure their security and guard against theft or accidental leaks.
In fact, just days before Russia began its propaganda barrage about these documents, the head of the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program Robert Pope expressed concern about the effects of the war in Ukraine. In an interview with the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, Pope said that he did not believe that Russian forces would deliberately target any of the Ukrainian biolabs because they “know enough about the kinds of pathogens that are stored in biological research laboratories,” However, Pope was concerned that the facilities could be damaged by conflict, which could lead to disastrous consequences.
That’s why the U.S. and the Ukrainians are rushing to destroy pathogens in the lab as the Russians advance. It’s not a matter of “covering up evidence,” it’s a matter of not wanting anything to escape the lab if a Russian shell should accidentally hit it. We’ve already seen one near-miss on a Ukrainian facility hosting a weapon of mass death, remember.
Again, not only is this not a secret, the U.S. has acknowledged the labs before — including during the Trump administration, Greg Sargent notes. And even if you’re disinclined to believe Trump’s State Department, basic common sense points to an innocent explanation for the facilities. As Dispatch reporter Andrew Fink says, it would be batty for the U.S. to outsource something as sensitive as a bioweapons program to a country that’s crawling with Russian spies and which contains many Russian sympathizers. (Although far fewer now than it did two weeks ago.) We’d be asking for trouble, whether Russian penetration of the lab or a Wuhan-style accident that brings about a global pandemic. It makes no sense.
The Washington Post also did a "fact checker" analysis article about it too.
In Australia, Putin sympathisers can't be bothered waiting for, or reading, the details:
CL, like Tucker Carlson, now thinks Glenn Greenwald is some kind of honest commentator. As Bernard Keane says of Pilger:
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