Well, the judgement does pretty much sum up the fact that the Govt are liars.
The Porton Down official doesnāt confirm it is definitely a Novochok but categorically says it is Novochok or similar
&
The NHS Trust refuses to be drawn on non clinical matters.
Worryingly, or sadly, the Judge also has to rely on Court of Protection rules as no one has come forward in support of the victims, who appear unlikely to recoverā¦
I had an interesting chat in the local last night with a neighbour who is an ex Colonel in army military intelligence. He is firmly of the opinion that āweā had nothing to do with this and that it was Russian ops. When I asked him why they just didnt take him out when he defected he said that this sends a stronger message to anyone thinking of defecting. That they can take you out any place, any time. You are never safe. It is also Putin playing the biggest swinging dick game - he can do what he wants, where he wants and doesnt give a stuff about sovereignty. When I asked him how he could be so sure it wasnt a set up he said that our ops teams donāt do things like this. This comes from a man who served in Iraq and Northern Ireland.
@saintbletch once said that we should follow people on social media that we donāt agree with. This bloke is one such for me.
He is a very clever person who plays on semantics a lot. He accuses the governement of semantics all the time yet is happy to play with them himself.
Donāt get me wrong I think BoJo (sorry for the contraction NYS) is a buffoon and a liability and he should be very careful with what he says. However I do think La Murray has a very big axe to grind and he also needs to be careful what he says.
Wonāt stop me reading him with @saintbletch 's excellent advice ringing in my skull
Seeing as this is the same chap who was sued for libel by some dude from the Mail, he still perserveres with strong headlines and content. Either he is a brave man or a fucking idiot.
He won the libel case, so smarter than the mail bloke. That doesnāt really tell us anything about how smart he is admittedly.
He seems to be outdoing May and Boris as well, but thatās no help in determining intellect either.
Smarter than the mail and the bulk of cabinet ministers, iām disappointed to say, no longer gives any insight to a persons intellect.
I agree with myself.
I have a similar reaction to Murray as you, Bob. Thereās something about the way he lays out his case that seems as extreme as those that heās calling out.
That doesnāt mean that I doubt what heās saying is true. On Salisbury I could quite easily believe heās a lone voice of truth, but I get a sense that heās over-egging it and that he has quite some agenda.
But donāt we all?
He made a post a couple of weeks ago where he suggested that Israel had the capability to have been behind the Salisbury nerve agent attack and I really couldnāt understand why he brought them into the discussion.
It struck me as an odd direction for his discussion to go in.
Still does.
More like settled out of court
He also burnt through Ā£100k of other peoples money defending it
Will he ask other people to fund the next one?
Yes. It worked last time.
The Israel connection gets mentioned in relation to nuclear weapons too, largely because the nation has them but isnāt signed up to any non-proliferation treaties.
It is one of five voting countries not to ratify OPCW. The others are South Sudan, Palestine, Egypt and North Korea.
Why isnāt Israel signed up to the OPCW? How does it get to criticise the likes of Syria in unproven cases when it cannot even say, officially, that chemical weapons are a bad thing and must be controlled, subjecting themselves to international inspection?
If one were to begin an investigation of where a proliferated chemical weapon sprung from, I do not think it unreasonable to look at countries that officially, arenāt that arsed about their proliferation.
Yep, absolutely fair comment.
I can see why the Israeli position on such weapons should be discussed.
However, IIRC, the suggestion that israel has chemical weapons appeared midway through a blog article criticising the lazy leap to a Russia-shaped conclusion to the question of the source of the weapons.
At one point he was saying the leap to the conclusion that āRussia has weapons ergo Russia is responsibleā was lazy, next he lazily introduces Israel to the conversation.
Bringing Israel into the discussion at that point and at such a tangent (from somebody who has been critical of Israel in the past) made him look like a man carrying a hammer thinking that everything he sees is a nail.
I even asked @goatboy if Iād missed a real connection to Israel. He said I hadnāt.
I think Murray could and should have joined the dots much better. Had he linked it to the 2013 chemical attack in Syria, he might have been on solid ground. The OPCWās report eventually ended up pointing blame away from the Assad regime.
Itās also a very similar story, structurally. In both cases, the blame is cast before an investigation was undertaken. In both cases, calls for international interventions ensued. In both cases, it made no political or strategic sense for the quickly identified perpetrator to have perpetrated the attack.
To recap 2013, the attack took place six months after Obama had issued a US red line that any chemical weapons use would trigger a US military intervention in Syria. Government forces were turning the tide against the rebels, the course of the war already shifting to where we are now. Assad was winning, and as long as he didnāt use chemical weapons, the US would not get involved.
The winning strategy was not to use chemical weapons, yet we are to believe that he and his government would do the one thing that would guarantee US involvement, and defeat.
In both cases, the āweasel wordsā Murray refers to were used, and in both cases, the accusations were never proven.
If Murray had written that, and pointed out that the Israeli government officially confirmed_ _that Assad had used chemical weapons, its inclusion might have been less incongruent.
He might also have waited for Israelās official statement this time, which doesnāt mention Russia at all.
Would it be ok to mention a country, if said country had already been identified with certainty, as having attempted to assassinate someone on foreign soil with a nerve agent?
āYet this lack of discretion also applies to his personal life. Murrayās great sin, in the eyes of the FCO, may be that he chose to live the life of a typical expat in the former Soviet Union. He is an unashamed socialiser, almost keen to let me know that he cares little how much I see of his colourful personal life. On Friday night, he takes me to the Rande-vue bar beneath one of Samarkandās hotels. We begin in the Bohar restaurant, where a series of dancing girls in traditional costume, then in cowboy outfits, parade on stage, while Murray drinks a couple of neat whiskiesā
Craig Murray, his blog is more factual than all other media outlets because it agrees with my worldview 
To be fair sounds like he had a great time in Moscow 
Sauce
Reality check time. The comments from Boris Johnson comparing the 1936 Olympics with the Russia 2018 World Cup are beyond ludicrous. Theyāre actually rather dangerous.
Peter Hitchens has previously spoken of the huge unpaid debt to the Soviet Union for its decisive role in defeating Nazism. That Stalin was in charge doesnāt make their collective sacrifice of the Soviet people any less impressive. The Red Army had been purged of many of its best officers. When war on the Eastern Front broke out, Stalin refused to believe it, ceding huge amounts of territory. The Red Army often lacked basic equipment, and were forced forward at point of death by the NKVD.
The Soviets had vast numbers of people, and vast numbers of them were killed during the Second World War. Thirty million. A human tragedy on a scale of no other, which touched many families, and is understandingly a source of a great deal of national pride.
And our foreign secretary thinks itās a good idea to compare them with Nazis. Perhaps Boris forgets that the Soviets boycotted the 1936 Olympics, while our own athletes were ordered to do the Nazi salute by the British ambassador.
Another reality check. Whilst the Russian sacrifice was huge and they played a massive part in the defeat of the Nazis, Stalin was responsible for the deaths of between 20 and 25 million of his own people. Churchill only entertained an alliance with Stalin because he knew that was the best chance of winning the war, but his feelings were that Stalin was only marginally less of a tyrant than Hitler.
I think you need to change ābest chance of winning the warā to āonly chanceā¦ā. Britain were certainly being moved to the sidelines and becoming a junior partners as the war progressed.
First off, youāve got to be careful not to lionise Churchill too much, or take his views on race too seriously. A quick glance into his views on Indians reveals that prejudice ran deep in Winston.
Most importantly, the post was not a defence of Stalin, who didnāt actually have to sacrifice that much himself. I think that was clear enough in the post I wrote. He blundered, and his blinkers and private vendettas came second place only to the Germans in terms of harming Russia. Massive reprisals for anyone suspected of being a traitor or a coward.
Stalin died in the 1950s. He was not one of the 30 million Soviets that died during Barbarossa. The fact that he was a tyrant, eventually denounced by Khruschev, does not change that, nor does it alter the huge debt the Allies owed the Soviet people for their sacrifice.
I generally donāt disagree with your points. Hitler vs Stalin was totalitarian regime vs totalitarian regime. The people that died for those regimes were in the main, just people, progagandised to bits during peacetime and brutalised during the war.
Theyāre just not a rebuttal to the central thrust of my point, which is that our Foreign Secretary is insane for sticking the knife in this wound. There are just about people who still remember those lost in the war, living today. Their younger relatives will have seen the haunted looks in their expression. heard the almost unbelievable tales of what that war took.
It is huge insult to those who suffered then and the Russia of today. Have a look at one of their Federal meetings and look at the diversity on show. Europeans, Asians, Orthodox Christians. Itās far more diverse than many Western equivalents. Boris is implying that these people, of all people, are Nazis.
The actual Nazis described them as an Asiatic subhuman horde. The actual Nazis planned and executed a war of annhiliation on the Soviet Union, premised and propagandised of ideas of racial supremacy.
Stalin was a murderous bastard, but he didnāt host the 1936 Olympics, wonāt host the Russia 2018 World Cup either. This is Boris insinuating things about the present Russian leadership and state. Theyāre not at all true, and not at all helpful.