An extract:
Lemoine handles even more delicate matters extremely well. The WSJ had already established that the national health authorities in China only learned of the growing Wuhan disease outbreak at the very end of December, and he persuasively argues that their local counterparts in that city had only become aware a few days earlier. But in Part I of his series, he also includes a discordant early paragraph mentioning that multiple US Intelligence sources had disclosed to ABC News that in late November a unit of our own Defense Intelligence Agency had distributed a secret report describing a “cataclysmic” disease outbreak taking place in Wuhan and warning our military forces stationed in East Asia to take appropriate health precautions. Lemoine correctly notes that the claims “made no sense” since “there is simply no way US intelligence could have known that an epidemic was underway at the time.” Therefore, he concludes that the report never existed and that the leaks were false information provided by enemies of Donald Trump in an effort to embarrass the president.
But as an extremely diligent researcher he surely must be aware that Israeli TV had independently confirmed the existence of that secret DIA report, disclosing that it had been widely distributed both to their own government and to our NATO allies. However, if Lemoine had acknowledged the reality that our intelligence agencies were fully aware of the Wuhan outbreak more than a month before anyone in China, the obvious implications would be too explosive to avoid considering. And any such discussion would have ensured that his very important 31,000 word series never appeared in any respectable venue. But by including that crucial paragraph, he may at least have begun to raise questions in the minds of his establishmentarian readers.
An effective media strategy may often require a division of labor, with different horses for different courses. Given that my own writings and webzine lack the “mainstream respectability” of Quillette, I can be much more candid in my analyses, and will once again repeat a few of the crucial paragraphs I had first published back in April:
But with the horrific consequences of our own later governmental inaction being obvious, elements within our intelligence agencies have sought to demonstrate that they were not the ones asleep at the switch. Earlier this month, an ABC News story cited four separate government sources to reveal that as far back as late November, a special medical intelligence unit within our Defense Intelligence Agency had produced a report warning that an out-of-control disease epidemic was occurring in the Wuhan area of China, and widely distributed that document throughout the top ranks of our government, warning that steps should be taken to protect US forces based in Asia. After the story aired, a Pentagon spokesman officially denied the existence of that November report, while various other top level government and intelligence officials refused to comment. But a few days later, Israeli television mentioned that in November American intelligence had indeed shared such a report on the Wuhan disease outbreak with its NATO and Israeli allies, thus seeming to independently confirm the complete accuracy of the original ABC News story and its several government sources.
It therefore appears that elements of the Defense Intelligence Agency were aware of the deadly viral outbreak in Wuhan more than a month before any officials in the Chinese government itself. Unless our intelligence agencies have pioneered the technology of precognition, I think this may have happened for the same reason that arsonists have the earliest knowledge of future fires.
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The deadly SARS and MERS outbreaks in East Asia and the Near East had never significantly spread back to America (or Europe), so the plotters wrongly assumed that the same would be the case with Covid-19. Anyway, since international organizations always ranked the US and Europe as having the best and most effective public health systems for combating any disease epidemic, they believed that any possible blowback damage would be very minor.