Thursday, 8 February 2007
Bird Flu in the UK: Another Government Inside Job?
On January 30 this year, turkeys started dying at a farm in Suffolk, England. Two days later, another 860 birds died there. The state veterinary service was contacted, and on February 3 it was confirmed to be an outbreak of the most dangerous form of bird flu, the H5N1 strain. The farm's entire flock of 159,000 turkeys was culled. More than 320 farm workers had to take the antiviral drug Tamiflu, though so far none appear to have become infected with the disease. According to The Guardian, this is "the first H5N1 outbreak in British poultry since an infection of 8,000 turkeys in Norfolk in December 1991."
What is suspicious about this whole affair is that on January 30, the day when the first chicks died at the farm, the British government and numerous agencies were holding the first phase of a massive training exercise to test their responses to an outbreak of bird flu. A Department of Health spokesperson said, “It was pure fortuitous timing on our behalf." The exercise, called Winter Willow, is described as "a UK wide pandemic influenza exercise sponsored by the Cabinet Office and the Department of Health in London, and organised by the Health Protection Agency." Its aim was "to enhance the UK's ability to manage the effects of an influenza pandemic by practising and validating response policies and the decision-making process at National, Regional and Local levels." The Sunday Mirror reported that, in order "to prepare Britain for a lethal bird flu outbreak," Winter Willow would involve "all the emergency services, town hall officials and government ministers including Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt and Environment Secretary David Miliband." While the exercise's first stage was on January 30, a second stage is planned for February 19-20. Patricia Hewitt told ITV 1's The Sunday Edition, "[W]e've still got more weeks to go of that exercise so that we learn the lessons of this."
Hewitt called Winter Willow, "the biggest planning exercise there's ever been on pandemic flu." The Sunday Times called it "the largest emergency exercise since the cold war." It added, "Police will stop people entering exclusion zones and emergency centres will be set up to make the exercise as real as possible. Ministers will take part in mock media conferences in what is being described as 'one of the largest and most ambitious' projects of its kind ever conducted. The exercise will also involve international agencies and bodies, including the World Health Organisation and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control."
We could perhaps dismiss the concurrence of the Winter Willow exercise with the actual outbreak of bird flu in Suffolk as just an extraordinary coincidence. However, this seems increasingly unlikely if we look back to the previous incident of H5N1 bird flu in the UK, which occurred in early April 2006. On that occasion, a dead swan found in a harbor in Fife, Scotland was discovered to have the strain. And at the very same time, the British government was holding its first full bird flu exercise -- "Exercise Hawthorn." The BBC described Exercise Hawthorn as "an office-based initiative set three days into a hypothetical outbreak of avian influenza in poultry." Run by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA), it was based on a "scenario in which bird flu was found on a free-range poultry farm in Norfolk, with suspected cases at a turkey farm in the north of England and at an egg production unit in south Wales." Also participating were Downing Street, the Environment Agency, the Ministry of Defence, and other government departments. The exercise was canceled in response to the actual case of bird flu. The UK's Chief Veterinary Officer Debby Reynolds said, "I brought to an end the national avian influenza exercise to ensure that we can bring all our resources to bear on this situation."
The fact that both of the most recent incidents of H5N1 bird flu in Britain have coincided with major training exercises is evidence that the bird flu has been no accident, but instead due to deliberate acts by a rogue group working within the government. The purpose is to frighten the British public.
Internet investigative reporter Paul Joseph Watson explains how training exercises can help such a rogue group to perform its treasonous acts: "Staged-managed manufactured crises are always paralleled by drills of the same nature. This provides culpable deniability if any government agency is caught with their hands in the cookie jar. They can say it was just part of the drill."
This has been most obvious in the cases of large-scale terrorist incidents. The 9/11 attacks against New York and Washington occurred at the same time as numerous government and military training exercises were taking place. One of these was based around the scenario of a plane crashing into a government building just 24 miles from the Pentagon. Another was described as "an air defense exercise simulating an attack on the United States." And a further exercise was described as a "practice Armageddon."
Four years later, at the same time as the 7/7 London bombings occurred, a crisis management company was "running an exercise for a company of over a thousand people in London based on simultaneous bombs going off precisely at the railway stations where [the actual attacks] happened" that morning.
Does anyone else see a pattern here?