Glenn Greenwald@ggreenwald
With Tulsi Gabbard's new revelations about US bio labs in many countries around the world including Ukraine, it's fascinating recall the bizarre series of events that gave rise to this controversy in the first place:
In May of 2022, some of us began asking whether the US had bio labs in Ukraine, what they were for, and why the US had them there. For asking those questions, we were instantly branded as "pro-Russian conspiracy theorists" in official Ukrainian intel reports, on our Wikipedia pages, by countless media outlets, etc. This was and remains one of the most bizarre episodes I've ever seen.
Before May 2022, when we asked those questions, barely anyone had ever thought about let alone asked about "bio weapons in Ukraine"! I certainly hadn't. Like most people, I had never mentioned a word about it because it had never occurred to me we had them there.
But then, Marco Rubio summoned Victoria Nuland to the Senate and asked her in a televised hearing under oath about these "rumors," clearly expecting her to immediately debunk them as obvious Kremlin lies and to proclaim the US had no such bio labs in Ukraine.
Instead, Nuland did the opposite! She *confirmed* key aspects of these "rumors," and she explicitly warned that the US has several "bio research labs" in Ukraine that are so dangerous that they must not be allowed to fall into Russia's hands.
When some of us heard Nuland's rather shocking admission -- the first-ever disclosure about these labs -- we of course asked: wait! what? Why does the US have bio labs in Ukraine, and what are the US and Ukraine doing in those labs that make them (in Nuland's eyes) so dangerous?? (Note: nobody ever suggested that the presence of these bio labs in Ukraine justified the Russian invasion; we just wanted answers about these US bio labs that Nuland had casually divulged).
We never got real answers. We got smear campaigns. To this day, our names are formally attached to claims that we spread "conspiracy theories" for asking about these labs even though it was Victoria Nuland herself who was the one who accidentally revealed them for the first time in a Senate hearing in response to a shocked Marco Rubio. They then quickly tried shutting down any questioning by pretending that Nuland never said this, and it was just a bunch of paid Kremlin mouthpieces who were spreading lies.
You see the same tactics now being against Tulsi for releasing this new intelligence report. Watch the Nuland testimony in question:
