at least three people are injured in a shooting at the headquarters of you tube in california police say the female shooter has taken a. group of scientists. able to pinpoint the source of the nerve agent used in the poisoning of a russian double agent and his daughter. up in paris as rail workers launching a nationwide strike against the president on the drive to overhaul the state from the transport industry. for the latest on these stories you can head to our dot com coming up cross talk discusses the diplomatic fallout from the poisoning in the u.k. . hello

and welcome to cross talk where all things are considered. words have consequences and threatening actions can be very dangerous this is the atmosphere engulfing the west's relations with russia the poisoning incident in the u.k. has yet to be explained to the public but this is not stop the british and american governments from playing the role of judge jury and executioner. talking toxic relations i'm joined by my guest charles shu bridge in london he is a security analyst and a former u.k. army and counterterrorism intelligence officer in brussels we have any she is a former british intelligence officer and writer and in washington we cross to

james jatra see is a former advisor to the us senate republican leadership all right as always crosstalk rules in effect that means you can jump in anytime you want and i always . ne let me go to you first in brussels you know a lot you were only on last week the more we learn about what happened with this poisoning incident there's only been one thing that has been consistent russia did it everything else keeps changing very fluid except for the conclusion reflect upon that any please well the more we know the less we know apparently because we have a situation where one the police had to build up another dental chain to they had to identify the substance three had to find a motive but forget all that in terms of a classic investigation technique within a few hours the british media was saying it must be in russia because he's a russian spy and within a week the russian government saying it was russia so we have a situation where things have escalated ass control in hugely fast ways and to date

a month later we still don't even know exactly how this so-called substance was applied to these two people it was supposed to be incredibly toxic substance but two of the victims have survived and of recovering and scriptural himself is apparently in a stable condition and three we still don't know washington involved in which might create a motive over the last eight years since had safe haven as a former m i six agent finding safe sanctuary having a pension in the u.k. so the whole thing is a mess the fact that the british government rushed in to condemn russia is a mess the fact that they have apparently shared so-called intelligence with other allies in order to strong arm them into trying to make sure that they expel diplomat is a mess and it's just escalating it's metastasizing in a really frightening way your international relations with you know you know channels or what one of the tragedies of all this is that how do you walk this back

because you the british government in the american government have invested themselves. so much into this before there was an investigation before there was discussion of evidence it's almost impossible for them to walk back now i mean they've got this story and if they can't prove they'll say just trust us which fewer people actually do that anymore they've actually boxed themselves in and this is what i think is going to be very dangerous because if evidence is we have this chemical weapons organisation if they don't back this up ok there's going to be a lot of egg on a lot of people's faces and with the political environment in the u.k. that will not be permitted go ahead charles yes of course some of us have argued in the past and i know you covered it yourself of course why would the british and the americans wait for an investigation because they decided to take certain actions as we know to put in change this as you pointed out largely unstoppable train of

expulsions and tit for tat actions against different countries taken action against russia why would they wait for an investigation if there's any possibility it's all so that investigation may not produce the results that they want and then if they don't produce the results the government wanted of course they then couldn't take those actions what's bizarre to me is that perhaps trying to fend off these kind of criticisms in the last few days the united kingdom kingdom government has actually hardened its position if you look at the statements coming from the foreign office from the british ambassador in moscow and so on it seems that any doubt whatsoever that the russian government is responsible for this has been removed the british government in the foreign office of specifically explicitly said over the last few days repeatedly so we know it's a pop up considered message there is no doubt that the russian government was responsible for this but actually of course there is a great deal of doubt and i think people understand this not just in russia but also amongst european capitals now we've got a situation where annie is quite right to mention that the. the suggestion has been

and sunny one has been carried a lot of british media that if. european capitals some of them not all of them have backed the british government in its assessment publicly at least then they must have been shown convincing evidence and yet we can see from the comments of for example some german politicians and also the czech president himself was saying he backed the expulsions because you need to stand with an ally when he asks you to stand with them he said very pointedly we need to see evidence and that suggests very strongly to me that they actually haven't been shown evidence they have just backed britain because britain has very pointedly asked them to do so and allies stand with allies but eventually britain is going to have to produce some evidence and if it doesn't you're right it is going to be on people's face and i think jim you know what charles would say that i think that's really where the us angle is i think of course london was elbowing european capitals to follow but the americans when they put their foot down particularly when it comes to nato people begin to

fall in line what's really interesting is that the media spin is that there is unity in the atlantic alliance actually the the it's actually just the opposite there isn't a whole lot of unity there there are members of nato said they're not going to expel and sitters and they're not going to get into this parlay here so i mean if you were honestly to take a look at it the elbowing and pushing people around has not been nearly as effective i think as london washington had hoped for go ahead jim. well that's right if peter of charleston and he will indulge me a little yankee arrogance here i've always liked to think of the u.k. as our poodle but it seems in this case the americans or the british brutal that they throw these accusations out there show us no proof whatsoever but the americans say well if it's good enough for our british friends it's good enough for us and that's what's got at least most of the allies going through the motions you notice that the vast majority of russian diplomats that were thrown out came from the united kingdom from the united states from ukraine and then you look at the

continent one or two here and there before m h country and then several countries like bulgaria and grace that every refused to do so so i think that the united states is the necessary muscle you have to back up the british accusations to get these other countries intimidated and on board but what you know this this is a way is like tony blair's swearing by the american lives on. in iraq except now we're doing it just because our british friends say so well anyhow you know obviously a great place really well into the russia russia russia nonsense going on in the states i mean this is one of the reasons why people are pushing it because it dovetails very nicely into the russian bogeyman on the stage ok i've watched the coverage in the us on the cable stations and hasn't gotten a whole lot of coverage but it what it does is that it's basically says well they're there they go again up to their nasty stuff that's how it's in played

they're not nearly the same it has been in the u.k. what is to resume's the goal in all of this i mean. you know over the last few days a anti-aircraft kalyan has returned to germany that was withdrawn at the end of the cold war i mean is this where we're going to go here because i can tell you if they were if the nato wants to fight in a conflict with russia it will pay very dearly for the i always tell my viewers here listen to the words not. to the bluster because russia is prepared go ahead. now i think it's very interesting that against altenburg who's the head of nato right moment was one of the first people to say very clearly after the u.k. claimed it must be russia that we need to wait for proof and manual macron also did that first week after this attack but france was also very rapidly pulled into line to sign up and say no no the u.k. knows that russia carried out this attack so this is going on i think there might

be two strands here first of all the u.k. wants to puff itself up like an animal and a threat to look bigger because it's got brakes it going on it's got trade wars going on it's being expelled from. choice so it's under threat as a country but secondly it wants to try and project its power through nato so that's what they're trying to do i think but you know it's a major problem for the u.k. because it's caught between a rock and a hard place between america between the. growing so crowed eastern bloc which is russia and china and let's not forget the influence of china whatever half the countries in the e.u. have said that they are going to sporty baseless evidence free evidence light assertions of the government moment you e.u. countries are not doing so but also thirty every other country in the world is not doing so and china has categorically said this is supporting the russian position

they want to wait for evidence we are still lacking in evidence you know charles i like when he said there because may's government is doing is it showing our europe that it's still very important to have relations with the u.k. respectable what's going on with briggs it and of course it's proof positive that the special relationship with america is meaningful because the u.k. will remain a surrogate of the united states in the european continent go ahead. point just now i mean the number of countries and. pulled out diplomats and it's twenty years one hundred ninety odd countries in the world that haven't pulled out diplomats and haven't backed britain's line on this not worth considering the world is not. the west likes to think it is. canada and the united states it's plenty of other countries besides but going back to their main question about motivation one needs to think about that britain has a long history even as boyce johnson was boasting the other day of being in the forefront of confronting what it cost the russian menace but this goes back of

course hundreds of years and yet the imperial times and so when we look at the timing of this to discredit russia just before the presidential elections just before the world cup cup coming up and then also just before the british local elections coming up in just a few weeks time in which before this incident happened opinion polls showed to reason why it was going to do extremely badly and now largely because the media has one hundred percent back on this blaming russia that now she's starting to write high notes opinion polls and so when we look at motivations concern for this instant britain has many motivations and as we know of course also has the capability to carry this out it doesn't mean britain did carry it out but it has the motivation and the ability just as russia does ok let me jump in here we're going to go to a short break and after that short break we'll continue our discussion on toxic relations stayed with r.t. .

played for many clubs over the years so i know the game and so i got. the ball isn't only about what happens on the pitch to the final school it's about the passion from the fans it's a gauge of the super manager killian and spending to the twenty million. it's an experience like nothing else on the. because i want to share what i think all you know about the beautiful guy great so. it's going to. prison industry is the only industry that really routinely consistently provide returns on the day that americans try to sell to keep goldman sachs and j.p. morgan from having a clear insolvency because technically that's what they are but to keep those tanks

rolling gotta build prisons because it's a guaranteed income rate because a security selden chinese america's an apartheid state driven by wall street financier's and the jay gould's of the twenty first century. welcome back across the uk where all things are considered i'm peter bell to remind you we're discussing toxic relations. can we go back to jim in washington you know one of the if we can just kind of broaden this out because i think one of the things that's being missed and being lost actually are some very fundamental principles that we expect from the state and our media and those are the presumption of innocence due process and the right

to dissent all three or under savage attack by this this cobol of liberal corporate media and governments ok and these things three issues that i mention are the pillar of western society and they're being crushed go ahead jim. well i guess peter i would say welcome to the twenty first century i mean that's nice to talk about all those needs riches and powdered wig principles in our constitution that we got from our mother country but they simply do not apply anymore you know this was mentioned earlier that the brits will have egg on their face of the proof doesn't come out i don't expect the proof to come out and i don't have any reason to suppose that the o.p.c. w. will not be as corrupted in this process as the so-called jim jones the best a gate of mechanism was on accusations against syria look let's look at the bigger picture here for over a year we've had this whole russia collusion hysteria going on in the united states

where does a trace back to to the russians no to christopher steel at m i six agent who's got a connection by the way this cripple through this or bas outfit in this fellow what pablo miller is his name that that when we look at the relationship between the elements of the american and the and the british deep states the various agencies m i six g c h q f.b.i. cia the other groups here that have been involved in this i would say conspiracy to not only subvert the american election but to make sure that our relations with russia stay worse and getting worse all the time that this is almost in a way a phase two of what we've been saying for quite some time in terms of a political campaign ok andy i'm going to ask you a hypothetical question and it's really quite serious is it possible that this incident is just a fabrication but there is no incident because i keep looking at what is being presented to the public and it is so sketchy there's no physical forensic evidence

been proved provided to us ok i mean there's even talk that this is a facebook page was accessed when she was in the coma or something like that i mean what happens is then we're not given information to the public then you start kind of rattle your brain like well what does this all mean here i mean it seems to me that. this is what's happening this is how this whole process is being presented to the public but it does create an enormous amount of doubt at least in some people and i think if you look at the comments under articles written about this there's an enormous amount of skepticism and then they either stop comments or they delete all of the comments i'm not convinced the public is so on board with this go ahead and. i don't think there is a huge amount of trust no. and in fact i've been invited on to other media outlets and u.k. to discuss this why to seventy or eighty percent of their respondents not trust what the media is saying the. hosts of the shows are. and actually why should they

not be astonished after the the mess of the weapons west structure with iraq and other lies that have happened around intelligence you know torture x. extradition all the rest of it so this is within a context a wider context over the last two decades of distrust of what our governments what our intelligence what our military tells us that's why people are not trusting what's going on moment in this particular case yes there has been an absolute does thought of of any form of intelligence any form of evidence any form of information from the medical team trying to care for the script holes so of course people are going to be questioning this and there has been a lot of very hard evidence coming out about what the porton down scientific institute might be doing what other institutes around the world might be doing i mean evidence even published in a magazine called the new scientist which is

a very prestigious scientific magazine in the u.k. where scientists come together and said actually these so-called novacek family of agents might and have been replicated around the world over the last couple of decades and certainly of the last decade when. they formally were published by the guy who blew the whistle when he defected to america so we have a situation where all this information is out there in the world so far you can government to immediately immediately say it must be russia could only have come from russia because this was developed under the soviet union in one nine hundred seventy s. it's so specious of course people are suspicious you know charles. you know in all of this you know what was the what is the made government and the americans what do they expect russia to do under these circumstances if they are not presented evidence of their guilt they're just post the say they're guilty i've never heard

that is childish i mean i have no i can't comprehend why they would even do that it's like it's like a maze government is talking to a wall it doesn't want to reply it doesn't want any kind of dialogue here so what are the right what do they expect the russians to do go ahead charles. well of course they expect the russians to do as they have to because the russians have had no alternative but to act in a way is to say well we are the accused party until you provide us with some kind of evidence we are in a position to be to comment on that and then russia is taken out further by saying but hey why don't we get bearing in mind the circumstances of this why don't we actually have a joint investigation where we can put our input into and that may actually come to haunt the british side that they haven't actually taken up this opportunity because of course in the last day or so details of a another potential motive in this case of emerge it's been emerge for example of that report only a couple of days before this poison attempt was made on her and her father.

something like two hundred thousand dollars came into her account from. the sale of father's house through his divorce and yet also it seems that only last year her brother who died supposedly in mysterious circumstances was the beneficiary of that money and so here if these reports are true this could start to really ring panics alarm signals for the british government that actually over here we actually have a potentially alternative motivation for this kind of killing if for example this kind of drug could be a bit st and we hear from the reports that the people concerned had high links to soviet and soviet days intelligence officials and so therefore it may well be that there is a reason for us to have a joint russian and british investigation so we can that's what you said about the investigation itself the police have been extraordinarily quiet on this they have been no c.c.t.v. is she there's been no descriptions issues and so on i would say perhaps to defend

british police if it's possible on this they may be keeping their cards close to their chest because they maybe cutely aware of the political pressure that they are likely to be placed under if there's any suggestion that the inquiry is not going to weigh the government wants after all as i mentioned earlier the british government said without doubt there is no. russian government being blamed so people have a right to ask what chance therefore is that of a nonpolitical pressurized british police investigation of even considering alternative much of a sions and possible it is you know jim just from what charles said right there it sounds like you know that the british authorities the police authorities sound like the f.b.i. during the american campaign intensely politicized corrupt ok again i was talking about some of the major features of of the rule of law and the end seems to be tumbling down all over again because you've got you've already drawn your conclusion and you work backwards ok i was in graduate school for a long time that's called bad science and it's actually immoral go ahead jim it is

and frankly peter i think that's the the charitable way to interpret this that we're on t.v. i don't think we're on t.v. and. i well i would i would tend toward the other thing is that the people making these accusations themselves do not believe them and in fact know that they are not true and if i were in the russian shoes and it's not my job to give them advice but as sort of saying well we didn't do it where's the proof we want a joint investigation i would turn around say look these two russian citizens were poisoned on your territory great britain within ten miles of your top chemical weapons facility unless we hear otherwise we presume you're responsible for this we demand proof that you're not. look this idea that somehow they're british are just sort of jumping to a conclusion i think it's much too fair here and to fair to the american government as well i think there is a deliberate provocation going on and i do too and that they know that they're making false charges just this is in the case of the w m d's in iraq i think most

of the people making those accusations knew full well that saddam hussein did not have these but they were making the actions they should anyway because it serves their purpose well jim they never would have invaded if there were weapons of mass destruction that's logical ok they never would have done it that's why they did it because they were there any you told me before on this program that city gate was under the protection of the british authorities is there going to be any kind of snafu about that they were actually supposed to be protecting him right. of course i mean he was a high value agent an asset working in russia for ten years he was reporting agent names back to m i six so people keep calling him a double agent he wasn't he was a british agent right they've been turned and betrayed russia so that's the situation he was in but you know the russians rinse him clean of information for they released him of course m i six nation of course and they received him that's why they allowed him to go free pension tomorrow bought

a mass allows him to live an open life so you know again in terms of motivation why on earth would the russians try and kill this guy now when he's been you know free for years he's been clean for years i would always said for many years i think charles would probably agree with this that in terms of motive it's going to be down to something he would be working in now in the last eight years where it's been living in the u.k. now if you was involved in the christmassy alto ca that might lead to motivation he might even work with other people as well we just don't know i would hope that the intelligence agencies and the police would be investigating those leads at the moment trying work out who actually much has a motive to time carry out. any i mean let me go to charles here a very considerable sort of this program i mean libby authorities are not looking for alternative under motives because once you instantly say you have the culprit

there is no it's like o.j. simpson ok you know you know he did it ok. you know why would the authorities look for the killer of his wife and her friend you know he did it ok in this case here they've already determined the outcome so why would they why would they even look for alternatives go ahead. well it may be i mean with the british police is is perhaps one of the least politicized police forces in the world i speak as many years as having worked in the british police and of course i know full well they can be susceptible to political pressure and it can you can imagine a situation where there's more political pressure and miss where the government is declared absolutely certainly that russia did it but it may well be that one of the reasons why they rushed to take action before the police investigation is because they actually suspect there may be a chance a police investigation won't prove their case and certainly i think the police will be wanting to look at alternatives if only to dismiss them and so we even though i

agree with what you're the logic of what you're saying that it seems that the government has without any doubt already come to its conclusions before any investigation we should wait as should the british government of waited of course in the american government all those are followed it should await the outcome of the british investigation and then if necessary we can pick holes in and see where they are on the way they've gone right but let's await the british investigation and let's wait see what the o.p.c. w. says well though i suspect the matter what the british investigation say it will be spun to support when they were in the report comes out we're going to have you all back again many thanks and i guess in london brussels and in washington and thanks to our viewers for watching us here are to see you next time and remember cross talk world's.

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later on a. plane. this is going bust broadcasting around the world from washington d.c. i'm partial to him coming up today r t correspondent dan cohen tells us about the teachers' strike in the u.s. and oklahoma and kentucky and the energetic and always insight will are most of the stocks whooshes back and we'll talk tech stocks as they continue their volatile ride and reaction to some of president trump's tweets and with regard to amazon his words today plus r.t. correspondent ashley banks tells us about one of the most important ingredients in our cell phones and electric cars and why there is a clamor for that commodity is to jam packed show so let's go first we had some. mick mulvaney.