|
Manufacturing
consent for war on China?
US Attorney
General escalating rhetoric aimed at China
By Ryan Fahey
The
attorney general said China is a bigger threat
than Russia 'geopolitically, economically,
militarily and a threat to the integrity of our
institutions'
April 10, 2020 "Information
Clearing House"
- US General Attorney Bill
Barr has called China America's
biggest threat and says the danger posed by the
communist country is 'very serious' amid escalating
tensions with Beijing over the coronavirus pandemic.
In an interview yesterday,
amid rising anti-China rhetoric from the administration
about Beijing's alleged 'cover-up' of its
coronavirus infection rate, Barr was asked whether
he considered
Russia or China the biggest security risk to the
upcoming presidential election.
'In my opinion, it's
China', Barr told FoxNews. 'Not just to the election
process, but, I think, across the board.'
'There's simply no
comparison,' Barr added. 'China is a very serious threat
to the United States - geopolitically, economically,
militarily, and a threat to the integrity of our
institutions, given their ability to influence things.'
He also said: “The
Chinese are engaged in a full-court blitzkrieg of
stealing American technology, trying to influence our
political system, trying to steal secrets at our
research universities and so forth.'
The attorney general's
comments come amid a growing international feud over the
World Health Organisation's response to cornavirus and
whether it was hoodwink by a Chinese cover-up of the
extent of its cronavirus pandemic.
President Trump has
called has called the WHO 'China-centric' and complained
they 'missed the call' when it came to the coronavirus -
and Peter Navarro added fuel to the fire Wednesday night
when he slammed WHO chief Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesu
as one of China’s 'proxies'.
In an interview yesterday
Bill Barr said that China, not Russia, was the
biggest threat to the United States 'geopolitically,
economically, militarily'
Tedros was called a 'proxy'
of China by Navarro in an interview with
Fox's.
'The U.N. itself
has 15 specialized agencies, including the WHO,' Navarro
said to host Martha MacCallum.
'What China has
been doing very aggressively over the last decade is to
try to gain control of those by electing people to the
top. It already controls five of the 15, also, by using
proxies, colonial-like proxies, like Tedros [Adhanom
Ghebreyesus] at the WHO.
'As you can see in
this crisis, the damage [done by] that kind of control
by China [of] the key health organization has been
absolutely enormous. They suppressed the human to human
transmission [data], they refused to call it a
pandemic,' he added.
Trump's main beef
with the United Nations health group is that their
directors said it wasn't necessary to ban travelers
coming from China when the coronavirus started spreading
beyond Wuhan, where it originated.
The president
bragged that his early ban of some travelers from China
kept it from being a greater threat to the US.
Trump has followed
the lead of prominent conservatives in complaining that
the WHO has been too friendly to China during the
coronavirus crisis.
He wrote on
Twitter: 'The WHO really blew it. For some reason,
funded largely by the United States, yet very China
centric. We will be giving that a good look.'
Vice President
Mike Pence also weighed in on Hannity last night,
warning that the administration will be asking 'tough
questions' of the WHO in the aftermath of the
coronavirus pandemic.
He said: 'This is
a president who believes in accountability, and the
American taxpayers provide tens of millions of dollars
to the World Health Organization,' Pence said. 'And as
the president said yesterday, I suspect we will continue
to do that, but that doesn't mean that at the right time
in the future we aren't going to ask the tough questions
about how the World Health Organization could have been
so wrong.'
'Literally at the
time President Trump stood up the coronavirus task force
in January and suspended all travel from China, just
days before that, the World Health Organization was
continuing to diminish the threat of the coronavirus and
its impact in China,' the vice president said. 'We'll
get to the answers of that and we'll create
accountability, just like the American people would want
us to do.'
The World Health
Organization has been criticized for not pushing China
to clarify its response and question its numbers on the
disease. There is skepticism about the numbers Beijing
is reporting.
During a press
conference earlier this week, the president was asked
why he thought the WHO was 'China centric'.
Trump responded:
'I don't know, they seem to come down on the side of
China.'
'Don't close your
borders to China, don't do this, they don't report
what's really going on, they didn't see it and yet they
were there. They didn't see what was going on in
Wuhan...they must have seen it, but they didn't report
it,' he said.
On January 31, the
Trump administration announced travel restrictions on
people coming from China due to the outbreak.
Trump was
following the lead of American conservatives including
Florida Sen. Rick Scott who placed blame on WHO for
'helping Communist China cover up a global pandemic.'
Other GOP
lawmakers have floated a theory that WHO is under
China's spell.
Last week, Sen.
Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican, said WHO's
Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus should
resign because 'he allowed Beijing to use the WHO to
mislead the global community.'
As did Sen. Martha
McSally, an Arizona Republican.
'They need to come
clean and another piece of this is, the WHO has to stop
covering for them,' she said of China. 'I think Dr.
Tedros needs to step down,' McSally said on Fox Business
Network.
'We need to take
some actions to address this issue. It's just
irresponsible, it's unconscionable what they have done
here while we have people dying across the globe,'
McSally added.
Scott, the Florida
senator, said the Senate Homeland Security Committee
needed to launch an investigation into WHO's handling of
the virus.
In late January,
Tedros complimented China's President Xi Jinping for the
country's handling of the virus, as the Chinese leader
centralized the response after local officials in Wuhan
couldn't keep the outbreak under control.
But Xi also
controlled the flow of information, with reports coming
out of China that the country had been trying to silence
whistleblowers.
At the same time,
Democratic governors, lawmakers and pundits have
condemned Trump's response in combatting the virus,
suggesting he did too little, too late.
Yesterday, Tedros
warned the president to stop politicizing the
coronavirus crisis 'if you don't want many more body
bags.'
'At the end of the
day, the people belong to all political parties. The
focus of all political parties should be to save their
people, please do not politicize this virus,' WHO
Director-General Tedros said in a virtual press
briefing.
'If you want to be
exploited and if you want to have many more body bags,
then you do it. If you don't want many more body bags,
then you refrain from politicizing it.'
Trump fired back.
'So when he say's
politicizing he's politicizing, and he shouldn't be,'
the president said at his daily briefing when he was
asked about Tedros' comment.
'I can't believe
he's talking about politics when look at the
relationship they have to China,' Trump said and
repeated his charge the agency favored China above other
countries.
Tedros, at his
briefing, made an appeal for global unit and said all
leaders of all political parties should focus on saving
their people.
'Unity is the only
option to defeat this virus,' he said.
'Without unity, we
assure you even any country that may have a better
system will be in trouble and more crisis. That's our
message. Unity at the national level,' he said. 'No need
to use COVID to score political points. No need. You
have many other ways to prove yourselves.'
Trump has also
threatened to cut off the WHO's supply of money from the
United States this week. He said: 'We're going to put a
hold on money spent to the WHO. We're going to put a
very powerful hold on it. And we're going to see.
'It's a great
thing when it works but when they call every shot wrong
that's not good. They are always on the side of China.'
When the president
was asked if it was a smart move to cut off funds to the
major global health organization during a worldwide
pandemic he backed away from his previous threat.
'I'm not saying
I'm going to do it, but I'm going to look at it,' Trump
pledged.
The president was
also asked why he thought the WHO was 'China centric'.
Trump responded:
'I don't know, they seem to come down on the side of
China.'
'Don't close your
borders to China, don't do this, they don't report
what's really going on, they didn't see it and yet they
were there. They didn't see what was going on in
Wuhan...they must have seen it, but they didn't report
it,' he said.
On January 31, the
Trump administration announced travel restrictions on
people coming from China due to the outbreak.
But WHO said such
bans were not needed, noting that 'travel bans to
affected areas or denial of entry to passengers coming
from affected areas are usually not effective in
preventing the importation' of coronavirus cases, but
may instead 'have a significant economic and social
impact.'
And the group
noted that 'restricting the movement of people and goods
during public health emergencies is ineffective in most
situations and may divert resources from other
interventions.'
'Fortunately I
rejected their advice on keeping our borders open to
China early on,' Trump tweeted Tuesday.
'Why did they give
us such a faulty recommendation?' the president asked.
WHO is also still
not recommending that every person wears a mask, while
the Centers of Disease Control made the voluntary
recommendation last week.
In late January,
Tedros complimented China's President Xi Jinping for the
country's handling of the virus, as the Chinese leader
centralized the response after local officials in Wuhan
couldn't keep the outbreak under control.
But Xi also controlled the
flow of information, with reports coming out of China
that the country had been trying to silence
whistleblowers.
President Trump
attacked the World Health Organization on Tuesday,
calling it too 'China centric' and suggesting that it
was hiding information about the coronavirus from the
rest of the world
Trump also
accused World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus of playing politics with his
criticism of Trump
Trump
suggested he might cut the US's funding that goes toward
WHO, calling the United Nations agency 'very China
centric'
"Source"
Do you agree or disagree?
Post your comment here | 
