SOURCE: Salon.com, 2020-04-17 | reddit
An Israeli news report on Thursday revealed that the country was told in November by U.S. intelligence about the potential threat of the coronavirus-warnings that were also made to NATO and to the White House-a clear contradiction of Pentagon claims last week that no such report existed.
"The smoking gun has arrived," tweeted Joel Rubin, a former aide to the presidential campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).
The Smoking Gun has arrived.
The US knew about #Coronavirus in November and shared the intel with NATO and Israel.
There was no #WHO cover-up. Their funding should be immediately restored. https://t.co/IQdxZEtlWq
-- Joel Rubin (@JoelMartinRubin) April 17, 2020
The information reportedly came from U.S. intelligence monitoring of internal Chinese communications that revealed the potential danger of the outbreak before it was publicly known.
The Times of Israel reported that U.S. intelligence agencies were aware of the disease as early as the second week of November and shared the information with President Donald Trump's White House, NATO, and Israel. The U.S. administration did not deem the report "of interest" while Israeli officials discussed the possibility of the threat but ultimately took no action. What NATO's response was to the report-if any-is thus far unknown.
Reporting on April 8 from ABC News revealed the existence of a November 2019 report by the National Center for Medical Intelligence (NCMI) on the potential of a pandemic from the Wuhan outbreak.
According to ABC News:
The report was the result of analysis of wire and computer intercepts, coupled with satellite images. It raised alarms because an out-of-control disease would pose a serious threat to U.S. forces in Asia-forces that depend on the NCMI's work. And it paints a picture of an American government that could have ramped up mitigation and containment efforts far earlier to prepare for a crisis poised to come home.
The Pentagon told ABC News on April 8 that no such report from the NCMI existed, but Thursday's news could appear to contradict that denial-though it is unclear if the two reports were the same or just contemporaneous.
SOURCE: TimesOfIsrael.com, 2020-04-16
US intelligence agencies alerted Israel to the coronavirus outbreak in China already in November 2019, Israeli television reported Thursday. According to Channel 12 news, the US intelligence community became aware of the emerging disease in Wuhan in the second week of that month and drew up a classified document. Information on the disease outbreak was not in the public domain at that stage -- and was known only apparently to the Chinese government.
US intelligence informed the Trump administration, "which did not deem it of interest," but the report said the Americans also decided to update two allies with the classified document: NATO and Israel, specifically the IDF. The network said Israeli military officials later in November 2019 discussed the possibility of the spread of the virus to the region and how it would affect Israel and neighboring countries.
The intelligence also reached Israel's decision makers and the Health Ministry, where "nothing was done," according to the report. Last week, ABC News reported that US intelligence officials were warning about the coronavirus in a report prepared in November 2019 by the American military's National Center for Medical Intelligence. It was unclear if that was the same report that was said to have been shared with Israel.
Colonel Shane Day, the NCMI director, denied last week that any such report existed. "As a matter of practice the National Center for Medical Intelligence does not comment publicly on specific intelligence matters," he said. "However, in the interest of transparency during this current public health crisis, we can confirm that media reporting about the existence/release of a National Center for Medical Intelligence Coronavirus-related product/assessment in November of 2019 is not correct. No such NCMI product exists."
In its first major step to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, Israel announced on January 30 2020 it was barring all flights from China, ten days after Chinese leader Xi Jinping issued his first public comments on the virus and the Asian country's top epidemiologist said for the first time it could be spread from person to person.
An Associated Press report on Wednesday said Xi's warning came seven days after Chinese officials secretly determined that they were likely facing a pandemic, potentially costing China and other countries valuable time to prepare for the outbreak. Doctors in Wuhan, the city at the center of the outbreak in China, are reported to have first tried to have warn about the virus in December, but were censored. The Chinese government has repeatedly denied suppressing information in the early days, saying it immediately reported the outbreak to the World Health Organization.
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