U.S. Army Colonel Lawrence Sellin (Ret.), Ph.D. previously worked as a research physiologist at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick, Maryland, and served in Iraq and Afghanistan.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFqxEu7GWsg&t=17s
By ION MIHAI PACEPA | February 9, 2018
Seen from my vantage point, the four-page FISA abuse memo authored by Rep. Devin Nunes is proof that former president Barack Obama and Democratic Party leaders wanted to transform the U.S. into a Russian-style intelligence dictatorship — and the FBI into a KGB-style instrument for rewriting American history by smearing its capitalist politicians.
They say that history repeats itself. If you have lived two lives, as I have done, you have a good chance of seeing a re-enactment with your own eyes.
Forty years ago, I paid with two death sentences from my native Romania. I had publicly revealed that Ceausescu’s highly praised independence from Moscow was in fact an undercover intelligence dictatorship, designed to transform Romania into a monument to him by annihilating his critics and enemies. “I’ll give you a name, and you’ll build a criminal record for him,” Ceausescu used to tell the head of the Securitate — his Marxist version of the FBI. For him, lying was the first step toward stealing and killing.
In July 1978, Ceausescu gave such a name to my foreign intelligence service, the DIE, and that was the last straw for me. In an open letter to the captive daughter I had to leave behind, repeatedly broadcast by Radio Free Europe after my defection, I explained:
I got the order to organize the assassination of Noel Bernard, the director of Radio Free Europe’s Romanian program, who had infuriated Ceausescu with his commentaries. Knowing you, Dana, I was firmly convinced that you would prefer no father to one who was an assassin.
I spent my next 30 American years under five presidents — some better than others — but the joy of being a part of this magnanimous land of freedom was surpassed only by the joy of simply being alive.
In 2008, however, I suddenly had the feeling of watching Ceausescu’s ghost haunting my adoptive country.
“We are the ones the world is waiting for,” proclaimed Barack Obama during his campaign, while his spiritual adviser Jeremiah Wright was caught on video screaming “God damn America.” The Democratic Party put the icing on the cake, proclaiming Obama an American Messiah. The senator agreed. On June 8, 2008, during a speech in New Hampshire, Obama stated that his presidency would be “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet to heal.” Earlier, an indiscreet video showed a picture of communist idol Che Guevara hanging on a wall behind Obama.
Our media and our political sages regarded Obama’s outrageous rhetoric as just millennial generational talk. For me, it was thinly veiled Ceausescu talk. My former boss’s version usually was: “A man like me is born only once every five hundred years.” Ceausescu also kept a picture of Che in his office.
At that time, veteran journalist David S. Broder compared Obama’s tactic for hiding his undercover communism to a tactic of military pilots who need to protect themselves when flying over a target heavily defended by anti-aircraft guns: “They release a cloud of fine metal scraps, hoping to confuse the aim of the shells or missiles being fired in their direction.” Obama assiduously sealed off his university transcripts and other key files dealing with his past. Concurrently, he portrayed himself either as a present-day Lincoln or a new Teddy Roosevelt. Nevertheless, the truth is like oil — no matter how much water you add to sink it, it always floats on top.
“I will negotiate with Russia to take our ICBMs off hair-trigger alert and to achieve deep cuts in our nuclear arsenal,” Obama told the country on February 18, 2008, when he announced his foreign policy as future U.S. president. “I will cut investments in unproven missile defense systems. I will not weaponize space. I will slow down our development of future combat systems.”
In a private message for Vladimir Putin, picked up by an inadvertently hot microphone, Obama — now president — was more explicit. He told Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev: “On all these issues, but particularly missile defense, this can be solved, but it is important for him to give me space.”
No wonder Obama was enthusiastically endorsed by the Communist Party USA (CPUSA). In a column entitled “Big Political Shifts Are Underway,” Joelle Fishman, the chairman of the CPUSA Political Action Committee, emphasized that the CPUSA was now part of Obama’s coalition. Nor is it any wonder that when Obama became president, the first open member of a Communist Party was working at the White House. Van Jones (now a CNN contributor) had belonged to an organization named “Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement (STORM).”
To a knowledgeable eye, Obama’s actions suggest he might have had some intelligence connection with the Kremlin, such as Whittaker Chambers once had. In 2010, the FBI arrested ten Russian intelligence officers documented as native-born Americans who were serving as spies in the United States. President Obama then returned them to Russia before they were interrogated by the FBI about their spying tasks.
When I was one of the leaders of the KGB community, among other duties I coordinated Romania’s highly secret department for illegal officers, whose task was to form “skeletons of communist governments” in the U.S. and other NATO countries.
It is also noteworthy that soon after these KGB/FSB illegal officers were returned to Moscow, the CPUSA gave its enthusiastic support to Obama’s re-election bid. “It may be early in the campaign season, but the Communist Party USA already has seen fit to endorse Barack Obama for the 2012 election,” stated Sam Webb, the chairman of the CPUSA, in an article published in CPUSA’s official newspaper.
Is our United States a perfect country? Of course not. Since 1792, however, free elections have been the American way of correcting the past and improving the future. Obama, when he came along, tried to replace this American tradition with Russian-style uprisings.
One of the noisiest was “Occupy Wall Street,” an anti-American movement born under Obama’s administration. “Long live the revolution! Long live socialism!” screamed some of the participants. Others marched with Communist flags. “Young people like the ones here today … are the reason I ran for office in the first place,” President Obama told the protesters.
I could write a book about Obama’s undercover Marxism and the devastating effect it has had on my adoptive country.
Seen through the perspective of history, Obama’s undercover Marxism constituted a malignant tumor on the body of the United States. Like most cancers, it worked silently — you could feel it only after it had spread throughout the whole body. Unfortunately, our Democratic Party has refused to extirpate Obama’s cancer, as proved by its 2016 candidates for the White House: Hillary Clinton, a Marxist posing as a progressive; and Bernie Sanders, an open Marxist who honeymooned in the Soviet Union.
Now America’s cancer came to light. A new Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) announced that it would occupy city centers and parks in major U.S. cities, and not depart until the (legally elected!) capitalist President Trump was forced to flee the White House. The protests, the RCP boasted, would rage “day after day and night after night — not stopping — until our demand is met.”
A couple years ago, the RCP published a draft of a new U.S. Constitution, intended to set forth “fundamental principles and guidelines, for … a vastly different society and government than now exists: the New Socialist Republic in North America.” In order to bring it into being, the RCP Constitution states, “it would be necessary to thoroughly defeat, dismantle and abolish the capitalist-imperialist state of the USA; and this in turn would only become possible with the development of a profound and acute crisis in society.”
The RCP’s Constitution is breathtaking in its Marxist brutality. The “New Socialist Republic in North America” would grant citizenship to everyone currently living here, with the exception of capitalist enemies of the state. The RCP Constitution legalizes “special Tribunals” for dealing with the “war crimes and other crimes against humanity” committed by “former members and functionaries of the ruling class of the imperialist USA and its state and government apparatus.” These enemies of the state would “be imprisoned or otherwise deprived of rights and liberties.”
It continued: “Means of production, and other private capital and wealth of the former capitalist-imperialist ruling class of the United States of America, shall be expropriated, without compensation, and converted into state/public property. … The power to abolish private property is absolute.”
The recent dramatic drop in the stock market should give our Democratic Party a strong warning. The first Marxist empire, the Soviet Union, collapsed overnight without warning. In 1991, former CIA director Stansfield Turner wrote in Foreign Affairs: “I never heard a suggestion from the CIA or the intelligence arms of Defense or State about a growing systemic economic problem [in the Soviet Union].”
It is time for the Democratic Party to realize that all Marxism has ever left behind is countries looking as if they’ve been devastated by a hurricane, their leaders roasting in Dante’s Inferno. The current economic collapse of Venezuela, once the world’s largest oil producer, is the most recent warning.
The Democratic Party’s open Marxism is a national emergency.
Lt. Gen Ion Mihai Pacepa is the highest-ranking Soviet bloc intelligence official ever to defect to the West.
By Lawrence Sellin and Anna Chen | May 23, 2021
Chunying Hua, spokeswoman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, has promoted the conspiracy theory that Fort Detrick is the origin of the COVID-19 virus.
Although such a claim is patently ridiculous, there may be a kernel of truth in it, given how much knowledge and skills may have been obtained by Chinese scientists working in Fort Detrick’s virus laboratories.
Make no mistake, the Chinese military is clearly “inside the wire.”
It is important to recognize the fact that, in China, there is no distinction between civilian and military research.
Although unofficial before then, the Chinese Communist Party declared the fusion of civilian and military research as an official goal in its 2016 Thirteenth Five-Year Plan.
It is also a fact that, more often than not, scientists born and trained in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), even after becoming U.S. citizens, never completely sever links with their home universities and research institutions, many of which are connected to the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA).
The U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick has long been an espionage target of the PLA.
The PLA’s pathway to that target has been through the Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research, which is inside Fort Detrick, only a few minutes walk from USAMRIID.
We will present a case in point because the examples are too numerous to document here, but they will be addressed in a future article.
It is the 2007 scientific publication about the coronavirus from the first SARS pandemic in 2002-2004 entitled “Potent cross-reactive neutralization of SARS coronavirus isolates by human monoclonal antibodies.”
Its authors represent a collaboration of scientists from the Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research, the Virology Division of USAMRIID and Dr. Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).
The individual authors are interesting as well.
What one notices first about the publication histories of the two PRC-trained Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research scientists, Zhongyu Zhu and Xiaodong Xiao, is that their work has dealt less with cancer than with viruses, many of which are highly dangerous pathogens also studied by China’s biowarfare program.
Another author is PLA-trained Shibo Jiang.
Before returning to China as a professor at Fudan University in Shanghai, Shibo Jiang had been associated with the Lindsley F. Kimball Research Institute of the New York Blood Center for nearly twenty years.
During that time, he developed an extensive network of collaborative research with other major U.S. virus research laboratories and received more than $17 million in U.S. research grants, the vast majority coming from Fauci’s NIAID.
At the same time, Shibo Jiang maintained extensive collaborative research with PLA laboratories, described in detail here, while simultaneously inviting into his U.S. laboratory and training scientists linked to the Chinese military, such as Yuxian He, another author on the cited 2007 publication.
It is believed that Shibo Jiang was involved in the insertion of the furin cleavage site into the COVID-19 virus, the “smoking gun” evidence for its laboratory origin.
Linfa Wang worked at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and has been a long-time collaborator of the “bat woman” Zheng-Li Shi.
Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina, one of the world’s most notorious “gain of function” researchers, has also worked with Zheng-Li Shi of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, as well as others whose connections eventually lead back to the PLA.
In other words, Xiankun Zeng has access to the U.S. military’s and NIAID’s most sensitive information about U.S. biowarfare defense.
Xiankun Zeng obtained his PhD degree in the Key Laboratory of Developmental Genes and Human Disease, Ministry of Education, Institute of Life Science, Southeast University in Nanjing, PRC.
That laboratory has close collaboration with the Nanjing Military Command, now part of the PLA Eastern Theater Command.
Note: This Lawrence Sellin article also appears at Gateway Pundit with the following additional information:
As stated in The Gateway Pundit article of May 20, 2021, the creation and delivery of the COVID-19 virus appears to be linked to the PLA Eastern Theater Command in Nanjing, in particular PLA military officer, Changjun Wang.
As recently as October 2015, Xiankun Zeng was still claiming affiliation with Southeast University in Nanjing.
Even while employed by USAMRIID, Xiankun Zeng has maintained close ties to China’s virus research programs, here shown giving a lecture about the deadly Ebola and Marburg viruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology on October 9, 2018.
Lawrence Sellin, Ph.D. is retired from an international career in business and medical research with 29 years of service in the US Army Reserve and a veteran of Afghanistan and Iraq. His email address is lawrence.sellin@gmail.com.
The nexus between China and the U.S.
According to his biography posted on the website of the School of Basic Medical Sciences, Fudan University in Shanghai, China, Dr. Shibo Jiang is Professor and Director, Institute of Medical Microbiology.
He obtained his MS and MD degrees from the First and Fourth Medical University of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), respectively.
In 1987-1990, he received his postdoctoral training in the Laboratory of Cellular Physiology and Immunology, the Rockefeller University in New York.
From 1990 to 2010, he had worked in the Lindsley F. Kimball Research Institute of the New York Blood Center as Assistant Member, Associate Member, Member, and Head of Viral Immunology Laboratory.
Since 2010, he has worked as a professor in the Key Laboratory of Medical Molecular Virology, Shanghai Medical School, Fudan University, Shanghai, China.
That description is neither accurate nor complete.
The military links
As recently as November 3, 2020, in an article published with Peter J. Hotez of Baylor College of Medicine, Shibo Jiang indicated his professional address is not China’s Fudan University, but the Lindsley F. Kimball Research Institute, New York Blood Center, New York, NY, 10065, USA.
That article is found in the Results section of research grant 4R01AI098775-05 for $1,165,855 entitled “RBD [receptor binding domain] RECOMBINANT PROTEIN-BASED SARS VACCINE FOR BIODEFENSE” and awarded by Dr. Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), in which Shibo Jiang is listed as a Principal Investigator.
That research grant includes collaboration with the University of Texas Medical Branch Galveston, home of the Department of Defense-funded Center for Biodefense and Emerging Infectious Diseases, which houses a BL-4 high containment facility for viral research.
The results of the above-mentioned research grant would be shared with the U.S. Army’s Walter Reed Army Institute of Research and, presumably, also with the Chinese military.
Also found within the Results section are articles published by Shibo Jiang in collaboration with institutions and scientists associated with the PLA as well as the Wuhan Institute of Virology, alleged by many, including officials in the U.S. government, as the origin of the COVID-19 virus.
One 2016 Shibo Jiang article entitled “A RECOMBINANT RECEPTOR-BINDING DOMAIN OF MERS-COV IN TRIMERIC FORM PROTECTS HUMAN DIPEPTIDYL PEPTIDASE 4 (HDPP4) TRANSGENIC MICE FROM MERS-COV INFECTION” lists as co-authors, two graduates of China’s PLA Military Medical Universities, Yusen Zhou and Guangyu Zhoa, who are long-time associates of his and scientists in the State Key Laboratory of Pathogen and Biosecurity, Beijing Institute of Microbiology and Epidemiology, Academy of Military Medical Sciences, Beijing, China.
A second 2017 article entitled “CROSS-NEUTRALIZATION OF SARS CORONAVIRUS-SPECIFIC ANTIBODIES AGAINST BAT SARS-LIKE CORONAVIRUSES” was written together with the “bat woman” Zheng-Li Shi of the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
In fact, during the period 1997-2016, when Shibo Jiang was a Principal Investigator on U.S. research grants amounting to more than $17 million, the vast majority coming from Fauci’s NIAID, he was also receiving support from the Chinese government and actively collaborating with Chinese research institutions including those of the PLA.
Shibo Jiang and Yusen Zhou of the Academy of Military Medical Sciences, Beijing, China. are listed as co-inventors on at least eight U.S. patents, the references supporting those patents, for example, 9889194, was research funded by Fauci’s NIAID.
Shibo Jiang’s collaboration with China’s military is extensive.
In 2002, he published an article on Hantaan virus with the Department of Microbiology, the Fourth Medical University of the PLA, Xi’an, China.
Also in 2002, Shibo Jiang published an article with long-time associate, Shuwen Liu of the First Medical University of the PLA’s Key Lab for Drug Screening in Guangzhou, China, a study funded by grant R01 AI46221 from Fauci’s NIAID.
In 2003, Shibo Jiang published an article with the Department of Microbiology, The Fourth Military Medical University, Xi’an, China.
In 2004, he published another article with the Department of Microbiology, The Fourth Military Medical University, Xi’an, China, one which led to his initial work with the Chinese military on the first SARS pandemic of 2002-2004.
In May 2004, Shibo Jiang published a study on SARS with the First Military Medical University, Guangzhou, China, which was funded by grants from the Chinese National Foundation of Natural Sciences (No 30340015), Military Foundation of Medical Science (No 03F016‐2) and Foundation of Natural Sciences of Guangdong Province (No. GD2003‐80).
Between 2005 and 2010, SARS research articles by Shibo Jiang conducted in collaboration with Yusen Zhou of the State Key Laboratory of Pathogen and Biosecurity, Beijing Institute of Microbiology and Epidemiology, Academy of Military Medical Sciences, Beijing, China are too numerous to list here, all of which were funded by Fauci’s NIAID.
In a 2014 article, Shibo Jiang was working with the Institute of Biotechnology, Academy of Military Medical Sciences, Beijing, China.
In 2017, Shibo Jiang conducted research with the Translational Medicine Center, PLA Hospital No. 454 and the Department of Epidemiology, Medicinal Research Institute, Nanjing Military Command.
Until his recent death, Yusen Zhou’s collaboration with Shibo Jiang continued into the COVID-19 pandemic, publishing a July 30, 2020 Science article together with institutions associated with China’s military.
From 2012 to 2020, Shibo Jiang published twelve scientific articles with the Wuhan Institute of Virology and eleven articles between 2013 and 2020 with the University of Texas Medical Branch, Galveston Texas.
During the period between the first SARS pandemic in 2002-2004 and the 2019 COVID-19 outbreak, Shibo Jiang also had extensive collaborative research with many of the major U.S. coronavirus research laboratories, such as his 2015 joint project with the University of North Carolina, the University of Minnesota and the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
COVID-19’s unique furin polybasic cleavage site
Based on the available scientific evidence, the COVID-19 virus (SARS-CoV-2) was the product of “gain of function” research, not a natural transmission from animal hosts to humans.
Gain of function research is defined as when a naturally-occurring virus is genetically or otherwise manipulated to make it either more contagious, more lethal, or both.
There are only two reasons for conducting gain of function research, (1) to understand the structural features and actions of a virus in order to create a vaccine in anticipation of a potential new disease outbreak or (2) to create a biological weapon, or both.
The road leading to the COVID-19 pandemic began during the first, far less widespread and deadly SARS (Severe acute respiratory syndrome) pandemic of 2002-2004 (SARS-CoV-1), which also originated in China.
It is important to note that prior to the 2002-2004 SARS outbreak, the Chinese PLA largely considered coronavirus a veterinary disease, particularly in working dogs.
After the onset of the November 2002 SARS pandemic originating in Foshan, Guangdong, China, the PLA would play an outsized role in human coronavirus research.
Much of the PLA effort during and immediately after the 2002-2004 SARS pandemic would be centered in the Third Military Medical University in Chongqing, part of the Nanjing Military Command.
After 2009, publications from that institution involving coronaviruses went underground, virtually disappearing, only to resurface prominently in the controversy involving the origin of COVID-19.
Four key players in the COVID-19 saga, either working in or having connections to the PLA Third Military Medical University in Chongqing were the Chinese military-trained scientists Bing Ni, Yuzhang Wu, Guangyu Zhao and Yusen Zhou.
The latter two, through their association with Shibo Jiang, would be instrumental in opening China’s coronavirus research programs to the vast resources of U.S. laboratories and federal funding.
During that initial SARS outbreak and continuing to the COVID-19 pandemic, extensive gain of function and related research was conducted both in the U.S. and in China, sometimes by the Chinese PLA.
A vast number of coronavirus experiments were conducted by Chinese scientists working in U.S. laboratories, much of which was funded by U.S. taxpayers, especially via Fauci’s NIAID.
By matching the unique features of the COVID-19 virus with the research conducted by those scientists, in those institutions, often in collaboration, a roadmap leading to the pandemic may be constructed.
The COVID-19 virus has a number of unusual structural features that cannot be easily explained as products of a normal evolutionary process.
The most distinguishing and unique structural feature of the COVID-19 virus is the furin polybasic cleavage site.
The presence and importance of polybasic cleavage sites in the lifecycle of coronaviruses has been well-known since the 1980s.
Furin and other protease cleavage sites are widely known to increase both the infectivity and pathogenicity of coronaviruses.
The coronavirus “spike” glycoprotein binds to the human cell and initiates virus to cell fusion, allowing the virus to hijack the cell’s synthetic capabilities to replicate itself.
The COVID-19 virus spike has two main components. The S1 component of the spike contains the receptor binding domain (RBD) that binds to the human angiotensin converting enzyme-2 receptor (ACE2), while the S2 segment of the spike contains the fusion-regulating element.
At the S1-S2 junction is a furin polybasic cleavage site, which is responsible for separating the S1 and S2 sections, and facilitating fusion with the cell.
The COVID-19 virus polybasic cleavage site is a short sequence of the amino acids, proline-arginine-arginine-alanine-arginine-serine or “PRRARS,” where the cleavage occurs between R and S with the preceding basic arginines accelerating the reaction.
Although the R-S segment is present in many coronaviruses, there is no identified natural origin for the PRRA sequence. None of the closely related bat coronaviruses has such a structure in that position and the genomic nucleotides that codes for it, a double cytosine-guanine-guanine or CGG-CGG sequence is extremely rare.
It is far more likely that the PRRA sequence of COVID-19’s furin polybasic cleavage site was artificially inserted.
Experiments that may have led to the presence of COVID-19’s furin polybasic cleavage site
In 2004, during the first SARS pandemic, an important patent entitled “INSERTON OF FURIN PROTEASE CLEAVAGE SITES IN MEMBRANE PROTEINS AND USES THEREOF” was filed.
As of today, there have only been twenty-three scientific citations of that patent. One is by Shibo Jiang and his Chinese military-trained colleague Shuwen Liu.
In 2005, Shibo Jiang together with his colleagues Yuxian He and Yusen Zhou from the State Key Laboratory of Pathogen and Biosecurity, Beijing Institute of Microbiology and Epidemiology, Academy of Military Medical Sciences, Beijing, China, stated there was no observed cleavage between the S1 and S2 components of the first SARS virus.
By 2007, the same group of military investigators led by Shibo Jiang concluded that cleavage, in fact, did occur in the first SARS virus and it was correlated with infectivity.
In 2009, a research group from Cornell University confirmed the correlation between cleavage sites and SARS infectivity.
Then, in 2013, came what many might consider the smoking gun.
Despite having the innocuous title “SIMULTANEOUS EXPRESSION OF DISPLAYED AND SECRETED ANTIBODIES FOR ANTIBODY SCREEN,” Shibo Jiang and his military-trained colleague Shuwen Liu, demonstrated the artificial insertion of a furin polybasic cleavage site similar to that found in the COVID-19 virus.
That study was directly funded by the Chinese government and a private Chinese biotech company, while Shibo Jiang was also being funded by Fauci’s NIAID.
Perhaps coincidentally, between 2012 and 2020, Lixin Zheng, a scientist working in Fauci’s own NIAID laboratories, was conducting joint research with the PLA’s Third Military Medical University, Chongqing 400038, China.
The PLA’s Third Military Medical University in Chongqing has long been considered a focal point of coronavirus research.
Chinese whistleblower Dr. Li-Meng Yan claims that the COVID-19 virus originated in laboratories overseen by China’s PLA, using bat coronaviruses ZC45 and/or ZXC21 collected from Zhoushan, China and used as the viral “backbone” for genetic engineering.
Those bat coronaviruses were originally isolated and characterized between July 2015 and February 2017 under the supervision of the Third Military Medical University in Chongqing, China and the Research Institute for Medicine of the PLA Nanjing Military Command.
Shibo Jiang has collaborated with the PLA Nanjing Military Command and the Wuhan Institute of Virology has multi-level links to the PLA and both are connected to each other.
To be continued.
*Note added below by author the day after initial publication:
One scenario for the onset of the pandemic could have been an accidental direct release of the COVID-19 virus from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Another possibility involves an accident related to vaccine development.
Many vaccines contain live, but “attenuated” viruses, that is, weakened viruses insufficient to cause disease, but similar enough to an actual infection to initiate an immune response and the production of antibodies.
Live-attenuated vaccines are used for childhood diseases like measles, mumps, rubella and chickenpox. Because live-attenuated vaccines are so similar to the natural infection, they produce a strong and long-lasting, even a life-time immune response.
Live-attenuated vaccines can also be less expensive and more quickly produced, but they can be risky if the attenuated virus “reverts” back to its pathogenic state.
During the 2002-2004 SARS pandemic, the Wuhan Institute of Virology conducted tests of an inactivated SARS virus vaccine on rhesus monkeys.
It is possible that the COVID-19 pandemic began when a live attenuated vaccine for the laboratory-created COVID-19 virus reverted back to its pathogenic state in presumed immunized individuals or laboratory animals.
In addition to pressure coming directly from the Chinese Communist Party, there was, no doubt, similar coercion being brought to bear on susceptible and compliant people in Washington D.C. by international financial interests, whose investments in China would be placed in jeopardy if it was widely accepted that China manufactured the COVID-19 virus.
Similarly at stake were the careers of prominent members of the U.S. scientific establishment, who could be considered complicit or potentially culpable.
There was also the likely loss of trust by the American people in the integrity of science overall.
Like their partners in China, what U.S. government officials and members of the U.S. scientific establishment feared most was accountability.
That was the primary selfish motive for the cover-up they appeared to have initiated.
It began on February 3, 2020, when a meeting was held at U.S. National Academy of Science, led by Kelvin Droegemeier, Director, Office of Science and Technology Policy; D. Christian Hassell, Senior Science Advisor, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services; and Anthony Fauci, Director, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, National Institutes of Health.
The original emails related to the February 3, 2020 meeting are found in the following link:
Attendees included other U.S. government staff members from the Office of Science and Technology Policy, the National Institutes of Health and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Most of the participating scientists either had long histories of collaborative coronavirus research with China or were later associated with a robust support of China and the theory that COVID-19 originated as a naturally-occurring disease outbreak.
According to the Statement of Task and Work Plan, which were distributed before the meeting, it was already decided that the COVID-19 pandemic originated as a natural-occurring or “evolutionary” event and that arguments to the contrary needed to be countered.
That is, it was the responsibility of U.S. government officials and members of the U.S. scientific establishment to provide a continuous stream of evidence to support a preordained outcome, one that protected China, international financial interests and themselves from potential complicity or culpability.
As revealed in their own emails, the deliberations by the scientists involved in preparing a response to the February 3, 2020 meeting were primarily focused on suppressing any discussion that the COVID-19 virus might have originated in a laboratory.
Yet, the efforts to create a narrative that the COVID-19 pandemic was a naturally-occurring transmission from animals to humans for which no one is to blame went far beyond the response to the February 3, 2020 meeting.
Before the ink was dry on that response, Peter Daszak of the EcoHealth Alliance, on February 6, 2020, separately contacted selected scientific participants from the February 3, 2020 meeting in order to launch a public relations campaign in scientific journals in support of China, the theory that the COVID-19 pandemic was a naturally-occurring event and to condemn a laboratory origin as a conspiracy theory.
The statements made in these emails are stunning and can be construed as conspiratorial.
The original emails related to the February 6, 2020 letter are contained in the following link:
Not surprisingly, none of the U.S. government officials or members of the U.S. National Academy of Science were copied on the email exchange.
More surprisingly, however, Daszak included Lin-Fa Wang, who previously worked at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and was considered by some as a conduit to the Chinese Communist Party.
Daszak’s own words in that email exchange suggest that his public relations campaign was supported if not initiated by China and that Daszak’s and the others’ continued research collaboration with China was at risk:
“This letter is carefully worded to avoid political statements, and we have been told [by China?] would go a long way to supporting continued collaboration in this outbreak.”
I hope you are willing to sign on to this – your voice will be very influential, particularly in keeping these critical bridges open between the USA and China. You should know that the conspiracy theorists have been very active, targeting our collaborators with some extremely unpleasant web pages in China, and some have now received death threats to themselves and their families. They have asked for any show of support we can give them.”
On March 7, 2020, an article appeared in the British medical journal The Lancet entitled “Statement in support of the scientists, public health professionals, and medical professionals of China combatting COVID-19,” co-authored by some of those on Daszak’s February 6, 2020 email, which stated:
“We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.”
That initial effort was followed by a flood of China-promoted and Western media articles supporting the contention that the COVID-19 pandemic was naturally-occurring.
Since then, there have also been reports that scientific and medical journals were censoring views opposed to a natural explanation for the origin of COVID-19.
It has been a highly successful public relations campaign.
No less than the Office of the Director of National Intelligence of the United States has blindly accepted the scientific “conventional wisdom” promoted by the Chinese Communist Party, issuing the following April 30, 2020 statement:
“The Intelligence Community also concurs with the wide scientific consensus that the COVID-19 virus was not manmade or genetically modified.”
Lawrence Sellin, Ph.D. is retired from an international career in business and medical research with 29 years of service in the US Army Reserve and a veteran of Afghanistan and Iraq. He is a member of the Citizens Commission on National Security. His email address is lawrence.sellin@gmail.com.
There is now evidence that elements within the U.S. government coordinated with selected members of the U.S. scientific community, no doubt with the blessing of international business and the media, to protect China from responsibility and, in doing so, protected their own interests.
By January 13, 2020, there were already comments on the internet that the COVID-19 virus was manufactured in a laboratory in China and that U.S. scientists may have helped Chinese scientists obtain the knowledge to do so, specifically in the laboratory of Dr. Zheng-Li Shi at the Wuhan Institute of Virology with the assistance of Dr. Ralph Baric at the University of North Carolina.
On January 26, 2020, respected investigative reporter and defense expert, Bill Gertz, in his Washington Times article wrote:
“The deadly animal-borne coronavirus spreading globally may have originated in a laboratory in the city of Wuhan linked to China’s covert biological weapons program.”
On February 3, 2020, Kelvin Droegemeier, a product of the Republican establishment and then Director of the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), wrote a letter to Dr. Marcia McNutt, president of the National Academy of Sciences, asking:
“the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) to rapidly examine information and identify data requirements that would help determine the origins of 2019-nCoV, specifically from an evolutionary/structural biology standpoint.”
Oddly, his concern was precipitated by an obscure, non-peer-reviewed and already retracted Indian study “Uncanny similarity of unique inserts in the 2019-nCoV spike protein to HIV-1 gp120 and Hag.”
In retrospect, that article appears to have been a scientific strawman, suggesting that other government motives were involved, but what they were remains unclear.
Nevertheless, based on the scientists enlisted to formulate a response to OSTP’s request, the outcome of Droegemeier’s inquiry was preordained, that is, the complete absolution of China’s responsibility.
Those scientists were Kristian G. Andersen (Scripps Research Institute), Ralph Baric (UNC School of Public Health), Trevor Bedford (Fred Hutchinson Cancer Institute), Aravinda Chakravarti (New York University School of Medicine), Peter Daszak (EcoHealth Alliance), Gigi K. Gronvall (Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health), Tom Inglesby (Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security), and Stanley Perlman (University of Iowa).
By citing a scientific article from the Wuhan Institute of Virology stating the disease outbreak “started from a local seafood market,” the National Academy of Science’s letter to OSTP unequivocally supported the contention made by China’s Communist Party government that the COVID-19 pandemic was a naturally-occurring transmission from animals to humans
Additionally, the three presidents of the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine recommended that the United States continue to work closely with China, in particular, the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Most of the scientists consulted for the National Academy of Science response had long histories of collaboration with China and/or were later associated with a robust support of China and the theory that COVID-19 originated as a naturally-occurring event.
In some important respects, the final National Academy of Sciences response dated February 6, 2020, bears little resemblance to the original draft, dated February 4, 2020. (see “OSTP NAS emails 2” PDF)
According to the email exchanges between the National Academy of Science and the consultant scientists, there appeared to be a clear effort by the scientists to support the naturally-occurring theory and to eliminate or downplay any mention that the COVID-19 virus was engineered, had unique human binding characteristics, might mutate towards higher infectivity and possessed a furin polybasic cleavage site not found in any related coronavirus.
Subsequently, scientists consulted for National Academy of Sciences response began their own public relations campaign to support China and the theory that the COVID-19 virus was a natural transmission from animals to humans.
On March 7, 2020, Peter Daszak and Stanley Perlman were authors on an article in the British medical journal The Lancet, which stated “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.”
On March 17, 2020, Kristian G. Andersen appeared as senior author on the article “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2,” which claimed that the COVID-19 virus was “not a purposefully manipulated virus.”
On September 21, 2020, Gigi K. Gronvall was part of a Johns Hopkins University team that wrote a criticism of Chinese whistleblower, Dr. Li-Meng Yan, who presented evidence that the COVID-19 virus was created in a laboratory.
It is also well-known that Ralph Baric has been a long-time collaborator with Zheng-Li Shi, the “bat woman” from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, including conducting experiments involving highly dangerous “gain of function” research.
As recently described by Neil Patel in the Daily Signal, Peter Daszak, the sole U.S. representative on the World Health Organization team investigating the origin of the COVID-19 virus, is also a close associate of Zheng-Li Shi and was a key figure in directing American taxpayer funds to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Daszak even organized a public relations campaign to paint the lab leak hypothesis as a “conspiracy” before any thorough investigation had been conducted. His spokesperson later said the goal was to protect the lab’s scientists, but ultimately and, perhaps intentionally, the beneficiaries were China, international financial interests and the global scientific establishment.
To be continued.
Lawrence Sellin, Ph.D. is retired from an international career in business and medical research with 29 years of service in the US Army Reserve and a veteran of Afghanistan and Iraq. His email is lawrence.sellin@gmail.com
LAWRENCE SELLIN
Retired Colonel, U.S. Army Reserve
1:02 PM 12/30/2016
So far, the best thing that happened in the battle against radical Islam was the Iran-Iraq War.
As I have written, even without ISIS, the Middle East, the epicenter of radical Islam, is a complex political-military environment dominated by the Sunni-Shia religious conflict, but influenced by ethnic aspirations, tribal rivalries, regional hegemony, superpower competition and ever-shifting allegiances.
In order to maneuver successfully in the Middle East, the United States must better understand the political culture and, when necessary, learn to manipulate its rules.
In an environment with a chronic level of instability, of ambiguities and animosities, we have no permanent friends or enemies and need to reexamine our relationships on a continual basis, including using mutually destructive behaviors among opponents for our short- or long-term advantage.
One such untapped opportunity for greater foreign policy nuance is our contradictory alliance with Saudi Arabia.
For over fifty years, fueled by oil revenues, Saudi Arabia has exported a “rigid, bigoted, patriarchal, fundamentalist strain of Islam known as Wahhabism,” which may have “fueled global extremism and contributed to terrorism” because “the exclusionary Saudi version of Sunni Islam, with its denigration of Jews and Christians, as well as of Muslims of Shiite, Sufi and other traditions, may have made some people vulnerable to the lure of Al Qaeda, the Islamic State and other violent jihadist groups.”
Saudi-funded Wahhabism has, in many cases, undermined local, more inclusive and tolerant variations of Islam. According to Thomas Hegghammer, a Norwegian terrorism expert, the effect of “Saudi proselytizing might have been to slow the evolution of Islam, blocking its natural accommodation to a diverse and globalized world.”
For example, a Pakistani town near the border with Afghanistan, known for its mixture of Sunni, Shia, Barelvi and Deobandi traditions, was transformed after the arrival of a Saudi-trained cleric: “women who had used shawls to cover their hair and face began wearing full burqas. Militants began attacking kiosks where merchants sold secular music CDs. Twice, terrorists used explosives to try to destroy the village’s locally famous [Barelvi] shrine.”
The export of Wahhabism is clearly contrary to the interests of the United States, yet Saudi Arabia remains an “ally,” no doubt influenced by Saudi contributions across the American political spectrum from Senator John McCain (R-AZ) to the Clintons.
In the war against radical Islam, the US cannot continue its role as global firefighter while supporting the arsonist.
The Saudi Wahhabi initiative was accelerated by the 1979 Iranian revolution that “brought to power a radical Shiite government, symbolically challenging Saudi Arabia, the leader of Sunnism, for leadership of global Islam. The declaration of an Islamic Republic escalated the competition between the two major branches of Islam.”
It is ironic, then, that the two foremost promoters of radical Islam, Saudi Arabia and Iran, should now find themselves, not only in a contest for theological hegemony, but for regional political-military dominance including a proxy war in Yemen.
To me it smells like a foreign policy opportunity to further US interests by exploiting naturally-occurring Muslim internecine, whether figurative or literal.
In addition to the Sunni-Shia struggle, the same could be said for other historic enmities not of our making: Turkey-Kurds, Russia-Turkey, Turkey-Syria, Iran-Kurds, Turkish Secularists-Turkish Islamists, and a variety of ethnic minorities seeking greater autonomy.
It’s not rocket science. It’s Machiavelli.
Lawrence Sellin, Ph.D. is a retired US Army Reserve colonel, a command and control subject matter expert, trained in Arabic and Kurdish, and a veteran of Afghanistan, northern Iraq and a humanitarian mission to West Africa. He receives email at lawrence.sellin@gmail.com.
Obama’s Rigged Intelligence Community
LAWRENCE SELLIN
Not since the pope declared the Earth flat and Dan Rather inaugurated “fake but accurate” news has so much baloney been disseminated by so many media outlets based on so little evidence.
Fake intelligence generating fake news to provide a basis for a fake Congressional investigation.
According to a December 9th Washington Post article:
“The CIA has concluded in a secret assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win the presidency.”
Unfortunately for the CIA super sleuths, that may not be true.
A day later, The Washington Post said that the FBI did not concur, calling the CIA evidence “fuzzy” and “ambiguous.”
Based on an interview with Craig Murray, the former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan, who is a close associate of WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange, the UK Guardian wrote:
“’I know who leaked them,’ Murray said. ‘I’ve met the person who leaked them, and they are certainly not Russian and it’s an insider. It’s a leak, not a hack; the two are different things.’”
We already know that Barack Obama has politicized the intelligence community – for years.
According to a September10, 2015 Daily Beast report:
“More than 50 intelligence analysts working out of the U.S. military’s Central Command have formally complained that their reports on ISIS and al Qaeda’s branch in Syria were being inappropriately altered by senior officials.”
“The complaints spurred the Pentagon’s inspector general to open an investigation into the alleged manipulation of intelligence. The fact that so many people complained suggests there are deep-rooted, systemic problems in how the U.S. military command charged with the war against the self-proclaimed Islamic State assesses intelligence.”
One defense official called it: “The cancer was within the senior level of the intelligence command”
If you have been wondering about the source of the Russian hacking kerfuffle, wonder no more.
CIA Director John “Watch Me Pull a Rabbit Out of My Hat” Brennan will soon publish his “intelligence” in the Journal of Irreproducible Results.
Does anyone seriously believe that Brennan, your proverbial political butt-snorkeler, would not stoop to create fake intelligence in pursuit of some perfidious aim?
In 2008, CNN reported that Brennan, a then Obama “foreign policy and intelligence” advisor, as well as a $2300 contributor, was “CEO of a company whose employee is accused of improperly looking at the passport files of presidential candidates.”
The Washington Times, which broke the story, stated the State Department’s inspector general (IG) was investigating the matter to determine “whether the three contract employees who accessed the records had a political motive or were part of a political operation to obtain personal data on Mr. Obama, Sen. John McCain or Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton” and “officials do not know whether information was improperly copied, altered or removed from the database during the intrusions.”
In July 2008, the State Department IG issued a 106-page heavily-redacted report on the incident in which over half the pages still remain completely blank.
Many believe the breach “was an effort to sanitize Obama’s passport records” of embarrassing or potentially campaign-killing evidence prior to the 2008 Presidential election.
Fast-forward to October 2016, less than a month before the Presidential election, there appeared an endless numbers of articles blaming the release of emails from the Democrat National Committee on Russian hacking. It was an accusation backed by Obama intelligence officials. Many of those articles implied a Trump-Russian connection, some even suggesting sanctions or perhaps stronger measures be taken against the Russian state.
“Yes, why not risk thermonuclear war with Russia in order to score a few political points against Donald Trump?” said the galacticly stupid.
What we are witnessing today is fake news based on faked intelligence instigated by the failed Democrat Party, promoted by a corrupt media and exploited by a scorned and impotent Republican establishment.
It is all being done to discredit President-elect’s Trump’s victory, to disable his administration and to deny the American people a voice in their own government.
First we had disinformation connecting Trump to Vladimir Putin and Russian hacking; then the bogus recounts in the critical states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania; and now the baseless, politically-driven intelligence reports as a reason to turn electoral college votes away from Trump in the million-to-one chance that they might be able to annul the election and install Hillary Clinton in the White House.
It is a coup attempt in slow motion.
Lawrence Sellin, Ph.D. is a retired US Army Reserve colonel, a command and control subject matter expert, trained in Arabic and Kurdish, and a veteran of Afghanistan, northern Iraq and a humanitarian mission to West Africa. He receives email at lawrence.sellin@gmail.com.
Benghazi’s Unconnected Dots
LAWRENCE SELLIN
12:24 PM 12/05/2016
If all politics is local, then all foreign policy is personal, a combination of piques, proclivities and prejudices.
The attack on the US government facilities in Benghazi, Libya on September 12, 2012 by radical Islamic militias and the death of four American was both an act of war and a national tragedy. In foreign policy terms, however, it was still just one scene in a larger international tapestry, a yet not entirely clear complex sequence of events.
During 2015, I wrote a series of articles about Benghazi, Libya and the Obama-Clinton policy of overthrowing authoritarian, but stable Arab governments and replacing them with so-called “moderate” Islamist movements like the Muslim Brotherhood as an alternative to more violent groups like al Qaeda and the Islamic State published here, here, here, here, here and a 2016 summary here.
Those articles were based on a search of publicly-available sources and interviews with individuals directly or indirectly involved in the Benghazi attack, both American and Libyan, who will remain unnamed.
If Barack Obama’s approach to Libya could be described as the intersection of ideology and incompetence, Hillary Clinton’s was the product of naked ambition.
Clinton was among the most vocal early proponents of using U.S. military force to topple Libyan dictator Moammar Qaddafi, claiming erroneously that Qaddafi was about to engage in a genocide against civilians in Benghazi, where the Islamist rebels held their center of power.
Eventually Obama bowed to her leadership on the issue, privately informing members of Congress that Libya “is all Secretary Clinton’s matter.”
Many will recall Clinton, on October 20, 2011, cackling to a TV news reporter over the death of Qaddafi: “We came, we saw, he died.”
According to released emails, Hillary, at that time, considered the violent 2011 “regime change” in Libya such a triumph that her aides discussed labeling it the start of a “Clinton Doctrine” and a prelude to her Presidential campaign in 2016.
In terms of US foreign policy and national security, the role of Hillary Clinton in the Libyan fiasco was as reckless as it was cataclysmic, but that is not the whole story.
What reignited my interest in this topic was a recent article in the New York Times “In Trump’s Security Pick, Michael Flynn, ‘Sharp Elbows’ and No Dissent.” Again carrying water for the Obama Administration, The Times criticized Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, President-elect Trump’s choice for National Security Advisor, for the temerity to suggest Iranian involvement in the Benghazi attack, because, regurgitating the conventional wisdom, “Iran, a Shiite nation, has generally eschewed any alliance with Sunni militants like the ones who attacked the American diplomatic compound.”
That is not quite right.
Although you would be hard-pressed to find a heavy Iranian footprint in Libya, Iran, like the US, often operates via surrogates, in this case, Shiite Arabs speaking non-North African Arabic such as Levantine indicating someone from Lebanon or Alawite Syria. Furthermore, Shiite and Sunni Muslims often collaborate when their interests intersect as in opposition to the US or recent Syrian/Turkish joint action against the Kurds.
It would have been a disaster for the 2012 Obama reelection campaign, the Iran nuclear deal and his legacy, if it was known that Iran was involved in the Benghazi attack and that those operations, the interdiction of the flow of arms to Syrian rebels and the thwarting of US policy in Syria and Iraq were driven by penetration of the Obama Administration by Russian intelligence.
That is, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were not only arrogant and inept in the conduct of their foreign policy, but they were duped and outmaneuvered by the Iranians and Russians, enmity from which may have spilled over into the 2016 Presidential campaign in the form of WikiLeaks and accusations of Russian meddling.
One wonders if Obama’s proclivity for appeasing Iran and his fear and loathing of Vladimir Putin are the keys to connecting the remaining dots of the Benghazi attack and perhaps might also explain Lt. Gen. Flynn’s hurried departure from his administration for treading dangerously close to the truth.
Lawrence Sellin, Ph.D. is a retired US Army Reserve colonel, a command and control subject matter expert, trained in Arabic and Kurdish, and a veteran of Afghanistan, northern Iraq and a humanitarian mission to West Africa. He receives email at lawrence.sellin@gmail.com.
www.dailycaller.com
There is no place for me in Hillary’s America
By Lawrence Sellin, contributor
I consider myself a patriot, someone who believes in the Constitution, the rule of law and representative government.
Under a President Hillary Clinton, none of those will any longer exist.
Electing Hillary will mean, quite literally, the end of the United States as it was originally designed.
The Constitution will be de facto obsolete; the rule of law will be arbitrarily applied dependent upon one’s financial status or political clout; and we will have a government driven by crony capitalism and political expediency, benefitting only the rich and powerful, and one conspicuous for corruption, fraudulent elections and pseudo-representation.
Under Hillary’s open borders policy, the United States of America will be neither United nor America. It will not be a melting pot, a nation guided by the notion of E Pluribus Unum, but a collection of simultaneous arguments, where the only thing we have in common is our differences.
It will mean a president, who is, without any doubt, hopelessly corrupt and a pathological liar.
It will mean that the organs of government will not be used to enforce the law, but to enforce the political whims of Hillary Clinton, courtesy of the Department of Justice, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Internal Revenue Service.
Because, when blatant and outrageous lies are no longer sufficient to soothe the electorate into complacency, such a government must begin to curtail freedom and oppress the people in order to pursue its policies and remain in power.
For me, one who traveled in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe during the Cold War, Hillary’s approach to government has a familiar ring.
In “Mountain of Crumbs”, a memoir of childhood in the 1960s and 1970s propaganda-soaked Soviet Union, Elena Gorokhova explains the meaning of “vranyo”, the Russian word for “a white lie or half-truth:”
“In Russia we played the ‘vranyo’ game on a daily basis. The government lied to us, we knew they were lying, they knew we knew they were lying, but they kept lying anyway and we pretended to believe them.”
“In practice vranyo provided a coping mechanism for both unbearable tragedies and petty annoyances. Can’t feed your starving children? Tear up a piece of bread to make a mountain of crumbs and declare it an abundance of food.”
Or declare: the failed Obamacare a success, a moribund economy as booming, a world wracked by Islamic terrorism as safer, illegal immigration as beneficial or the Clinton Foundation as honest.
Angelo Cordevilla provides an insightful comment about the 2016 election:
Never before has such a large percentage of Americans expressed alienation from their leaders, resentment, even fear. Some two-thirds of Americans believe that elected and appointed officials — plus the courts, the justice system, business leaders, educators — are leading the country in the wrong direction: that they are corrupt, do more harm than good, make us poorer, get us into wars and lose them. Because this majority sees no one in the political mainstream who shares their concerns, because it lacks confidence that the system can be fixed, it is eager to empower whoever might flush the system and its denizens with something like an ungentle enema.
Hillary Clinton represents that wrong direction, the constipated status quo, while Donald Trumpprovides a laxative.
The United States under Hillary Clinton will become ungovernable. Millions of Americans, those “basket of deplorables,” who are the bedrock of the country will simply “tune out” the federal government and the media.
Without the Constitution, the rule of law, representative government, a recognizable culture or even defined borders, there is no reason to be patriotic and little reason to participate.
America will become Hillary’s dystopia, the ideological and the incompetent leading the unwilling to do the undesirable.
Sellin holds a Ph.D. is a retired U.S. Army Reserve colonel, a command and control subject matter expert, trained in Arabic and Kurdish, and a veteran of Afghanistan, northern Iraq and a humanitarian mission to West Africa. He receives email at lawrence.sellin@gmail.com.