Manufacturing consent for war on China?
By Ryan Fahey
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'
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==See Also==
‘Run them over’: The rise of a new Sinophobia and its dangers to us all : Americans of Chinese and other Asian descent are still being assaulted. Harm is being done to them on the streets.
What Trump has said about China and the coronavirus
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