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Re: The Silence of the Skripals

PostPosted: Sat Sep 15, 2018 4:02 pm
by MacCruiskeen
Sorry, RocketMan! Damn, I always mix you up with Dr Evil, he's the Norwegian, you're the Finn. Mea culpa, I will keep it in mind now.

My sarcasm wasn't directed at you personally, btw. I had just read two deeply annoying tweets by those Giants of Investigative Journalism, Jon fucking Snow of Channel 4 and Andrew "Brillo Pad" Neil of the Murdoch Empire, two well-travelled and highly influential gents in their mid-sixties, both of them acting all "ROTFL!! " at the very idea of Russians not loving having their arses frozen and their feet soaked.

As for the Nina Ricci perfume thing: Yes, I've bought women's perfume before, many times, but only when I wanted to give it to a woman as a present. And I've certainly taken flights without buying any perfume at all. What's ridiculous about Boshirov and Petrov, gay or straight, denying having bought any womens' perfume? Nothing. Nothing ridiculous about it at all. In any case, not buying perfume, like buying it, is not a crime.

There is no case there. None. It's a giant nothing, a bubble, a media mirage, completely laughable. Or it would be if it weren't the latest stage in the longstanding drive towards WWIII.

Kippis!

Re: The Silence of the Skripals

PostPosted: Sun Sep 16, 2018 10:17 am
by Sounder
dada wrote...
What I'm trying to get at is I guess what would be called the optics in this particular situation. Blaming Western Intel makes the West look bad, the Kremlin look good. Blaming the Kremlin makes Western Intel look like fools, and the Kremlin look like super duper spies. West looks bad, Kremlin looks good. Truth doesn't need to be factored in, no matter how one looks at it the West is in a position of total narrative disadvantage.


Good observation. This brings to mind the Karl Rove quote about empire and 'making' reality. Maybe the US is not the empire he and his ilk like to think it is. What precedes narrative collapse, -and what follows?

Re: The Silence of the Skripals

PostPosted: Mon Sep 24, 2018 3:22 pm
by MacCruiskeen
Craig Murray's latest, about perhaps the most blatantly obvious whopping lie told by the Met. (Links in the original, emphases added.)

The Incredible Case of Boshirov and Petrov’s Visas

81 comments
24 Sep, 2018

The Metropolitan Police made one statement in the Skripal case which is plainly untrue; they claimed not to know on what kind of visa Boshirov and Petrov were travelling. As they knew the passports they used, and had footage of them coming through the airport, that is impossible. The Border Force could tell them in 30 seconds flat.

Image


To get a UK visa Boshirov and Petrov would have had to attend the UK Visa Application Centre in Moscow. There not only would their photographs be taken, but their fingerprints would have been taken and, if in the last few years, their irises scanned. The Metropolitan Police would naturally have obtained their fingerprints from the Visa Application.

One thing of which we can be certain is that their fingerprints are not on the perfume bottle or packaging found in Charlie Rowley’s home.
We can be certain of that because no charges have been brought against the two in relation to the death of Dawn Sturgess, and we know the police have their fingerprints. The fact of there being no credible evidence, according to either the Metropolitan Police or the Crown Prosecution Service, to link them to the Amesbury poisoning, has profound implications.

Why the Metropolitan Police were so coy about telling us what kind of visa the pair held, points to a wider mystery. Why were they given the visas in the first place, and what story did they tell to get them? It is not easy for a Russian citizen, particularly an economically active male, to get past the UK Border Agency. The visa application process is very intrusive. They have to produce evidence of family and professional circumstances, including employment and address, evidence of funds, including at least three months of bank statements, and evidence of the purpose of the visit. These details are then actively checked out by the Visa Department.

If they had told the story to the visa section they told to Russia Today, that they were freelance traders in fitness products wanting to visit Salisbury Cathedral, they would have been refused a visa as being candidates for overstaying. They would have been judged not to have sufficiently stable employment in Russia to ensure they would return. So what story did Petrov and Boshirov give on their visa application, why were they given a visa, and what kind of visa? And why do the British authorities not want us to know the answer to these questions?

Which brings us to the claims of neo-conservative propaganda website Bellingcat. They claim together with the Russian Insider website to have obtained documentary evidence that Petrov and Boshirov’s passports were of a series issued only to Russian spies, and that their applications listed GRU headquarters as their address.

There are some problems with Bellingcat’s analysis. The first is that they also quote Russian website fontanka.ru as a source, but fontanka.ru actually say the precise opposite of what Bellingcat claim – that the passport number series is indeed a civilian one and civilians do have passports in that series.

Image


Fontanka also state it is not unusual for the two to have close passport numbers – it merely means they applied together. On other points, fontanka.ru do confirm Bellingcat’s account of another suspected GRU officer having serial numbers close to those of Boshirov and Petrov.

But there is a bigger question of the authenticity of the documents themselves. Fontanka.ru is a blind alley – they are not the source of the documents, just commenting on them, and Bellingcat are just attempting the old trick of setting up a circular “confirmation”. Russian Insider is neither Russian nor an Insider. Its name is a false claim and it consists of a combination of western “experts” writing on Russia, and reprints from the Russian media. It has no track record of inside access to Russian government secrets or documents, and nor does Bellingcat.

What Bellingcat does have is a track record of shilling for the security services. Bellingcat claims its purpose is to clear up fake news, yet has been entirely opaque about the real source of its so-called documents.


MI6 have almost 40 officers in Russia, running hundreds of agents. The CIA has a multiple of that. They pool their information. Both the UK and US have large visa sections whose major function is the analysis of Russian passports, their types and numbers and what they tell about the individual.

We are to believe that Boshirov and Petrov were GRU agents whose identity was plainly obvious from their passports, who had no believable cover identities, but that neither the visa department nor MI6 (which two cooperate closely and all the time) knew they were giving visas to GRU agents. Yet this information was readily available to Bellingcat?

I do not know if the two are agents or just tourists. But the claimed evidence they were agents is, if genuine, so obvious that the two would have been under close surveillance throughout their stay in the UK. If the official story is true, then the failures of the UK visa department and MI6 are abject and shameful. As is the failure to take simple precautions for the Skripals’ security, like the inexplicable absence of CCTV covering the house of Sergei Skripal, an important ex-agent and defector supposedly under British protection.

A further thought. We are informed that Boshirov and Petrov left a trace of novichok in their hotel bedroom. How likely is it, really, that, the day before the professional assassination attempt, which involved handling an agent with which any contact could kill you, Boshirov and Petrov would prepare, not by resting, but by an all night drugs and sex session? Would you really not want the steadiest possible hand the next day? Would you really invite a prostitute into the room with the novichok perfume in it, and behave in a way that led to complaints and could have brought you to official notice?

Is it not astonishing that nobody in the corporate and state media has written that this behaviour is at all unlikely, while scores of “journalists” have written that visiting Salisbury as a tourist, and returning the next day because the visit was ruined by snow, would be highly unlikely?

To me, even more conclusively, we were informed by cold war propagandists like ex White House staffer Dan Kaszeta that the reason the Skripals were not killed is that novichok is degraded by water. To quote Kaszeta “Soap and water is quite good at decontaminating nerve agents”.

In which case it is extremely improbable that the agents handling the novichok, who allegedly had the novichok in their bedroom, would choose a hotel room which did not have an en suite bathroom. If I spilt some novichok on myself I would not want to be queuing in the corridor for the shower. The GRU may not be big on health and safety, but the idea that their agents chose not to have basic washing facilities available while handling the novichok is wildly improbable.

The only link of Boshirov and Petrov to the novichok is the trace in the hotel room. The identification there of a microscopic trace of novichok came from a single swab, all other swabs were negative, and the test could not be repeated even on the original positive sample. For other reasons given above, I absolutely doubt these two had novichok in that bedroom. Who they really are, and how much the security services knew about them, remain open questions.

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives ... s/#respond

Re: The Silence of the Skripals

PostPosted: Mon Sep 24, 2018 4:25 pm
by JackRiddler
Swab it until you get a positive! That's how scientific testing works.

Can anyone here read Russian? Wait, that would be a confession, I realize you can't tell us.

The case for the prosecution on social media is to ridicule the RT interview. They're obviously agents but they suck as agents. A double.

About the most interesting point I've read is that the CCTV doesn't show snow on the ground in Salisbury. But I'm trusting those of you who tracked down the weather in Salisbury and at Stonehenge for the days in question.

Re: The Silence of the Skripals

PostPosted: Mon Sep 24, 2018 7:57 pm
by Elvis
JackRiddler wrote:About the most interesting point I've read is that the CCTV doesn't show snow on the ground in Salisbury. But I'm trusting those of you who tracked down the weather in Salisbury and at Stonehenge for the days in question.


Scroll through this post: viewtopic.php?f=8&t=41004&p=663358#p663358

This image is from the Salisbury Journal’s liveblog on 4 March.


Image


Those mocking the idea that the pair were blocked by snow from visiting Stonehenge have pointed to the CCTV footage of central Salisbury not showing snow on the afternoon of 4 March. Well, that is central Salisbury, it had of course been salted and cleared. Outside there were drifts.

Re: The Silence of the Skripals

PostPosted: Mon Sep 24, 2018 9:17 pm
by JackRiddler
Thanks. I already saw that, of course. This thread is perversely entertaining. Unfortunate but true. I must try not to employ the means of ridicule, that's basically what antagonists do when there's nothing else.

Re: The Silence of the Skripals

PostPosted: Tue Oct 02, 2018 2:40 pm
by MacCruiskeen
It doesn't get much cosier than this: Luke Harding of the Guardian (& MI6) reviews a new book about the Skripal Affair by Mark Urban of the BBC (& MI6). For purposes of journalism, presumably.

Sergei Skripal initially did not believe Russia tried to kill him – book

Former spy only gradually came to realise he had been Kremlin target, says author

Luke Harding

Tue 2 Oct 2018 07.00 BST

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/201 ... l-him-book


Even the future Sir Luke Harding is finding it a beastly difficult task to make this stuff sound unsuspicious.

The whole WikiSpooks page on the future Sir Mark Urban is a must-read. It begins:

Mark Urban is a UK Establishment-friendly journalist, author, academic and was the diplomatic and defence editor for BBC Two's Newsnight at the time of the Skripal Affair. Asked by Craig Murray in an email (mark.urban@bbc.co.uk):

Craig Murray wrote: "You were an officer in the Royal Tank Regiment together with Skripal’s MI6 handler, Pablo Miller, who also lived in Salisbury. Have you maintained friendship with Miller over the years and how often do you communicate?"


In their response, the BBC avoided the question, saying:

The BBC wrote: "Some of the information you’ve requested we are not obliged to share as it is held for purposes of journalism."[1]

[...]



https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Mark_Urban


Image
^^ "Chatham House"

https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Mark_Urban

Re: The Silence of the Skripals

PostPosted: Tue Oct 02, 2018 8:00 pm
by MacCruiskeen
Breaking News: Sergei Skripal is still silent, for some reason. Yulia too has completely lost her voice. Silent as the grave, both of 'em.

Luckily, they have Mark Urban to speak for them, posthumously. Even luckier, May set to hit back Russia over whatever insultingly stupid crap the Guardian or the Torygraph will feed to an insatiable public next. They know their audience, being nothing if not uncritical, will copy and paste it, without the slightest doubt or demurral, all over the World Wide Web.

In other news, we are all going to die.

Re: The Silence of the Skripals

PostPosted: Tue Oct 02, 2018 8:07 pm
by MacCruiskeen
Rigorous Intuition means never having to doubt a story.

Re: The Silence of the Skripals

PostPosted: Thu Nov 22, 2018 7:04 pm
by MacCruiskeen

Re: The Silence of the Skripals

PostPosted: Fri Nov 23, 2018 12:15 am
by JackRiddler
It may be a new low, though I've lost track!

Re: The Silence of the Skripals

PostPosted: Sat Nov 24, 2018 9:39 pm
by Grizzly

Re: The Silence of the Skripals

PostPosted: Wed Jan 09, 2019 4:04 pm
by MacCruiskeen
This man Rob Slane, who actually lives in Salisbury and knows the place well, has done a power of work in exposing the countless lies fed to us about this case by the UK government and mass media. Here he sums it all up:

https://www.theblogmire.com/summing-up- ... d-wanting/

Re: The Silence of the Skripals

PostPosted: Mon Mar 04, 2019 8:14 pm
by alloneword
Still silent, one year on.

https://rusemb.org.uk/fnapr/6762

Re: The Silence of the Skripals

PostPosted: Mon Mar 25, 2019 7:00 pm
by alloneword
OK, so I wasn't going to post this (it's over a month old), but recent (non)events etc... Maybe as narratives go, it could at least potentially offer some sort of 'closure'?

The recent titbit fed to us by Bellingcat (reputedly close to MI6) that a third Russian agent was booked on the flight from Heathrow to Moscow on the night of 4th March 2018 — the flight taken by the two alleged GRU officers filmed in Salisbury — but didn’t show up for it, has pointed to a possible solution to the baffling Skripal puzzle. What if the third man, or perhaps the man who was supposed to take his place, was by then lying in Salisbury Hospital in a coma from opiate poisoning? What if Sergei Skripal was a triple agent trying to escape back to Russia to tell the world the truth about the Steele Dossier, which he had helped to concoct as a scurrilous, obscene joke and which had unexpectedly become the new bible of the insane war party in Washington?

This is the alternative narrative I will set out in detail here so that the reader can judge whether it forms a more plausible and coherent story than the mishmash of improbabilities, absurdities and contradictions served up by the British police and MI6. Of course in the absence of all the facts we must sometimes use imaginative reconstruction to fill in the gaps, but the point is to see how many thorny problems, raised by the facts we do have, can be solved by this narrative and cannot be solved by the official one...
(my bold)

https://off-guardian.org/2019/03/05/the ... narrative/

Thoughts?