Russia May Not Have Attempted to Assassinate an Ex-Spy in England (Recently)

Plus, if The West was serious and not feigning indignation, they would listen to Navalny and expel ALL the Russian Oligarchs since the Russian Oligarchs are as much Russian Agents as the Diplomats of not more so.

What He Said

The West needs to put its Money where its Mouth is. It needs to put up or shut up.

I agree with Navalny. Russian Oligarchs, like Putin, ARE THE RUSSIAN STATE. Russians, especially Russia’s Oligarchs, think in terms of The State. If there is one thing that defines Russians, it is this.

Therefore, Russian Oligarchs Abroad are necessarily Russian Agents and cannot and should not be trusted.

I want them out of America and out of The West period.

Also, they’re The Rich. The West treats The Poor like shit and rolls out the Red Carpet for Rich Foreigners. Pathetic. Traitorous, actually. Classist.

If The West is true in its conviction that the Skripal Poisoning was perpetrated by Russia, then it will expel ALL Russian Oligarchs from its Realm.

I know The West won’t do that, therefore, this entire Skripal Poisoning Spectacle is a Diversionary Nothing Burger and The West knows Russia didn’t really do it or, it knows Russia did it and doesn’t really care as much as it’s feigning to care.

If they didn’t, why such a puny response?

@Stirling – because throughout all this, Russia has bent over backwards to avoid doing anything the West might construe as provocation, even as the West has behaved more and more outrageously toward Russia.

Russia Insider posted 30 questions; asking “Where are Sergei and Yulia Skripal now? How are they? Are they alive?”

If the Russian state used nerve gas in Salisbury England, this is an act of war with consequences no less dire than the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria. But, instead of the truth, facts are hidden from the populace. There is World War underway in Syria. The USA has not withdrawn since the fall of Raqqa and is holding on to an oil field in the eastern desert. If the intention is for the USA and Israel together to neutralize Iran by destroying the Shiite militias in Syria, this will inevitably will draw Russia into a shooting war. Whoever is pushing this march towards a nuclear war is insane and needs to be committed.

This is their next step –

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/03/07/dems-m07.html
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/03/08/dems-m08.html
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/03/09/dems-m09.html

Of the much-touted red-to-blue wave underway, less than half a dozen, if that, are from the Bernie Sanders wing of the party.

I don’t know how something like this will pan out, but I’m not optimistic. This last paragraph underlines my worst fears and confirms all the scary things I’m seeing in the people around me.

“The upper-middle-class layer that provides the “mass” base of the Democratic Party has moved drastically to the right over the past four decades, enriched by the stock market boom, consciously hostile to the working class, and enthusiastically supportive of the military-intelligence apparatus which, in the final analysis, guarantees its own social position against potential threats, both foreign and domestic. It is this social evolution that now finds expression on the surface of capitalist politics, in the rise of the military-intelligence “faction” to the leadership of the Democratic Party.”

someofparts, my view of the Democrats is that if they wanted my vote they would stand for and fight for things I believe in. They don’t. So I figure they don’t want my vote. The current giddiness in the Democratic party is fueled by expectations that voters will vote for them as a way of rejecting Trump and the Republicans. They are likely right for 2018. But 2020 not so much.

Survival of the fittest is a brutal concept, but it is asserting itself now at the most basic level.

The fittest are those who survive the fight for life and security. Period. It does not matter. in evolutionary terms, how that fight is won; all that matters is whether you win it.

We can easily see who is winning the fight. And what the future they are fashioning will look like. So, let’s stop pretending that it’s an ambiguous mystery of some sort.

there are many ways to say “We did not do it.” None of then the Russians did. The does not mean they did the deed, but it does say they might know who did.

On a meta level, credibility no longer has much survival value for states in the current environment. The news media are such an effective tool of mass manipulation of essentially passive or credulous audiences, that it no longer matters. The British government does not bother to “prove” anything it asserts and Russia doesn’t bother refuting evidence that has not been presented; and Rachel Maddow’s ratings go up. What can you do?

The idea that Russia is behind Skripal attack is laughable.

George Galloway: “No slither of evidence” against Russia
https://www.rt.com/uk/422568-skripal-spy-evidence-galloway/

Ray McGovern (ret. CIA) “I do not put it past MI5, and MI6, at all”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6J0QHHMNCV4

Philip Giraldi (ret. CIA) “As noted above, May’s argument is, to a certain extent, based on character assassination of Russians – she even offered up the alleged “annexation” of Crimea as corroboration of her view that Moscow is not inclined to play by the rules that others observe. It is a narrative that is based on the presumption that “this is the sort of thing the Russian government headed by Vladimir Putin does.” The British media has responded enthusiastically, running stories about numerous assassinations and poisonings that ought to be attributed to Russia, while ignoring the fact that the world leaders in political assassinations are actually the United States and Israel.”
…
It could be plausible to consider that states hostile to Russia like Ukraine and Georgia that were once part of the Soviet Union could have had, and might still retain, stocks of the Novichok nerve agent. That in turn suggests a false flag, with someone having an interest in promoting a crisis between Russia and Britain. If that someone were a country having a sophisticated arms industry possessing its own chemical weapons capability, like the United States or Israel, it would be quite easy to copy the characteristics of the Russian nerve agent, particularly as its formula has been known since it was published in 1992. The agent could then be used to create an incident that would inevitably be blamed on Moscow.
…
And to throw out a really wild possibility, one might observe that no one in Britain had a stronger motive to generate a major confrontation with a well-defined enemy than Theresa May, who has been under fire by the media and pressured to resign by many in her own Conservative Party. Once upon a time suggesting that a democratically elected government might assassinate someone for political reasons would have been unthinkable, but the 2016 election in the United States has demonstrated that nothing is impossible, particularly if one is considering the possibility that a secret intelligence service might be collaborating with a government to help it stay in power. An incident in which no one was actually killed that can be used to spark an international crisis mandating “strong leadership” would be just the ticket.”

http://www.unz.com/pgiraldi/russiagate-comes-to-england/

@Stirling Newbury: IIRC, the Russian had said that they were not behind the Skripal poisoning, but nobody in HM Government or the MSM is willing to listen.

Moreover, the idea that this somehow “sends a message” is absurd. Besides having no motive, the timing could not be worse for Russia, and the timing could not be more convenient for those who seek Cold War II.

The idea that [fill in the blank] is laughable.

Nothing against metamars’s particular comment here, but I just do not want to read or listen to a lot of open-ended speculation. It is hardly limited to the blog comments. Look at cable news shows and that’s all there is. The whole Trump-Russiagate thing is built out of nothing else, and it seems to rot the brains of people who dive into it.

It isn’t just about “suspending judgement” for me; it is about not getting drawn into the process of propaganda. And, that is what is going on here: a process of propaganda, where there is no reliable information and only a facsimile of critical judgment amidst a floodtide of groundless speculation and drama mongering.

I think it is important that we apply the same standards of evidence and critical analysis to any question, any policy. Not every bad leader (May) is equivalent to every other bad leader (Putin). All national leaders in the world today are bad. All governments are kleptocracies. So do we just throw up our hands and walk away? Do we really equate Great Britain’s highly tangential role in Yemen with Russia’s direct and heavy-handed intervention in Syria?

On the one hand, the US and Western countries are given no benefit of the doubt. They are presumed guilty, no evidence required. I mean evidence and a case can often be made, but they aren’t necessary to the presumption. On the other, with Russia, if any theory, not evidence but theory, –and there is always the handy false flag operation– that can be used, then there is a tendency to give Russia a pass. But it is worse than that. Even if a solid case can be made that Skripal was targeted by Putin and the Russian intelligence services, that is seen as insufficient because Putin is never wrong and the West is never right. QED. Even if there was a TV crew following the Russian agent as they explained who they were and what they were about to do, the reflex of some would be either to find a way to deny what they were seeing or say that everybody does it, in fact the West does it more or worse. So no biggy.

This is precisely the kind of behavior that we decry and ridicule, justly, in the wingnut right. It crushes our credibility to engage in the same thing.

“It isn’t just about “suspending judgement” for me; it is about not getting drawn into the process of propaganda. ”

That’s a better way to look at it. In my defense, I think it can be an interesting exercise to engage in speculation for a moment or two so long as you don’t get sucked into taking any of it seriously. In the Skripal case, the point would be that there are other storylines the press could be pushing if they wanted with equal or greater plausibility. But I am not going to spend any time pushing an alternative theory when we have no evidence.

“Cui bono” relentlessly comes to mind.

Who benefits? And why such crappy implementation? Now it’s thought something was put on the Skripal front door.

Whatever it was, it does not seem to have affectd those trying to help the couple. A doctor working to help the Skripals upon their being found on the outdoor bench spent quite a long time working on the pair. No poisoning, no illness affected him. No one in the area sent to the hospital showed any signs of being poisoned.

The Guardian at one point said Detective Sergeant Nick Baily was thought to have touched something at the Skripal residence that caused some form of illness. I tried searching for a timeline which indicated when –or if– the officer went to the residence, but haven’t found one yet.

Too many questions for May and then all the follow on countries to be so amazingly certain that the Russkis did it. OK. too many questions for me to be convinced. Actual evidence would be good.

The money quote from the Stephen F. Cohen links I posted, earlier, are:

“No verified facts have been produced for either. None. Not here, nor in London. About either Russiagate or the Skripal case. And secondly, and note this, that Putin is personally blamed, for having personally ordered, the Russiagate allegations, and the murder of Skripal.”

False equivalences and double standards are credibility killers whether they come from the right or progressives. If progressives want to be taken seriously and sell their values to the rest of society, we really need to dispense with this nonsense. It is self-defeating.

Putin is not some eleven dimensional chess player. Most of the time he is and acts like a common thug. There is a saying that when you hear the clatter of hooves outside your door, think horses, not zebras. This was a fairly typical Russian-style hit attempt. Much like the polonium poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko, it was meant to be messy, painful, and nasty. It was never meant to be hidden, but to make a statement. The labored efforts I see here to turn a horse into a zebra are just icing on the cake for Putin and his intelligence services. They can attempt to pull off a gruesome double murder right in front of you. They are perfectly willing to take advantage of your gullibility, and have nothing but contempt for you for it.

I say this as someone who is not anti-Russian. I have immense respect for Russian culture and the Russian people. I think that post-USSR Russia was unconscionably screwed over by the West, but I have no illusions about a dictator like Putin, the kleptocracy he runs, or how low he is willing to go.

Both for credibility and just to understand the world in which you live and how it operates, I would counsel progressives to regard all sides critically and dispassionately.

Progressives really need to take the rose colored glasses off. The sheer degree of willful unreality is staggering. Dictators are not nice people. They maintain power by killing people and scaring the shit out of everyone else. But nooo, because if Western leaders are corrupt, and they are, then Putin must be warm and fuzzy. You will never understand the world you live in because the reality of it makes you uncomfortable. And any uncomfortable truth must be rejected. Again no difference between you and the wingnut right.

Hugh, I believe the Russians are guilty of bombing civilians in Syria, as are we. Responsibility for that sort of atrocity is difficult to hide. Nobody claims some other actor bombed Aleppo or Ghouta or in our case, Mosul and Raqqa.

When it comes to this spy vs spy stuff, ordinary people like ourselves are pretty much at the mercy of whatever our governments claim, or we would be if we take your advice. I have no firm opinion on the guilty party at all. There is no logical reason why I should.