Wheel Out the Skripal Story Again

Hey, you believe the political classes but me and Striped Horse don't, and all we're doing is saying we don't on this forum - no big deal? When you say 'try looking at the facts and data', how on effing earth can we plebs get our hands on official facts and data? And even if we could in these days of blatant government lying, stupidity, and self-serving propaganda, how would we know whether those facts and data are to be believed? Last question - Why the **** am I having to point that out to you?

 

Poppycock... very strong opening.

Apparently, you do not understand the difference between an accusation and a denial.

You see, in the real world, the burden of proof falls on the person making the accusation, not the person making the denial.

In this case, the UK government are the ones making the accusation, which means the burden of proof falls on them to demonstrate their claim. Thus far, they have not even come close to demonstrating their claim. Ergo, the default presumption of any reasonable person would be to treat such claims with a heavy dose of skepticism. You, on the other hand, accept them at face value, despite the UK government's LONG history of lying and corruption.

Of course they lied. They asserted their claim as a fact when they had no idea if it was true or not. That's a lie. And they intentionally tried to connect the 9/11 attacks to Iraq, which was another lie. They also claimed we'd be greeted as liberators, and that the war would be easy. Again, more lies. The Iraq war, which resulted in the wanton destruction of entire country, and caused the entire region to descend into utter chaos, was based on lie after lie after lie, lies which you are now attempting to defend in the most disgraceful fashion.

And as I already informed you, it's not "our" government. It doesn't belong to "us", it belongs to the richest and most powerful members of society. They wage wars not because of good intentions, but because of greed and lust for power. One must be willfully blind not to see this.

 

Good point. It's only a question of whether we'll believe them - bit like whether we believed the Skripal story or not, and the reason I don't believe it is that there were too many inconsistencies and it looked too staged.

 

And yet you swallow their inflammatory accusations without a second thought as to their motives and past behavior.

I'm sure people like you said the exact same thing when the US government was telling the entire world that Iraq had "weapons of mass destruction". Anyone who challenged the US government's LIE was accused by people like you of being loyal to Saddam Hussein. Yet somehow you failed to learn your lesson. Because here you are AGAIN, doing the exact same thing. Only this time, you're directing your inflammatory and dubious accusations at a nuclear power.

Because you're behaving like one.

You treat government officials and agents like high priests and their accusations like holy writ. You exercise absolutely no skepticism of the narratives they attempt to foist on you.

Anything and everything I've ever said on this forum can be backed up with facts, evidence, and logic. It requires no special knowledge of anything, unless you consider the historical record a form of special knowledge.

My theory is that we don't know what happened. Real delusional, right?

In any case, the burden of proof falls on the ones making the accusation, not the people exercising skepticism of the accusation. Apparently, this basic distinction is lost on many individuals living within the west, despite the fact that it's the ostensible basis of their criminal justice system.

 

It also defies common sense that Russian intelligence services would conduct such a sensitive operation in this manner. The timing and methodology sound like something out of a spy novel. It certainly does not resemble authentic statecraft.

 

When Putin's adversaries are murdered most intelligent people think it's
reasonable to suspect Putin. Maybe they are wrong - but at least they are
reasonable.
There's a whole class of what Lenin called "useful idiots" in the West who
will sympathize, condone, deny and even support Russian foreign and
domestic policies. Not because they love Russia, but because they hate
their own liberal democracies.

 

Exactly, and only the gullible actually believe it. If Putin wanted him dead he'd have allowed him to return to Russia, which is what Skripal had requested, then do the deed there rather than risk a diplomatic incident.

 

A reasonable person might ask why Putin seems incapable of conducting a covert operation in a way that doesn't automatically point right back to him.

 

There are any number of methods that would have been more effective, less risky, and allowed for plausible deniability, yet we're supposed to believe Putin chose the most exotic and conspicuous method possible. Apparently, Putin is a mastermind and an idiot all at the same time.

 

Like the famous Polonium case of Litvinenko? Or the murder of the journalist and critic Politkovskaya, shot in an elevator? The latter case was simply blamed on the Chechnya's - the very people she defended. And many in Russia, and their idiot counterparts in the West, went along for the ride.
Simply put - the Putin administration has got careless. If Putin himself put a gun to the head of a dissident and shot them on prime TV there would be a legion of people saying it was fake news.

 

And there's the other aspect, and that's the presumption of being innocent until proven guilty? How on earth could anyone in the West know if Putin murdered an adversary? Actually I'm one of those who hates his democracy because it has become obsessively liberal and it's ruining my country.

 

So your explanation for why Russian intelligence cannot seem to conduct a successful covert operation is that Putin is "careless"... my, what a compelling argument.

 

Don't forget he's the devil incarnate too?? I mean, that's what I call 'versatile'??

 

Put it this way - THEY DON'T HAVE TO BE CAREFUL.
They rely upon plausible deniability.
Doesn't always work, but like the Russian Buk missile incident which brought down
Flight 17 Malaysian airliner - what are you going to do about it?

 

Just because it was Russian-made doesn't mean that Russia fired it? Although it does make for a good anti-Russia story for western governments and media!

 

Western journalists are generally liberal/left by tradition. Any university poll on media studies
proves that (including my own sister.)
The media will generally give more leeway to Russian behavior than it gives to its own govts.

Facts:
Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine
Putin signed off on the ordinance.
Putin said he would fully cooperate with the investigation.

We can at least agree upon that.

But all this comes back to the Skripal story. It's all from the same man with a history of violence,
intolerance and contempt for the truth.

 

I have a serious question for you Big Yella.

Is it really true that you are, as some here whisper, an actual comic superhero masquerading on this forum as a burned-out, hidebound, narrow-minded, sozzled old Irish-Aussie men's underwear salesman who contributes nothing other than spite and bile - along with the occasional self-pitying "poor me, I'm so misunderstood" statements?

In short, are *********-Man?

Yes or no?

 

Actually, she look pretty hot!!!!

 

The media of any country will base its editorial output on two things - being compliant to government policy and to keep up and increase its circulation figures.

I don't know that we can agree on it; why did he do that, do you believe?

I don't know who you're talking about - is it Skripal or Putin?

 

Quote - The media of any country will base its editorial output on two things - being compliant to
government policy and to keep up and increase its circulation figures.

Compliant to the law like everyone else. Not compliant to the whims of a party currently
in office. In the US I found something like 90% of all online papers were hostile to Trump.
Even when he manages to get something right (which is rare) he gets little credit for it.
And as for circulation numbers - they are way down.

 

I'm not going to let this exchange turn into an anti-Trump rant. Anyway why did Putin invade Ukraine? You 'forgot' to tell me.

 

Agreed on that. If you have proof of their involvement in the original Skripal affair (and this Amesbury affair), then now's the time to provide it.

Otherwise it remains in my book a classic British propaganda play dreampt up by Christopher Steele and Pablo Miller of Orvis along with the very nice people at Vauxhall Bridge Road - all on behalf of Her Munificence, our PM, Theresa Stick Creature.

The clue to why such a ploy was necessary was made clear in an article by Elijah Magnier (HERE), when he revealed a secret plan by the US, UK and France to conduct a last chance "crippling" strike against the Syrian military in order to destroy it completely and thereby clutch victory from the jaws of defeat (the Russians knew of the plan and foiled it). For that to happen without an immense public outbreak of anger and clamour, the British public had to be manipulated by the media to view Putin and Russia as marauding hobgoblins aiming to eat our children, rape our women, steal our burgers and beer and generally defecate on all things British, like our German heritage royal family. Etc etc.

This second affair draws from the same Skripal playbook, but it seems very different. At least at the present.

There is a sense, for me anyway - and by no means more than personal musings -- that the British government has been caught completely off-guard on this, and are racing around trying to downplay things - while also blaming the Russians for it in a knee-jerk reaction.

There were indications in the Skripal affair that elements of the Russian emigre community in London were involved. A close Russian friend of Sergie Skripal actually made this claim in a BBC interview at the time which was ignored. And Pablo Miller, he who's name is not to be mentioned by the British media under threat of sanctions - following the government issue of a D Notice in March 2018 - is very deeply involved in the Russian emigre community, I believe. It was he, for example, who originally "recruited" the money-loving Skripal, and the later almost certainly was involved with Messrs Steele and Miller (who lives in Salisbury btw) in the Trump "piss dossier".

The whole affair had multiple spook themes written all over it.

I do, for reasons already provided. Lightening might, very rarely, strike in the same place twice. Novichok however doesn't.

 

Now it's all beginning to make a bit of sense - until now, it hasn't! But the government (and I use the word loosely! lol) said this morning that the Amesbury 'decontamination (I use that word loosely, too ) could take months'; then again, it said that the Salisbury decontamination would take months but in fact the charade was over in less than a fortnight. All I can say is that if there's another 'poisoning' in the vicinity of these two places, even the gullible BBC will start asking question of Her Munificence' ( ). Curiouser and curiouser, said Alice?

 

Putin invades other countries to restore the old Russian empire, in a nutshell.
(There are other reasons such as fear of NATO, fear of liberal democracies hard
against his borders etc..)
But the Big Problem is that "we" (the so-called civilized word) have decided that
we should respect the current world's borders - r.e.g.a.r.d.l.e.s.s. of historic claims.
Historic claims would have all and sundry going back to the war which settled these
borders. Thus Crimea is not a part of Russia, and the Falklands are not a part of
Argentinia and norther Iraq is not a part of a new Kurdish state. Feels terribly unfair
at times, but unfairness is better than deciding all borders are up for grabs, all over
again.

 

Just to repeat
When Putin's adversaries are murdered most intelligent people think it's
reasonable to suspect Putin. Maybe they are wrong - but at least they are
reasonable.
There's a whole class of what Lenin called "useful idiots" in the West who
will sympathize, condone, deny and even support Russian foreign and
domestic policies. Not because they love Russia, but because they hate
their own liberal democracies.