Tuesday, November 28, 2006

Topics of the Day

I haven’t been posting on two of the biggest news stories — the bogus news coming out of Iraq, and the radioactive poisoning of the former KGB spy Alexander Litvenenko — because other bloggers are doing such a great job on them.

The manufacture of fake news by the terrorists in Iraq has become so outrageous, and the credulous (or complicit) peddling of it by the MSM has become so shameless, that you would think that surely the whole “news media” edifice has to come crashing down. But somehow it can keep piling treason upon disinformation upon propaganda, without hurting its business model. Very peculiar.

See this post by Gateway Pundit, or go to his main page and scroll to look for others. Flopping Aces digs very deeply into the topic, and deserves much of the credit for turbocharging this meme.

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The Alexander Litvenenko poisoning affair is so bizarre and labyrinthine that it’s hard to know what to make of it. When you peer into it, you not only run into the lies and disinformation put out by the Russian government, but also those put out by the intelligence agencies within Russia to deceive their own government. It’s a hall of mirrors of indefinite extent.

The best summary I’ve seen so far is by AJStrata; see his main page at The Strata-Sphere for other posts on the topic.


Hat tips: Larwyn.

3 comments:

James Higham said...

Living in Russia, I have a personal interest in this and there's been a raging debate and a series of posts in the last days. I've been asking people over here in the know about it as well and the results were surprising.

Wally Ballou said...

I don't think AJStrata provides a summary as much as a complex of his own conspiracy theories. He seems awfully eager to brand anyone anti-Putin as pro-Chechen on little evidence. I didn't see anything even remotely critical of pooty-poo.

Besides, it seems to me there are a heck of a lot more players over there than just the (angelic?) Putin and the devilish Chechens.

BTW, the best phrase to describe the world of intelligence is the one James Jesus Angleton borrowed from T.S. Eliot - "A wilderness of mirrors"

Wally Ballou said...

There is a good actual summary on Wikipedia. Check it out here

Note that Litvinenko has spent years accusing the FSB of staging acts of domestic terrorism and blaming them on Chechen rebels. He claims Putin had personal involvement with corruption and terror during his KGB days and that he has basically siezed the Russian state my means of an FSB coup d'etat. It's possible his claims are motivated by a desire to whitewash the Chechen rebels, but it's hard to imagine why a man with his background would have that as his primary motivation. If the claims reflect his actual knowledge and sincere beliefs (and he was in a position to know) then it hardly makes him a Chechen rebel "sympathizer".