Paul Craig Roberts
OpEds
A British governmental inquiry has concluded that Russian President Putin “probably approved” the killing of Alexander Litvinenko by polonium poisoning.
Litvinenko’s widow, Marina, and their son, Anatoly, in London. The Litvinenkos have become the latest propaganda tool of the West to besmirch Putin’s and Russia’s reputation. See sidebar below for more evidence how the Western media are using them (willing foils) to advance their slander.
As no evidence is provided for the surmise, we can conclude that this report on an unresolved event that happened a decade ago is part of the lies being used by the West to demonize Putin, just as the lies about MH-17 and “the Russian invasion of Ukraine.”
Litvinenko’s brother and father say that they “are sure that the Russian authorities are not involved. It’s all a set-up to put pressure on the Russian government.” Maksim Litvinenko dismisses the British report as a smear on Putin. https://www.rt.com/news/329804-litvinenko-brother-britain-murder/
And that is what it is.
“Our” government not only lies to us about the economy and the wars, it also lies about literally everything. For example, do you remember the Rwanda genocide? The story we were told is the exact opposite of the truth. Today the perpetrator of the genocide, Paul Kagame, is the President of Rwanda.
SIDEBAR
British media jump into the poisoned pit. Observe below how The Independent, a paper that has on occasion carried anti-establishmentarian stories (like the Guardian), cheerfully disseminates Western disinformation. Shows how unreliable such media can be, as long as they remain in the hands of tycoons. Click on the bar to read in full. The report, penned by Cahal Milmo, literally drips with cloying sentimentality, feigning an instance of muckraking journalism siding with the weak to expose the powerful. It obligingly quotes Mrs. Litvinenko’s wish to have all “Russian agents expelled from Britain…” plus other hostile measures. The only attempt at balance, with the damage done, is the inclusion of a quote from Litvinenko’s own brother, who clearly dismisses the whole thing as a propaganda charade against Russia.
Alexander Litvinenko's widow vows to continue fight to bring killers to justice
Marina Livinenko demanded the expulsion of all Russian intelligence agents from Britain along with economic sanctions
By Cahal Milmo | @cahalmilmo | The Independent
After he was granted asylum in Britain in 2003, Alexander Litvinenko took his young son to the Tower of London to see the Crown Jewels. On his deathbed three years later, the dissident recounted how he had told him: “Sonny, you must defend this country in the future until the last drop of your blood.”
..
The gratitude felt by Litvinenko, who formally became a British citizen a month before his murder, and his family to Britain for giving them sanctuary was sincere. But for his widow and son the long path to justice pitted them against not only the Kremlin but also at times their adoptive state.
As she stood on the steps of the Royal Courts of Justice, minutes after publication of the public inquiry report which lay official blame for her husband’s death firmly at the Moscow’s door, Marina Litvinenko spoke of her satisfaction that an English court had found that Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin, were - to a greater or lesser extent - instrumental in the assassination.
It was a finding that came only after a tortuous and at times lonely battle to ensure that the authorities provided the fullest possible account of Alexander Litvinenko’s death.
In 2013, an inquest into the killing was delayed after the coroner decided that a public inquiry, which would be able to hear evidence from the intelligence services (albeit in private), was the most suitable instrument for deciding how and why the 44-year-old former intelligence officer was murdered.
When months later Home Secretary Theresa May ruled out such an inquiry, Mrs Litvinenko, a former dance teacher with a degree in economics, was forced to risk all by launching a High Court case to reverse that challenge. There was no guarantee of success but the courts found in Marina’s favour, forcing the Government to order the investigation which on 21 January went some way to achieving the goal set by her and her son, Anatoly, of establishing the facts surrounding the polonium poisoning in November 2006.
As Sir Robert Owen, the inquiry chairman, put it in his report: “It was [Mrs Litvinenko’s] action in bringing a judicial review against the Home Secretary (at considerable financial risk to herself) that resulted in this Inquiry being established… Above all, she has demonstrated a quiet determination to establish the true facts of her husband’s death that is greatly to be commended.”
Ironically, it was due to his role as an investigator for the Russian FSB internal security service that Mr Litvinenko met his wife. The pair met after two of her friends, whose complaint of extortion was being investigated by Mr Litvinenko, invited him to her birthday party in June 1993. They married in the following October following the birth of Anatoly.
On 21 January, Mrs Litvinenko made it clear that her quest to, in some way, hold to account those responsible for her husband’s death continues. She demanded the expulsion of all Russian intelligence agents from Britain along with economic sanctions and travel bans against named individuals, including Mr Putin.
Asked to confirm that she had not given up on the two suspected killers, Dmitry Kovtun and Andrei Lugovoi, being brought to justice, she said: “They are walking the streets of Moscow today but I believe there will be a final day when these two people will be punished.”
In the meantime, the mother and son will continue their lives in their adoptive country, on the one hand grateful for its actions, on the other seek to prod it into a more robust stance against an adversary unafraid of deploying radioactive poison in London.
When asked how the nine years since his father’s death had felt, Anatoly said: “It’s been pretty difficult. I can’t compare with anyone else’s life - you only have one life. My life is what it is. For some looking from the outside, it might look difficult.”
However, Mr Litvinenko’s younger brother, Maxim, a chef living in Italy who once blamed Russia for the murder, told the Daily Mirror: “My father and I are sure that the Russian authorities are not involved. It’s all a set-up to put pressure on the Russian government. “Why else would the court be called to hold this inquiry only after 10 years? The West appears to be collaborating with Russia in Syria, but it’s not real. There are still sanctions.”
Asked why Mrs Litvinenko blamed the Kremlin, he said: “She lives in London: to survive, she has to play the game and take this point of view.”
END OF SIDEBAR. P. CRAIG ROBERTS TEXT RESUMES HERE
Western governments and media have covered up his crimes and praise him as a great humanitarian who has healed Rwanda and is totally supported by the people. The truth is that Kagame has proved himself a worse totalitarian that Hitler, Pol Pot and other dictators combined. He has turned Rwanda into a fear-ridden psychological prison. Anjan Sundaram, a journalist who ran a journalism training school in Rwanda, describes in detail Kagame’s destruction of all truth and all independent thought in Rwanda. In his just published book by Doubleday, Bad News: Last Journalists In A Dictatorship, Sundaram gives the gruesome details of how Rwandans, with the complicity of the West, have been brought more psychologically under control than Winston Smith in George Orwell’s 1984.
Kagame used murder, fear, and bribes and purges of his own supporters in order to eliminate all expression of independent thought in Rwanda. Indeed, in Rwanda the individual has disappeared. People have been merged into the state. Sundaram reports his conversation with a Rwandan who is being reconstructed along the lines of Winston Smith. This person tells Sundaram: “In this kind of country we don’t know where the state ends and where we begin. And if I don’t know where I begin I’m worth nothing. I don’t have any rights. We are not individuals, we are agents of the state.”
Kagame: Hard to pigeonhole in a neat category.
None of the totalitarianisms that the West ranted against during the 20th century ever got this far. There was resistance everywhere. Hitler’s own top generals plotted against him. In the Soviet Union and Mao’s China, there were dissidents, including highly placed members of the Communist Party. But in Rwanda even the concept of opposition has been erased.
Reading Bad News brings to mind parallels to the US. In Rwanda sentences result not from law but from “the word of authority. Simple words had attained such power.” This reminds us of simple words from the US president that result in indefinite detention and assassination of US citizens without trials and conviction. The subservience of Western journalism has been obtained by the state similar to the suppression of independent journalism in Rwanda. Bribes are used, both monetary and access. Fear of being fired and rendered unemployable as a journalist is used. Occasionally, perhaps even murder is used as in the unresolved case of the US journalist whose car suddenly accelerated and crashed at high speed. Other American journalists have been threatened with prison sentences.
The disturbing fact that the Anglo-Zionist Empire has supported Kagame, a genocidist who “has killed more than five times as many people as Idi Amin,” is perhps an indication of what the Anglo-Zionist Empire has in mind for the rest of us.
A former establishmentarian, Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts’ latest books are The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West, How America Was Lost, and The Neoconservative Threat to World Order.
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