1 June 2018

On Tuesday, the right-wing Ukrainian regime reported that Arkady Babchenko, a Russian journalist living in Kiev and a vocal critic of the Kremlin, had been shot dead in his apartment building. Kiev immediately pointed the finger at Moscow, with Ukrainian Prime Minister Volodymyr Hroysman declaring that “the Russian totalitarian machine” was responsible for the journalist’s murder.

Within minutes, the news flashed across the globe, becoming a lead story in major news outlets in Europe and the United States, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian and the BBC. The Mighty Wurlitzer of American propaganda began belching vast amounts of hot air.

In every report, the announcement of the murder was accompanied with the conclusion that the Russian government was behind it: that is, the US media outlets announced a murder mystery and its solution simultaneously.

The New York Times’ star reporter, Andrew Higgins, declared, “The killing of the journalist, Arkady Babchenko, a former war correspondent who stirred fury among Russian nationalists with his sharply critical coverage, is the latest in a series of attacks, many of them fatal, on outspoken foes of President Vladimir V. Putin, both inside Russia and beyond.”

Higgins, who in 2014 was forced to retract a story featuring falsified photographs of Russian troops entering Ukrainian territory, placed the murder in a long list of alleged crimes by the Putin regime, including the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal earlier this year, and the downing of flight MH17 over Ukraine in 2014.

In their coverage, the Times and other major newspapers relied on a script they have used repeatedly: A prominent critic of the Kremlin dies or is injured abroad, and Moscow is immediately blamed. Any effort by Russia to deny these claims, or even to challenge the accusations, are treated as more evidence of a malevolent Kremlin plot.

But at the height of the international furor over the murder, the unexpected took place: the corpse of Babchenko made a dramatic reappearance at a press conference called by the Ukrainian police, and the journalist announced that he had dramatically faked his own death.

Looking back on the story, it would not have taken more than a careful examination of the photo of Babchenko’s corpse released by Kiev—which showed the journalist slumped over in a puddle of a liquid resembling ketchup—to know that something was amiss.

But the American press responded to the resurrection of Babchenko by trying to find another way to incriminate the Kremlin. Typical was the editorial published by the New York Times Thursday, headlined, “Whatever It Was, We Didn’t Do It.”

STAGED NEWS DEPT. Babchenko: the man who never was— dead.
Observe below how CNN ran this photo with a completely misleading caption. The New York Times and BBC may call the shots, but the herd of disinformers that call themselves the "free press" obediently follow. 

CNN'S LYING CAPTION: "In this photo taken on Friday, May 31, 2013, Arkady Babchenko, 41, who had been scathingly critical of the Kremlin in recent years, stands at a police bus during an opposition rally in Moscow, Russia. Police in the capital of Ukraine say a Russian journalist has been shot and killed at his Kiev apartment. Ukrainian police said Arkady Babchenko's wife found him bleeding at the apartment on Tuesday, May 29, 2018 and called an ambulance, but Babchenko died on the way to a hospital. (AP Photo/Alexander Baroshin)"

And how about this item, run by CNN on May 30. Observe again the caption.

Russia, Ukraine blame each other for journalist killing

A photo is  included, purporting to show Kiev police guarding Babchenko's apartment building entrance. The caption reads (bold ours):

Policemen stand guard at the entrance of the building where journalist Arkadi Babchenko was shot dead in his apartment on May 29, 2018. - "Arkadi Babchenko was killed by three gunshots to the back in the stairwell of his building as he came home from the store," a colleague, journalist Osman Pashayev, wrote on Facebook. (Photo by Sergei SUPINSKY / AFP) 

The page goes on to claim that Kiev police is now conducting a manhunt to capture the killer, also utterly false considering they knew it was a hoax. 

Manhunt underway

Ukrainian police are now searching for the man they believe to be responsible for Babchenko's death.

The Interior Ministry released a sketch of a bearded man wearing a baseball cap, and described him as being in his early 40s, between 175 and 180 centimeters tall, of average build and with gray in his beard.

Ukrainian officials released a sketch of the suspected killer.

Babchenko left Russia after he criticized the Kremlin in a Facebook post in 2017.

He faced backlash after commenting on the crash of a Russian plane transporting the world-famous military choir Alexandrov Ensemble en route to Syria. They were traveling to perform for pilots involved in Russia's air campaign on Aleppo.

Babchenko called Russia an aggressor, and accused the country of killing children in its air support of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's regime..

https://www.cnn.com/2018/05/30/europe/russian-arkady-babchenko-killed-ukraine-intl/index.html

Later, as the hoax could not be maintained, a new, also fraudulent, Kremlin-blaming story, emerged...

Arkady Babchenko said his death was faked with the help of a makeup artist and pigs' blood, in a ploy that Ukrainian security services say was necessary to protect his life. Speaking at a press conference in Kiev, the anti-Kremlin journalist described how he was shown how to fall as if he had been shot. He put on a T-shirt that had been shot through to show bullet wounds and was then covered with pigs' blood. After his wife called emergency services, Babchenko said, he was transferred to an ambulance. "Measures were taken to resuscitate me but it was not successful and I died, where the doctor established death."

The above is almost an anatomy of deception, how the western propaganda system operates to feed the public false flag narratives, in this case the instrument probably being the deranged (and corrupt) Ukrainian security service, controlled by the CIA, but the last statement is probably the most transparent lie, indicating the doctors were also in on the scam, not to mention the traitor Babchenko, also, most likely, a fellow on the payroll of the CIA/MI6 disinformation machine. What qualified doctor is going to misdiagnose a man as dead when all vital signs are still present and cannot be suppressed at will? Not to mention that whatever holes someone may show on a T-shirt at the ER they will immediately see no actual bullet holes in the body itself.

“After news came from Kiev on Tuesday that a Russian journalist critical of Vladimir Putin had been shot dead, it did not take long for the Kremlin’s denial machinery to shift into high gear,” the Times wrote, complaining that the Kremlin had the audacity to deny that it was complicit in a murder that never took place.

James Bennet: Yale grad, of Polish-Jewish descent, and with a US senator brother from Colorado. The man is well connected.

In other words, the Times sought to shift the story to the Kremlin’s “denial machine,” instead of what the incident has exposed about the lies peddled by the Times. What really stands exposed is the propaganda machine operated by James Bennet, the editorial page editor of the Times, who manipulates the news in the service of the intelligence agencies to promote war abroad and political repression at home. For Bennet, when one lie is exposed, the time has come to reply with an even bigger lie.

Every editorial published in the online edition of the New York Times includes a note that the editorial section “is separate from the newsroom and the Op-Ed section.” Nothing could be further from the truth: In fact, they are generally indistinguishable. The Times routinely places stories on its news page that consist entirely of unsubstantiated claims and speculation, which then becomes the basis for the editorials promoting war and domestic repression.

For more than a year and a half, the US media has been engaged in a campaign against what they call “fake news” allegedly spread by Russia and its sympathizers. In the name of this campaign, the major media outlets, leading politicians, and the US intelligence agencies have justified the imposition of the most sweeping regime of internet censorship in US history, deleting thousands of social media accounts, silencing oppositional viewpoints, and burying left-wing news sites in search results.

But the fraud of Arkady Babchenko’s murder has shown who the real purveyors of “fake news” are: not the oppositional news sites targeted for censorship, but the newsrooms of the mainstream press in New York, Washington and London.