Former Russian double agent seriously ill in Salisbury.

[Freakbro]

And I did ask you what do you actually know about Putin other than what you hear from the media.

Yes, because he climbed the ranks of the KGB, then became the President of Russia, during which time Russia is widely ackowledged as a corrupt state entwined with organised crime, has seen a degraded performance of Russia Corruption index and Freedom in the world index, to such a degree that Russia is no longer classified as a democracy. Human rights organisations have criticised him and personally accused him of persecuting political critics and activists, including ordering their torture and murder.

And all this, while he is such a 'nice guy' who 'wouldn't do anything nasty'.

I suppose they are all part of this New World order that have all come together with some shadowy coordinated conspiracy to undermine Russia/Putin by spreading all these lies about him and the country.....yea, that sounds plausible....not.

Funny though, that you readily accept our guys are capable of doing this but not Putin....not sure the reasoning there.

Now ask yourself have the CIA ever been involved in stuff like this before, would they also have the capability to do something like this?

And why would the CIA want to assassinate a former Russian double agent who had worked for the UK and was now currently living here by means of an extremely risky method that put the lives of UK citizens at risk?

Now lets think which of the limited state actors in the world who have the ability to produce such a high purity weaponsied Novachock agent would want to kill a double agent who had sold out the Russians to the UK....maybe a state actor who also has previous for doing such things, and how many more of their citizens who have been critics of the current establishment have been turning up dead in London...

Hmmm...

 

[Amnesia]

lol

 

[ubersonic]

And why would the CIA want to assassinate a former Russian double agent who had worked for the UK and was now currently living here by means of an extremely risky method that put the lives of UK citizens at risk?

Because it would give the west chance to go strong man on Russia a week before the elections and thus change Putin's weak approval rating and imminent lacklustre election performance into a record setter. This is why Vlad got Trump elected, so he could return the favour

(it's a joke).

 

[Cold Fusion]

Russian reporter Borodin dead after mystery fall

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-43781351

 

[ubersonic]

Russian reporter Borodin dead after mystery fall

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-43781351

Let me guess, he mysteriously fell down his buildings elevator shaft onto some bullets, Putin has called it a tragic suicide

 

[Werewolf]

Russian reporter Borodin dead after mystery fall

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-43781351

Isn't defenestration classed as natural causes in Russia these days (at least for anyone critical of the government).

Or in classic Soviet style he died of "heart failure" (the old go to when a general/member of the government who annoyed Stalin etc was shot or whatever but they didn't want to admit dissent to the masses).

 

[HazardO]

It's quite an amazing coincidence really that so many people for whom the Russian state would appear to have the motive to silence permanently seem to decide to commit suicide. Often in ways which you might think would be an unnecessarily painful way to choose to terminate themselves. It's lucky that the Russian state run media does such a thorough job investigating these events to prevent people from coming to the wrong conclusions about what happened.

 

[HEADRAT]

Someone used this line on some radio programme I was listening to the other day “ The Russians seem to be in a geopolitical game of you smelt it, you dealt it” in relation to nerve gas attacks”. It made me

 

[StriderX]

Well considering the level of discourse that seems to exist in both the UK parliament and US congress/senate... it's not all that surprising that it's gotten this low, they learnt from the best.

By this i mean, every exchange in Parliament is disgustingly childish (even with our much respected speaker lately, it's still too crude) and has been for decades (I get that the sort of structure of it kinda relies on the arch-nemesis back and forth, but it's the 21st century jeez). And i needn't explain how bad the US exchanges are, almost certainly not defending it, i wish it was more far more "adult" than it is.

But you get what you vote for, which is amusing to figures like Putin, because we never get what we want anyway.

 

[ubersonic]

Someone used this line on some radio programme I was listening to the other day “ The Russians seem to be in a geopolitical game of you smelt it, you dealt it” in relation to nerve gas attacks”. It made me

Was on Radio 4 IIRC, I liked the bit where they pointed out that Russia said one day there was no attack then the next day said that the west should refrain from bombing Syria in case it destroyed the evidence of the attack XD

 

[FortuitousFluke]

Isn't defenestration classed as natural causes in Russia these days (at least for anyone critical of the government).

Or in classic Soviet style he died of "heart failure" (the old go to when a general/member of the government who annoyed Stalin etc was shot or whatever but they didn't want to admit dissent to the masses).

Ah that reminds me of the radio shows in GTA 3 involving the pro-gun activists. You can't die from a bullet, you can die from massive internal haemorrhaging but a little bit of metal isn't the problem.

I really only came in here to reminisce about sandbox games based around car theft but I've got to say comparing press freedom in Russia to that of the west is hilarious, as is the suggestion that the CIA hoped to derail the Russian election by poisoning the Skripals. Even if it did sway public opinion in Russia, the pre-election interference prior to the event makes it a done deal, Putin took over 60% of the vote for heaven's sake. Who did the cost benefit analysis on that job? Because the CIA should probably poison them.

Also, Putin didn't do it because he's a nice man? When the validity of your position is incapable of weathering the inverse of your own arguments then you're probably on shaky ground.

 

[HEADRAT]

Was on Radio 4 IIRC

Yep I think it was

 

[Doobedoo]

Yes, because he climbed the ranks of the KGB, then became the President of Russia, during which time Russia is widely ackowledged as a corrupt state entwined with organised crime, has seen a degraded performance of Russia Corruption index and Freedom in the world index, to such a degree that Russia is no longer classified as a democracy. Human rights organisations have criticised him and personally accused him of persecuting political critics and activists, including ordering their torture and murder.

And all this, while he is such a 'nice guy' who 'wouldn't do anything nasty'.

I suppose they are all part of this New World order that have all come together with some shadowy coordinated conspiracy to undermine Russia/Putin by spreading all these lies about him and the country.....yea, that sounds plausible....not.

Funny though, that you readily accept our guys are capable of doing this but not Putin....not sure the reasoning there.



And why would the CIA want to assassinate a former Russian double agent who had worked for the UK and was now currently living here by means of an extremely risky method that put the lives of UK citizens at risk?

Now lets think which of the limited state actors in the world who have the ability to produce such a high purity weaponsied Novachock agent would want to kill a double agent who had sold out the Russians to the UK....maybe a state actor who also has previous for doing such things, and how many more of their citizens who have been critics of the current establishment have been turning up dead in London...

Hmmm...

Ok well that's a start Well you say that Russia are widely known as a corrupt entwined with organized crime based on western perception I take it? You do realize that the same could probably and has probably been said about the west, mp cookie jar scandal comes to mind but I sure I could find more examples.
He has just won a landslide vote to govern his own people but they voted for him because they like it like that I suppose? Freedom in the World according to who? And would China be a target of that too because I don't hear to much being said about them at the minute while Putin is the boogeyman of western choice. Russia is no longer a democracy umm ok refer back to the recent election won by Putin. And more accusations this time with a little more substance to back them I hope?

Anyway I'm not here to say that Putin or Russia or any of the non western backed leaders are white than white just trying to offer a little bit of balance and perspective to this media witch hunt.

Now let's get down to the good stuff. I've already posted plenty about Propaganda, it's use and methods of employment (just not by us only the "bad guy's

I'll start with this one I've only just come across but it fits the bill and should serve to offer some insight into the Cia.

Watch this and report back.

 

[Doobedoo]

Behind the Sudden Death of a $1 Billion Secret C.I.A. War in Syria

WASHINGTON — The end came quickly for one of the costliest covert action programs in the history of the C.I.A.

During a White House briefing early last month, the C.I.A. director, Mike Pompeo, recommended to President Trump that he shut down a four-year-old effort to arm and train Syrian rebels. The president swiftly ended the program.

The rebel army was by then a shell, hollowed out by more than a year of bombing by Russian planes and confined to ever-shrinking patches of Syria that government troops had not reconquered. Critics in Congress had complained for years about the costs — more than $1 billion over the life of the program — and reports that some of the C.I.A.-supplied weapons had ended up in the hands of a rebel group tied to Al Qaeda further sapped political support for the program.

While critics of Mr. Trump have argued that he ended the program to curry favor with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, there were in fact dim views of the effort in both the Trump and Obama White Houses — a rare confluence of opinion on national security policy.

The shuttering of the C.I.A. program, one of the most expensive efforts to arm and train rebels since the agency’s program arming the mujahedeen in Afghanistan during the 1980s, has forced a reckoning over its successes and failures. Opponents say it was foolhardy, expensive and ineffective. Supporters say that it was unnecessarily cautious, and that its achievements were remarkable given that the Obama administration had so many restrictions on it from the start, which they say ultimately ensured its failure.

The program did have periods of success, including in 2015 when rebels using tank-destroying missiles, supplied by the C.I.A. and also Saudi Arabia, routed government forces in northern Syria. But by late 2015 the Russian military offensive in Syria was focusing squarely on the C.I.A.-backed fighters battling Syrian government troops. Many of the fighters were killed, and the fortunes of the rebel army reversed.

Charles Lister, a Syria expert at the Middle East Institute, said he was not surprised that the Trump administration ended the program, which armed and trained thousands of Syrian rebels. (By comparison, a $500 million Pentagon program that envisioned training and equipping 15,000 Syrian rebels over three years, was canceled in 2015 after producing only a few dozen fighters.)

“In many ways, I would put the blame on the Obama administration,” Mr. Lister said of the C.I.A. program. “They never gave it the necessary resources or space to determine the dynamics of the battlefield. They were drip-feeding opposition groups just enough to survive but never enough to become dominant actors.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/02/world/middleeast/cia-syria-rebel-arm-train-trump.html

Won't post anymore so you'll have to click the link to read the rest. But yes that's right the Cia have been arming and funding the rebel (terrorists) in Syria. Not heard this been mentioned in our British media or by Boris but then again it's old news as we've doing things like this for decades haven't we.

 

[Doobedoo]

CIA Covert Operations: From Carter to Obama, 1977-2010

CIA Covert Operations: From Carter to Obama, 1977-2010 provides a detailed account of the operational and diplomatic history of U.S. covert operations, encompassing the time period beginning with the inauguration of President Jimmy Carter in 1977, and concluding with the George W. Bush administration, although a few Obama-era documents are also included. Containing 2,337 declassified documents from a wide range of sources, namely the Central Intelligence Agency, the Department of State, the White House, the National Security Council, as well as a variety of others, the set provides a wide-ranging look into the intricacies of CIA covert action. The primary source material contained within this collection is dynamic in its ability to illuminate not only the specific aspects of individual covert operations, but also the CIA’s role in U.S. policy more broadly.

Overall, the set concentrates on two distinct, but occasionally overlapping, thematic areas: the oversight and management of covert operations and the details of particular covert activities. Documents associated with the control and management of covert operations often showcase the tension between the CIA and the legislative branch. The collection, for instance, features the director of central intelligence nomination hearings for figures such as Stansfield Turner, James Woolsey, George Tenet, and Michael Hayden, among others, and notably includes the expansive Robert Gates hearings of 1991. It also highlights the Carter administration’s attempts to overhaul the intelligence community through documents such as the National Intelligence Reorganization and Reform Act of 1978, as well as containing an assortment of various Senate Select Committee on Intelligence hearings. The set includes extensive documentation on the effort between 1977 and 1981 to develop a legislative charter for the intelligence community, showing the Carter administration’s internal deliberations, as well as Reagan administration efforts to revisit some of these issues.

Documents dealing with the details of particular covert activities cover well-known operations, such as the United States’ support of the Mujahedeen during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan from late 1979 and throughout much of the 1980s, to lesser known propaganda operations involving Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) broadcasting to Soviet Muslims. The set touches on the efforts of the U.S. to halt Cuban activities in Africa, in countries such as Angola, as well as programs to arm the Contras in Nicaragua, and the actions the Reagan administration took against Libya. It also contains more recent documents which provide a unique insight into the CIA’s rendition programs and use of enhanced interrogation techniques during the “War on Terror,” and into activities and programs such as the Airbridge Denial Program, which aided in the shoot down of a missionary plane over Peru in 2001.

https://proquest.libguides.com/dnsa/covert1977

 

[Jokester]

Eh, this is common knowledge and has been posted several times over the years in this thread alone.

 

[Doobedoo]

A Look Back at the CIA's Dirty War in Laos

A Great Place to Have a War: America in Laos and the Birth of a Military CIA by Joshua Kurlantzick (Simon & Schuster) is a must read. One learns an enormous amount from this book. As a quite close observer of East Asia for more than half a century, I did not know that the CIA had provided military training to Chinese Muslims and Tibetans (to "harass" Chairman Mao's regime). What does that have to do with the war in Laos in the 1960s? Pretty much everything, for, as the author forcefully demonstrates, the CIA's covert war in Laos provided a template for secret wars in decades to come, including involvement in Afghanistan, where the CIA supported the mujahedin , and in the Iran-Contra affair in Nicaragua.

It is quite amazing that such a small place--population roughly 2.5 million at the time of the war--should have had such a huge global impact and legacy. It is even more amazing that while it was the U.S.' longest war, it has virtually disappeared from history textbooks and from most people's radar screens. A major reason is that while the Vietnam War was administered by the U.S. State Department, fought by the U.S. Armed Forces and widely covered by the media, the war in Laos was run and fought by the CIA and out-of-bounds to the media.

The "rationale" for both wars was the same. After the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 and its abandonment of its erstwhile Indochinese colonies--Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos--violent turbulence occurred in all three countries. Following the "loss" of China to the Maoist People's Liberation Army in 1949 and with the domestic backdrop of McCarthyism in the U.S., the fight against communism became an ideological and strategic obsession. This gave rise to the "domino theory," well illustrated in then President Eisenhower's remark: "If Laos were lost, the rest of Southeast Asia would follow, and the gateway to India would be opened to communists."

Much of the book recounts the juxtaposition of the war in Laos with the rise and metamorphosis of the CIA. Thus, while the CIA destroyed Laos, Laos made the modern CIA.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jplehmann/2017/03/01/covert-war-in-laos/#57a64fce2efa

 

[Doobedoo]

Eh, this is common knowledge and has been posted several times over the years in this thread alone.

So they have a history of doing dirty deeds yet are not capable of doing anymore? It could only possibly be the Russians? No one else why because we say it.

Never mind the fact that Putin is ex-KGB so if he was personally responsible surely would have the know how and resources to make sure the trail wouldn't lead directly to Russia, quite literally as we are told.

And with the salisbury one they couldn't think of any better way than to use a known "russian" made nerve agent.

 

[Doobedoo]

Mapped: The 7 Governments the U.S. Has Overthrown

The era of CIA-supported coups dawned in dramatic fashion: An American general flies to Iran and meets with “old friends”; days later, the Shah orders Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh to step down. When the Iranian military hesitates, millions of dollars are funneled into Tehran to buy off Mossadegh’s supporters and finance street protests. The military, recognizing that the balance of power has shifted, seizes the prime minister, who will live the rest of his life under house arrest. It was, as one CIA history puts it, “an American operation from beginning to end,” and one of many U.S.-backed coups to take place around the world during the second half of the 20th century.

Several national leaders, both dictators and democratically elected figures, were caught in the middle of the U.S.-Soviet Cold War — a position that ultimately cost them their office (and, for some, their life) as the CIA tried to install “their man” as head of state. The U.S. government has since publicly acknowledged some of these covert actions; in fact, the CIA’s role in the 1953 coup was just declassified this week. In other cases, the CIA’s involvement is still only suspected.

The legacy of covert U.S. involvement in the seven successful coups below (not to mention a number of U.S. military interventions against hostile regimes and U.S.-supported insurgencies and failed assassination attempts, including a plan to kill Fidel Castro with an exploding cigar), has made the secret hand of the United States a convenient bogeyman in today’s political tensions. Even now, despite waning U.S. influence in Cairo, conspiracy theories suggesting that both the Muslim Brotherhood and the military-backed government are in cahoots with the United States abound in Egypt.

http://foreignpolicy.com/2013/08/20/mapped-the-7-governments-the-u-s-has-overthrown/

 

[Doobedoo]

35 Countries Where the U.S. Has Supported Fascists, Drug Lords and Terrorists
Here's a handy A to Z guide to U.S.-backed international crime.

The U.S. is backing Ukraine's extreme right-wing Svoboda party and violent neo-Nazis whose armed uprising paved the way for a Western-backed coup. Events in the Ukraine are giving us another glimpse through the looking-glass of U.S. propaganda wars against fascism, drugs and terrorism. The ugly reality behind the mirror is that the U.S. government has a long and unbroken record of working with fascists, dictators, druglords and state sponsors of terrorism in every region of the world in its elusive but relentless quest for unchallenged global power.

Behind a firewall of impunity and protection from the State Department and the CIA, U.S. clients and puppets have engaged in the worst crimes known to man, from murder and torture to coups and genocide. The trail of blood from this carnage and chaos leads directly back to the steps of the U.S. Capitol and the White House. As historian Gabriel Kolko observed in 1988, "The notion of an honest puppet is a contradiction Washington has failed to resolve anywhere in the world since 1945." What follows is a brief A to Z guide to the history of that failure.

https://www.alternet.org/world/35-countries-where-us-has-supported-fascists-druglords-and-terrorists