[Peace-discuss] Russiagate: Navalny bullshit put into perspective courtesy of The Grayzone

[J.B. Nicholson]

Establishment media, like the BBC:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-16057045
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-54002880
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-54061370
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-54189573

repeat the claim:
> His [Navalny's] team allege he was poisoned on the orders of Russian President
> Vladimir Putin, who denies any involvement.
and tell the tale of what happened to Alexi Navalny in such a way that you can see 
the BBC buys the Russiagate narrative -- the BBC never tells you that Navalny is 
quite unpopular in Russia (he has around a 2% approval rating, according to Ben 
Norton in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ow9-w8nvJM at 10m05s). So why would Putin 
need to harm or kill him? Why make him politically stronger than before and certainly 
more well known than ever before, thus making him more of a political threat than before?

The BBC apparently buys the idea that what members of Navalny's team collected from 
Navalny's Omsk hotel room was "evidence":
> The video posted on Mr Navalny's Instagram account shows members of his team in a
> hotel room in the Siberian city of Tomsk after news of his poisoning emerged.
> 
> The post says they were there to gather potential evidence from the hotel to send
> to Mr Navalny's medical team in Germany because they did not trust the Russian
> authorities.

This is reminiscent of the Clinton email server scandal where establishment media 
outlets and pundits called an image (or copy) of Hillary Clinton's email server 
provided by hired agency CrowdStrike "evidence". The FBI treated that ostensible copy 
of server data (we'll never know how well that image represented server data because 
the Clinton team destroyed the server) as evidence. The FBI never took custody of the 
physical server as they'd normally do. But that doesn't make the FBI's decision 
correct, nor does it make establishment media's view of that image data correct. 
CrowdStrike should be identified as what they are -- a team hired by and working with 
Mrs. Clinton's group, a party with an axe to grind. But, hey, if that scam worked 
with the establishment media perhaps it will work again in the Navalny case.

Establishment comedy news is so eager to ignore facts and logic, it becomes easier to 
put together a hamfisted satire that gets to the points of the Navalny case and show 
this case as just another chapter of the ongoing saga colloquially called 
"Russiagate". Now, the Grayzone is getting in on the act:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyAom8aDgGo -- "Explosive leaked phone call exposes 
Putin's hand in poisonings, chemical attacks, Taliban bounties": Navalny, Skripal, 
Assad, Afghan "bounties", black Americans in the street protesting all coordinated by 
Putin himself; it's all in there.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ow9-w8nvJM -- A serious interview episode of 
"Moderate Rebels" where Norton and Max Blumenthal interview Bryan Macdonald (the 
aforementioned comedy piece runs in this too).

I plan on listing the second video above in the recommended videos because 
Blumenthal's summary of events is informative, and because good points and good 
questions are asked throughout. You won't find much in media that covers this ongoing 
Navalny case which asks the right questions and makes the right connections to the 
German/Russian pipeline. Recently an RT interview raised a similar point (echoed in 
the above interview) -- Kim Jong Un's brother-in-law was reported to have been killed 
with a toxin less lethal than any from the Novichok group of toxins. Yet somehow only 
one person has died from what was alleged to be one of the Novichok poisons (and 
there's good reason to doubt how Dawn Sterling actually died and what condition she 
was in when she was poisoned). So many ordinary people have had so much contact with 
these Novichok poisons and not died.

-J