In 2013 I mused whether Putin might be willing to trade
Edward Snowden for Victor Bout, the Russian arms dealer arrested in 2008. At
this point Bout has done hard time and even a loyalist might be tempted to 'flip'
as he still faces another fourteen years in prison.
As I've written elsewhere Bout is not unique in the
international sphere. The US has dozens of Victor Bout-like figures, most of
which are on the government payroll but few with actual official connections.
That's the way the game is played.
Recently, the Russians convicted Paul Whelan, a
Canadian-American for espionage and sentenced him to 16 years in prison. Is he
spy? I don't really know. He could be but there are also reasons to doubt Moscow's
claim and argue it was a setup. Regardless, the US is expressing outrage and
Washington's hypocrisy on this point is able to flourish as the US media plays
along and plays dumb when it comes to the many bogus and political
imprisonments the US has engaged in either directly or by proxy.
It's a game and Bout and Whelan whether involved or not are
pawns in that game.
The coverage continues to remind me of the Cold War years.
Everything Russia does is villainous. America is land of the free and unlike
the arbitrary tyranny of the Russian system, the United States is a land
governed by the rule of law. It's hard to write that with a straight face.
The BBC has become almost intolerable on this point, recently
giving great attention to Russian operations within Germany – going after
Chechen dissidents. Of course this gets complicated as some of these figures
are tied to organised crime which may or may not mean they were being targeted
by the Kremlin. Others have worked with Western intelligence agencies and
others are by any definition Islamic terrorists.
Of course when it comes to Chechnya the US has a long record
of working with Salafi fighters and supporting them through Turkey and Georgia
in an attempt to destabilise the Russian state.
There is no doubt that Moscow proxy, the Chechen 'Head' Ramzan
Kadyrov is an authoritarian, a corrupt murderer if ever there was one. And yet
he has accomplished the pacification Moscow wanted. It took a former Chechen
fighter to brutally subdue the tiny Muslim nation on the southern periphery of
the Russian Federation.
And yet the resistance hasn't been eliminated and venues such
as Syria have generated a resurgence. At this point we're into the shadowy
connections between the birth of ISIS and Western intelligence – a story that
goes back to some of the murky events connected to Libyan War in 2011 and the re-casting
of the War on Terror – what I sometimes refer to as War on Terror 2.0 – a notion
that has already been replaced by Great Powers Conflict, even in official
statements released by the Pentagon. This scenario can legitimately be called
Cold War II and we've been in it since at least 2004 but it picked up
considerable momentum in 2014.*
Of course the BBC stories ignore the fact that the US is on
the record when it comes to targeting enemies abroad. Are Putin-Kadyrov
connected agents pursuing Chechen dissidents and exiled fighters within the EU?
I don't doubt it.
But we already know Washington does this. It kidnaps and
tortures people and in some cases will assassinate them. The old policies that
were commonplace during the Dulles era went deep underground in the
1970's-1990's but after 9/11, they were officially re-embraced and given a
significant official (if classified) boost. Leaks and scandals have revealed
some of the tale and there have been paltry half-hearted and less-than-transparent
attempts at reform. And the policies continue. The US employs drones in some
cases and in others it uses death squads and assassins.
This does not exonerate the evils of Vladimir Putin but
instead it indicts the shoddy sham journalism of Western Establishment media
and the role they play in promoting the fictions and narratives of the so-called
free and liberal West with its 'dedication' to the 'rule of law'.
At the end of the day, they're all thugs, gangsters, robbers
and murderers. I suppose what's unique in the West is that the facade of
liberalism creates enough of a smokescreen that even figures within government
and media can be blinded – and in other cases embrace a willing and defiant
blindness – refusing to see and understand how the system really works, relying
(as the good apparatchiks that they are) on official pronouncements and communiqués
– ignoring the fact that for decades we have had an endless stream of stories
that reveal these very revered institutions (such as the State Department, Pentagon,
CIA, FBI, NSA, White House etc.) habitually resort to lies and deception
resulting in scandal, war, butchery and death.
There is very little free media in the West. It is largely
corporately owned and politically connected. The media is not an objective
commentator on the game and unlike Bout, Whalen or Snowden, it's not a pawn.
Rather it's one of the game pieces, and an important one at that.
----
*2004 marked yet another significant eastward expansion of
NATO which included several former Warsaw Pact states as well as some former
Soviet Republics. That year also saw the Western-backed Orange Revolution make
significant gains in Ukraine and it was the start of the tug-of-war between
Moscow and Washington for control of Kiev. Moscow would regain control only to
be countered in 2014 by the American backed Euromaidan coup and the
installation of pro-Western proxies. Moscow would respond by backing secession
movements in the Donbass and the annexation of the Crimea.
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