+and Russians, forgetting their Crimea, grateful to their liberators, will throw flowers at us and, bashfuly lowering their eyes, ask for humanitarian canned meat handouts, while kicking Putin effigy and swearing that, deep inside, they always opposed him.
— Ластик и Абырвалг (@ValLisitsa) May 29, 2018
Remember this tweet"😎 pic.twitter.com/oGxK7A2c66
http://honesthistory.net.au/uploads/PDFs/quadrant-cia.pdf
South Africa's Truth & Reconciliation Committee uncovered a document from the National Intelligence Agency of the former white supremacist South African government that revealed the CIA had planned to assassinate Hammarskjöld, a supporter of Congolese independence, likely with the assistance of Belgian business interests and/or local paramilitaries, and under the express orders of CIA director Allen Dulles.
It seems the NSA at one point believed the guy responsible for shooting down Hammarskjöld's plane was part of just such a paramilitary group, the "Katanga Air Force". This was a mercenary gang of Belgian, French and British pilots, scrambled overnight by MI6 and company, to act as the air force of a short-lived pseudo-revolutionary government known as "Katanga", a stratagem devised and funded by Belgian mining interests in an attempt to carve off territory from independent Congo. The idea was to turn the now-independent country under Patrice Lumumba's government into a rump state, and to rob it of the mineral resources the Belgians had previously exploited when the Congo was their colony—the resources upon which any independent Congolese state would depend to survive—bringing them back under Belgian control through a puppet regime.
Of course, if there is evidence of direct U.S. government involvement in Hammarskjöld's death, there's no guarantee a FOIA would produce it, and the below document seems to offer an early, shoot-from-the-hip recommendation based on the results of the NSA's normal duties: monitoring, collection, interception & analysis of data & communications. I think it's almost certain the CIA was involved in assassinating Hammarskjöld, but probably also likely that the NSA was one hand that didn't know what the other was doing, at least at the point this document was produced.
Probably the most LOL part is where they "do not allege" Rhodesian or Belgian support for shooting down Hammarskjöld's plane in the same sentence where they urge pressure on Brussels and Salisbury (now Harare, then the capital of short-lived "independent" white-supremacist Western client state Rhodesia), not to capture Hammarskjöld's supposed assassin, but merely to ground him to keep him from interfering with future operations in the area.
New Novichok poisoning near town where Skripals were poisoned
A MIDDLE-aged couple appear to be secondary victims of the same deadly nerve agent attack used against a Russian spy and his daughter earlier this year after stumbling across its source.
hmmm, a different town very near porton down, but this time theyre not even russian or w/ever *placing another pin on the ol' corkboard map*
Edited by tears ()
getfiscal posted:i never really read this thread but i'm going to start.
Welcome to my realm. Be sure to let me know if you try any of my old pdf links and they don't work.
tears posted:JUST WHEN YOU THOUGHT IT WAS SAFE TO GO BACK ON THE STREETS OF BRITAIN
New Novichok poisoning near town where Skripals were poisoned
A MIDDLE-aged couple appear to be secondary victims of the same deadly nerve agent attack used against a Russian spy and his daughter earlier this year after stumbling across its source.hmmm, a different town very near porton down, but this time theyre not even russian or w/ever *placing another pin on the ol' corkboard map*
this is a very interesting development for a few reasons:
-before it was said that A-234 degrades with humidity, temperature, etc and that this is why the assassin did not manage to kill sergej and yulia ("it was reaining") - and we are supposed to just accept it persisted for 4 months. from the chemistry point of view, i can confirm it should hydrolyze in a matter of weeks at most in soil and atmospheric conditions.
-it's said that the poisoned couple got into contact with some needle or syringe they found in the park (the newly poisoned guy is apparently a registered heroin user) - why didn't the elite decontamination crew at least pick up whatever syringes they find on the floor in the park where the skripals were found previously?
-IV drug users know better than anyone else which risks there are with sharing needles - so why would they handle a random syringe they find in a park?
-why would the assassin dump a needle somewhere where random people kind find it, instead of throwing it in a river or pond, which will dilute and neutralize the substance and make the needle very difficult to find?
-what happened to the story of the toxin being a gel instead of some solution in a syringe.
-what about the story of the gel being on the doorknob?
-why did no one else get poisoned in those 4 months if the contamination was so bad that after 4 months still a critical dose for 2 people remains
It's very funny to see Chemical and Biological Weapons crew on twitter (ppl like Dan Kaszeta) contorting themselves in crazy angles to explain the latest discrepancies. Also, interesting how none of those experts have any background in actual biology, toxicology or chemistry, so usually if you confront them they will say something like "Hold on, I need to check this with my expert contacts" and then never get back to you.
otoh i can't actually figure out why now is the right time for anything, unless it's a Five Eyes shared job to ratchet up anti-russia sentiment to the next level and the british drew the short stick, and their desperation is just them trying to not look like failures in front of their big bros in langley.
maybe america offered an anglosphere trade bloc to brexiting britain in exchange for making some fake news. (with no intention of following through, of course)
i just listened to the Radio War Nerd episodes on The Ustica Incident and the Aldo Moro murder so literally anything sounds possible now.
my actual theory: the british state are just massive fuckups
lenochodek posted:-what happened to the story of the toxin being a gel instead of some solution in a syringe.
-what about the story of the gel being on the doorknob?
the funniest part of the skripal thing is that the UK government has never established what exactly was supposed to have happened or where or when, and somehow that's not the main point of debate
drwhat posted:
idk, i think in a lot of cases conspiracy nuts & liberals in denial make the same mistake, which is to assume that dirty shit between intelligence agencies in different countries, or even different agencies in the same country, requires close communication through the whole operation, mutual sign-offs, etc.
instead a lot of the time it probably comes out of carefully vague conversations, with different actors preferring to beg forgiveness rather than ask permission. if you look at documents from truth & reconciliation committees and the like, there's usually plenty of people getting irked and annoyed over other operators jumping the gun on things both sides wanted done, or choosing sloppy methods, and so on.
a lot of folks seem to be unable to see that stuff as anything other than all or nothing: either it's all perfectly planned and jointly coordinated down to the hour, or there was no coordination. but that's not how the real world usually works. if you look at conspiracies that have been prosecuted as such, then of course a lot of the evidence is transcripts of gangsters trying to suggest and okay things with each other in the most vague ways they can think up. in a lot of cases, they don't really want to know how things get done, but they'll still get mad if they're done poorly.
Like, during the 2012 election, the Democrats used Romney bragging about meeting with MI6 to attack him as not ready for the presidency, because savvy U.S. diplomats should know they're not even supposed to acknowledge MI6 exists, while otherwise in the U.S., the idea of an insanely powerful national security agency that you shouldn't even mention out loud, that's still thought of as extremely fucked up, "uncivilized" and outside the supposed normal methods of control in a good-guy bourgeois democracy elected by mostly white people. So there seems to be a failure in discourse in the U.S. to understand exactly how few details & how little evidence the UK government has put forward in the Skripal affair, because much of the UK press doesn't expect to see it.
From talking with people in the UK, my impression is that the result of years of that stuff was an enormous amount of pent-up rage and distrust domestically over issues relating to Iraq, like the "dodgy dossier", if for no other reason than nationalist contempt for Downing Street deferring to the U.S. on foreign policy, and it's lingered in ways that e.g. anger in the U.S. toward the Department of Defense hasn't, with a greater implicit acknowledgement of how creepy the government can get. So, when the Skripal/Porton Down business showed up, those decades of secrecy backfired and the official story met a population primed to call bullshit on it, for some of the same reasons that Blair's inheritors lost control of Labour.
By way of contrast, in the U.S., there's still this pervasive belief that civilian executives and closed Congressional committees shape the policy of security agencies rather than the other way around, and deeply nasty stuff always comes from "bad apples", unusual cases of agents or agencies gone rogue, or from outside pressure from people like the Bush administration on otherwise virtuous cops. So, when you see stuff like questioning the influence of the "deep state" in polite & accepted conversation, it follows political lines pushed by those agencies themselves, where the people asking those questions and the people telling them to shut up are Republicans against Democrats, where the bourgeois party taking either side from year to year, or even both to month, is incidental to how exactly different agencies are fucking with politics at the moment and which bourgeois-party politicians they're fucking over.
The net result is that I think most people in the United States who know about or care about the Skripal affair imagine the UK government has provided a lot more details & evidence to support their accusations than they really have, because in the U.S., it's expected that such claims to the public will be accompanied by a detailed account of the events as claimed, even if it's extraordinarily flimsy and only accepted by the news media out of fear & deference. The same thing is certainly true of U.S. agencies' claims about Russia and the 2016 election, where much of what's come out of various alphabet boys' mouths has just been flat-out evidence-free claims or "acknowledgements" that this or that supposedly happened, while most Democrats who follow the events in the news seem to believe that those agencies have provided evidence to the public somewhere.
drwhat posted:i just listened to the Radio War Nerd episodes on The Ustica Incident and the Aldo Moro murder so literally anything sounds possible now.
those episodes were really good. you know youve got a good case when even the sanitized wikipedia page is utterly insane.
lenochodek posted:the explanation (according to metro) is now that they both smoked the same 4 month old cigarette butt
regardless of who is involved, would flavour capsules in the butt be plausible intoxication method?
Gssh posted:flavour capsules in the butt
ah, so they were poisoned by my posts.
lenochodek posted:holy shit.. the novichok is coming from inside of the house
shriekingviolet posted:it seems like absolutely no one had any conceivable motive to deliberately initiate this mess, so my bet would be on someone's horrible stupid fuckup and then the UK threw out the quickest easy excuse trying to take advantage of russia hysteria so no one has to be embarrassed about it.
i could conceivably believe there was a reason the perps believed was logical. maybe they had justified or moronic suspicions that skripal was about to skip back to russia with a USB full of secrets, and some absolute idiot at MI6 thought killing him and framing russia would be both plausible and wise. a simple step for some MI5 dipshit tasked with cleanup to get drunk and wake up late and fail to return all the novichok back to the lab, thus dusting our other victims. i just find it odd that of all people to get accidentally caught up in all this, it would be a russian spy with form for playing both sides against each other. maybe it was a favour from one spook agency to another, like they decided it was in both their interests to snuff the dude, and it snowballed out of control from there.
we won't know until someone inevitably leaks the case files like 20 years from now.