It is apparent, when you watch the speech, that no one understood the horror that was about to be unleashed on a comparatively stable world. All told, the speech is just very, very sad.

It’s sad to see that even the harshest, strongest parliamentary critics couldn’t come close to guessing the scale of the destruction. When Mr Cook spoke of a projected death toll “at least in the thousands”, he thought he was giving a grisly warning. We now know it to be a dramatic understatement.

It’s sad to hear him refer to “suggestions the war may last only a few days” when it lasted years. Iraq is a fractured mess to this day.

It’s sad to witness stark warnings about the breakdown of international law fall on deaf ears. When Mr Cook talks of American “eagerness for regime change”, no one in the House knows just how much damage that eagerness will do. Is still doing.

It’s sad to witness the quality and honesty of the speech, when there is not one MP in the current Tory government – and very few in the opposition – with the intelligence, erudition or dignity to make this speech today…let alone the moral conviction to resign on a point of principle.

Read more:

https://off-guardian.org/2018/03/17/watch-robin-cooks-resignation-speech...

The Russian election is rolling on, so far with no major hitches, and maybe even less than the expected level of Western sniping. Ghouta continues to be liberated, and so far the predictions of a chemical weapons false flag to justify NATO cruise missile attacks on Damascus have not come about. For the sake of global survival we have to hope that continues.

Meanwhile the Skripal case is exposed more and more as a poorly executed, ragged and ridiculous piece of political theatre. 

The name “novichok” was very possibly grabbed from a Sky TV drama aired earlier this year.

Read more:

https://off-guardian.org/2018/03/18/bbc-allows-boris-johnson-claim-of-ru...

MOSCOW (Sputnik) - The United Kingdom and its mainstream media disapprove of the election process in Russia, claiming that the March 18 presidential election was rigged, despite there being evidence to the contrary, Janice Atkinson, the vice-president of the Europe of Nations and Freedom group in the European Parliament, said.

"No, you’re not going to get a fair hearing, absolutely. I saw the mainstream media, the BBC reporting and the mainstream media at home, the left and right, and you’re not going to get a fair hearing in Britain. They’re saying that your votes are rigged; the cameras were turned away from the electronic voting machines. I actually checked that and I could see that the cameras were actually working," Atkinson said.

READ MORE: Russian Senate Records External Attempts to Meddle in Presidential Election

The politician added that there were alternative media outlets that could report on the election truthfully to counter what the mainstream media broadcast.

Incumbent President Vladimir Putin is leading in the vote count with 76.67 percent after 99.75 percent of the ballots have been processed.

Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/russia-elections-2018-news/201803191062682472-uk...

MOSCOW (Sputnik) - London is not providing Moscow with a sample of the substance that poisoned former GRU Colonel Sergei Skripal, because the Russian experts are able to quickly determine that it was not manufactured in Russia, Leonid Rink, one of the developers of the Novichok chemical weapons system said in an interview with Sputnik.

"Why do you think the British refuse to give a [nerve agent] sample to Moscow? Because no matter how hard the specialists try, the manufacturing technology always differs a little. It's a kind  of a 'handwriting sample.' It will immediately become clear that this is not a Russian technology," Rink said.

Rink added that the sample from Salisbury is like a "fingerprint" for a forensic expert.

"It could be easily determined that it [the poison] was not 'cooked' in Russia," he stressed.

According to the scientist, British chemical weapons experts had access to Novichok technology and could have used it to poison Skripal and his daughter.

Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/world/201803201062711423-novichok-nerve-agent-sk...

It is becoming increasingly difficult for the British authorities and for the British media to deny that ‘due process‘ – ie. the well-established system of rules for conducting fair and impartial trials and investigations in order to determine questions of guilt or innocence – are not being followed by the British authorities in the Skripal case.

Here are some of the violations of due process the British authorities which in my opinion the British authorities are committing:

(1) The British government is interfering in the conduct of a criminal investigation, with Prime Minister Theresa May and especially Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson pointing fingers at who they say is guilty (Russia) whilst the criminal investigation is still underway;

(2) The British government has said that unless Russia proves itself innocent within a specific time the British government will conclude that it is guilty.  As I have explained previously this reverses the burden of proof: in a criminal case it is the prosecution which is supposed to prove the defendant’s guilt, not the defendant who must prove his innocence;

(3) The British government refuses to share with Russia – the party it says is guilty – the ‘evidence’ upon which it says it has concluded that Russia is guilty, the evidence in this case being a sample of the chemical with which it says Sergey and Yulia Skripal was poisoned.

This violates the fundamental principle that the defendant must be provided with all the evidence against him so that he can properly prepare his defence;

(4) The British government is not following the procedure set out in Article IX (2) of the Chemical Weapons Convention to which both Britain and Russia are parties.  This reads as follows

States Parties should, whenever possible, first make every effort to clarify and resolve, through exchange of information and consultations among themselves, any matter which may cause doubt about compliance with this Convention, or which gives rise to concerns about a related matter which may be considered ambiguous. A State Party which receives a request from another State Party for clarification of any matter which the requesting State Party believes causes such a doubt or concern shall provide the requesting State Party as soon as possible, but in any case not later than ten days after the request, with information sufficient to answer the doubt or concern raised along with an explanation of how the information provided resolves the matter.

This says clearly that in a case like the Skripal case the British authorities should have sent a request for information to the Russian authorities, who would then have had up to ten days in which to respond.

Instead the British demanded a Russian reply within 36 hours, and said they would assume Russian guilt unless a response was provided which satisfied them, even though the Chemical Weapons Convention does not give the British government the right in a case like Skripal to say based on such a reply that the Russians are guilty or not.

There has been an attempt to argue that the British disregard of the procedure set out in Article IX (2) does not breach the Chemical Weapons Convention.

Read more at http://theduran.com/skripal-case-british-media-admits-due-process-not-ap...

Watch John Pilger in this commentary on the British Government's accusations against Russia over the attempted assassination of the double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, in Salisbury, only a quarter of an hour drive from the Porton Down facility where the UK develops chemical weapons.

https://independentaustralia.net/article-display/john-pilger-britains-skripal-case-a-carefully-constructed-drama-video,11322

Imagine the following scenario: You are a star football player at the local high school, with a number of college teams hoping to recruit you. There is even talk of a NFL career down the road. Then, overnight, your life takes an unexpected turn for the worse. The police show up at your house with a warrant for your arrest; the charges: kidnapping and rape. The only evidence is your word against the accuser’s. After spending six years behind bars, the court decides you were wrongly accused.

That is the incredible story of Brian Banks, 26, who was released early from prison in 2012 after his accuser, Wanetta Gibson, admitted that she had fabricated injurious claims against the young man.

Many other innocent people, however, who have been falsely accused in the West for some crime they did not commit, are not as fortunate as Brian Banks. Just this week, for example, Ross Bullock was released from his private “hell” – and not due to an accuser with a guilty conscience, but by committing suicide.

“After a ‘year of torment’… Bullock hanged himself in the garage of the family home, leaving a note revealing he had ‘hit rock bottom’ and that with his death ‘I’m free from this living hell,’” the Daily Mail reported. 

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/op-ed/422206-russia-skripal-courts-metoo/

More details have emerged about the alleged poisoning of former Russian intelligence officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter as British police struggle to piece together their movements on the day of the attack.

Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia turned off the GPS tracking on their mobile telephones for four hours on the day they were poisoned by a nerve agent, The Sun on Sunday reported.

The devices' GPS signals which identify positions were not in operation during a crucial period in which their movements remain unknown, the newspaper wrote.

This may mean they were poisoned after switching off their phones to keep a clandestine meeting secret.

"The most likely reason would be if they were going to meet someone and wanted to remain off the radar. This would fit with the tradecraft Skripal used as a spy," The Sun on Sunday quoted an unnamed source as saying.

A Scotland Yard spokeswoman refused to discuss any details when meeting with reporters on Sunday.

Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/military/201803261062902960-skripals-cellphones-...

"Sergei and Yulia Skripal are seriously ill in hospital" we are told (while being shown a picture of them happily drinking beer and wine in a restaurant), but so far not a single picture nor a single proof of this statement has been brought forward. They could be somewhere in an MI5 safe house, until the storm blows over, then be given new identities and enough cash to travel the world forever after... unless they are "disappeared" or "suicided" with no trace by the Poms, so that one day they don't spill the real beans.

The second [of those] video[s] shows Putin offering Russia’s billionaires the choice between being dispossessed of their companies by the Government, or else signing an agreement with the Government, promising that they will henceforth place the welfare of their workers and of the people of Russia, above their own personal welfare and wealth, and only one billionaire there, Oleg Deripaska, hesitated, at which point Putin treated him contemptuously and Deripaska promptly signed.

Here is how Britain’s Express newspaper, on 7 October 2015, described that second video:

It shows the 63-year-old [Putin], who has launched a blitz of more than 50 airstrikes against the terror regime [Syria’s ISIS] in recent days, directly confronting Russian oligarchs and ranting at them that they are good for nothing COCKROACHES.

In the incredible footage, Putin humiliates Oleg Deripaska, one of the world’s richest men with a fortune of $6m [Deripaska’s fortune in 2009 was actually $3.5 billion], and treats him like his personal lapdog.

It was filmed on a tour of Pikalevo, a struggling factory town where families had been venting their anger over job losses and unpaid wages.

Back when the Putin-Deripaska encounter happened, the right-wing British newspaper Telegraph had bannered, on 4 June 2009, “Vladimir Putin takes Oleg Deripaska to task”, and it placed their hostile slant on the event by sub-heading: “Vladimir Putin, the Russian prime minister, publicly criticised his most faithful oligarch on Thursday in an attempt to deflect growing social discontent on to the country’s unpopular super-rich.” (Of course, the U.S. regime would ignore why Russia’s super-rich were “unpopular,” much less the fact that America’s super-rich were involved in these heists from Russia that had caused so much of Russia’s post-Soviet depression.)

On 27 April 2018, Deripaska ceded control over the world’s second-largest aluminum-producer, Russal, and he did it because the United States regime had recently placed him and his corporations under new economic sanctions, which are allegedly focused against Russian billionaires who support Putin politically. If Deripaska wouldn’t cede control, then the sanctions-hit would be harder and more damaging to Russia’s economy, so Deripaska — in fulfillment of his agreement signed with Putin — ceded control.

In other words, Deripaska, whom Putin had actually forced to commit to placing Russia’s interests above their own, is now being treated by the U.S. regime as one of the chief people to ‘blame’ for Putin’s being in office, in Russia’s ‘dictatorship’.

This threat, by Putin, to Russia’s wealthiest (Deripaska having been one of the billionaires whom Putin didn’t dispossess when coming into power in 2000), wasn’t a staged PR event, but instead was simply the best-filmed instance of Putin’s standard policy, ever since becoming Russia’s leader: his policy that an aristocrat can lose everything if he places his interests above the nation’s interests.

This policy was the fundamental change from the prior, Boris Yeltsin, years, when Harvard’s economics department and the World Bank, during the immediate post-Soviet 1990s, came into Russia and set up the system, working in conjunction with Yeltsin’s friends, to funnel the future profits from Russia’s vast undervalued natural resources, into partnerships between Yeltsin’s friends and U.S. billionaires and affiliated investors. That American-led corruption sent the Russian economy into a tailspin, from which the new Russian President, Putin, rescued it, by laying down the law to the billionaires: that their interests were subordinate to, not dominant above, the nation’s interests. This is the principal difference between the ideology of today’s America, and of today’s Russia.

My 3 June 2014 article, “How and Why the U.S. Has Re-Started the Cold War (The Backstory that Precipitated Ukraine’s Civil War)”, showed, by means of graphs, that the economic depression which engulfed Russia (and which was totally ignored by the Western press) during 1990-2000, ended and reversed immediately following (when Putin came into power), and especially ever since around 2004, so that Russia’s economic growth-rate under Putin, at least the rate prior to America’s economic sanctions against Russia in 2014, was one of the world’s best and looked likely to pose serious competition to the U.S. aristocracy in the future. From the pits that were brought by the U.S. regime in Russia — including the massive heists from the Russian public — to the period of Putin’s rule in Russia, has been a sea-change, and the U.S. regime cannot tolerate it; they want the U.S. elite’s looting of Russia to return.

This is necessarily a simplified overview of the conflict between the U.S. regime and Russia, but it’s nonetheless true. In order to understand it more deeply, filling in the details during the period after the end of the Soviet Union — and of its communism, and of its Warsaw Pact military alliance mirror-image to America’s NATO alliance, till now — cannot meaningfully be done outside the context of the U.S. regime’s swindle of Russia ever since the night of 24 February 1990, when U.S. President George H.W. Bush told America’s allies that it was a lie to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev when Bush’s people had promised Gorbachev that if the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact ended, then NATO would not expand, not move “one inch to the east” toward Russia’s border — which the U.S. and those allies have since done all the way up to Russia’s border. (In reverse, it’s as if Russia now were placing its soldiers and its missiles on or near the Mexican border, and the Canadian border.) This swindle of Russia meant that though the Cold War did end on Russia’s side, it never yet has ended on America’s. The greed of the U.S. regime — and of its allies — seems to be endless, including, ultimately, grabbing Russia itself. Putin resists, and so they hate him. That’s the reality.

To the U.S. regime and its propagandists, Putin is “The Pariah” and “The West’s Public Enemy Number One”, but to the Russian people, he is the protector of their nation against the U.S. regime’s threats to Russia’s national sovereignty. More diametrically opposite views of the same man, could hardly even be imagined.

Read more:

https://off-guardian.org/2018/04/30/why-the-u-s-regime-hates-vladimir-pu...

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