Narrative malfunction set to beget more of same as Skripal case jumps shark into looky-likey dopiness?

Let us begin by simply stating the situation as it stands in the Skripal incident: police cannot place their suspects, Boshirov and Petrov (whom they have charged in absentia in relation to the offence), at the scene of what will be referred to hereafter as the primary crime – to wit, the supposed attack on the Colonel Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, via a front door handle laced with lethal/not-so-lethal nerve agent (take your pick). Moreover, they cannot link the primary crime to the secondary crime – to wit, the supposed accidental poisoning of Sturgess and Rowley. As such, the British Government is currently promoting the work of a fly-by-night internet operation by the name of Bellingcat, and its propaganda mouthpieces in the corporate-media are revelling in a “case closed” moment. Basically, those who are hard-of-having-a-brain are being gaslighted along these lines: here are the people who committed it, so there must have been a crime.

Thinking people, as very few of them as there are, will understand that Bellingcat’s information is the latest in a long trail of circumstantial talking points to distract from the fundamental failure, in several places, of the official narrative: another smokescreen of fluster to convict the suspects in the court of public opinion without having to address the matter of the distinct lack of evidence. Helping blow the smoke is the blogo-alternative media and the Skripal case experts that are everyone’s favourites in the discipline. Never shy to leap at every new talking point according to a pet theory whereby something-happened-but-not-what-the-Tories-say-happened, or by parroting elements of the official narrative as gospel, these people send their readership into wild goose chase territory†. The Bellingcat development has proven no different in these respects; e.g. Boshirov isn’t who Bellingcat says he is, but he isn’t Boshirov either.

As far as Bellingcat’s input into the Skripal saga is going to broached here at FBEL, the following three paragraphs will suffice.

The major “revelation” is that Boshirov is a highly decorated GRU officer – a colonel – by the name of Chepiga, who has been described in corporate-media as a “hero of Russia”, and a man personally acclaimed by Putin himself.

Anyone who watched Tinker Tailor, Soldier Spy, starring Alec Guinness, will know that down at the “Circus” (MI6) Beryl Reid has an encyclopaedic knowledge of all the major players in Russian intelligence, a veritable catalogue of names, faces, ranks and operations-attributed-to – all contained in her own soft-tissue memory banks; and that was in the Seventies when there were only batty gin-sodden bag-lady-types and no proper computers. Just think what MI6 can do now! So, bearing this in mind, it appears as if we are being asked to believe that the British security services had no idea that Colonel Chepiga (or maybe we should call him Karla) was in the UK until after Bellingcat found a photo that looked a bit like an image in the documentation that Boshirov supplied in order to get a visitor’s visa (whatever particular visa type it was). More narrative malfunction ahead (and chuckles), surely, as the British Government fumbles around for an explanation for this oversight (and here’s a start: “Russian secret services were today accused of influencing staff inside the British embassy to secure visas for the two men they sent to kill Sergei Skripal with novichok”).

What the Bellingcat development boils down to is the corporate-media effectively investing its last vestiges of credibility in a realm currently purveyed by the “they’re all crisis actors, nobody died” auto-hoaxer, where the phenomenon of the “spitting image”, inexplicably forgotten or never learnt, (where human beings not even directly related to each other possess a striking resemblance) is never allowed to explain a pair of “lookey-likeys”. No doubt someone could come along to tell us that Bellingcat’s prognosis is generated by facial recognition software – but how does that software deal with spitting images? The author would hazard this estimation in answer: the same as humans do, without the intuition; in other words, it reports that two people look very much alike, but doesn’t judge that they aren’t the same person. Relying on the software means living or dying by the computer saying yes or no – although the art of facial recognition appears to be something like horoscopes where a percentage figure can be interpreted just as one pleases. In short, it’s rather dopey.

On the other hand, what needs to be presented and stated over again with regards Boshirov and Petrov – so one takes hold of the official narrative like Beowulf gripped Grendel’s arm – are the issues that were introduced at the top of the page. There’s no evidence that Boshirov and Petrov visited the Skripal residence. As for the Metropolitan Police’s failure to produce proof of their suspects’ connection to the secondary crime, this has been dealt with comprehensively at FBEL, most recently in the article, The problem of Rowley’s perfume not being the same as the Met Police’s – here – (which revisited Rowley’s found object and the Met’s poisoning material – and never the twain shall meet – here).

Incidentally, the author has noticed that in the blogo-alternative media it has been posited that the Met Police have not charged Boshirov and Petrov with the secondary crime due to a lack of fingerprints on the bottle of perfume found by Charlie Rowley – meaning the fingerprints belonging to Boshirov or Petrov, of which the authorities will have a record due to the data supplied with their visa applications (apparently), are not present on the offending article. This is an assumption constructed out of (and perhaps even to provide an explanation for) police behaviour that can in fact be reasoned as being due to the introduction of incriminating evidence in a manner that has nothing to do with Charlie Rowley’s bin-diving. See the article linked-to above; and see how the gate-keeping works?

Speaking of planting evidence, another issue pertaining to Boshirov and Petrov to be restated is the one whereby the only way the police can connect them to the primary crime in the Skripal incident is through an alleged tiny Novichok sample discovered in the room in the City Stay Hotel, where the Russians stayed over the weekend in question. This was discussed at FBEL before in the articles, Highly trained Russian assassins adopt British terror patsy practice (firstly) and (then) Post-Magna Carta, the mob concurs: “Skripal poisoning” case suspects did it because police say so.

To summarise as briefly as possible, the portrayal of the way Novichok was collected at the City Stay (as stated by police) points to the manufacturing of evidence to incriminate the Russians. So small was the discovered sample that in swabbing for it, the police cleaned the contamination. In their statement of 5th September, the Met Police say that they unsuccessfully tried to acquire other samples in other areas in the room – which suggests, one way or another, they were testing somewhat blindly, and as such – at least while we don’t know by what criteria, if any, the police identified various parts of the room to search, we must marvel at the their good fortune in finding a speck of Novichok. Moreover, the stark contrast in the treatment of the City Stay Hotel where business resumed as normal, as opposed to the Zizzi restaurant, the Skripal residence, and the address at the infamous Muggleton Road – all of which were cordoned off and  underwent deep decontamination – suggests that there was never any nerve agent at the City Stay Hotel.

However, it was not for shoring-up the flagging Novichok side of the narrative that a tale of raucous debauchery committed in Boshirov and Petrov’s room emerged in the Sun (and was copied copiously into that other most popular propaganda rag, the Mail) – rather it was to counter a growing impression, after the men were interviewed by RT and, before that, their relationship was generally wondered at (as it was here at FBEL), that threatened to ruin the accusations of Russian State involvement: the two men were nothing more than a couple of fruity sightseers. Unsurprisingly, a name was not supplied, but an anonymous fellow hotel patron had quite a lot of cause to complain (line spacing copied from the Sun – obviously something to do with the reading age of the paper’s audience):

At least one guest recognised Petrov from CCTV footage released by the Met after he bumped into him at the hotel’s toilet the evening before the failed assassination.

He told The Sun on Sunday: “I came back from work and had a little cooker in my room, so I was going to cook my dinner.

“It was a Saturday night so it’s always quieter than a weekday.

“But I could smell weed from their room.

“It was by the door and in the corridor, it was unmistakable.

“It must have been around 7pm.

“Later there was a woman in there. I think it was a prostitute.

“They were having sex. Definitely.

“I heard them having really loud sex for a long time.

“It was definitely a woman. I don’t think the men were having sex with each other. I could still smell the pot.”

The angry guest complained to front desk staff at the hotel but the pair continued with their antics.

He added: “It got too much so I went, ‘Bang, bang, bang, bang,’ four times on the door.

“It stopped for a bit but carried on later.

“I went to the shared bathroom at about 11pm and saw one of the blokes, I later realised was Petrov. The one without the beard.

“I was coming out for a wee and he was coming in. I didn’t speak to him.

“It’s very rare you speak to anyone there. He was wearing a dark top and dark jeans, I think.

“I’m 100 per cent sure it was that Petrov.

“I’m one thousand per cent sure that they stayed in that room.

“You could hear them speaking Russian.

“I turned the TV up loud but could still hear them at it.

“I fell asleep at about 11pm and I’m a heavy sleeper.

“Most of the guests would have seen or heard them — there was shouting going on throughout the night.”

Needless to say, all this must be true because the Sun reports it as fact, right? In that case, the Metropolitan Police must know who the prostitute is, otherwise they would have made mention of her in their September 5th statement, and also a plea for her to come forward (in the strictest confidence, of course)? Also worthy of note is that this hotel guest didn’t have a room, but a suite with kitchen – otherwise a breach of building regulations was possibly being admitted to?

Now some of the Skripal case experts in the blogo-alternative and social media have bothered to weigh up this contribution from the Sun as if it were evidence worthy of consideration. Here at FBEL, its treatment will come in the form of one paragraph from Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four:

And the Records Department, after all, was itself only a single branch of the Ministry of Truth, whose primary job was not to reconstruct the past but to supply the citizens of Oceania with newspapers, films, textbooks, telescreen programmes, plays, novels — with every conceivable kind of information, instruction, or entertainment, from a statue to a slogan, from a lyric poem to a biological treatise, and from a child’s spelling-book to a Newspeak dictionary. And the Ministry had not only to supply the multifarious needs of the party, but also to repeat the whole operation at a lower level for the benefit of the proletariat. There was a whole chain of separate departments dealing with proletarian literature, music, drama, and entertainment generally. Here were produced rubbishy newspapers containing almost nothing except sport, crime and astrology, sensational five-cent novelettes, films oozing with sex, and sentimental songs which were composed entirely by mechanical means on a special kind of kaleidoscope known as a versificator. There was even a whole sub-section — Pornosec, it was called in Newspeak — engaged in producing the lowest kind of pornography, which was sent out in sealed packets and which no Party member, other than those who worked on it, was permitted to look at.

Orwell’s Ministry of Truth wasn’t science fiction, it was the activity of Government propaganda production – superficially the BBC – extrapolated into the future. Yes, the reader might venture, but the BBC, or the corporate-media as was, partnered a nation at war in Orwell’s day, and shades of totalitarianism were just necessary. The answer: but that was the whole point of World War II – to establish a socialised country (see the FBEL articles The socialist “Rights of Man” – towards a New World Order (first) and (then) In which we observe H G Wells agitating for a New World Order in 1940). This Sun piece was exactly the sort of thing that Orwell was managing expectation for (rather than “warning people of”, given that he was Fabian Society).

Speaking of which, reading the book again, it was noticed this time that the Ministry of Truth is a white-faced pyramid. The Great Pyramids in Egypt, of course, were also at one time white-faced (with limestone), and they were temples of initiation into the Egyptian branch of the Mystery Religion. It just goes to show the lengths that the British ruling class will go to invite understanding of their activity safe in the knowledge that their Helot slaves (or their Eloi) are too stupid or frightened to cotton on.

† Update, 30th September:

Now comes a story planted by “an impeccable Whitehall source” that reinforces the official narrative: Boshirov and Petrov are indeed GRU, but Bellingcat is being fed material about Chepiga by the Russians, which will embarrass and discredit the British Government if it endorses it.

No. The Bellingcat material isn’t for Government endorsement, it’s for gaslighting the consumers of corporate-media to save the Government’s own onions; it’s for keeping the slaves on the plantation (as is the controlled blogo-alternative media).

Moreover, perhaps what we see here is the start of a lot of back-peddling because, as explored in this FBEL article, the Bellingcat spasm promises to lead to more failing narrative hysteria.