Published On: Thu, Sep 13th, 2018

Post-Magna Carta, the mob concurs: “Skripal poisoning” case suspects did it because police say so

The Metropolitan Police’s “Skripal poisoning” case suspects have been interviewed by RT – the reader is probably well aware. Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov claim that they were in Salisbury on the 3rd and 4th March, 2018, to see the sites: Stonehenge and Salisbury Cathedral. Of the latter, Boshirov talks of its spire, which only people on Twitter don’t know is special because of its height, and also, surprisingly, the clock: “It’s one of the oldest working clocks in the world”. Boshirov, then, turns out to be a bit of an horologist (or whatever the word is for a man with an interest in clockwork timepieces). One cannot help but start to wonder if he’s also into real ale – or train spotting. Not mentioned, but we should take note that Salisbury Cathedral, of course, is also the home of the Magna Carta – one of the four original copies extant is on display in the Chapter House. That would be rich, wouldn’t it? It would be rich if Petrov and Boshirov’s admiration for all things English Medieval also stretched to the building block, the corner stone, of English civil liberties. This is clause 38:

In future no official shall place a man on trial upon his own unsupported statement, without producing credible witnesses to the truth of it.

Bear this in mind, dear reader.

There isn’t a lot in the story told by Petrov and Boshirov that needs to be reacted to here at FBEL: there is nothing surprising in it. After all, in the first part of a two-part series titled UK Government doubles down on Salisbury (here), it was explained that stills from CCTV issued by police were not to be trusted, the reason being the ease by which they may be manipulated (to create a timeline for a version of events that didn’t actually happen), and in any case

… all the imagery produced by the Met Police is not proof that two men, being called Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov – though they might as well be the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy – did anything other than visit Salisbury.

There was new information produced by the interview that explained the only thing that had puzzled the author: why did the Russians visit Salisbury twice? The answer: snow. In the panic that ensued on Twitter – as those, who can only find big holes in a story told by a Russian, flocked to defeat the alternative version of events by a turn out in big numbers – there was apparently much mockery generated by the notion that snow could be offered as a plausible explanation for their movements.

As the frequent reader of FBEL will know, half the battle is stupidity drummed into the Briton from childhood and by prison camp (school). If, on the other hand, one makes an effort to be informed, one could easily discover that the snow was problematic on that particular weekend. In fact, when making Petrov and Boshirov suspects – and, indeed, charging them – the Metropolitan Police put it on the record in their statement:

The public may remember it was a particularly cold weekend and there was heavy snow in Salisbury.

Indeed, the Russian pair actually mostly complained about slush when in Salisbury, making their visits unpleasant and therefore short-lived.

Now, while the British general public is prolifically thick so that, to it, tweeting idiocy is as crapping in a field to cattle, how can we explain the behaviour of the alternative media Skripal case experts, of the ex-politician/ex-Scotland Yard/ex-ambassador variety, who have expressed doubt about the plausibility of the two Russians’ story – one going so far to state that it is likely that “these men aren’t telling the truth”? Indeed, the author has seen comments from these types to the effect that the (supposedly) bad execution of the interview of Petrov and Boshirov is detrimental to their credibility*. And so, of these characters one must ask, is the story unbelievable for its own sake, or because it doesn’t suit the official-narrative maintaining, variation-of-the-official-narrative theory that they have been promoting to their vast support? There is no justification in any evidence pertaining to the Salisbury incident for inventing gatekeeping tales of secret meetings [another example here] between the Skripals and Petrov and Boshirov, or dealing ropey bodybuilding supplements; but this, believe it or not, dear FBEL reader, is what some of these characters have proposed.

Given the influence these characters have, that a tale of innocent tourism just isn’t going to cut the mustard for them is all very damaging when, in fact, Petrov and Boshirov have a story that fits the very simplest explanation: the Metropolitan Police’s charges against the men are trumped-up. Having read Part One of the FBEL series mentioned at the top of the page, the reader will appreciate the very peculiar, and indeed all-too-convenient nature of the discovery of the “Novichok” at the City Stay Hotel (where the men resided in London). The reaction to a fantastic Met Police story about cleaning up the contamination by taking the sample was this:

How truly unbelievable it all is. Isn’t it more likely that the police claim to have found Novichok at the hotel is a complete fairy tale? Isn’t it more likely that the City Stay Hotel was Novichok-free not because of the miraculous activity of police forensics, but because it was never introduced in the first place.

It was then pointed out, in said previous FBEL article, that not only was the City Stay Hotel “Novichok” the only means by which the Met Police could link the Russians with a supposed crime in Salisbury, but it was incredibly dubious.

So now revisit the Magna Carta clause quoted above. What it is saying is that evidence from an official is not enough on its own to take a man to trial; i.e. to charge him with an offence. In other words, just because a piece of evidence is provided by an official does not make it conclusive – or, an appeal to an official’s own authority does not bestow integrity upon the evidence. There is this thing called an abuse of power, you see. And as this applies to the supposed Skripal poisoning case, the “unsupported statement” is the City Stay Hotel Novichok. We need to ask, where are the credible witnesses to the truth? Answers, as they used to say on Saturday morning children’s television, on a postcard.

It has been said, hereabouts before, that the UK is a post-civilisation country; now it has been discovered, as the mob takes to Twitter to persecute on behalf of the tyrant, that it is also a post-Magna Carta country. The State might be defined as being comprised of “the people” (with government, territory and sovereignty making up the quartet), but to the author’s thinking this is not correct. The people are the country, and the country is different to the State. A country is the State without government, if you like. The State is an imposition upon the Country, and has to manufacture consent in order to impose. That the people allow this is where all the trouble comes from. Of course, the level of State imposition, and the intelligence, or wisdom – or the shear capacity to act like a human being – of the people must be inversely proportional. If the people don’t even know the basics of their sovereignty, and don’t act in them, then proportionally it won’t exist. Ours is a post-Magna Carta country, therefore the people are appalling creatures: morons who can’t grasp ideas readily understood by any Medieval peasant about the abuse of power, and having constitutional safeguards against it. The police say someone committed a crime, and the mob of appalling creatures won’t truck any dissent. Disgusting.

 

 

* For what it’s worth, and perhaps indicating that RT placed more importance on journalistic value than appearances, the author thought that the encounter was slightly combative in one place where it appears that the interviewer might have been questioning the heterosexuality of the two men. In Russia, where suggesting that someone is a homosexual is still to cast aspersions, this might indeed provoke the following sort of reply (from Boshirov):

You know, let’s not breach anyone’s privacy. We came to you for protection, but this is turning into some kind of interrogation. We are going too far. We came to you for protection. You’re not interrogating us.

From this and the following dialogue, it appears that Boshirov thinks that going to the media (instead of the authorities) would be a means to present a side of the story without having to answer questions about matters that are not related to the case. It didn’t go unnoticed in the said previous FBEL article that the couple shared a room.

Update 14th September:

Not really an update, but something that obviously has a bearing, but would have meant too much of a tangent if it were included in the article. Of course, the mob on Twitter isn’t necessarily what it seems. The following is from January 2015 (Channel 4 News):

Headline: British Army unveils ‘Twitter troops’ for social media fight

Sub-headline: The British Army is to create a new unit for psychological and social media warfare to help Britain “fight in the information age” and control the “narrative” of warfare.

[The focus of] The new unit, the 77th Brigade… will be on “unconventional” non-lethal, non-military methods such as “shaping behaviours through the use of dynamic narratives”, an Army spokesman said… Its brand of “non-lethal warfare” will mirror efforts by the Israeli and US armies to practice psychological operations as a key part of military strategy.

And more recently, there was this (Telegraph, 6th September, 2018)

The head of GCHQ  has vowed to retaliate against the “brazen Kremlin” for Russia’s nerve agent attack on Salisbury.

Jeremy Fleming, the director of GCHQ, said the Government’s top secret cyber intelligence agency would “deploy the full range of tools” to counter the threat posed by Vladimir Putin’s regime.

Mr Fleming’s intervention – part of the UK’s coordinated response to the Novichok attack orchestrated by Russian military intelligence – further ratcheted up the pressure on the Kremlin.

Whitehall sources said Britain possessed the “offensive cyber capability” to target the GRU and individuals linked to it.

Fascinatingly, a reply by a @ChisieWeirdo to an @FBEnemyLines tweet, that broadcast a link to the article mentioned above, appeared very soon after publication – @FBEnemyLines tweets rarely generate replies, and never so immediately. It was a reply that now appears to have been deleted, but it talked about how yours truly must have had to work through a lunchtime to produce the Twitter material, and that better working terms and conditions should be sought.

Obviously, the tweeter was implying paid propaganda production, and the tactic may have been to imply connection with Russian intelligence output in order, after the preparation of public perception by the Government, to discredit it by the assertion of that association alone. Therefore the reply tweet may well have been deleted because it provided evidence for someone who could use it to demonstrate “77th Brigade activity”. This is not to place any special importance on tweets produced by British Government propagandists; in the end, it’s just paid-for cattle defecating in a field – and another reason not to pay taxes.

We should say a word about how the mob has been, or so it seems, especially directed at everyone’s particular blogo-alternative-media Skripal-incident favourite, who took the opportunity to promote the following idea to his audience:

Were I Vladimir Putin, I would persuade Boshirov and Petrov voluntarily to come to the UK and stand trial, on condition that it was a genuinely fair trial before a jury in which the entire proceedings, and all of the evidence, was open and public, and the Skripals and Pablo Miller might be called as witnesses and cross-examined.

Rainbow unicorns! The Skripals are probably already in the US on a witness protection scheme – just like people were told would happen to them – and Pablo Miller represents the garden path, up along which the followers of the blogo-alternative-media expertise shall go. However, it is worth a mention because it is a meme that appeared in yet another response to an (other) @FBEnemyLines tweet (remarkably, there was a total of three in the same day).

They could be tried and possibly acquitted if they showed up for trial to prove the police wrong. Of course they won’t do that.

Being suspicious, one might say that the appearance of such writings reflects a desire (of Government) to create expectation in the relentlessly shabbily ignorant British public which the Russians are just not going to live up to. If you don’t pay your Council Tax, your local authority runs a fake court, that the Magistrates Court services also pretends is real, so that it can obtain an “order” to steal your money. The Old Bailey is regularly used for fake trials where terror patsies do not receive any kind of adequate defence, and then get sent to jail. Why would Boshirov and Petrov voluntarily expose themselves to the British criminal justice system?

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