Just three days ago I mocked a New York Times story that used ‘Russiagate’ like claims by ‘U.S. officials’ to tie a number of letter bomb incidents in Spain to some ‘Russian terrorist organization’.
U.S. Officials Claim More ‘Russiagate’ Like Nonsense
According to what U.S. officials claim some anti-Kremlin fringe group in Russia was used by a Russian intelligence service to somehow send letter bombs from Valladolid, Spain, to some offices in Madrid.
But why would Russian intelligence run such a nonsense campaign? Why would it use a problematic fringe group of Russian crazies to do so. Why in Spain? Why not in Poland, Germany or France? What is the evidence?
None of those questions get answered. Instead rumors and hot air assumptions are put together to make the claims somewhat less outrageous. This is on the same level as the lies about ‘weapons of mass destruction in Iraq’ the Times printed 20 years ago.
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We know that ‘U.S. intelligence’ is bullshit and that U.S. official are liars, especially with regards to anything around Ukraine.We know that because ‘U.S. officials’ said so:
That makes the publishing of the above story by the Times even more egregious.
Three days on the Spanish police arrested the guy most likely responsible for making and sending out those letter bombs:
The man was detained in the northern town of Miranda de Ebro, and police searched his home.The suspect is a retired Spanish citizen with the initials P.G.P. who is tech-savvy and very active on social networks, the ministry said.
Armed officers kept people away the low-rise cinder-block building housing the man’s third-floor apartment in a blue-collar neighbourhood.A video provided by the Interior Ministry showed officers and a sniffer dog searching a silver Peugeot car parked outside as forensic specialists took photographs. Police also appeared to gain access to a lock-up garage.
Witnesses said the suspect remained inside the house as the searches were conducted.
The man used to work for the town hall of the Basque capital Vitoria-Gasteiz before retiring in 2013, a city spokesperson said. Miranda de Ebro is 35 km (22 miles) southeast of Vitoria.
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Investigators have concluded that all six parcels were sent from the city of Burgos, the ministry said.A source close to the inquiry had told Reuters in early December that all the parcels had been mailed from Valladolid, a two-hour drive from Miranda del Ebro.
All the named cities and towns are in norther Spain and near to each other.
So it now seems that some lonely tech savvy pensioner, for whatever reason, has made and sent those bombs. Someone who had worked in a local city administration. There is no reporting from Spain of any relation of the case with Russia or some Russian fringe group.
The Times today reports of the arrest but uses it to regurgitate all the ‘Russiagate’ like nonsense claims its previous story provided. This again without any evidence and solely based on what ‘U.S. officials say …’.
But the Spanish authorities did not even consider that obvious nonsense. As Reuters provides:
The New York Times reported on Sunday that investigators had focused on the Russian Imperial Movement, a group with ties to Spanish far-right organisations that was believed to be linked to Russian intelligence.Spanish officials have declined to comment on the report, while a senior judicial source denied having knowledge of such a line of investigation.
In other words – the whole story was made up by ‘U.S. officials’ to further the creation of the Russian bogeyman:
Lawmakers stirred up anti-Russian sentiment long before the invasion of Ukraine. It can be argued that the Russian “malign influence” story helped to get the public’s buy-in for a new Cold War with Russia by normalizing the idea that Russians not only helped to elect Donald Trump, but were actively trying “to destroy U.S. democracy” and are still doing so. “It became conventional wisdom that Russia wants not just to compete with the United States, but to destroy us—to divide our society from within, to cripple our democracy,” said George Beebe, a former chief of the CIA’s Russia analysis and author of The Russia Trap: How Our Shadow War with Russia Could Spiral into Nuclear Catastrophe (2019).
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“Russiagate transformed Russia from a foreign policy issue into a matter of domestic politics at a time when the United States was becoming increasingly divided,” points out Beebe, who is now director of grand strategy at the Quincy Institute (and so is my colleague). As a result, adds Arta Moeini, research director for the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy, “demonization of Russia [prior to its invasion of Ukraine] permitted a new Manichean dynamic, an inflated threat that would be used to rationalize increased securitization domestically, and a fresh push for containment of Moscow internationally.”
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“The constraints this scandal imposed on U.S. policy toward Russia have been immense,” Beebe said. “It prevented Trump from advancing any kind of a détente with Russia. Its lingering effects made it all but impossible for Biden to seek a compromise over Ukrainian membership in NATO—the one thing that might have prevented the war—even if he had wanted to.”Today, we can only pray that the anti-Russian narrative enabled by the manipulation of social media does not become a self-fulfilling prophecy ending in a direct fighting war with the nuclear power.
The New York Times, as well as British media with their equally stupid Skripal affair claims, can be credited with giving cover for the anti-Russian propaganda campaign. It was unleashed after, in 2014, Russia reintegrated Crimea and foiled British and U.S. plans for stationing their naval forces in the Azov and Black Sea.
The Times and other media should be held responsible for the deadly consequences its misreporting and lies have caused.
Reprinted with permission from Moon of Alabama.
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