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punditman says...
Lately I’ve been thinking about how we live in a world awash in coincidental misfortune. It's all very odd.
Like how Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny coincidentally died in a Russian Arctic penal colony. I suppose you could easily catch a death of cold up there, even with global warming.
It reminded me of how Yevgeny Prigozhin's plane coincidentally crashed killing everyone aboard just two months after he'd led a partial insurrection against the Kremlin. How fluky was that? At least the former petty criminal turned hotdog salesman-Oligarchic-murderous mercenary leader didn't lead an uneventful life.
Putin must be shaking his head in bewilderment at how these challengers to his rule curiously met an untimely demise.
Western leaders expressed disgust with Russia's mistreatment of Alexei Navalny who they called “Russian political Jesus” and said no one should ever be jailed for their political beliefs or for free speech.
Speaking of free speech, coincidentally WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, is in the midst of his final appeal to the British courts to avoid extradition to the United States for committing the crime of journalism.
To understand the crime of journalism, a little background will be helpful.
After exposing US war crimes, rendition, extrajudicial killings and torture in 2010, Assange coincidentally found himself in the crosshairs of the US government. This was bizarre because as one intelligence source deep inside the US Deep State told Punditman’s deep mind:
“I don’t know why we got our knickers in a knot over that Assange thing. It's no secret that slaughtering innocent civilians is an institutionalized pastime for our country. What's the 'big reveal'?”
So began a long running legal saga that resulted in Assange facing a potential 170-year sentence under the US Espionage Act, which was written in 1917 and applies to every person on earth, and their pets.
Shortly after the WikiLeaks release, Assange was coincidentally charged with sex crimes by Swedish authorities. Actually I don't know if that was a real coincidence or not. But Donald Trump, who had not yet inflicted himself upon the American political system and humanity's collective psyche was overheard at the time waxing philosophical, "Are sex crimes illegal in Sweden?"
In 2012, Assange took refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy to avoid extradition to Sweden and then the US.
Senior CIA officials discussed abducting or killing Assange but the whole thing was called off at the last minute because then-President Trump was busy doing a McDonald's run for his daily four Big Macs. It was only after Trump learned that Pamela Anderson had been visiting Julian Assange that, he too, wondered aloud if “our country” could kill Assange.
Trump later denied he’d said any such thing, telling the media that it had been Hilary Clinton who said “Can’t we just drone him? Clinton later said she did not recall "joking" about killing Assange—unlike the rather public chuckle she'd had after Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi was killed by rebels supported by US-led NATO forces: "We came, we saw, he died....lol."
And thanks to the US-led intervention, Libya descended into civil war and a failed state with open slave markets. What a hoot!
Trump added that, contrary to fake news reports, it was in fact five Big Macs he’d consumed, not four, a daily routine he’s proudly observed for 48 years.
Meanwhile Julian Assange's self-exile at the Ecuadorian embassy ended after seven years, when Ecuador withdrew his asylum status. And so in April 2019, British authorities forcibly arrested him and placed him in London’s Belmarsh high-security prison, which is even more miserable than being stuck in a clown car on the M25 in rush hour with a flat tire and a faulty radio endlessly looping bagpipe music played by tone-deaf hedgehogs.
President Joe Biden who doesn't remember being Vice-president Joe Biden said in 2010 during a UN Security Council session that WikiLeaks had caused “no substantive damage” other than being “embarrassing” for the US government.
And so, in order to punish those who embarrass the United States, like Trump before him, Joe Biden is ensuring that his Department of Justice will continue to prosecute Julian Assange.
Disclaimer: the above content contains satire, parody and facts.
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However sad it is for Navalny, his family and friends, it seems highly coincidental that Putin would have him killed despite the many millions who watched Putin's Carlson interview, the Avdiivka fortress fell, the AFU's command structure was in disarray and Navalny's wife was conveniently on hand to address the Munich Security conference. As Scott Ritter observed, Navalny was "an MI6/CIA asset, an anti-Islamic and anti-Georgian racist, who participated in three failed attempts to assassinate Vladimir Putin and was trained, funded, and directed by the CIA to destabilize Russia," yet we're told Putin killed him. Meanwhile Chilean American Gonzalo Lira died miserably in a Ukrainian jail due to the lack of medical treatment and what was perceived to be pro-Russian journalism. His pleas for help and the fell on deaf ears in Washington. Despite wall-to-wall Western media hysteria about Navalny's death--something largely ignored in Russia--Lira's death was hardly noticed. Similarly Julian Assange, also guilty of committing journalism, for revealing US war crimes, is likely to face life behind American bars. These disparate events are hardly coincidental.
Yes, I'm also looking forward to hearing about Lira in Part Two. Also, I don't know who killed Navalny or whether his accumulating ill health just killed him in a highly coincidental way. The autopsy may soon be published and that may help.
For sure your sarcasm, Punditman, stands but here are a few things to add about Navalny. He was an ultra-nationalist skin head at one point before standing and later being expelled by the Yabloko Party, precisely for his far right positions. He has little credibility or visibility within Russia despite lavish funding from the National Endowment for Democracy, a Secretary of State organization that was behind the colour revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine and several others elsewhere (see Brian Berletic on Navalny). See the Napolitano interview below with Ray McGovern who describes the video of Navalny's manager with MI6. The British have had a much closer relationship with him than the CIA but both have supported his "anti-corruption, pro-democracy" line towards which he has swerved in recent years. This has made him the most important opposition figure to Putin in the eyes of the Western media but his largest polling support inside Russia was something like 2.5%. The Russian Communist Party is by far the second largest party in the Duma (which I've had a fancy dinner in once). Of course it was the British who claimed that the Skripals were poisoned with Novichuk (not far from MI6 headquarters), originally developed and then discarded by the Soviets. They thought it was too unstable to be handled because it could easily kill those administering it yet many versions of it have since been patented in the US.
So it's unclear who poisoned him with it, if indeed he was poisoned at the time he was on parole and the Russians allowed him out to the Charite hospital in Berlin. A blood test at that time showed he had lithium and an anti-Parkinsons drug in him but it's assumed that he has been taking those medications for some time. Ray McGovern goes into some of the details of his relationship with MI6 and the video.
It wouldn't have made sense for the FSB or Putin, for that matter, to kill Navalny when he was killed given the obvious degree to which they now have the upper hand on the front with the AFU, particularly after the capture of the Avdiivka. Putin is riding high as he faces reelection in March which huge Russian support at the polls. Cui Bono is the important question to ask.
Obviously with the capture of Avdiivka, the dominance of Russian troops all along the front, the collapse of Western support for Ukraine and the impending reelection of Putin with huge popular support, Putin is riding high and had no incentive to kill Navalny, who was already in prison.
See Christoforou, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvYWG4dTAls; McGovern, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89RMbW97RLU&t=3789s; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0uRXkw3_0BE; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8t6mkx-QcDk&t=14s