Public noninformation inquiry…

…at the expense of a disposable murder victim

Since 2022 I’ve been on a journey – or less dramatically, exploring another byway – about the case of the 2018 poisoning of the Skripals, which you can look up if you don’t remember. From searching the blog, I see I’ve hinted at it rather than explaining it extensively. But perhaps my best summary is here, where I compare it to the equally dubious story about the poisoning and subsequent death this year of Alexei Navalny, an unsavory man set up by the West to simulate a serious “democratic” (in its current, weasel-word, sense) rival to Vladimir Putin.

Well, this piece is particularly for those who swallowed the official version of the Skripal incident despite its bizarre implausibility. I myself did, up to around 2022 when I actually did some research, originally congratulating myself on seeing how cack-handed the Russian explanations were, though in truth they made a lot more sense than our official narrative. Be warned by this of the power of domestic propaganda: once the State loses its scruples on brainwashing its own population rather than enemies, they are actually very good at it.

My main source today is an interview on the left-libertarian channel The Grey Zone with former ambassador and whistle-blower Craig Murray, reporting on the not-widely-reported “Public Inquiry” into the death, two months after the Skripal event, of Dawn Sturgess. As is pointed out in the interview, Sturgess, like arms-inspector David Kelly, was denied a proper Coroner’s Inquest so as not to interfere with this much delayed Public Inquiry, which is of course a whitewash. This, it seems , does not matter because Dawn was a person of low social status, entitled neither to life nor truth in someone’s eyes.

There’s a link from the video to a longer one from a year ago on the original case, if you’re uninformed. But this one reports, from the inquiry, how the doctor present when Yulia Skripal regained consciousness was able to question her by getting her to blink once for “yes,” and two for “no.” His notes record his asking whether she had been sprayed with the nerve-agent, to which she replied “yes.” He then asked if she’d been sprayed in the restaurant where they ate, and she replied “yes.”

For some reason the judge in the inquiry dismissed this evidence as “hearsay,” but nevertheless the audience heard it from the doctor’s contemporaneous notes, and now you have as well. It has to be hearsay, I suppose, because the Skripals themselves will not be heard at the inquiry, having apparently disappeared off the face of the earth once they were said to have recovered.

Now the point is that the official claim that the Skripals were poisoned by touching their door-handle four hours earlier, wandered around sightseeing, had a three-course restaurant meal, and then simultaneously collapsed on a bench, to be coincidentally spotted by the chief nurse of the British army as she happened to be passing, makes no sense in the context of a quick acting deadly nerve agent like Novichok. Neither does their eventual recovery, nor the death of Dawn Sturgess months later (and the non-death of her male friend) from a perfume bottle allegedly dumped in a charity bin by the assassins – after being rewrapped in cellophane and sealed, according to some plod at the inquiry, with a “portable heat sealer” the Russians happened to have in their pocket.

What makes a lot more sense, and accords with the answers of Yulia, is that some agent was sprayed on them in the restaurant, and acted soon after they left. And that is interesting because it is now known that they were accompanied at their meal by Sergei’s MI6 handler, Pablo Miller. A D-notice ensured that his name did not get into the press reports at the time or later (even though he was already “retired”). He would have seen them sprayed, but has not given evidence at the inquiry, it seems. And he did nothing to help them – unless he called the chief nurse of the British Army as she was shopping, before doing a runner to preserve his incognito. Incidentally, Miller also recruited Alexander Litivenko, who similarly met his death in Britain under equally bizarre conditions in 2006. How unlucky is that.

To join a few more dots, Miller went on to work for “former intelligence officer” Christopher Steele in his Orbis Business Intelligence firm, which produced the infamously fake 2016 Russiagate dossier implicating Donald Trump as a Russian asset. Despite its complete dicrediting, Steele is still trotted out in articles like this in the main stream media to do the dirt on both Russia and Trump, and occasionally, China. Most of the rumours of Putin’s ailing health since the Ukraine war began seem to have this “Russia expert” as their source.

It’s fascinating, though of course possibly entirely coincidental, how the Skripal affair came just two years after Trump’s election brought in an outsider not under the control of either the US or the UK deep state, and that the threat prompted the same “retired” actors to link the President to a demonised Russia in the dodgy dossier prior to the election. The dossier’s credibility (being pushed for much more than it that it was worth during the Democrats’ impeachment proceedings) could only have been boosted by blaming Putin for poisoning a defector and his attractive daughter in Salisbury. Trump was, after all, shown faked photographs of poisoned ducks by his own intelligence people to get him to sanction Russia over the affair.

Another name to watch out for in your daily paper is Sir Richard Dearlove, the “retired” head of MI6 (and former Master of my Cambridge College) whose path often seems to have crossed Steele’s, and Miller’s come to that. He was, of course, involved in the earlier dodgy dossier that started the Second Gulf War, as the largely-forgotten Chilcot Report found. Recently he has helpfully pointed out that Russia (wrongly?) thinks it is at war with the West, as if launching our NATO missiles on Russia’s homeland were anything but peaceful democracy in action.

This paper looks an interesting academic article on this whole matter. It tells us more than the whole of the costly, redacted, Public Inquiry ever will… though of course, it is by official definition disinformation:

“The purpose of intelligence services is to generate knowledge in ways that are not normally replicable by members of the public. It has to be taken on trust. But since we must assume that one of their necessary capabilities is winning the trust of people who they may deceive or betray, the public would be justified in treating their communications with caution.”