"Putin's Way" excerpt: PBS documentary on "Russia's 9/11", tied to ex-KGB, that put Putin in power

[uhnope]

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http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/foreign-affairs-defense/putins-way/transcript-74/

NARRATOR: But there was a problem. Putin was a faceless bureaucrat unknown to the public, who would have to win an election if he was to become president of the country and protector of the Yeltsin family. As in St. Petersburg, an instant biography was commissioned. Nataliya Gevorkyan was on the writing team. She now lives in Paris.

GILLIAN FINDLAY: What was the narrative that they wanted out?

NATALIYA GEVORKYAN, Putin Biographer: Just to— everything. I mean, where he comes from, who is he, why he was in KGB. He was. That was the main thing about him, he’s the KGB man. That’s all. So what they wanted to present him that he is a normal human being, he has parents, he has a biography.

NARRATOR: His biography tells of an only child who grew up in a poor quarter of St. Petersburg, an unusual boy who at age 16, went to the local KGB office and asked to join up He was told to come back later. Seven years later, he did, with a law degree, and after KGB training was assigned his post in East Germany.

GILLIAN FINDLAY: Once and always KGB. Can you explain to a Western audience— what does that mean?

NATALIYA GEVORKYAN: They are the people who prefer to operate in shadow. They are the people which are like state is first, and people are second. All this kind of things he has in him. And he cannot— I don’t think he can change it, you know? It’s unchangeable.

NARRATOR: He was so much the KGB man, he would take a turn as head of its successor agency, the FSB, in the year before he became prime minister. Then one month into his new job, in the fall of 1999, this. Bombs obliterated four apartment buildings in Moscow and other cities, all blown up at night while people slept. Hundreds died. This was Russia’s 9/11.

Russian historian Yuri Felshtinsky has written a book on the apartment bombings.

YURI FELSHTINSKY, Co-Author, Blowing up Russia: What we have to understand is the whole country is very nervous, that the feeling is that every several days, or like once a week, a building is going to be blown up.

NARRATOR: All of a sudden, a prime minister few Russians had heard about was everywhere, swearing revenge.

VLADIMIR PUTIN, Prime Minister: [subtitles] We’ll be chasing the terrorists everywhere, at the airports or in the toilet. We’ll waste them in an outhouse. End of story.

NARRATOR: Putin would point to rebels in Chechnya, where a separatist movement was holding ground.
...
NARRATOR: And it worked. Three months into a new millennium, Russia had a new president. He seemed a modern man, a man for the future, a future all Russians hoped would be better than the past.

But 15 years later, shadows from the past haunt this place. It’s a memorial to those who died in those apartment bombings. Since that day, books, newspaper reports and documentaries have all raised disturbing questions about what really happened here, who was really responsible.
...
KAREN DAWISHA: I think that the evidence that there was an FSB operation to place explosives in the apartment building in Ryazan is incontrovertible.

NARRATOR: At the time, the FSB claimed the Ryazan operation was part of a training exercise. But the broader conclusion that security services could have killed their own people in the other apartments was dismissed by the government. In his biography, Putin called it utter nonsense, totally insane.

No Chechens were ever charged. Others arrested were convicted in secret trials, and still others in trials tainted by allegations of forced confessions. But all along, it’s been disturbingly dangerous to investigate too closely.

DAVID SATTER: People who tried to investigate the apartment bombings in many cases ended up dead— Yuri Shchekochikhin, Sergei Yushenkov, Alexander Litvinenko, Anna Politkovskaya.

[newthinking]

1. Et Tu, Frontline?

OpEdNews Op Eds 1/25/2015 at 15:30:48
Et Tu, Frontline?
By Patrice Greanville


Putin by DonkeyHotey (via flickr)


Hatchet job on Putin only demonstrates the conformist spirit permeating US journalism
______________________________

Frontline sees itself as an implacable observer of political and social reality, an uncompromising witness to contemporary history. The truth is often a lot less flattering.

As a legendary liberal franchise, Frontline has frequently produced interesting and even controversial reports on a variety of topics, including the NRA's intransigence to gun control, the abortion wars, JFK's assassination, the modern KKK, "Bush's War" (somewhat critical of the Iraq War's genesis as something of a botched, incompetent affair, but not scandalized by its sheer immorality, arrogance, systemic roots or broader purposes), and a host of other issues, but when it comes to foreign policy questions in which the American empire is again competing with some invidiously designated foe (these days the villains are again Russia and China), it behaves, conceits aside, like the rest of the conformist pack, as little more than an stenographer to power.


Given that thinly-veiled script, it doesn't take long for the show to deliver an unrelenting cascade of innuendo against Putin. Apparently the show's producers could not refrain from vacuuming up and regurgitating just about every negative cliche disseminated by the Western media since the official demonization of the Russian leader began, except that in this case, Frontline being Frontline, the closest equivalent to the New York Times on television, the weapon of choice is not so much the bludgeon favored by Fox News' crude propagandists, but the scalpel and the stiletto, the half-truths and omissions of truth, and the decapitation of context, in short the far more subtle, insidious and highly effective natural tools of the centrist corporatist liberal.

The first few minutes set the tone:

ANDREY ZYKOV, Former Police Investigator: [through interpreter] Well, of course, there has always been corruption in Russia, but building it into such a meticulous system was something only Mr. Putin has managed to do. Could Putin be held criminally responsible based on the evidence that has already been gathered? Absolutely, yes.

From that point on, it only gets worse.

Students of American propaganda usually have a problem: not the scarcity of items to prove their case, but precisely the opposite, the overabundance of material. Practically everything said or shown on mainstream media that concerns American foreign policy, especially on television, is riddled with so much bias and outright falsehood that codifying and answering such outrages on a case by case basis is simply an impossible, gargantuan task, a fact that --besides their monopolizing the mainstream media--prevents any meaningful or timely response by genuinely impartial observers.

Full story, links, and transcript:
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Et-Tu-Frontline-by-Patrice-Greanville-Condemnation_Journalism_Media_Propaganda-150125-684.html

[newthinking]

2. The Propaganda War Over Crimea's Break From Ukraine - Truthout

*A very good read for those who want to understand the fact from fiction on Crimea (Ukraine conflict)

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/27891-the-propaganda-war-over-crimea-s-break-from-ukraine

The Propaganda War Over Crimea's Break From Ukraine
By Roger Annis,
Truthout | News Analysis


Defence Ministers working session at the NATO summit in Wales. (Photo: NATO Summit Wales 2014)

In the propaganda campaign being waged by the NATO countries and the government of Ukraine against Russia and in support of Kiev's war in the east of the country, the events in Crimea of the past nine months occupy a pivotal place.

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NATO might be upsetting the entire military and political balance of Europe by continuing to push eastward today in Ukraine, but the drumbeat of Western government and media propaganda claims the heightened tensions of this past year are all Russia's fault. Russia's supposed annexation of Crimea in March is the example par excellence that a new "Russian aggression," harkening back to Soviet Union times, is afoot. It must be stopped at all costs before Ukraine falls, too.

In this made-up world, Kiev's murderous, illegal war against its own population disappears. The war is an "ongoing conflict" between "armed groups" in which the only actors with a purpose, it seems, are "pro-Russian separatists" and their purported backer in Moscow. An emerging subset of the theme of Crimea as victim of annexation is that it's also a land of disappearing human rights.

Given the very high stakes involved in all of this for the future of Europe, if not the world, it is time to step back and examine what is actually taking place in Crimea.

Fact From Fiction

Full story:
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/27891-the-propaganda-war-over-crimea-s-break-from-ukraine