Did FSB Bomb Metrojet?

TRT NEWS ^ | Nov 7, 2015 | TRT NEWS

[xzins]

They’re already securing that flank. Why bomb their own plane to make possible what they’re already doing?

A better reason for them to do so would be to regain a foothold with Egypt. They used to be Egypt’s military hardware supplier.

[Mariner]

The premise is ludicrous.

[wideminded]

And for what purpose? To have an excuse to bomb the rebels?

To create a crisis that would allow Putin and his KGB friends to take power and allow Yeltsin to resign without having his family corruption investigated.

[ETL]

Doubt it. From the look of how the story developed it seemed that Russia very much wanted it not to be a bomb and this is how their state media presented it at first.

But the Russians are such disinformation artists you never know what to believe coming from them. They say things they want others to believe. This doesn't mean it's the truth, or that they themselves actually think or believe it. For some reason they might simply want the world to think that they think it wasn't a bomb. They are masters at the complex game of chess, thinking many moves ahead. We in the US, unfortunately, have a hard enough time playing checkers.

[ETL]

From a 2007 article titled "Putin's Russia"...

"KGB influence 'soars under Putin,' " blared the headline of a BBC online article for December 13, 2006. The following day, a similar headline echoed a similarly alarming story at the website of Der Spiegel, one of Germany's largest news magazines: "Putin's Russia: Kremlin Riddled with Former KGB Agents."

In the opening sentences of Der Spiegel's article, readers are informed that: "Four out of five members of Russia's political and business elite have a KGB past, according to a new study by the prestigious [Russian] Academy of Sciences. The influence of ex-Soviet spies has ballooned under President Vladimir Putin."

The study, which looked at 1,061 top Kremlin, regional, and corporate jobs, found that "78 percent of the Russian elite" are what are known in Russia as "siloviki," which is to say, former members of the KGB or its domestic successor, the FSB. The author of the study, Olga Kryshtanovskaya, expressed shock at her own findings. "I was very shocked when I looked at the boards of major companies and realized there were lots of people who had completely unknown names, people who were not public but who were definitely, obvious siloviki," she told Reuters.

Other supposed experts — in Russia and the West — have also expressed surprise and alarm at the apparent resurrection of the dreaded Soviet secret police. After all, for the past decade and a half these same experts have been pointing to the alleged demise of the KGB as the primary evidence supporting their claim that communism is dead.

From the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, the Russian security apparatus Cheka (and its later permutations: OGPU, NKVD, MGB, KGB) had been the "sword and shield" of the communist world revolution.

"We stand for organized terror," declared Felix Dzerzhinsky, the first chief of the Cheka for Soviet dictator Vladimir Lenin. In 1918, Dzerzhinsky launched the campaign of arrests and executions known as the Red Terror. Krasnaya Gazeta, the Bolshevik newspaper, expressed the Chekist credo when it reported approvingly in 1918 of the terror campaign: "We will make our hearts cruel, hard and immovable, so that no mercy will enter them, and so that they will not quiver at the sight of a sea of enemy blood."

Unflinching cruelty and merciless, bloody terror have been the trademark of the communist secret police, from the Cheka to the KGB. Obviously, the demise of such an organization would be cause for much rejoicing. Hence, when the KGB was ordered dissolved and its chairman, General Vladimir Kryuchkov, was arrested in 1991 after attempting to overthrow "liberal reformer" Mikhail Gorbachev in the failed "August Coup," many people in the West were only too willing to pop the champagne corks and start celebrating our supposed victory over the Evil Empire.

But, as Mikhail Leontiyev, commentator for Russia's state-controlled Channel One television, recently noted, repeating a phrase popular among the siloviki: "Americans got so drunk at the USSR's funeral that they're still hung over." And stumbling around in their post-inebriation haze, many of these Americans have only recently begun noticing that they had prematurely written the KGB's epitaph, even as it was arising vampire-like from the coffin.

However, there is really no excuse for Olga Kryshtanovskaya or any of her American counterparts to be stunned by the current siloviki dominance in Putin's Russia. For nearly a decade, even before he became Russia's "president," THE NEW AMERICAN has been reporting on Putin's KGB pedigree and his steady implementation of a long-range Soviet deception strategy, including the public rehabilitation and refortifying of the KGB-FSB. ..." (continues at link)

http://www.thenewamerican.com/world-news/europe/item/8420-putins-russia

[ETL]

"For 16 years Putin was an officer in the KGB, rising to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel before he retired to enter politics in his native Saint Petersburg in 1991.

He moved to Moscow in 1996 and joined President Boris Yeltsin's administration where he rose quickly, becoming Acting President on 31 December 1999 when Yeltsin unexpectedly resigned. Putin won the subsequent 2000 presidential election, despite widespread accusations of vote-rigging,[3] and was reelected in 2004."

"On 25 July 1998, Yeltsin appointed Vladimir Putin head of the FSB (one of the successor agencies to the KGB), the position Putin occupied until August 1999. He became a permanent member of the Security Council of the Russian Federation on 1 October 1998 and its Secretary on 29 March 1999."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Putin

[ETL]

They're already securing that flank. Why bomb their own plane to make possible what they're already doing?

Because such an atrocious "terrorist" attack would serve as rationale for substantially stepping up their campaign. Aren't they now talking about using nukes there?

[Krosan]

That is why I believe that Russians desperately wanted it to not be a bomb - their media was constantly talking about technical failure and they showed very hostile reactions to British statement that Brits believe it to be a bomb and almost insisted that it was a technical failure of Russian plane.

I believe it is because Putin does not want Russian people to pressure him into war. So far he can do the easy thing of flying safe sorties and dropping bombs and declare it a victory, but if he were required to put boots on the ground then the weakness of Russian military would show and people would get upset about Russian casualties.

[ETL]

But, we've given it to them. On a platter.

I suspect that Obama and Putin are in cahoots on the Russian takeover of the Middle East. And that he (Obama) has been intentionally weak on ISIS in order that the Russians have a clear excuse for moving in. So he's made to look like an inept fool before the world. He doesn't care. In the end the larger mission is accomplished.

[BobL]

“To what end?...For an excuse to bomb ISIS?”

Putin doesn’t seem like the kind of guy to kill INNOCENT CIVILIANS to further his policies. He’ll leave that to Bill Clinton and people of his type.

In the case of Syria, Putin is MORE THAN HAPPY to test his MODERNIZED military against any in the West, including our TOTALLY GUTTED military.

So no, he had no motive there.

[Vermont Lt]

I think you are right. They split it up between Israel, Russia, and Iran. And we keep getting our oil cheaply. For now.

[ETL]

Putin doesn't seem like the kind of guy to kill INNOCENT CIVILIANS to further his policies.

The guy was with the KGB, then FSB for around 20 years. He knows how to fool and deceive people. They are experts at it.

[ETL]

I think you are right. They split it up between Israel, Russia, and Iran.

Certainly not Israel.

[ETL]

Israel and the US are their main enemies. Obama is the saboteur-in-chief of the US.

[BobL]

What I’m saying is that there is NO NEED for Putin to kill innocent Russians. Given his military, at this point, he pretty much can do whatever he wants without having to fabricate a reason.

[Krosan]

Putin is not testing modern weapons in Syria. Russia is using old unguided bombs. Basically spending them before the best before is over. In that way of looking these bombs cost him nothing.

http://time.com/4059442/russia-bombing-syria-isis-assad/

““Those aren’t precision weapons,” [Lieut. General Bob] Otto said Thursday of the Russian bombs. “We can tell what’s hanging off the airplane” via intelligence imagery, he said. They’re “dumb” bombs, guided to their targets only by gravity and the plane’s position and velocity when they’re released. Such weapons are notoriously inaccurate.”

[Krosan]

Something went wrong with the quote marks. I’ll try again

“Those aren’t precision weapons,” [Lieut. General Bob] Otto said Thursday of the Russian bombs. “We can tell what’s hanging off the airplane” via intelligence imagery, he said. They’re “dumb” bombs, guided to their targets only by gravity and the plane’s position and velocity when they’re released. Such weapons are notoriously inaccurate.

[BobL]

“Russia is using old unguided bombs.”

So you’re one of those people that complain that we spend WAY TOO MUCH on our military.

That’s fine, they were Communist TALKING POINTS. So don’t be surprised if people here don’t give you the time of day.

[ETL]

at this point, he pretty much can do whatever he wants without having to fabricate a reason.

As I commented earlier, such a barbaric (supposed terrorist) attack as the downing of a civilian airliner would practically assure that the world would give them a free pass on getting as aggressive as they want.

[Krosan]

I was correcting you. You claimed that part of Russia’s motivation is to test out modern weapons and I showed that intelligence imagery shows they are using old unguided bombs.