the russians just keep coming!

Im​age: Trudeau greets the people

UPDATE Mar 1/18: Revised footnote "More to Read"*

NATO needs Canada to hate and fear the Russians.

NATO researcher warns of Russian interference in 2019 Canadian election
A leading NATO researcher says Canada should assume Russia will attempt to interfere in the 2019 federal election because that would serve the Kremlin's purpose of helping destabilize the military alliance...

• Russia has threatened unspecified retaliation against Canada for its passage of anti-corruption legislation named in honour of the Russian whistleblower Sergei Magnitsky.

There was a time when NATO was intended to protect humanity, but now it's preoccupied with its own preservation.

And dressing up in somebody else's clothes seems to suggest a good deal about what Canada has become in its close association with the US/NATO - unless the image of a monkey seeing and doing comes to mind first.

As Justin's dad once admitted, living next to the US "is like sleeping with an elephant" and hoping it won't roll over onto you.

In other words, you do what you think you must in order to keep from being engulfed even if it means dressing up in the so-called Magnitsky legislation.

Magnitsky has been presented as a hero because he is said to have blown the whistle on Russian corruption. At the same time, those who have blown the whistle on American corruption are so vilified that they must resort to taking refuge in Russia or in an Ecuadorian embassy in London -- or possibly being shot to death, if Seth Rich was indeed the culprit who downloaded the Clinton stuff to Wikileaks.

If the Seth Rich conspiracy is so laughable, why did CNN feel obligated to downplay it twice in one day? Here and here.

Maybe because it was the revered Seymour Hersh who fuelled it? [YouTube]

And then tried to save his own skin by obfuscating?

Lucky Bill Browder had somewhere to run to when his fall-guy Magnitsky -- who is repeatedly called a lawyer by western media but was in fact an accountant of just the sort who could help an obscenely rich American avoid taxation -- ended up in trouble. Does raising Magnitsky's status to lawyer make him seem less likely to be a tax fixer?

In 2010, when the Washington Post may not have been quite so adept at strategic omission as it appears to be now under Jeff Bezos' love and care, it reported that:

• "Magnitsky had a degree in economics and worked as an accountant and auditor. He was not a lawyer," [Irina Dudukina, spokeswoman for the Ministry of Interior Investigative Committee] said. "And as an accountant, he was developing a tax-evasion scheme." 
• She said results of the investigation would be sent to prosecutors for action. And she offered Browder a deal: If he repaid the missing money, she said, criminal charges against him in another tax-evasion case would be dropped. 

From CBS News: 

• Born and raised in the US, Browder had left that country for Russia in order to avoid paying tax.

See, that proves he's not CIA-affiliated. Of course it does.

If he were CIA, he'd be very vocal -- oh, he is -- in supporting the innocence of Magnitsky because in doing so he's supporting himself. If he were a tool of the CIA, he would know how to silence Magnitsky - and he's been silenced.  If Browder worked for the CIA, he could get to someone inside the prison to rub out Magnitsky before he could go to trial in a weakened condition that might cause him to make some sort of verbal slip.

I wonder if Magnitsky cried out, like Lee Harvey Oswald before he was felled: "I'm just a patsy."

As Putin himself says:

• "These are some very unconstructive political games over things, which are in essence not what they look like ..."

And things change over time.  Fresh deals get made in favour of new, now more important secret endeavours.

Meanwhile ... From Wikipedia:

• In August of 2017 a Monte Carlo, Monaco based writer and a wealth-fund manager, Alex Krainer, has published a book originally titled The Killing of William Browder: Deconstructing Bill Browder’s Dangerous Deception, to stellar reviews from his Amazon readers. Soon after, Jonathan Winer, the United States government's Special Envoy for Libya, acting on behalf of Bill Browder, managed to suppress and effectively ban Krainer's book from the Amazon.

See that? Browder abandons the US, finds refuge in Britain, and still gets protection from a US government agent. And a book gets banned in the process -- in the land of the free.

Shhh ... said book is now available at no cost in PDF format.

Let's end this on a more encouraging note, shall we?  From the same article in which NATO is so negatively quoted:

• The Trudeau government and the Kremlin view the Arctic as an area of co-operation.
• Both countries say they need to work together because thawing Arctic ice will mean greater ship traffic, which will increase the potential for oil and gas exploration, as well as potential threats on the environmental and security fronts.

Now that's the spirit!

But don't get me started on the thawed ice thing. Which came first, I keep wondering: the thaw or the greed-need to easily access the oil and gas?

​That and the lingering question: Why do they call spying "intelligence"?

*More to read:
​Russia was the target of Nato's own fake news
Military and media reports hyped the Zapad military exercise as a major threat. In fact, what took place was nothing as dramatic as the West's warnings would have led you to believe

A Blacklisted Film and The New Cold War (Added Mar 1/18)
... we – in the land of the free, home of the brave – are protected from seeing this documentary produced by filmmaker Andrei Nekrasov who was known as a fierce critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin but who in this instance found the West’s widely accepted Magnitsky storyline to be a fraud.

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