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by John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

Paul Robinson (lead image, right), a professor at the University of Ottawa, has published a defence of the British Government’s indictment of the Russian Government for an attempt to assassinate Sergei Skripal with a nerve agent. “That’s the official narrative, which most people accept”, according to Robinson. He wants you to know he does too.

To the analysis of evidence of what happened, and didn’t happen,  in the Salisbury town incidents of March 4, 2018, and the legal consquences which have ensued over the two years since, Robinson concludes: “I can only say ‘phooey’.” In what Robinson calls a book review of “Skripal in Prison”, he has concluded: “Helmer [lead image, left] produces not a jot of evidence…I find it odd, therefore, that he’s so keen to let the Russians off the hook for the Skripal poisoning. Perhaps the reason lies in his conspiratorial frame of mind…He’s the sort of guy who thinks that for every crime the GRU have committed, MI6 and the CIA have committed two. It’s not my frame of mind at all. But then perhaps I’m part of the conspiracy too!”

Robinson teaches politics. In his past, he was educated at Oxford University and between 1989 and 1994 he was a Russia analyst in the British Army Intelligence Corps, before serving as a reservist in the Canadian military with the same function. In the secret services and in universities, Robinson has never been subject to the British legal standards of evidence or proof of crime beyond reasonable doubt. That is, until he launched this attack in defence of his old British Army oath, and then ran into a cross-examination on a different oath – the courtroom one to tell the truth. You be the jury. 

Published on April 11, Robinson’s review of “Skripal in Prison” appeared in his blog, “Irrussianality”. Read what he published at this archived link.

After Robinson sent me his review, a detailed exchange of emails followed.  Among the points in dispute were issues of fact, such as whether Robinson had read the book beyond the two-thirds mark. He won’t say he has. Another issue of fact is whether Robinson has read The Blogmire, an independent, voluminous source of analysis of the evidence accumulating (still) in the Skripal case. Robinson refuses to say while announcing that “Helmer does’t consider alternative possibilities”.

Unedited and unabridged, here is Robinson in the witness box.

Robinson’s reference to “certain features of my long distant past of which only a few are aware” is to the Intelligence Corps. As that mask fell off in the witness box, Robinson removed several lines from his ending: “I find it odd, therefore, that he’s so keen to let the Russians off the hook for the Skripal poisoning.  Perhaps the reason lies in his conspiratorial frame of mind and the fact that he is, as I observed when reviewing his last book, ‘an equal opportunity critic’. He’s the sort of guy who thinks that for every crime the GRU have committed, MI6 and the CIA have committed two. It’s not my frame of mind at all. But then perhaps I’m part of the conspiracy too!”

Source: https://www.army.mod.

Instead, Robinson’s revision can be read here. He still wants the reader to know “I find it odd, therefore, that he’s so keen to let the Russians off the hook for the Skripal poisoning.” To that Robinson adds: “Some may be persuaded by his logic. I am not.”

A lie, wrapped in a qualification, inside an innuendo.  That’s what phooey means.

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