A high-profile Russian dissident is more than three weeks into a hunger strike that he explains he’s pursuing to restore his reputation – tarnished by what he says are staged child-pornography charges brought against him in the United Kingdom.
Allegedly at the behest of his old nemesis, Russia’s top commanders.
The issue involves Vladimir Bukovsky, now 72 and living in the U.K., known, according to a report on the situation, for his “gigantic and unblemished renown for courage and conscience, forged in 12 years as a political prisoner of the Soviet dictatorship.”
In an interview with the Guardian a short time back, he commented on the pending case, a series of counts alleging he made and had child porn.
“Frankly, I don’t care about the risk of being sent to prison. I have already spent 12 years in Soviet prisons having committed no crime in my life. I don’t expect to live for very long, and it makes little difference to me whether I spend the final few weeks of my life in jail. However, what is fundamentally important to me defending my reputation. … Throughout the 72 years of my life, my moral reputation had been spotless. It has been ruined in one day by the worldwide publicity given to the CPS [Crown Prosecution Service] allegations.”
Bukovsky’s claims that the charges against him were made up is getting a following in America.
WND columnist Diana West has taken up the cause, reporting on her own website about how authorities released information on the allegations in ways that were not used in other cases, and more.
Then, she reported, “The [British] court went to the unusual and unusually totalitarian length of imposing a ‘reporting ban’ on recent developments in Bukovsky’s libel suit against the Crown Prosecution Service.”
That libel case was filed by Bukovsky against authorities over the allegations they made, which, he said, destroyed his reputation.
She points out that the attack on Bukovsky came a month after he testified, just last year, on the 2006 assassination of Putin-era defector Alexander Litvinenko.
Litvinenko was poisoned by polonium, “probably at the behest of Vladimir Putin?” as a British inquiry found.
“Is there a sentient person, naturally revolted by the thought of child pornography, even five or six images’ worth, going to believe for one minute that the British state, for decades having turned the blindest and hardest and most craven of eyes against the sexual despoilment and prostitution of generations of little British girls at risk at the hands of criminal Islamic ‘grooming’ gangs, has suddenly developed some compelling interest in protecting the welfare of children, and thus turned its avenging sword on … Vladimir Bukovsky? The context, at least, is all wrong from the get-go,” she said.
She reported it is “incumbent” for people to consider the incentives for charges against Bukovksy.
West also cites an online report on the case from Claire Berlinski, at Ricochet.
Berlinski points out that when the charges arose, Bukovsky was facing heart surgery, and wasn’t really expected to survive, though he did.
“So the point of the exercise [the charges] wasn’t just to shut him up. He would soon be dead anyway. The point was to nullify his life, It was to prove to him, and to anyone tempted to emulate him, that the Kremlin will punish you for defying it even after your death. It will turn you, in the eyes of the world and of history into a child molester. These charges, even if he is acquitted, as he expects to be, would tarnish any man with an ineradicable stain. No one will believe there could be that kind of smoke without fire. They call into doubt Bukovsky’s entire life, testimony, and legacy. He is all too aware of this.”
West reported the British Crown Prosecution Service handling the case has dozens of news releases listed online.
“Almost every single one of these nearly 100 press releases pertains to criminal cases that are over and done with; that is, cases that have already gone to court or been otherwise settled. … But then there is the listing from April 27, 2015: ‘Vladimir Bukovsky to be prosecuted over indecent images of children.’”
“To be prosecuted?”
“There is no other such announcement of ‘to be prosecuted’ anywhere else on the list,” she confirmed.
“It stands out on contemplating Bukovsky’s libel suit in which he accuses the CPS of, as the Guardian reported, ‘falsely and maliciously’ damaging his reputation and of abusing its powers,” she wrote.
Continued Berlinski, “For now – if you’ll take my word for it – consider what this implies about Putin’s malice and that of the KGB’s successor organ, the FSB. The object of this exercise isn’t something as banal as killing a dissident on foreign soil,” she wrote.
“Bukovsky is prepared to die rather than to permit the Kremlin to have the last word, and given his health, he may well do that. So I wanted to publish at least this much about the case before that happens. I want him to know that I won’t leave the story alone, even if the hunger strike kills him.”
from PropagandaGuard https://propagandaguard.wordpress.com/2016/05/15/man-on-hunger-strike-clear-my-reputation-before-i-die/
from WordPress https://toddmsiebert.wordpress.com/2016/05/15/man-on-hunger-strike-clear-my-reputation-before-i-die/
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