Thread: Russia on the march - again

Originally Posted by MrFirst

Noone has poisoned Yushchenko, simply one should drink less vodka and gorylka. As for "spigot to mexico" the US now is building the wall in the Mexican border, quite similar to a kind of spigot.
Firral is right, the article is a paranoid delirium, but I do not agree this is new, the old well-known stereotypes' list for western readers - Siberia, kgb, empire of evil, etc. Propaganda works.

Last I checked, Mexico imported oil to the US. So building a wall to stop smuggling and alien invasion is hardly shutting off the spigot as it won't affect legitmate trade under NAFTA. You really don't think the President of the Ukraine was poisioned, guess the medical team in Austria is lying. same as Scotland Yard is lying about Russia poisioning dissedents in London. If it is actualyl happening then it not a stereotype now is it.

So, if the wall is hardly shutting off the spigot, the same the raised price was not a termination of trade, including the oil trade.
And OK, you have convinced me, Putin poisoned Yushchenko and this... forgot his name... from London. And also Putin killed Kennedy and Martin Luter King! And Hoffa too!

I received death threats, says doctor who denied that Ukrainian leader was poisoned

By Bojan Pancevski in Vienna
Last Updated: 12:00am GMT 27/03/2005

A senior doctor ousted from the Vienna clinic where Viktor Yushchenko, the Ukrainian president, was treated for dioxin poisoning, claims that his life was threatened after he cast doubt on the diagnosis.

Dr Lothar Wicke, the former clinical director at the Rudolfinerhaus, said that the clinic came under intense pressure from Mr Yushchenko's entourage to diagnose poisoning, even when there was no apparent evidence.

Dr Wicke told The Telegraph that, as the crime writer Agatha Christie liked to point out, there was "no murder without a corpse, and no poisoning without poison".

Mr Yushchenko, 50, first claimed that he had been poisoned in September last year. He suffered severe stomach pains and disfiguring facial lesions while campaigning in Ukraine's bitterly fought presidential election against Viktor Yanukovych, the rival pro-Kremlin candidate.

At the time, doctors believed that his symptoms may have been caused by food-poisoning or a mysterious virus. On September 9, Mr Yushchenko checked into the prestigious clinic in Austria. Initially, it could not confirm the cause but in December, it backed the poison theory.

Speculation that the politician was the victim of a dirty tricks campaign helped him to victory in the elections on December 26.

Dr Wicke remains uncomfortable about the role played by the Rudolfinerhaus in the drama. "The first two times Mr Yushchenko was examined, there was no evidence of poisoning whatsoever," Dr Wicke, 64, said. Yet, to his dismay, persistent leaks from the clinic suggested that the politician had indeed been poisoned.

Dr Wicke said: "I was directly involved, and I can tell you that the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Vienna did not find any traces of poisonous agents in his blood. If there is no poison, there cannot be poisoning and there was no trace of it whatsoever."

He made his feelings public at the end of September, shortly before Mr Yushchenko made a second trip to Vienna for further tests. Dr Wicke told reporters that a "medically forged diagnosis" had been circulated by someone "not permanently employed in this clinic". This was taken to refer to Nikolai Korpan, a Ukrainian-born surgeon who had been treating the politician in Vienna.

Three days later, Dr Wicke received a written request from Dr Michael Zimpfer, the president of the clinic's supervisory board, to retract his remarks.

Dr Wicke marked the memo with the word "Acknowledged". It was after this that a man speaking accented English rang Dr Wicke and introduced himself as "a friend from the Ukraine". He said the man told him to "take care. Your life is in danger". Dr Wicke and his family were then put under 24-hour police guard.

Behind the scenes, Mr Yushchenko's repeated visits to the clinic had caused turmoil, said Dr Wicke, who had worked there for 25 years and was awarded the Cross of Honour First Class for Science and Art by the late Austrian president, Thomas Klestil, last year.

At one point, members of the politician's entourage tussled with Austrian police who were trying to confiscate Mr Yushchenko's medical records at the behest of a Ukrainian parliamentary commission investigating the case.

Dr Wicke is now suing the Rudolfinerhaus for substantial damages. He claims that he was forced out of his job for refusing to go along with the poisoning diagnosis.

Dr Wicke declined to speak at length about the dismissal case but asked if his dismissal was linked to the Yushchenko case, he said: "I will restrain from commenting but, given the facts, you will certainly not find it difficult to make your own conclusion.

"The official announcement said I left of my own free will but that wasn't the case."

He also declined to comment on speculation that Mr Yushchenko was actually suffering from stress and that he was treated by American doctors. It is also thought that the clinic in Vienna might have been used as a smokescreen.

"It was announced during Yushchenko's third visit to Vienna that he had been poisoned but I had been removed from the case by then. I don't know what evidence was taken into consideration," Dr Wicke said.

Dr Korpan said last week that several international laboratories had confirmed that Mr Yuschenko had been poisoned. "There is a reason why Dr Wicke disputed the poisoning diagnosis but it is not a medical one. It will be revealed later," he said. "I can only say that the whole thing is worth writing a book about."

The Rudolfinerhaus refused to comment before Dr Wicke's case is heard on Tuesday.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.../ixportal.html

And interesting reading for those who is able to read...

The Strange Case of Dr. Wicke or Questions Surrounding the Alleged Poisoning of Viktor Yushchenko (with Update)

Since Saturday’s announcement by Dr. Michael Zimpfer of Vienna’s Rudolfinerhaus clinic that Ukrainian presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko had been poisoned with dioxin, the alleged dioxin-poisoning of Yushchenko seems set to become established fact as far as the traditional, mainstream English-language media are concerned. The December 11 AP story on the matter is titled “Doctor: Yushchenko Poisoned With Dioxin”, thus at least still indicating that what is at issue is an allegation from a single source. By contrast, the title of the NYTimes story of December 12 eschews such niceties in order to declare point blank: “Liberal Leader From Ukraine Was Poisoned”. By “liberal leader from Ukraine” is meant, of course, Viktor Yushchenko, though, as has been repeatedly pointed out here, there is reason to doubt that Yushchenko is in fact particularly “liberal”. The two stories refer respectively to Dr. Zimpfer as the “director” and the “head” of the Rudolfinerhaus clinic. Neither mentions that his title is in fact President of the clinic’s Supervisory Board [Aufsichtsrat] - an administrative body - and that the actual medical director of the clinic, Dr. Lothar Wicke, resigned from his post on December 9: i.e., one day before Viktor Yushchenko was set to return to Vienna for the latest round of tests to determine the origins of his mysterious illness. This was in fact Yushchenko’s third visit to the clinic since early September when the symptoms of his illness first appeared. Neither the AP nor the Times piece mentioned either that in the meanwhile Dr. Wicke had dismissed the allegation of poisoning as scientifically unfounded and made known, moreover, that he had been threatened by Yushchenko’s entourage with unspecified "means" or "measures" should he persist in denying the charge.

An article published in Sunday’s edition of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) [link in German] – a paper which, as Trans-Int’s German readers will be able to confirm, cannot be suspected of harboring tender feelings for the Kremlin – enters into some of the details of what it calls the “strange goings-on” at the Rudolfinerhaus clinic since Viktor Yushchenko first checked in on September 9. Citing investigations conducted by the journalist Emil Bobi of the Austrian magazine Profil, it notes, for instance, that the allegation of poisoning originated with one Nikolai Korpan, a Ukrainian-born surgeon who had joined the team treating Yushchenko during his first visit to the clinic in early September. Before, however, Yushchenko returned for a second visit on September 30, Dr. Wicke held a press conference in which he accused persons not on the Rudolfinerhaus staff – “the reference was to Korpan,” according to the FAZ – of disseminating “medically falsified [verfälschte] diagnoses concerning the condition of Mr. Yushchenko” and indicated that no signs of poisoning had in fact been found. The FAZ article continues:

Thereafter Yushchenko’s people made clear to Wicke that he should not say anything more concerning the affair, since otherwise [Wicke is here again being quoted] “one would resort to other means against me and the hospital”. Dr. Wicke is also supposed to have received death threats at the time.

These threats were taken sufficiently seriously by the Viennese police that, as the FAZ notes, an armed guard was assigned to Dr. Wicke. Furthermore, according to the FAZ, four days after the cited press conference, Zimpfer submitted a request to Wicke asking him to retract his statement to the effect that there were no indications of poisoning. On October 3, Wicke is supposed to have filed a memorandum noting that Zimpfer had said that if the statement was not retracted, “Dr. Yushchenko’s people will not be happy and will take other measures.” Later that month, acting on a request by a Ukrainian parliamentary committee investigating the poisoning allegations, Viennese criminal investigators were dispatched to the Rudolfinerhaus clinic to seize Yushchenko’s medical files, whereupon, according to Emil Bobi, they “practically came to blows with Yushchenko’s entourage.”

An article published last Friday (10 December) in the French daily Le Figaro also broaches details of Yushchenko’s “mysterious hospitalization” in Vienna and provides a taste of the atmosphere of intimidation which has reigned at the Rudolfinerhaus. It invokes, for instance, the outbreak of scuffles at a October 1st news conference on the Yushchenko case and a "strange security force with slavic accents" that on the same occasion is said to have harassed foreign journalists. The Figaro piece cites Dr. Wicke to the effect that Yushchenko personally accused him of “perhaps having made me lose the presidential election”, as well as excusing himself for a momentary reluctance to insist on his scientific opinion: "I have a child, you understand."

Codeblueblog has today posted “Ten Reasons Why This Weekend’s Yushchenko Diagnosis is a Fraud” (Hat tip Instapundit). Some of these reasons are of a specialized medical nature and have provoked debate between Dr. Boyle of CBB and medical colleagues. Others, however, are simple matters of logic and plausibility. Hospital authorities claim, for instance, that a new procedure has only just been developed that now allowed them finally to make the diagnosis that has eluded them for the previous three months. What, after all, is the likelihood of that just two weeks before the re-run of the Ukrainian elections? The questions raised by CBB combined with revelations in the European press on the odd circumstances surrounding the Korpan/Zimpfer “diagnosis” - which, like the very existence of Dr. Wicke, have been largely ignored by the accounts in the English-language press – give ample cause to pause regarding the alleged poisoning of Viktor Yushchenko.

(Many thanks to H-R for putting me on to the FAZ article!)

Update: Dr. Lothar Wicke has been almost entirely effaced from the accounts in the mainstream English- language media of Viktor Yushchenko's hospitalizations at the Rudolfinerhaus clinic in Vienna. He is mentioned in passing in an AP report dated 25 November (reproduced here on CNN.com), which notes that Dr. Wicke "requested police protection after receiving an anonymous threat while treating Yushchenko". He is also mentioned in another AP report dated 8 December (reproduced here in USA Today), which notes: "One of the chief doctors treating Yushchenko, Lothar Wicke, was been placed under police protection after receiving an anonymous threat." "No details about the threat have been released," the AP report continues. I am not sure whom the AP was expecting to "release" the details in question. Emil Bobi's investigative article on the case in Profil was published on 11 October. Given the general tenor of the two AP articles and the ominous context of poisoning accusations against the Ukrainian authorities, readers of these laconic remarks will be tempted to assume that the threats against Wicke must originate from the same sources as are alleged to have attempted to off Yushchenko. They would never know that they are, on the contrary, supposed to have come precisely from the Yushchenko camp itself - as they might, nonetheless, have speculated if the AP had bothered to inform its readers that Dr. Wicke has rejected the poisoning accusation. As I have often been led to wonder in treating mainstream American media on this site: is this a matter of willful disinformation - sticking to the preferred script with the roles of "good guys" and "bad guys" neatly distributed in advance - or of simple incompetence? Why couldn't the AP correspondent read Emil Bobi's article as the FAZ author did? Perhaps because he or she does not read German? But why would someone without the requisite linguistic competence be sent to cover a story at a Viennese clinic? Either way - whether disinformation or misinformation - it is further proof that the American public is very poorly served by its established news media.

posted by John Rosenthal at 4:22 PM

http://trans-int.blogspot.com/2004/1...questions.html

John Rosenthal

John Rosenthal's writings on international politics have appeared in English, French and German in such publications as Policy Review, Newsday, The Opinion Journal, Les Temps Modernes, Le Figaro, and Merkur, as well as numerous scholarly journals and collective volumes. He has taught Political Philosophy and History of European Philosophy at, among other institutions, New York University, Rutgers University and the École Normale Superieure of Lyon.

The last one exactly goes in the Ray's line about English newspapers and thoughts in the western way, doesn't it?

Originally Posted by zraver

Firral, the differnac eis of course in the way the game is played. America uses its means to influence outcome sin forgien countries, but it does not poision the Prime Minister of Canada or shut off spigot to mexico.

Huh? Political assassinations? Coup et dats? Take a look at 1950s Iran and see how the CIA destablized an freely elected government. Same thing with Central America and African countries during the Cold War.

As for today, seizing bank accounts and assets would be enough for America to influence.

Originally Posted by smilingassassin

Are you kidding? Everyone silent following the USA's efforts to persue its own interests? Last I saw theres no end of critisism, from your own president Putin no less!

Same goes for Israel, I can't begin to count the number of times European nations have called UN sesions to curtail Israeli attempts at self defence...

My sentiments exactly.

Blademaster, President Ford outlawed that type of behaviour in the 70's. over 30 years ago. Russia/Putin is engaged in that behaviour today.

And why thos emany years ago did America engage in such despicable behaviour? Ohya to prevent Russian/Soviet dominance of millions. We did not do it to gain dominance over them.

Originally Posted by zraver

And why thos emany years ago did America engage in such despicable behaviour? Ohya to prevent Russian/Soviet dominance of millions. We did not do it to gain dominance over them.

One may ask - what's that?
The direct result of brainwashing.
I have no words!