I was aware that the exorbitant length of my diary was going to test the patience of readers -- as in previous posts of mine on the Litvinenko mystery.  There is however an element of genuine difficulty.  When one is dealing with stories relating to intrigue in the post-Soviet space, and also with stories about disinformation peddlers taking advantage of the gullibility unfortunately found in large areas of the MSM in the West, separating out fact from fiction is not easy.  

So it can be necessary to go into the minutiae of evidence at rather greater length than one might like, if one is to find any kind of firm ground.  And this is all the more so, as one does not want to give people in the MSM any grounds for ignoring or disputing one's conclusions, on the basis that people in the blogosphere are not rigorous in their handling of evidence.

The importance of the whole subject of disinformation peddling -- and the very radical ways in which it subverts constitutional government -- is something which I myself have only recently been beginning to grasp, although it has I think been apparent to de Gondi for much longer.  The demonstrated capacity of disinformation involving nuclear scaremongering to make Western countries do very silly things is frightening.

In this connection, the story of the Niger uranium forgeries, and the quite specious allegations repeatedly levelled by anonymous 'security sources' in the UK that the Russian authorities have pioneered nuclear terrorism, belong to a pattern -- into which the continuing stream of disinformation about the Iranian nuclear programme fits.  (Despite the awful warning provided by Iraq, it is still quite possible that disinformation about Iran will succeed in precipitating a disastrous U.S. attack on that country.)

Disinformation moreover commonly turns out to be generated by transnational networks, which can get away with the most flagrant distortion because the incredibility of claims made about one country is not apparent to people in another.  For instance, the MSM in Britain have recycled Berezovsky-inspired disinformation on the Litvinenko affair, partly because they have been fed it by the American and Italian branches of the networks with which he is involved, and do not grasp the dubious nature of the sources.

If, in the period immediately after the Litvinenko story broke, the MSM in the UK had paid attention to de Gondi's posts on this site on his Italian associate Mario Scaramella, they might not have swallowed the incredible claims put our by some of the more unscrupulous of our spooks.