If ever there was a case of `unreliable witnesses', it is this.  If one exposes claims made by any of the major protagonists - in particular Litvinenko - to close analysis, very many of them emerge as unreliable.

However, the whole basis of the approach taken by the Western MSM has been that one can approach this story on the basis that some witnesses are absolutely reliable, and some absolutely unreliable.  Those classed as reliable are commonly either people who were genuinely dissidents - Alex Goldfarb or Vladimir Bukovsky - or belong to a class one might call `repentant Chekists':  Gordievsky, Yuri Shvets, Oleg Kalugin, Vladimir Rezun (aka `Viktor Suvorov'), Boris Volodarsky, Litvinenko himself.

Claims made by members of either class are simply taken on trust - an example being the report in the Times on 20 November, in which Gordievsky shifted the focus of suspicion from Scaramella to Lugovoi, and accused Putin of instigating the supposed murder.  No evidence was provided, nor was any asked for, before an individual - Lugovoi - and the head of a foreign state - Putin - were accused of pioneering nuclear terrorism.

By the same token, it is simply assumed that Lugovoi is an absolutely disingenuous witness, and that there is no need even accurately to report what he has said in his own defence.

Why precisely the MSM in Britain is determined to interpret a complex story of intrigue as a Manichean drama in which `good guys' always tell the truth, and `bad guys' never, is a critical question.  Whatever the explanation, however, the result is that a great deal of the coverage of the Litvinenko mystery verges on the inane.  The fact that Gordievsky, Shvets, `Suvorov' and Bukovsky all turn out to have been implicated in Scaramella's disinformation schemes brings the bizarreness of the situation into sharp relief.