Defenestration Row:Convenient Suicides and State Power

Written by Chris Floyd
Tuesday, 06 March 2007

This week saw the mysterious death of yet another journalist in Moscow. This time it was Kommersant columnist Ivan Safronov, a former colonel who wrote about Russia's ever-murky military affairs, as the Moscow Times reports. Safronov, who occasionally ran afoul of the "security organs" when digging up dirt on Russia's military-industrial complex (much akin to its American counterpart centered in the north Virginia badlands formerly known as Hell's Bottom but now called the Pentagon), apparently committed suicide by jumping out of a fifth-floor window, head first, with his hat and coat on. And if you believe that "official" explanation, we have some beachfront property in Nizhny Novgorod we'd like to sell you.

The Western media is emphasizing the fact that Safronov joins a list of some dozen other Russian journalists who have died under mysterious circumstances during the presidency of Vladimir Putin (including real journalists like Anna Politkovskaya and shadowland operatives like Alexander Litvinenko). Although this number is but a fraction of the death toll of journalists in George W. Bush's satrapy of Iraq, it is of course a disturbing figure. >>>cont

(The complete story, with annotations, can be found here: The Secret Sharers: The CIA, the Bush Gang, and the Killing of Frank Olson.)

So let us lay not that flattering unction to our souls, that such mysterious deaths and defenestrations occur only in the mephitic air of Putin's Moscow. Inconvenient people – especially those persistent enough to be a bother but not powerful or connected enough to protect themselves from reprisal – are removed from the scene, one way or another, all the time. Gangsters do it; terrorists do it; and so do agents of the state, "rogue" or otherwise.

Chris Floyd