Russian Apartment bombings

Venom

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This is one of the most plausible conspiracy theories I have yet read about. I saw this interview of Aleksander Litvinenko that was done almost a decade before his death in which he talked about the Russian Apartment Bombings of 1999.

I have to say, given what we know about Russia and its secret police and the death of Litvinenko and other former government people you'd think more of these popular CT guys would make Russian CT videos.

I think they'd be twice as busy living in Russia than in the U.S.

 
I have no opinion due to lack of research on this particular conspiracy theory. But I'll make a theory. Russia Today makes fun of American conspiracy theorists for a variety of reasons. Sometimes to badmouth America, sometimes to make certain conspiracy theories sound ridiculous. Let's see how much and what kind of reporting RT does on this theory, might tell you all you want to know.
 
Joey McGee said:
I have no opinion due to lack of research on this particular conspiracy theory. But I'll make a theory. Russia Today makes fun of American conspiracy theorists for a variety of reasons. Sometimes to badmouth America, sometimes to make certain conspiracy theories sound ridiculous. Let's see how much and what kind of reporting RT does on this theory, might tell you all you want to know.
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That's funny. From what I've heard RT routinely hosts conspiracy theorists like Jesse Ventura and 9/11 Truthers.

But years back when American journalists interviewed Russia's bin Laden equivalent, Shamil Basayev, Putin was livid, saying it was an outrage and comparing the interview of their #1 terrorist to Russian journalists tracking down and interviewing Osama bin Laden, so I don't know how that works. :confused:
 
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Well Putin has been criticising ME intervention since the beginning, but then intervenes in Syria to save a child torturing psychopath, how does all of that posturing look now, tough guy?

Yeah cause a journalist being granted access to a terrorist is just as likely as a CIA spy being granted access, the journalist should have smuggled in a late-acting poison if he was an American with balls, the guy is all posture, which everyone always knew, but then he's riding horses with no shirt on I mean **** you...

Is RT a serious news source that doesn't have making Americans look stupid to others as it's top agenda? No, definitely not.



You can't recover from that as a news station. You either have to admit that you exist to make Americans look bad, or you just fold and go home.
 
Nah. Putin may be ruthless and authoritarian, but he's not all-powerful (even today, having built up a lot more power in Russia than he had had in 1999). Based on what I've read about this one, I just don't see it being plausible.
 
Allen773 said:
Nah. Putin may be ruthless and authoritarian, but he's not all-powerful (even today, having built up a lot more power in Russia than he had had in 1999). Based on what I've read about this one, I just don't see it being plausible.
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Of course, the idea is that Putin was not necessarily the mastermind behind the event and responsibility would extend to Yeltsin and his associates. Even local FSB officers and police were shocked to hear the government's excuses upon the discovery of the failed 5th bomb.http://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/01/world/russian-says-kremlin-faked-terror-attacks.html

Let's remember how Putin and the Kremlin handled this case, with overwhelming secrecy, haste, suppression of independent investigations.

No Investigative Committee report, no NIST-like investigation, no 9/99 Commission. :confused:

Just a bunch of "It must be the Chechens!!".... Basayev doesn't claim responsibility like he usually does....Chechnya already gained de facto independence from the first war.

They find the alleged perps pretty quickly, alleged perps die soon after or are imprisoned for life, no transparency, evidence sealed and any further investigations are forbidden.

How are we to interpret this? I think this is up there...
 
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This is a very relevant article with a lot of detail, and of all CTs, I also think this one is among the most credible:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/nov/22/finally-we-know-about-moscow-bombings/

The book reviewed above draws on the best available evidence:

Dunlop, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, seeks in his book to provide the “spade work” for an official Russian inquiry, if it ever were to be initiated (a highly doubtful proposition as long as Putin remains in power). He draws on investigative reporting by Russian journalists, accounts of Russian officials in law enforcement agencies, eyewitness testimony, and the analyses of Western journalists and academics. The evidence he provides makes an overwhelming case that Russian authorities were complicit in these horrific attacks.​

This is one very important fact to consider:

A central question involved the materials used in the explosives. The day after the first Moscow apartment bombing, an FSB spokesman said that both hexogen and TNT were discovered. Patrushev himself confirmed this in his September television interview. But by March 2000 the FSB had changed its story and claimed that hexogen had not been used in the bombs. In fact, several Russian investigative journalists were able to demonstrate that hexogen was the key ingredient in all of the bombs and that hexogen can only be obtained from Russian government facilities under the control of the FSB.​
 
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Speaking of Patrushev, he only made the announcement that it was an "exercise" shortly after the fugitives were arrested and found to be FSB agents. Before that, like you mentioned, he went along with the official line that it was a real bomb. Even Putin parroted that they had thwarted a real bombing attempt. This whole case reeks of corruption and barely anybody knows about this event.
 
Praktik said:
This is one very important fact to consider:

A central question involved the materials used in the explosives. The day after the first Moscow apartment bombing, an FSB spokesman said that both hexogen and TNT were discovered. Patrushev himself confirmed this in his September television interview. But by March 2000 the FSB had changed its story and claimed that hexogen had not been used in the bombs. In fact, several Russian investigative journalists were able to demonstrate that hexogen was the key ingredient in all of the bombs and that hexogen can only be obtained from Russian government facilities under the control of the FSB.​
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:confused: RDX is a pretty commonly manufactured explosive.
 
I think the most interesting aspect of the RAB CTs implicating Putin/the FSB/Russian government at large is that
a) we, the notorious CT debunkers, can find them plausible or even credible
b) and we do so in large part for pretty much mirror images of the sort of reasons that 9/11 / JFK / Boston Bombing etc CTers advance in support of theirs. Such as: Russia bad; cui bono; look how they changed stories; journalists/independet researcher wrote a book that says...

I find it difficult to discern the respective value of arguments for and against in no small part because I don't understand Russian and thus can't google my way to the bottom of anything. I am thus reduced to accepting the biased accounts of people whose diligence and fairness I usually can't properly assess.

I can see believers in other CTs in a similar position - at least those incapable of digging for evidence (doesn't have to be language barriers - a lack of education provides you with enough blind spots to ignore vast expanses of search area).
 
Oystein said:
I think the most interesting aspect of the RAB CTs implicating Putin/the FSB/Russian government at large is that
a) we, the notorious CT debunkers, can find them plausible or even credible
b) and we do so in large part for pretty much mirror images of the sort of reasons that 9/11 / JFK / Boston Bombing etc CTers advance in support of theirs. Such as: Russia bad; cui bono; look how they changed stories; journalists/independet researcher wrote a book that says...
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Well, there are other reasons to consider that this hypothesis is more likely that traditional CTs.

1) It's a relatively straightforward plan: Plant bombs, detonate bombs, blame Chechens. No nonsense like taking out insurance on the buildings, warning all the Jews to leave the buildings, using a nuke and them claiming it was RDX, using a space beam, or any of that fantasy stuff. It's a straightforward sort of plan similar to proven conspiracies: it directly advances the interests of the suspect party, without unnecessary frills.

2) It directly implicates the very people Russia would want to blame. They had it in for the Chechens, and the Chechens were directly blamed for it. Again, no nonsense like claiming that mostly Saudis carried out the attack, and then invading Afghanistan and Iraq.

3) There's nothing in the claim of Russian involvement that violates any laws of physics. It doesn't presuppose magical powers on the part of the Russians to be able to set up the attack. The plan of planting bombs is something that could plausibly be carried out by almost anyone - no ridiculous contrivances needed either for Russian involvement, or Chechen involvement. Indeed, such attacks have been provably carried out many times before, by many different groups.


I'm sure we could find other such examples. I'm not haring off and dedicating my life to proving that Russia/Not Russia is to blame, but really, it's not unreasonable to accept the notion that Russia was involved as being plausible, even if not proven.
 
Horatius said:
Well, there are other reasons to consider that this hypothesis is more likely that traditional CTs.
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I am not denying this. However...

Horatius said:
1) It's a relatively straightforward plan: Plant bombs, detonate bombs, blame Chechens. No nonsense like taking out insurance on the buildings, warning all the Jews to leave the buildings, using a nuke and them claiming it was RDX, using a space beam, or any of that fantasy stuff. It's a straightforward sort of plan similar to proven conspiracies: it directly advances the interests of the suspect party, without unnecessary frills.

2) It directly implicates the very people Russia would want to blame. They had it in for the Chechens, and the Chechens were directly blamed for it. Again, no nonsense like claiming that mostly Saudis carried out the attack, and then invading Afghanistan and Iraq.

3) There's nothing in the claim of Russian involvement that violates any laws of physics. It doesn't presuppose magical powers on the part of the Russians to be able to set up the attack. The plan of planting bombs is something that could plausibly be carried out by almost anyone - no ridiculous contrivances needed either for Russian involvement, or Chechen involvement. Indeed, such attacks have been provably carried out many times before, by many different groups.
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#1 and #3 are variants of a typical CTer ploy: Point out that something is possible or even easy, and concluding it is likely.

#2 is a variant of the "cui bono" I mentioned already.

That doesn't make those arguments wrong, but makes them weak - how convincing they are is more determined by the prejudices the addressee already holds (such as "Russia bad").

Horatius said:
I'm sure we could find other such examples. I'm not haring off and dedicating my life to proving that Russia/Not Russia is to blame, but really, it's not unreasonable to accept the notion that Russia was involved as being plausible, even if not proven.
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Plausible, yes. A JFK assissanation conspiracy is also plausible - there isn't a President in history without organized enemies who'd have plausible motives, and that it was easy to shoot him is proven by Oswald.

What seems missing (at least according to my very limited perception) is direct evidence that I can vet.
 
Oystein said:
Plausible, yes. A JFK assissanation conspiracy is also plausible - there isn't a President in history without organized enemies who'd have plausible motives, and that it was easy to shoot him is proven by Oswald.

What seems missing (at least according to my very limited perception) is direct evidence that I can vet.
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If not an inside job, it is at the very least a very sloppy cover up. For there to be no 9/99 Commission, no NIST-like evaluation, no transparent investigation at all as far as anyone knows is inexcusable.

That being said, the main Russian dissidents that brought attention to this CT were in full blown CT territory in their wider claims about the Russian security services and its alleged connections to terrorist groups and other alleged false flags.
 
catsmate said:
I have no idea. Look at the official Russian backpeddling on the MH 17 shoot-down, they seem to be poor at covering up.
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Well, that's what happens when you're trying to overcome decades worth of not caring if people know you're a brutal dictatorship.
 
Oystein said:
Are they? Is this discussed anywhere on this forum?
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There was some discussion of the changing stories promulgated by official Russian sources and their apologists in the MH 17 thread, IIRR. Specificlaly to do with the changing information they provided to the Dutch investigation and their later repudiation of it when it became inconvenient.
 
catsmate said:
There was some discussion of the changing stories promulgated by official Russian sources and their apologists in the MH 17 thread, IIRR. Specificlaly to do with the changing information they provided to the Dutch investigation and their later repudiation of it when it became inconvenient.
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Sounds similar to the Korean Air Lines 007 shootdown. At first they denied it. Then it was a spy plane. Even after all evidence to the contrary was presented to the Russians after the dissolution, it was still a spy plane.
 
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