Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh has busted the Washington Post's claim that the US intelligence community's last-minute terrorist warning to Moscow specifically cited the Crocus City Concert Hall as the target.
Citing an American official familiar with the matter, the investigative journalist noted that the target was merely described as a "public gathering" and that WaPo's report was specifically aimed at presenting the tragedy as President Vladimir Putin's failure.
The coverage of the terror attack and Team Biden's approach to it have raised questions from the outset: immediately after the attack, Washington insistently denied any Ukraine connections to the tragedy despite a well-established record linking the Kiev regime with terror attacks in Russian territory.
The US press openly chastised the Kiev regime for unilateral operations "frustrating" the White House, including an attack on the Crimean Bridge and a car bombing that killed Daria Dugina, the daughter of the Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin. The New York Times admitted last March that Ukrainians are "not always transparent with their American counterparts" about their sabotage efforts.
"Team Biden and his predecessors since Bush junior, with its fabricated evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, have lost all credibility as they have replaced politics with a delusional game of concocted narratives - straight lies masquerading as plausible truths – to cover up their serial obsession of regime change by destruction of the target country, to the point where, enmeshed in their deceits, they have lost their basic sense of realism, common sense and ethics, thus undermining the international order they falsely claim to underpin. The Biden Team cannot therefore be trusted, even with a barge pole – nor the EU and collective West for the very same reason," Fabien Chalandon, chevalier of the French Legion d'Honneur, investor, and writer, told Sputnik.
While the US and its allies are jumping to conclusions before the official probe is completed, Chalandon highlighted the importance of investigative activities related to the attack and the need to find the masterminds, financiers and operatives who supported the egregious and odious slaughter.
On April 3, Secretary of the Russian Security Council Nikolai Patrushev highlighted that the Crocus City Hall attack was accompanied by extensive and seemingly pre-orchestrated media coverage in the West.
More Possible Ukraine Connections Emerging
Meanwhile, the Russian Investigative Committee and Federal Security Service's (FSB) initial probes have indicated a Ukraine link to the attack, including possible funding by Ukrainian operatives as well as a hideout for the terrorists in the Eastern European state.
On April 5, Russian investigators announced the results after studying the suspects' mobile phones. In addition to the exchange with the "curators" about the attack, photographs of people in camouflage with the Ukrainian flag near destroyed houses were found.
For its part, the Kiev regime does not make it any easier for the Western press to divert suspicions away from Ukraine. The head of Ukraine's Center for Countering Disinformation (CCD), Andriy Kovalenko, told The Times that the center is capitalizing on the Crocus City Hall terror attack by instigating ethnic tensions in Russia.
The CCD has infiltrated Russian social media and Telegram chats posing as Russians or ethnic minorities to express sympathy for the terrorists and pit netizens against police, all the while trying to instill hatred against migrant workers among Russians.
The CCD has about 50 full-time analysts and is subordinated to the National Security and Defense Council, the body supervising Ukraine's security services. Remarkably, these activities were met with little if any condemnation in the Western media, even though they were directly aimed at abusing human rights.
Who is Really Responsible for Spike in Islamist Terror?
While trying to convince the public that ISIS* is solely responsible for the terror attack, the Western mainstream press remains silent about NATO's destructive actions in the Middle East, Central Asia and North Africa over the past decades, which provided fertile ground for the emergence of al-Qaeda*, ISIS and many other radical Islamist groups.
Western corporate media also shies away from questioning the intelligence services' alliance with the jihadists, leading to their funding, arming and training to enable them to carry out regime change and clandestine sabotage operations against NATO rivals.
A few years ago, French investigative journalist Maxime Chaix published a book called "The Shadow War in Syria" about the CIA's “Timber Sycamore” operation, describing how American, Gulf State and European intelligence operatives instigated the Syrian civil war by weaponizing Islamists to overthrow the nation's President Bashar al-Assad.
"Since Afghanistan and al-Qaeda, the US has accustomed the world to the nefarious business of funding Islamic terrorists to further their ill-conceived strategic goals of regime change, including in Russia. In fact, this is the very sick specialty of the neocons, which is hitting back everyone like a boomerang, everywhere in the world," Chalandon said.
"I would not be a bit surprised to discover that the US has induced some extremist groups into fighting in Ukraine as mercenaries against Russia to overcome the shortage of Ukrainian soldiers, and even introduce plausible denials in some of the black operations which are part of the neocons-induced asymmetrical war. Remember too that there are reports that US arms given to Ukraine have been found in the hands of Hamas [in Palestine]. But so far the dots have not been crossed and some more peeling away is needed to reach the bottom layer of this Russian doll," the French writer continued.
Nord Stream Sabotage Fuels Distrust Towards Team Biden
On top of this, Team Biden is stained by the Nord Stream sabotage controversy: despite Hersh's bombshell revelations about the US president and its officials' direct role in plotting and ordering the attack on the pipelines more than a year ago, the West is yet to present an alternative plausible explanation for what had happened and who was behind it.
The West's sinister silence and failure to complete its investigation into the sabotage fuel suspicion and distrust. Being incapable of finding the culprits behind the Nord Stream attack, NATO member states somehow managed to determine that Ukraine did not have a hand in the Crocus City Hall attack within hours.
"Would this mean that for a change the Biden Team is finally expressing the truth in the Crocus City Hall terrorist act? It is always difficult to establish if and when a congenital liar is finally not duplicitous… short of using a polygraph. So time is better spent waiting for more details to come out. Russian authorities are currently in the driving seat. It is incumbent to them to expose the facts when this investigation is over, which may take some time to unravel. It is also the duty of the countries forming the Collective West to provide Russia with as much intelligence as they can get, the real acid test of their innocence or complicity," Chalandon concluded.
In parallel to his investment banking career, Chalandon co-founded and ran a French political think tank, Fondation Concorde, and was awarded the French Legion d'Honneur in 2000 and wrote for leading French newspapers on political issues. His father, Albin Chalandon, served as minister of various governments under President Charles de Gaulle and Georges Pompidou and then minister of justice between 1986 and 1988 in a Jacques Chirac-led government under then President Francois Mitterrand.
*Al-Qaeda, ISIS, and ISIS-K (ISIS-Khorasan/Islamic State – Khorasan Province) are terrorist organizations banned in Russia and many other countries.