From Consortium News
Film director Andrei Nekrasov, who produced 'The Magnitsky Act: Behind the Scenes.'
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Why is the U.S. mainstream media so frightened of a documentary that debunks the beloved story of how "lawyer" Sergei Magnitsky uncovered massive Russian government corruption and died as a result? If the documentary is as flawed as its critics claim, why won't they let it be shown to the American public, then lay out its supposed errors, and use it as a case study of how such fakery works?
Instead we -- in the land of the free, home of the brave -- are protected from seeing this documentary produced by filmmaker Andrei Nekrasov who was known as a fierce critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin but who in this instance found the West's widely accepted Magnitsky storyline to be a fraud.
Instead, last week, Senate Judiciary Committee members sat in rapt attention as hedge-fund operator William Browder wowed them with a reprise of his Magnitsky tale and suggested that people who have challenged the narrative and those who dared air the documentary one time at Washington's Newseum last year should be prosecuted for violating the Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA).
It appears that Official Washington's anti-Russia hysteria has reached such proportions that old-time notions about hearing both sides of a story or testing out truth in the marketplace of ideas must be cast aside. The new political/media paradigm is to shield the American people from information that contradicts the prevailing narratives, all the better to get them to line up behind Those Who Know Best.
Nekrasov's powerful deconstruction of the Magnitsky myth -- and the film's subsequent blacklisting throughout the "free world" -- recall other instances in which the West's propaganda lines don't stand up to scrutiny, so censorship and ad hominem attacks become the weapons of choice to defend "perception management" narratives in geopolitical hot spots such as Iraq (2002-03), Libya (2011), Syria (2011 to the present), and Ukraine (2013 to the present).
But the Magnitsky myth has a special place as the seminal fabrication of the dangerous New Cold War between the nuclear-armed West and nuclear-armed Russia.
In the United States, Russia-bashing in The New York Times and other "liberal media" also has merged with the visceral hatred of President Trump, causing all normal journalistic standards to be jettisoned.
A Call for Prosecutions
Browder, the American-born co-founder of Hermitage Capital Management who is now a British citizen, raised the stakes even more when he testified that the people involved in arranging a one-time showing of Nekrasov's documentary, "The Magnitsky Act: Behind the Scenes," at the Newseum should be held accountable under FARA, which has penalties ranging up to five years in prison.
Browder testified: "As part of [Russian lawyer Natalie] Veselnitskaya's lobbying, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, Chris Cooper of the Potomac Group, was hired to organize the Washington, D.C.-based premiere of a fake documentary about Sergei Magnitsky and myself. This was one the best examples of Putin's propaganda.
"They hired Howard Schweitzer of Cozzen O'Connor Public Strategies and former Congressman Ronald Dellums to lobby members of Congress on Capitol Hill to repeal the Magnitsky Act and to remove Sergei's name from the Global Magnitsky bill. On June 13, 2016, they funded a major event at the Newseum to show their fake documentary, inviting representatives of Congress and the State Department to attend.
"While they were conducting these operations in Washington, D.C., at no time did they indicate that they were acting on behalf of Russian government interests, nor did they file disclosures under the Foreign Agent Registration Act. United States law is very explicit that those acting on behalf of foreign governments and their interests must register under FARA so that there is transparency about their interests and their motives.
"Since none of these people registered, my firm wrote to the Department of Justice in July 2016 and presented the facts. I hope that my story will help you understand the methods of Russian operatives in Washington and how they use U.S. enablers to achieve major foreign policy goals without disclosing those interests."
Browder's Version
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