by Philip Giraldi, The Unz Review:
The Anatomy of an Internet Hoax
For well over 40 years I’ve read the print edition of the New York Times almost every morning, trying to keep myself informed on important world matters. Until recently, I read it very carefully, but in the last few years I’ve noticed such a tremendous decline in its quality that these days I usually just glance at most of the articles, saving myself close to an hour a day. Other knowledgeable people seem to have reached similar conclusions, even including former Times editors.
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With our leading mainstream outlets having become so unreliable, many of us now draw our information from alternative sources, but unfortunately these are often just as bad if not worse. As a result wildly exaggerated or incorrect stories can easily propagate across the Internet, including outright hoaxes.
Our own very lightly moderated website attracts many agitated commenters, and a few weeks ago some of them began claiming that a hypersonic Russian missile strike on an underground military bunker in Ukraine had killed dozens of NATO officers including American generals, a hugely important story that was being suppressed all across the Western media. This report struck me as typical Internet-nonsense and I paid absolutely no attention to it.
However, a couple of weeks later I was discussing foreign policy issues with a highly-regarded mainstream academic whom I know, someone who would certainly be considered a member of the American elite establishment. He shares my opinion of the total dishonesty of our mainstream media so he closely follows Ukraine war developments on various Telegram channels and he happened to mention the missile strike, being sure that it had actually happened even after I expressed my own strong skepticism. Therefore, I decided to investigate what might be a remarkable story.
With a bit of Googling, I quickly located the blogsite of Dr. Gilbert Doctorow. On April 15th, he had provided a detailed account of the supposed missile attack.
With respect to a still different news story of great importance, Western media are still deaf and dumb more than a month after its occurrence. I have in mind the alleged Russian strike on an underground bunker near the Western Ukrainian city of Lvov on 9 March. According to a report in an alternative news agency in Greece that was then amplified by Russian news wire agencies shortly after the 9th, we were told that 200-300 NATO generals and high officers together with their Ukrainian counterparts were killed by the strike of a Russian hypersonic missile Kinzhal in what was called a “revenge attack” for the murderous incursion of Ukrainian saboteurs in the RF’s Bryansk province a week earlier. Nearly all Western media imposed a blackout on this news. The few pro-Washington internet news portals that mentioned it did so only to blacken the sources of the report.
Now the Russians have once again put on their news tickers reports on the attack while giving some more details. See the Russian language article entitled “Catastrophe for NATO forces in Ukraine: in one blow of its Kinzhal against a secret bunker Russia postponed the Ukrainian Armed Forces counter-attack.” The subtitle goes on to say “Russian Kinzhal hypersonic rockets destroyed a secret bunker with 200 NATO and UAF officers.” The article appeared in the online version of the fairly respectable Komsomolskaya Pravda: https://www.kp.ru/daily/27490.5/4748875
We are told now that two, not one Kinzhal were employed to do the job of blowing up a bunker located more than 100 meters underground and protected by a reinforced concrete shield built in Soviet times and intended to resist a direct hit by a nuclear bomb. Each of the rockets carried 500 kg of high explosives.
The Polish, British and American officers felt so confident of their invulnerability in this shelter where they conferred daily with their Ukrainian counterparts on the conduct of the war that they carelessly parked dozens of their cars near the entrance to the bunker, a fact which did not escape the notice of Russia’s air and satellite reconnaissance.
The Kinzhals were fired by a MiG-31 fighter jet as far as 2,000 km away from the target, meaning well out of reach of Ukrainian anti-aircraft installations. Its accuracy was proven to be within one meter of the target.
The author of this article, Viktor Baranets, goes on to say that recent news releases in Ukrainian media confirm the basic story about the missile attack. He alludes to the dressing down which the American embassy gave to the Ukrainian command after the disaster and about the recovery of 40 bodies from the wreckage to date while excavation work continues to find more human remains deep underground. He believes that the loss of this vital coordination center is one major factor in the ongoing repeated delays of the onset of the vaunted Ukrainian counter-offensive. And he provides a couple of explanations of why Western media have not covered the disaster. First, that the destruction of this seemingly impregnable bunker could happen at all is proof of the unique effectiveness of the Kinzhal in doing what it was designed to do: destroy military command centers and thereby decapitate the enemy. The air defense systems of NATO are useless against an object flying at 10 – 15 mach and its impact is greater than a nuclear bomb. Second, if they were to reveal the numbers and tasks performed by the NATO contingent that was killed in the bunker, including U.S. generals, they would be exposing NATO to charges of direct involvement in the conduct of the war, meaning cobelligerent status, something which the Biden administration has sought to avoid at all costs.
Doctorow seemed convinced that the story was true and his name was slightly familiar to me as someone knowledgeable about the Ukraine war. When I checked, his background was solid and credible, with various outlets describing him as a long-time Russia watcher with a 1975 Ph.D. in history from Columbia University. The late Prof. Stephen Cohen had been an eminent Russia scholar at that same institution, and in 2015 Doctorow had worked with him to reestablish The American Committee for East-West Accord, which boasted numerous distinguished figures on its board, including Bill Bradley, Chuck Hagel, William vanden Heuvel, Donald McHenry, and Jack F. Matlock, Jr.
