"Alisher Usmanov, potential Arsenal chairman, is a Vicious Thug,
Criminal, Racketeer, Heroin Trafficker and Accused Rapist"
by Craig Murray
[Editor's Note: Craig Murray, former United Kingdom Ambassador to Uzbekistan, author of the book, Murder in Samarkand: A British Ambassador's Controversial Defiance of Tyranny in the War on Terror, and contributor to Atlantic Free Press has recently had his personal blogging site - as well as a number of sites not owned by him and on the same server, taken down by his U.K. hosting company due to pressure from Schillings, a high-powered London Law firm, on behalf of Uzbeki Alisher Usmanov - the latest Russian billionaire to move to the United Kingdom. Usmanov's lawyers have gone after the host of Murray's site rather than Craig Murray himself. It seems they would prefer not to have Murray on the stand in a courtroom. Usmanov is allegedly livid - as it has been leaked that he was not a political prisoner at all, but rather a hard-nosed criminal.
We at Atlantic Free Press feel that bloggers, hosting companies and Internet publishers cannot operate if they are bullied by rich plaintiffs. Defamation law in the United Kingdom, asinine as it is - needs reform. Mistakes on blogs can easily be sorted - particularly where they permit commenting which allows postings to be criticised, facts corrected, and arguments opposed. Rather than arm-twisting legal tactics. However, Usmanov, the nouveau riche thug that he is, chose to throw money at his lawyers to shut down those who dare to legitimately criticise him and has now gotten his hands full and has been locked in the cyber jaws of what is known as the "Streisand Effect" and learned what the power of the Internet really is. THOUSANDS of blogger's have rallied to support Craig and those who have been taken out by Usmanov's high priced lawyers at Schillings (whose reputation, backed up on their website by the laughable case studiescurrently beingmocked across the "blogosphere", is now at stake). Too bad they did not do enough research nor care to notice that other well-known political figures were on the same servers as Craig and were also pulled - including prospective candidate for London mayor Boris Johnson. Now it's now gone viral on the Net and is being picked up in the mainstream media. Mr Eugenides sums it up:
If you can be silenced for calling a businessman a crook, then you can be silenced for calling a politician a crook, too. Then it’s everyone’s problem.
I thought I should make my views on Alisher Usmanov quite plain to you.
You are unlikely to see much plain talking on Usmanov elsewhere in the media because he has already used his billions and his lawyers in a pre-emptive strike. They have written to all major UK newspapers, including the latter:
“Mr Usmanov was imprisoned for various offences under the old Soviet regime. We wish to make it clear our client did not commit any of the offences with which he was charged.
He was fully pardoned after President Mikhail Gorbachev took office. All references to these matters have now been expunged from police records . . . Mr Usmanov does not have any criminal record.”
Let me make it quite clear that Alisher Usmanov is a criminal.
He was in no sense a political prisoner, but a gangster and racketeer who rightly did six years in jail. The lawyers cunningly evoke "Gorbachev", a name respected in the West, to make us think that justice prevailed. That is completely untrue. Usmanov's pardon was nothing to do with Gorbachev. It was achieved through the growing autonomy of another thug, President Karimov, at first President of the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic and from 1991 President of Uzbekistan.
Karimov ordered the "Pardon" because of his alliance with Usmanov's mentor, Uzbek mafia boss and major international heroin overlord Gafur Rakimov. Far from being on Gorbachev's side, Karimov was one of the Politburo hardliners who had Gorbachev arrested in the attempted coup that was thwarted by Yeltsin standing on the tanks outside the White House.
Usmanov is just a criminal whose gangster connections with one of the
World's most corrupt regimes got him out of jail. He then plunged into
the "privatisation" process at a time when gangster muscle was used to
secure physical control of assets, and the alliance between the Russian
Mafia and Russian security services was being formed. Usmanov has two
key alliances. he is very close indeed to President Karimov, and
especially to his daughter Gulnara. It was Usmanov who engineered the
2005 diplomatic reversal in which the United States was kicked out of
its airbase in Uzbekistan and Gazprom took over the country's natural
gas assets. Usmanov, as chairman of Gazprom Investholdings paid a bribe
of $88 million to Gulnara Karimova to secure this.
This is set out on page 366 of Murder in Samarkand.
Alisher Usmanov had risen to chair of Gazprom Investholdings because of
his close personal friendship with Putin, He had accessed Putin through
Putin's long time secretary and now chef de cabinet, Piotr Jastrzebski.
Usmanov and Jastrzebski were roommates at college.
Gazprom Investholdings is the group that handles Gazproms interests
outside Russia, Usmanov's role is, in effect, to handle Gazprom's
bribery and sleaze on the international arena, and the use of gas
supply cuts as a threat to uncooperative satellite states.
Gazprom has also been the tool which Putin has used to attack internal
democracy and close down the independent media in Russia. Gazprom has
bought out — with the owners having no choice — the only independent
national TV station and numerous rgional TV stations, several radio
stations and two formerly independent national newspapers. These have
been changed into slavish adulation of Putin. Usmanov helped accomplish
this through Gazprom.
The major financial newspaper, Kommersant, he bought
personally. He immediately replaced the editor-in-chief with a
pro-Putin hack, and three months later the long-serving campaigning
defence correspondent, Ivan Safronov, mysteriously fell to his death
from a window. All this, both on Gazprom and the journalist's death, is
set out in great detail here. Usmanov
is also dogged by the widespread belief in Uzbekistan that he was
guilty of a particularly atrocious rape, which was covered up and the
victim and others in the know disappeared. The sad thing is that this
is not particularly remarkable.
Rape by the powerful is an everyday hazard in Uzbekistan, again as outlined in Murder in Samarkand
page 120. If anyone has more detail on the specific case involving
Usmanov please add a comment. I reported back in 2002 or 2003 in an
Ambassadorial top secret telegram to the Foreign Office that Usmanov
was the most likely favoured successor of President Karimov as
totalitarian leader of Uzbekistan.
I also outlined the Gazprom deal (before it happened) and the present
by Usmanov to Putin (though in Jastrzebski's name) of half of Mapobank,
a Russian commercial bank owned by Usmanov. I will never forget the
priceless reply from our Embassy in Moscow. They said that they had
never even heard of Alisher Usmanov, and that Jastrzebski was a jolly
nice friend of the Ambassador who would never do anything crooked.
Sadly, I expect the football authorities will be as purblind. Football
now is about nothing but money, and even Arsenal supporters — as
tight-knit and homespun a football community as any — can be heard
saying they don't care where the money comes from as long as they can
compete with Chelsea. I fear that is very wrong. Letting as diseased a
figure as Alisher Usmanov into your club can only do harm in the long
term.
Over the past weekend, bloggers - as a collective - have proven that they truly are players in the war of ideas. Now - underlying layers - which have been blanketed from the masses by corporate and government enslaved media can be disseminated by hundreds of thousands of online social networks that are only a few bytes removed from one another.
Media guru and electronical anthropologist Marshall McLuhan brilliantly predicted this in his 1967 work - "The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects". It's close to 40 year ago that McLuhan coined the term "the global village."
"...Ours is a brand-new world of allatonceness. 'Time' has ceased, 'space' has vanished. We now live in a global village...a simultaneous happening."... "Electric circuitry profoundly involves men with one another. Information pours upon us, instantaneously and continuously. As soon as information is acquired, it is very rapidly replaced by still newer information. Our electrically-configured world has forced us to move from the habit of data classification to the mode of pattern recognition. We can no longer build serially, block-by-block, step-by-step, because instant communication insures that all factors of the environment and of experience co-exist in a state of active interplay."
...Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication.... The alphabet and print technology fostered and encouraged a fragmenting process, a process of specialism and of detachment. Electric technology fosters and encourages unification and involvement. It is impossible to understand social and cultural changes without a knowledge of the workings of media. Anxiety is, in great part, a result of trying to do do today's jobs with yesterday's tools, with yesterday's concepts.
from McLuhan's The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects (1967)
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September 24, 2007
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