With days to go over 100 Russian athletes are banned, while NO OTHER COUNTRY IS INVESTIGATED. the remaining  completely innocent 300 Russian athletes are still waiting for permission to compete by the IOC as an obscene lobbying battle rages behind the scenes

The ”proof”  produced against Russia is pathetic and clearly manipulated. The 3 witnesses are all ex criminals  who were rescued from poverty and welcomed and rewarded in the west, in exchange for elaborating their stories.. little direct evidence apart from their self serving stories has ever been produced of a state link to doping.

Obviously some Russian athletes have been guilty of doping, but that they are no more guilty than anyone else. The push to ban all the athletes without proof and humiliate and expel Russians was timed for the Olympics and in the context of a continuing campaign of anti-Russian hysteria fomented  by the US media.

From a European viewpoint it looks like another CIA sponsored campaign, obvious, cynical and cruel, which fits in with the multi level attack on Russia from all sides and the daily demonization of President Putin and Russia.

The latest ”independent” report finally does find some evidence. It claims tiny invisible scratches on all the bottles of urine samples at the last winter olympics prove that they were ‘tampered with’. Really?  Then how about some conclusive DNI tests before condemning an entire country?

Since its inception a few years back the so called World Anti Doping Body, WADA has become increasingly dictatorial. It has been constantly obsessed (and well financed) with finding evidence of doping in Russia.. (google WADA and you’ll see.. In fact on Google I can find no evidence of any WADA reports or investigations EXCEPT AGAINST RUSSIA.)

The Three Stooges used in Campaign to discredit Russia

‘One important fact that escaped most international observers was that the media campaign began shortly after the 2014 deep freeze in Russian-US relations.

It was constructed around the “testimonies” of three Russian citizens who were all interconnected and complicit in a string of doping scandals, and who later left Russia and are making new lives in the West, using their ‘confessions’ as collateral.

Yulia Stepanova, a 29-year-old middle-distance runner, can be seen as both instigator and victim of this scandal. This young athlete’s personal best in global competition was a bronze medal at the European Athletics Indoor Championship in 2011….  Her career went off the rails in 2013, when the Russian Athletic Federation’s Anti-Doping Commission disqualified her for two years based on “blood fluctuations in her Athlete Biological Passport.”   In 2015 she requested political asylum in Canada. But many see Yulia as largely a victim of a corrupt anti-doping officer, her husband Vitaly Stepanov

Vitaly Stepanov, now Yulia Stepanova’s husband, is a former staffer at RUSADA, the national Russian anti doping body.  He had lived and studied in the US since he was 15, but later returned to Russia. and in 2008 somehow began working for RUSADA as a doping-control officer.

He met Yulia Rusanova in 2009 at the Russian national championships in Cheboksary. Vitaly has confessed that he was fully aware that his wife was taking banned substances,  Stepanova’s blood tests went positive starting in 2011 – i.e., from the time that her husband, an anti-doping officer, left RUSADA.

The Stepanovs, now married, accepted prize money from professional races until Yulia was disqualified for positive doping tests.  Then they no longer had a source of income and the prize money suddenly had to be returned. That’s when Vitaly Stepanov sought recourse to foreign journalists, offering to tell them the “truth about Russian sports” for cash.

In early June he admitted that the World Anti Doping Body WADA had not only helped his family move to America, but had also provided them with $30,000 in financial assistance.  It looks like Vitaly was bought to further the WADA campaign against Russia.

So, it seems Vitaly took money for covering up doping in sport, then took money from Yulia’s winnings, (knowing she was cheating and would get caught,) took money from foreign journalists to ”tell the truth”, and, he admits, took the $30,000 from WADA and help to move to the US.. (and is suspected by some of being a CIA infiltrator from the beginning.)… And now? we are expected to condemn and punish the whole of Russian Sport on his ‘snow white’ testimony.

Gregory Rodchenkov. And finally, the third figure in the campaign to expose doping in Russian sports – the former head of the Russian anti-doping laboratory in Moscow, Gregory Rodchenkov.  According to star witness Vitaly Stepanov, he was the man who sold performance-enhancing drugs while helping to hide their traces.  He had previously worked in Canada and for Russian petrochemical companies, and in 2005 he became the director of Russia’s national anti-doping laboratory in Moscow.

In 2013  Marina Rodchenkova – Gregory s sister – was found guilty and received a sentence for selling anabolic steroids to athletes.  Her brother was also the subject of a criminal investigation into charges that he supplied banned drugs.  Threatened with prosecution, Gregory Rodchenkov `tried to commit suicide‘, was hospitalized and “subjected to a forensic psychiatric examination.”

A finding was later submitted to the court, claiming that Rodchenkov suffered from “schizotypal personality disorder,” exacerbated by stress.  As a result, all the charges against Rodchenkov were dropped, but suspiciously he continued in his post. ……..in September 2015 a WADA Commission accused Rodchenkov of intentionally destroying over a thousand samples in order to conceal doping by Russian athletes.

He personally denied all the charges, but then resigned and left for the US where he was warmly embraced by filmmaker Bryan Fogel, who was shooting yet another made-to-order documentary about doping in Russia.

see much more detail here   Oriental Review

Conclusion? Yes there is doping in Russian Sport, and possibly the State did turn a blind eye in some cases in the nationalist fervour of the Ukraine crisis surrounding the Sochi Winter Olympics. But making this a reason for banning all 400 Russian athletes from Rio is just more dirty cold war politics.

But Why Why Why the ‘War on Russia’?

The US anti Russian campaign has become a common ‘blame everything on Putin’ joke around the world.  But what is the point?

This behaviour is often explained as part of a desperate battle to re-assert US ”exceptionality” and defend the economic privileges enjoyed ever since the economic system and petro-dollar were set up after WW2. Because if not they face a mega economic crash due to the multi-trillion $ debts they have run up. No matter that their ‘War with Russia’  policies appear insane, psychologically they fit the mindset of the macho schoolyard
bully attitudes of both US and Russian capitalist elites.

Also there’s an economic benefit, the US has a huge war economy sector, stimulated by weapons sales to controlled clients and its own use in a long series of continuous wars. (US politics, beneath the veneer of democracy, are largely controlled by these same corporations.)  When Russia defended its Crimean base by annexing (after a referendum) it was the starting signal for a general anti Russian psychosis, (which at least is forcing the NATO ‘allies’ to re-arm with US weapons).

European ‘allies’ were forced, many reluctantly, to apply sanctions against Russia, with both sides losing billions in trade, and now ( August 2016) the first tankers filled with liquid US gas from Fracking are docking in Europe, with the aim of taking customers from Russia. However new Harvard research shows that the gas from Fracking is ‘twice as bad as Coal’ as a climate change forcer. ( see US to flood EU with ‘Frack Gas’, now proven ‘Much Worse Than Coal’)

It’s about time NATO allies, France, Germany and Britain, stood up to the ‘US bully’ ( a personification of a clique of power-crazed billionaires) before it destroys the planet in its rage at gradually losing the unfair economic privileges it has become accustomed to.

Meanwhile spare a thought for the many innocent (as any other) athletes from Russia who will miss the high point of their lives due to malevolent Machiavellian machinations.