russian polocy /wrt freedom of information

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Posted by cycloptor on Oct-29-2002 01:00:

russian polocy /wrt freedom of information

Okay, here's the deal.

The recent hostage crisis in Moscow got me thinking. Why dosent the Russian government share their information as freely as some others.
Why wouldnt they tell the doctors what gas they used in the theater, especially if it could have saved life.

I dunno... my guess is that the kremlin still has problems shaking off some of the cold war diplomocy that it has become used to. There is a lot of things happening in that country that you just dont hear about.

Are we better off knowing everything that our governments are doing? or conversly, is it beter for the government to have a level of control over the media and only allow certian things to be reported?

dun dun dun....

Posted by zzleeper on Oct-29-2002 01:44:

Well in most of the cases, the government shouldn be hiding stuff to it's citizens. They do it because, well, probably cos they 've done something bad at some point and they don't want others to know.

Btw, I remember how Bush stopped the declasification of a lot of White House documents from Reagan? or Nixon? and /or his father that were supposed to be declassified. He argued that the president had the "right" to keep that secret.. well thats bullsht of course...

Posted by PhaseFour on Oct-29-2002 02:42:

well, i can sympathize with the russians for not releasing info on the gas for many reasons (security, and the fact that its probably illegal to use it anyway hehe), but if so many lives were at stake because of the gas, i dunno....

i actually like that decision. it tells the terrorists not to mess with russia, to a certain degree, though it was pretty extreme esp since u are hurting civilians too

Posted by IronDragon on Oct-29-2002 02:57:

Ever since the end of the Cold War, the Russian army is not even close to a shell of itself. Soliders (including very high ranking officers) go unpaid for months at a time. Checyna just isn't going away and then there was the Kursk disaster, now there's this mess with the hostages and the gas.

I can agree with not forcing a government to disclose every piece of information to the public (there is something called national security), but by witholding the information of exactly what gas was used to sedate the terrorists (and apparently even more hostages), they likely caused many lives to be lost and what gets me is all they had to do was tell the doctors. Had they just disclosed the information in secret to the doctors, they would've been able to apply the necessary antidotes in time and there would be much fewer deaths, thus less of a total fiasco. Then people wouldn't really care whatever they used, so long as the maximum number of hostages survived.

Posted by re808 on Oct-30-2002 08:51:

don't close your ears to what chechen "terrorists" wanted to say with this act. Their message was - stop war in chechenia!
Though officially the war ended 2 years ago in Chechenia and the official information say that Russia does not have a problem anymore, the war actually is going on. Before 11 sept. there was at least a pressure by Western countries to russia concerning violation of human rights in chech. but since then, the world just forgot that war. Everyone is talking about Bin-Laden since 11'th. Chechens have been alone with their problem, the act in Moscow was cryout to the world, which very professionally was "silenced" by russian (also western) media machine. The information has not been presented objectively. The result is - people know that chechens are bad "islamic terrorists", "binladen", "alquaida", "bad-bad", etc, and russia can have the war in chechenia without problem (oh, by the way, chechenia is rich of oil recources...). Might be that I'm wrong but my point is - question always everything that you hear.

Posted by malek on Oct-30-2002 10:44:

the top chemical and bioligical weapon expert in russia believes that its a new chemical weapon somewhere between LSD and Valium. No way in hell that Russia will divulgate its name or any details about it. That is understable, any county would do the same.

two major fuck ups caused the great number of deaths:

1-the security forces at the last instant decided to boost the dosage just to be sure that everyone would be knocked out (and saving their own asses doing so).

2-the emergency workers who were supposed to give an antidote to the hostages, gave it only outside of the theatre, imagine taking out 700-800 people outside then give them antidotes... the last ones surely got seriously ill and maybe dead now. Again, maybe the emergency workers didn't want to risk exposing themselves to the gaz for too long, that would explain why the antidote was given outside and not inside.

As that expert stated, if Putin's girls were inside that theatre he would surely not take the same decision... makes you wonder about the value of a human life.