Bellingcat has targeted enemies of the western world and is run by a British guy. It's a classic dictatorial distraction tactic to point to the US and say they do bad things too. But this is hardly just against the US. They tried to murder two people in the UK and shot down a commercial airliner in Ukraine.

Russia seems to shamelessly go around assassinating people so they make easy pickings for him.

One of his latest investigations and podcasts was some random African country (Cameroon) based on video evidence online.

A better question to ask is why hasn’t Russia or China freaked out at NSA hacks? Like the west just did with SolarWinds (I’m sure the western media would eat it up and so would we here). We had to wait for a western (Snowden) to find our rights are being violated domestically. The answer is Russia and China are on their own spree and keep any of the failed NSA ops quiet (assuming they exist). So there’s not much to go on for some random open intelligence blog. Russia et al don’t care about defending rights or exposing evil.

But Russia and the other mafia states provide plenty of open source evil to sort through.

I also don’t see the US shooting down a plane with a hundred people and denying it or openly assassinating their enemies in ‘enemy’ territory.

There’s so many answers here.

>Russia seems to shamelessly go around assassinating people so they make easy pickings for him.

That's pretty much exactly what Christo Grozev said in one of the recent interviews. They investigate government wrongdoing, and russia has been doing a lot of shady things in the last few years. Plus he lived in Russia and speaks russian, so that coupled with the corruption and tons of available data makes Russia a good target for his investigations.

Unrelated: if there were there a chart that shows the number of people killed by each country per year in this millennia -- what countries do you think will "in the lead" by an order of magnitude at least from the rest?

That would be interesting, as long as you focus on civilian deaths and normalize for population. My guess would be iran due to their heavy involvement in both the iraqi and syrian civil war. The saudis are also contenders with their yemen war. Then I would guess the US, turkey and russia.

We are moving into a multipolar world and interesting times.

This millennium? Probably Syria.

>> Unrelated: if there were there a chart that shows the number of people killed by each country per year in this millennia -- what countries do you think will "in the lead" by an order of magnitude at least from the rest?

> This millennium? Probably Syria.

How did you come to that conclusion? Though the question is far to ambiguous (what does "killed by" mean, exactly?), I'd assume Germany would be ahead of Syria, given that any reasonable count would include those killed in the Holocaust plus allied casualties from WWI and WWII (where all cases where there's clearly established intent to kill by the regime). The Syrian civil was was bad, but not that bad. I'm not aware of anything of similar magnitude there after 1900, and the numbers of anything before would be lessened by lower populations and less effective military technology.

I presumed that "this millennium" meant "since 2000". That removes Germany.

Ah, now I see. I'm just stuck in the 20th century. I suppose I should be glad I still don't accidentally write "19" for the century on my checks.

Not sure about millenia but in the last century the communists have done well, about 65 million for China and 20 for the Soviet Union.

Cameroon is the one example I was thinking of that actually isn't a US rival, yes. Nonetheless the US still used the conclusions to justify winding up support & funding to Cameroonian military.

> Furthermore the conclusions are always the ones they'd want (e.g. "Russia shot down an airliner").

I mean, it's pretty hard to dispute such a conclusion when you have social media posts tracking the movement from Russia of a Russian-made anti-aircraft missile launcher with identification markings to an area near where MH17 crashed, posts of rocket contrails at the time of the crash, then more posts tracing the same launcher leaving the area and traveling back to Russian territory, sans a missile.