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• Sunday, December 3, 2006 12:17 AM

  NYT sanitizes Khodorkovsky and Nevzlin, but why?

  Here's an example of how the American press tries to sanitize the nasty corrupt stinking Yukos affair:

  But Mr. Litvinenko nonetheless displayed a knack for confidential business. According to a report in The Times of London in November, he traveled to Israel weeks before he died to hand over a dossier on the Yukos oil affair — in which the company’s former chairman, Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, has been imprisoned for tax evasion — to Leonid Nevzlin, an exiled oil tycoon.

  Not one word about Pichugin serving 20 years for locking the Gorin children in a closet and making them listen to their parents being murdered.

  And not one word about Pichugin claiming Nevzlin ordered him to do it.

  And they left out the part where Nevzlin ran to Israel to avoid being prosecuted for his role in those murders.

  Why does the American press feel so compelled to sanitize the Yukos crowd and leave the murder charges from their resumes?

  I remember reading the Moscow Times in the nineties and seeing murder after murder in the news, and most of them happened to benefit Menatep or Yukos. I bet the poor Gorins are just the tip of the bloody iceberg.

  I don't usually pay attention to Russian claims of bias but this one is hard to ignore.

  I wonder -- how many, and which, Americans lost money on Yukos when Putin broke up the company?

  Watch "Spinning Boris." At least part of this murky story begins there.

  BY THE WAY -- when I started thinking on the "what if Khodorkovsky were behind this?" line -- I HAD NO IDEA Litvinenko had actually been to Israel to SEE Nevzlin a few weeks before he was killed.

  —Patricia Schwarz
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