Raimondo is quite good here, considering his lack of Russian. Almost a textbook case of how to use google. He uses, like, facts and evidence and stuff. (Despite the goof in identifying COBRA as an anti-terrorist committee.)
November 27, 2006 The Nuking of Alexander Litvinenko Why it's unlikely the KGB killed him by Justin Raimondo Four major political assassinations with international implications in the past year, three in the last month or so: Rafik Hariri and Pierre Gemayel in Lebanon, and two Russians, Anna Politkovskaya, a journalist, and former KGB officer Alexander Litvinenko. Is it just a passing fad, or is somebody trying to tell us something?
These murders are remarkably similar, not merely in that they were all politically motivated, but also in the journalistic narrative subsequently woven around them. The story line is simple and straightforward: in each case, the long arm of an evil dictator struck down internal critics. Four murders and two culprits – Syria and Russia. Two countries that, with the transfer of Russian missiles to Damascus, have entered a de facto military alliance and maintain good relations with Iran. Both have been singled out as prime candidates for regime change, at least as far as the unrepentant neoconservatives are concerned.
Since the president's infamous "axis of evil" speech, the axis has expanded beyond the original Iran-Iraq-North Korea trio to include Cuba, Syria, and Libya (the latter has since come in from the cold). And the expansion continues, with the latest candidate for axis-of-evildom being Vladimir Putin's Russia. The regime-changers have it in for Putin for a number of reasons, including the politics of energy and oil (Russia has the world's biggest natural gas reserves and the eighth-largest oil reserves), the politics of the Middle East (Putin's coziness with Tehran and Damascus), and the politics of pure power (Russia is big, nuclear-armed, and under Putin pursues an independent foreign policy).
In any case, the diplomatic and journalistic offensive against the Kremlin has been underway for some time, with the murder of Anna Politkovskaya and now the macabre poisoning of Litvinenko giving the Russophobes plenty of rope with which to hang Putin, whom they now liken to Stalin. The British media has been aflame with the fiery accusations not only of the victim, but also of Boris Berezovsky, the Russian oligarch who sponsored and supported Litvinenko in exile: both pin the blame squarely on the Russian president. However, on Saturday the Independent newspaper fairly summed up the conventional wisdom as it is evolving:
"Most believe the theory is implausible: if the Kremlin wanted to kill Litvinenko, why attract world-wide publicity? A quiet bullet would have been equally effective."
Why indeed. And why, pray tell, choose a highly unusual method of offing their target – with polonium-210, a highly radioactive and very rare metal, which is likely to have been produced in tandem with a sophisticated technical and scientific apparatus associated with a state sponsor? The Kremlin might just as well have left its calling card. Yet the hysterical lynch-mob mentality that is now crying out for Putin's blood is completely illogical, given a moment's reflection, for a good number of reasons.
To begin with, Litvinenko's own deathbed statement to the contrary, there is no good reason why the KGB would target someone whose wild accusations are no more credible than our own prophets of the "9/11 Truth movement." Here, after all, is a Russian convert to Islam who has accused the Russian security services, specifically the FSB, of bombing Russian cities in an elaborate plot to justify the war on Chechnya and generate political support for Putin's domestic policies. He also claimed that the Russians were behind al-Qaeda and the Beslan massacre: he was sure the KGB trained and funded Ayman al-Zawahiri. He accused Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi of being a Soviet agent, and even went so far as to announce that Putin is a pedophile.
Lacking a certain credibility, Litvinenko's foam-flecked screeching never had much of an audience inside Russia. Why would the KGB bother with this kook? To posit that they would risk a long, drawn-out martyrdom, acted out in front of the international media, complete with drama queen Litvinenko waffling on about how he heard the beating of "the wings of the angel of death drawing near" – it just doesn't compute.
Yet the media narrative we are being spoon-fed – particularly by the British tabloid press – is blithely indifferent to such old-fashioned values as logic and facts. The Telegraph is typical, with endless pieces detailing the entire sordid history of the KGB, replete with past poisoning incidents and well-larded with quotes from Berezovsky and his various sock-puppets voicing their certainty that the Kremlin was behind the killing. Yet even the Russophobic Telegraph has to admit – after listing all the possible reasons to point the accusing finger at Russia – that, as their Whitehall source put it:
"We are at a very early stage in the investigation and to date there is not a single piece of evidence that points directly to the Russians, so we have to keep an open mind."
Yeah, but not too open. The Times of London has been particularly outraged, devoting at least one editorial to deploring this apparent invasion of central London by Russian "terrorism" – and the rest of the right-wing media, in lockstep with the leftist Guardian and the Labor government, is marching to the same tune. In the U.S., the hysteria is even shriller, with David Pryce-Jones at National Review announcing:
"The murder reveals that the Soviet Union is arising, vampire-like, from its grave."
The anti-Semitic wackos over at PrisonPlanet.com, a Web site run by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, agree:
"Alexander Litvinenko's poisoning is, as we are led to believe by a small cadre of prominent Internet bloggers and their cheerleaders, some kind of elaborate set-up on behalf of Zionists and Neo-Cons to drag Putin's name through the mud, then why do today's major Israeli newspapers carry scant mention of the former spy's death?
"Apologists for Putin have attempted to weave a yarn that somehow suggests Litvinenko was knowingly poisoned by Zionist or Neo-Con agents in order to make it appear as if Putin was the culprit.
"If this was the case then we'd expect to see the biggest Neo-Con and Zionist media fronts in Israel, the Jerusalem Post and Ha'aretz, to be wallowing in coverage of the former spy's death in a London hospital last night.
"Yet both the Jerusalem Post and Ha'aretz chose to bury the story near the bottom of their websites, even as it was the top story at Reuters and BBC News."
According to the twisted worldview of those who inhabit the latter-day Jonestown of "Prison Planet," the entire Israeli media is in the hip pockets of the neoconservatives, which, as we all know – not! – is just a polite euphemism for Jews. If they didn't pay sufficient attention to the Litvinenko brouhaha, then that proves – what? Well, it proves exactly zilch, but try telling that to these deluded Jonestowners.
Litvinenko sought, without much success, to implant the methodology of the "9/11 Truthers" in Russian soil, writing that the bombings of several apartment buildings in Russia during the 1990s were government-directed "psy-ops" schemes designed to provoke war with Chechnya and give Putin a free hand inside Russia. The Beslan massacre, according to both Litvinenko and Jones, was "staged" by the Russians: and those poor little innocent Chechens, normally as gentle as lambs, were scapegoated by a mad and murderous tsar.
Oleg Sultanov, a Russian journalist who infiltrated Berezovsky's network-in-exile, was commissioned by the oligarch to write a book on Putin's Russia, with the one requirement that it must be "as scary as possible." Says Sultanov:
"'It was meant to be some kind of "foundation study" of the horrors of contemporary Russia and the criminal role of the special services,' Sultanov recalled. 'After all, that is the core of Berezovsky's theory: the special services, and Putin the former KGB agent, are responsible for everything that's happening in Russia – all the contract murders, terrorist attacks, frauds.
"'First there was the documentary: An Assault On Russia; then the book by Litvinenko the defector; the next link in this chain was meant to be my "epic,"' he said. 'Alex Goldfarb, Berezovsky's closest ally, admitted the Litvinenko books were a flop. So it's urgently necessary to create some hot new reading material which would prove that "our cause is just" and Putin is the enemy of the human race.'"
Does anybody really believe this malarkey?
Etc.: http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=10066
____________________________________________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Everyone is raving about the all-new Yahoo! Mail beta. http://new.mail.yahoo.com