|
Alexander Litvinenko
Read: December 4, 2006 -- New wrinkle in Litvinenko murder. Boris Berezovsky's other friend
Pale Fire & London Fog
Reproduced From:
December 4, 2006 -- New wrinkle in Litvinenko murder. December 4, 2006 -- New wrinkle in Litvinenko murder. It has been reported from London and Chechen sources that ex-KGB and FSB Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko was not only a convert to Islam but a supporter of the Chechen and Caucasus mujaheddin, a movement that has been linked to the so-called "Al Qaeda," an organization that is looking more and more like an contrivance by neo-conservatives and their organized crime friends to bring about a state of constant war in the Middle East, Central Asia, Russia, and beyond to maximize political and financial gain. Litvinenko's conversion to Islam has thrown a new wrinkle into Litvinenko's relationship with Boris Berezovsky and Alex Goldfarb, both Russian Jewish emigres. The following dispatch came from the Chechenpress.org, a Chechen news web site, on November 24: The communication from London the day before at night arrived to us of the poisoning and passing away of Aleksandr Litvinenko. A. Litvinenko it was poisoned on 1 November. Doctors struggled for the life of A. Litvinenko, however, it was impossible to save him. Meanwhile, a while back Litvinenko accepted Islam and all Moslem rites were carried out before his death. A specially invited mullah read over the dying Litvinenko the 'Sura Yasin' [key passage from the Koran]. Aleksandr Litvinenko will be buried in a Moslem cemetery, with the observance of all proper rituals. Nearing death, and understanding that his killers are Putin and his criminal clique, Aleksandr Litvinenko requested to transmit to the Mujahadeen of Chechnya and Caucasus that they understand him as their brother in the weapon [emphasis added] and he requested to the Most High Allah for themselves the future of martyr (insha Allah)." The European media is now reporting that Litvinenko was involved in smuggling nuclear materials from Russia to Zurich in 2000 and that he may have continued his involvement in nuclear smuggling. Some reports, including recent comments to the BBC by Litvinenko's friend, Italian "security expert" Mario Scaramella, suggest that Litvinenko was involved in the smuggling on radioactive materials. An accident involved in the smuggling of nuclear materials may have resulted in Litvinenko's poisoning from radioactive polonium-210. Litvinenko's involvement with the Chechen Mujaheddin, said to be allied with the so-called "Al Qaeda," his links to the same European organized crime smuggling networks that were the subject of surveillance by outed CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson and her Brewster Jennings & Associates covert CIA front company, and his links to Israel-based Russian gangsters all add to a mounting pile of evidence of "Al Qaeda" links to the Russian-Israeli Mafia.
Litvinenko now linked to syndicate nuclear smuggling, Islamic Mujaheddin, and Russian-Israeli Mafia, a dangerous troika on which WMR has been reporting for some time. The Chechen press release reference to "the weapon" may have been hinting at a project to build a radioactive "dirty bomb" by Litvinenko. London's Observer surmised as much in a December 3 report: "Among the theories that remain open is that the poisonings were an accident that happened while Litvinenko tried to assemble a dirty bomb for Chechen rebels. Those who know him believe he was crazy enough to attempt such a thing and, in the past week, some have implicated him in the smuggling of nuclear materials from Russia." Also of interest is Litvinenko's visit to the London office of the British private military contractor Erinsys, Ltd., which has been linked to Iraqi National Congress neo-con agent of influence Ahmad Chalabi. Erinsys has operations in Britain; Iraq; South Africa; the Nigerian Delta region, and Houston, Texas. A recent report in the Muckrakerreport.com reveals that an Israeli Defense Force veteran overheard a three-way conversation in Hebrew at a Newark, New Jersey Jewish cemetery in October 2000 in which it was stated that "the twins" would be attacked by planes the following September and then the Americans would "learn what it is to live with terrorists." The Israeli military veteran conveyed his concerns to the FBI, was visited by Newark Field Office Special Agents Robyn Gritz and Andrew Stengel, and provided supporting documentation to the above web site.
Was the use of polonium to kill Litvinenko
November 30, 2006 There is increasing evidence that the radioactive poisoning assassination of ex-KGB and FSB agent and Kremlin critic Alexander Litvinenko was the result of a plot by anti-Vladimir Putin criminal syndicates based in Britain, Israel, Ukraine, and Poland to embarrass the Russian government. Suspicions about the role of the exiled Russian-Israeli criminal syndicates in the poisoning of Litvinenko, including that headed by Litvinenko's friend, wanted oligarch Boris Berezovsky, re-surfaced after former Russian Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar became violently ill after eating breakfast at a conference he was attending in Dublin, Ireland. Ireland's banking secrecy laws has made it a favorite location for the Russian-Israeli Mafia. Gaidar's sudden illness occurred a day after Litvinenko died in a London hospital from poisoning from polonium-210, a deadly radioactive isotope when ingested. Radioactive traces were later discovered at sites around London, including Berezovsky's offices in the West End. Gaidar was moved from a Dublin hospital to a Moscow hospital where he received a telephone call from Putin wishing him a speedy recovery. Putin's Mafiosi critics in Britain, Israel, Moscow, and other countries have accused the Russian leader of poisoning Litvinenko and attempting to kill Gaidar. However, Russian officials are claiming that the attacks were carried out by Putin's criminal opponents who want to create tension between Moscow and the West. Their arguments appear to have merit when the choice of radioactive isotope used to kill Litvinenko is considered. Intelligence experts point out that polonium was discovered by Marie Curie (nee Maria Sklodowska) in 1897 and named after her native homeland Poland (Polonia in Latin) to express her support for Polish independence against its partition by Russia, Prussia and Austria.
Was someone allied to Russian-Israeli mob sending a message by killing Litvinenko with radioactive substance named in honor of Polish independence by native Polish nationalist Marie Curie? Before Putin moved in to take over Yukos Oil from the Russian criminal syndicates, there were plans to build a Russian-German gas pipeline through Poland. After Poland was taken over by a neo-con team of identical twins Lech and Jaroslaw Kaczynski, who serve as President and Prime Minister, respectively, Poland not only began to conduct a witch hunt against ex-Communists but also became a base of operations for the anti-Putin Russian-Israeli exiled gangsters and oligarchs. Named as Defense Minister was former American Enterprise Institute resident scholar Radek Sikorski, who also happens to be married to Washington Post editorial board member and leading neo-con journalist Anne Applebaum, also a leading critic of Putin (along with a number of so-called "liberals," including Clinton ambassador to the UN Richard Holbrooke). After Putin decided, along with former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, to bypass Poland and build the Russo-German pipeline under the Baltic Sea, Sikorski unleashed a barrage against Russia and Germany. He likened the pipeline deal to the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Agreement that carved up Eastern Europe, including Poland, between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Sikorski asked German Chancellor Angela Merkel to cancel the pipeline deal but she refused. We now know that Litvinenko was working on unspecified "energy issues" in London. We also know he has been described as a Russian-Israeli "double agent" and was reported to have transferred classified Russian documents in Yukos to a Russian-Israeli exiled oligarch in Tel Aviv. Double agents are always in danger from the party they are working against. Litvinenko's killers' use of polonium, named by Marie Curie in support of Polish independence, may mean that the assassins are more likely found in Warsaw's Russian-Israeli mob infested intelligence apparatus than in the Kremlin.
November 27, 2006 -- The poisoning death of former Russian KGB and Federal Security Service (FSB) colonel Alexander Litvinenko, a critic of the Russian government of Vladimir Putin, is being blamed on the Russian-Israeli Mafia by a number of Russian officials. The Russian officials point out that Litvinenko, described as a Russian-Israeli "double agent," was the perfect choice to set up for a false flag assassination just as Putin was attending a Russia-European Union summit in Helsinki. Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya of the liberal newspaper Novaya Gazeta and a fierce critic of Putin was assassinated a few days before Putin was due to make an important visit to Germany. Former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, who is a shareholder of Novaya Gazeta along with billionaire Alexander Lebedev, wrote an editorial in the paper in which he correctly noted that, "those who killed Anna Poltikovskaya wanted to hit Putin." One Russian official told The Sunday Times of London, "If you ask the question who had the most to gain from all this, the answer can only be Berezovsky, a man who by his own admission is out on a campaign to discredit Putin and the Kremlin." Litvinenko's assassination from poisoning with Polonium 210, a radioactive isotope, was quickly blamed on Putin by Russian-Israeli mafia figure Boris Abramovich Berezovsky. Litvinenko claimed he was sent by Moscow to London to assassinate Berezovsky but refused to carry out his orders. Litvinenko defected to Britain via Turkey, the latter a major trans-shipment nexus for radioactive materials -- including cesium-137, radium, iridium, strontium-90, uranium, thorium, and plutonium-239 -- sold by the Russian-Israeli Mafia to the highest bidders. It is also no coincidence that Turkey is the home to a major support network for the Chechen guerrillas and that one of their leaders, Ahmed Zakayev, is a close associate of Berezovsky and was also linked to Litvinenko. Litvinenko reportedly passed classified information damaging to Russian leaders to Russian-Israeli businessman Leonid Nevzlin, the former chief executive officer of Yukos Oil who is the subject of a Russian government arrest warrant for murder, embezzlement, and tax evasion. Nevzlin, a former head of the Russian Jewish Congress, is currently living in Tel Aviv under the protection of the Israeli government. Nevzlin's exiled Russian-Israeli comrades include Vladimir Dubov, a major Yukos shareholder and wanted oligarch Vladimir Gusinsky. The wanted ex-Yukos officials have also been linked to wealthy British businessman Jacob Rothschild. Nevzlin's former boss at Yukos, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, is in a Russian prison for tax evasion. The assassination of Litvinenko to embarrass Putin is similar to the false flag assassinations carried out by Russian-Israeli Mafia figures of Lebanese politicians in order to lay blame on Syria (as previously reported by WMR). Litvinenko's dodgy association with leading Russian-Israeli mafia figures, most of whom are wanted by Russia for looting and misappropriating the the assets of the Soviet Union, likely made him a convenient target for an exotic gangland-style hit. His reported role as a Russian-Israeli double agent, selling secrets to the highest bidders, also shortened his life expectancy. Litvinenko also was problematic for a number of criminal syndicate leaders especially considering the fact that his special operations task in the FSB was the targeting of foreign businessmen -- many of whom are leading figures in the global Russian-Israeli Mafia and some with direct links to the White House. Litvinenko, therefore, knew many of the secrets about the Russian-Israeli Mafia -- secrets that may have cost him his life.
"Sasha" Litvinenko kept a number of dodgy friends and associates tied to the Russian-Israeli mob and Chechen guerrillas. Britain is under tremendous financial pressure from the Kremlin to extradite Berezovsky to Moscow to stand trial. The assassination of Litvinenko and the blame placed by the neo-con media on Russia as the culprit buys Berezovsky some British sympathy and a little time. The involvement of Litvinenko with Israeli organized crime bosses was reported at the same time the Washington Post reported on the counterfeiting of U.S. $100 bills by a South Ossetia-based organized crime ring operating with Russian-Israeli mobsters based in the Republic of Georgia and Israel. On October 27, 2004, a courier for the counterfeit ring, Hazki Hen, met with an undercover Secret Service agent at a hotel in Linthicum, Maryland near Baltimore-Washington International Airport. Hen, who had just arrived from Tel Aviv, offered to exchange $230,000 in counterfeit Ben Franklin notes for $80,000 in real currency. Hen also agreed to supply an additional $1.5 million in counterfeit hundred dollar notes and discussed the potential of delivering as much as $100 million on counterfeit bills in the future. Hen was not charged by the Federal government until November 2005 and then, after he claimed he was too ill to stand trial, was permitted by federal prosecutors to return to Israel. Russian-Israeli mobsters are also reported to be counterfeiting U.S. Postal money orders and American Express Traveler's Checks in Eastern Europe. The Hen case is yet another example of the U.S. government failing to fully prosecute Israeli criminals, spies, and other threats to U.S. national security. The same scenario has played out with "Al Qaeda" financier Yehuda Abraham, a New York U.S-Israeli diamond dealer who was laundering money for the Russian-Israeli mob and a Malaysian linked to Al Qaeda affiliate Jemaah Islamiya; Asher Karni, a South African-Israeli who was shipping nuclear triggers from the United States to the A. Q. Khan network in Pakistan; and various Israeli spies caught around sensitive U.S. facilities posing as art students, movers, and tourists. Note: The screenwriters of the new James Bond film, Casino Royale, are on to the real life mobsters. Not only is a Montenegro-based mob ring (Montenegro is one of the centers for the Russian-Israeli syndicate) featured as engaging in international terrorism in order to manipulate the stock market, but there is a reference by "M" (Judi Dench) that a similar mob ring engaged in stock "put" options before the 9/11 attacks in order to make tons of money on the world markets. It would seem that fictional spies know more about the threat from international mobsters than do their real life counterparts.
"M" (left) gets the threat, FBI's Robert Mueller (right) does not.
Boris Berezovsky's other friend November 29, 2006 -- While much attention is being paid by the corporate media on Russian-Israeli criminal chieftain Boris Berezovsky (aka Platon Elenin) and his dubious involvement with the recently murdered former Russian FSB and KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko, little attention is being paid to Berezovksy's other business partner -- Neil Bush, the brother of George W. Bush and Silverado Savings & Loan crook.
George W. Bush's visit to Riga was not the first by a Bush to the Latvian capital. Neil Bush met wanted Russian oligarch/gangster Boris Berezovsky in Riga in 2005. Berezovsky is a major investor in Ignite! -- an educational software company. Berezovsky's co-investors include Barbara and George H. W. Bush -- Neil's parents -- Berezovsky's business partner Badri Patarkatsishvili, a former Georgian Communist Komsomol youth leader, chairman of the Georgian Olympic Committee, media mogul, and major investor in soccer clubs in Britain, Georgia, and Brazil; Kuwaiti financier Mohammed al Saddah; and Chinese computer tycoon Winston Wong. Patarkatsishvili is also wanted by Russian authorities but his Georgian citizenship and citizenship rights in Israel have prevented his extradition. Suspiciously, other investors in Ignite! hail from one of the notorious homes of secret corporations -- the British Virgin Islands -- and the always questionable Dubai and Russian-Israeli Mafia-connected Ukraine. Because of Neil Bush's frequent trips to the Philippines and Taiwan to appear at events (between romps with Asian prostitutes) with Unification Church head Sun Myung Moon, there are rumors that Moon is also a silent partner in Ignite!
Boris Berezovsky's (right) other business partner -- Neil Bush (left). Neil Bush has been a business partner of Berezovsky -- who is wanted for various crimes in Russia -- since at least 2003. Neil Bush and the wanted Russian fugitive met in September 2005 in Riga, Latvia (where Neil's brother met with NATO leaders recently and in a delusional state-of-mind yammered on about an "Al Qaeda" threat in Iraq and a booming economy (opium?) in Afghanistan. Neil was also seen in Berezovsky's private box at a British soccer match.
Reproduced gratefully from:
Pale Fire & London Fog I. The Baron and the Billionaire Everyone knows that Russian exile Alexander Litvinenko was killed by radiation poisoning in London last month. But beyond that bare fact, almost nothing is clear about the case. The truth has disappeared, probably forever, into the shadowlands - that murky confluence of crime, violence, money and politics where so much of the real business of the world is conducted. However, an examination of some of the curiously overlooked aspects of the affair might send at least a few shafts of light into the cloud of unknowing that has enveloped Litvinenko's death. Of course, one of the chief obstacles in assessing the situation is the fact that almost everything we knew about the case for weeks was spoon-fed to the media by the most elite PR operation in Britain. Almost from the moment that Litvinenko fell ill, he disappeared behind a phalanx of handlers paid for by his patron, Boris Berezovsky, the fugitive Russian billionaire and shadowlands operator par excellence. To handle - and generate - the publicity surrounding the incident, Berezovsky called on his old friend Baron Bell of Belgravia, who, back when he was just plain old Tim Bell, served as the private propaganda chief for Margaret Thatcher, as Sourcewatch reports. The baron has also flacked for disgraced media mogul Conrad Black, disgraceful media mogul Rupert Murdoch, and the Coalition Provisional Authority, the mechanism set up by the Bush administration to eviscerate Iraq. (Speaking of the CPA, UK investigators now say they've found traces of Polonium 201, the radioactive isotope believed to have killed Litvinenko, in the London offices of Erinys, a private security company. As I noted in Counterpunch back in December 2003, Bush's CPA gave Erinys's Iraqi branch - formed as a joint venture with business cronies and family members of bigtime shadowlander Ahmad Chalabi - $80 million to guard oil pipelines in the conquered land. This has grown into an armed force of 16,000 men - something of a militia, one might say. The freebooters also bagged big money riding shotgun for Halliburton and Bechtel in those palmy CPA days of yore. And as the Guardian reports, Erinys is also active in Russia. You pull at one string in the shadowlands, and a whole tangled nest of other dark business starts shaking somewhere else.) The leaping lord's PR shop has also represented Ukraine President Viktor Yushchenko, another victim of a spectacularly ham-handed poisoning laid at the Kremlin's door. Yet another client was former Russian President Boris Yeltsin, whose "miraculous" 1996 election victory - in the face of single-digit approval ratings - was engineered by a small group of oligarchs who were later given carte blanche to plunder Russia's state-owned enterprises and vast natural resources for private profit. The acknowledged leader of this clique - which had muscled its way to riches and power in the brutal, Hobbesian free-for-all that characterized the Yeltsin years - was of course a certain Boris Berezovsky. As one of the prime vetters of political aspirants in the Yeltsin court, Berezovsky was instrumental in bringing the obscure but presumably biddable ex-KGB apparatchik Vladimir Putin to power. But Putin had a clique of his own, based in the security organs - and soon the oligarchs found themselves out-muscled, on the receiving end of the state machinery they had manipulated for so long. Most fled abroad, where they'd stashed their billions; some were jailed. Berezovsky, charged with embezzlement and money laundering, repaired to sumptuous digs in London and environs, there to become Putin's most ferociously outspoken critic. He also found new friends in high places - including Neil Bush, George W.'s scandal-ridden brother. Berezovsky is one of the backers of Neil's "educational software" company, which peddles dumbed-down "interactive teaching DVDs" to public school systems loath to risk their federal funding by rejecting a First Family boondoggle. This then is the team that controlled the flow of information during the three agonizing weeks it took Litvinenko to die. They set out the basic storyline that was followed, with scarcely a variation, by all the leading UK papers and most of the world media. The Cold War had come again, we were told: a bold dissident against the tyrannical Putin regime had been assassinated in the streets of London by the undead KGB, wielding strange poisons concocted in secret laboratories. (All this while the latest James Bond movie was having its gala premiere!) A carefully composed photograph of the martyr was released by the baronial PR outfit, and quickly became the global emblem of the case. This is what Putin has done, Litvinenko was said to have said: see his evil handiwork with your own eyes. The human tragedy of the victim's painful deterioration was genuine: a man cut down in his prime, leaving behind a grieving wife, an orphaned son, a weeping father. As a PR move, it was even more effective: the disturbing images, coupled with the drumbeat of accusations against Putin, obscured several essential questions, such as: Who was Alexander Litvinenko? Why would the Kremlin risk a rupture with the West by killing him in such an open, garish fashion? And who was the obscure "Italian academic" he met with at that fatal sushi bar where, we were told, he probably ingested, somehow, the radioactive hemlock? II. Wheels Within Wheels In the press, Litvinenko is invariably described as a "fierce critic of Putin" or words to that effect, and as former officer in the FSB, one of the post-Soviet successor agencies of the KGB. (Most of the media stories skate over the fact that Litvinenko was also a military counterintelligence officer in the old KGB as well.) He is said to have fled Russia after refusing an alleged order to murder Berezovsky - who promptly took Litvinenko in, provided him with a house in London, and bankrolled his book, which accused Putin of staging the 1999 Moscow apartment bombing that the Kremlin cited as justification for its second savage war of destruction against Chechnya. Litvinenko's deathbed j'accuse against Putin - again, released by the Berezovsky phalanx - was heard around the world, as we all know. But this was the first time that Litvinenko's relentless barrage of charges against Putin had ever attracted widespread attention - or an assumption of credibility. His previous book had sunk without a trace; Berezovsky had in fact been shopping around for someone to write another terrifying tome on the subject, once asking Russian journalist Oleg Sultanov to take it on and make it "as scary as possible," as The Scotsman reports. "Alex Goldfarb, Berezovsky's closest ally [and one of the chief spokesmen during Litvinenko's illness], admitted the Litvinenko books were a flop. So it [was] 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," Sultanov told the paper. Over the years, Litvinenko had charged, among many other things, that the Kremlin had trained al-Qaeda's top leaders prior to 9/11; that Putin was behind last year's subway bombings in London; that the FSB was responsible for the 2002 Moscow theater massacre and the horrific 2004 slaughter at the Beslan schoolhouse; and that Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi was a long-time KGB agent. This summer, when Putin was filmed playfully smooching a small boy's belly, Litvinenko rushed out a piece declaring that Putin was a paedophile - a proven fact that he and other FSB officials had known for years, he said, although he didn't explain why he had refrained from revealing this damning information before. None of these charges had been taken seriously, or even noticed in the media. Almost no one had ever heard of Litvinenko before the poisoning. Unlike Anna Politkovskaya, the muckraking, anti-Putin journalist murdered in Moscow in October, Litvinenko did not have an international reputation based on years of solid, credible work in the field. He was an ex-KGB agent who had fled one quadrant of the shadowlands in the Kremlin for another quadrant under Berezovsky's roof. The fact that he had accused Putin of involvement in every major crime of the 21st century does not mean that he was necessarily wrong in this last, fatal instance, of course. But awareness of that fact would have given a different, more shaded context to the dramatic deathbed charges. Yet Berezovsky and his baron skillfully kept such mitigating data out of the public eye - and the media were happy to seize on the simple, more sellable tale of the dying champion of truth surrounded by simple, loving friends. They were equally willing to ignore the curious connections of the last man who supposedly met with Litvinenko before the onset of his disease: Mario Scaramella, invariably described as an "Italian academic" or "security expert" who had either given Litvinenko documents revealing the Putin-backed murderers of Politkovskaya, or else passed on the word from his contacts in Russian intelligence that Litvinenko was marked for death, or in one account purportedly by Litvinenko himself, produced some vague, non-urgent emails about Politkovskaya, then pointedly and nervously refused to eat sushi with the Russian. It was weeks before the Mail on Sunday sussed out the fact that Scaramella was in fact "a self-professed expert in nuclear materials" - especially loose nukestuff floating around the ex-Soviet states - who also had strong connections with both Russian and Italian intelligence sources. The former tipped him off about attempts to smuggle nuclear materials out of Russia and the East to terrorist and criminal gangs; the latter allowed him to lead an armed police raid to snatch some smugglers he'd fingered. What's more, Scaramella had also gone commercial with his nuclear services, founding a company that offered "environmental protection and security" against various biohazards - services that some panicky Londoners might have paid good money for as Polonium scares swept the capital after Litvinenko's death. Scaramella also claimed academic associations with the universities of Stanford, Naples and Greenwich - none of which had any record of his working for them. The wheels within wheels grind on. On that same portentous day of sushi, Litvinenko also met three Russians in a bar, including yet another ex-KGB man: Andrei Lugovi, who had once been arrested for assisting Berezovsky ally Nikolai Glushkov in an alleged escape attempt from police custody, "where he was being held on charges of embezzlement (to the tune of $250 million) and massive fraud," as Justin Raimondo notes in his exhaustive series on the case at Antiwar.com. Lugovi was later released; Glushkov was tried and convicted on lesser charges of financial chicanery related to the case and served three years in prison. Last month, a Moscow court in Putin's iron-handed tyrannical regime refused Kremlin requests to retry Glushkov on the fraud charges, Novosti reports. Lugovi meanwhile has apparently become a successful private detective in Moscow. In recent days, Berezovsky has begun hinting heavily that his former friend Lugovi has been restored to the good graces of the Russian security organs and thus might have had a hand in Litvinenko's poisoning. How else to explain his booming business? "Anyone close to me can normally not even find work in Moscow, let alone have a successful business," Berezovsky told the Moscow Times (again, noted by Raimondo). Yet Berezovsky himself has maintained successful business interests in Moscow throughout his bitter exile and denunciations of Putin. He only sold his controlling interest in the top Russian newspaper, Kommersant, earlier this year - and not because he was forced to sell by the media-controlling Kremlin tyrant, but evidently because he wanted a quick cash infusion for other enterprises, the Independent reports. (Maybe Neil Bush was about to bounce a check.) All of this adds up to ... well, nothing much in particular. It's the usual murky ooze you find whenever an incident like the Litvinenko case turns over a rock in the shadowlands: strange connections, mixed motives, bluffs and double-bluffs, half-truths, black ops, lurid tales, chancers, bagmen, spies, tycoons, mercenaries, war, murder, and money. It's clear that almost every single player in the Litvinenko killing could have had access to the sophisticated technical means necessary to deliver Polonium 210 as an edible poison. It's not clear at all that any of them had a compelling reason to do so. To be sure, Putin is a ruthless operator on behalf of what he perceives as Russia's national interests, which he tends to identify with the power and privilege of his own elitist clique, as do all our world statesmen - none more so than his avowed soulmate, George W. Bush. And like Bush, Putin has proven himself capable of wholesale slaughter and pinpoint "extrajudicial killing" in the service of those interests. Some of his critics have certainly ended up dead. Some of his supporters have too. (And so have some of Berezovsky's critics, such as the American journalist Paul Khlebnikov, whose book, Godfather of the Kremlin, blackened Berezovsky's name around the world far more successfully than Litvinenko's ignored, forgotten tome ever did with Putin. Khlebnikov was gunned down, Godfather-style, in Moscow in 2004.) But it beggars belief that a savvy operator like Putin would have countenanced a plan to kill a small-fry critic in a such a spectacularly public fashion, in the capital of a foreign country, with a slow-acting radioactive isotope that guaranteed weeks of damaging headlines and international outcry, putting at risk months of delicate negotiations over Russia's expansion into the European energy market and other lucrative deals. Someone who wanted to embarrass Putin might have done it. Someone with motives entirely unconnected to Russian politics might have done it. Rogue elements of this or that faction or agency or government might have done it. But it's clear from all the facts available that the one person who would benefit least from the murder is the one who has been most widely and confidently accused of ordering it: Putin. And so the question of who killed Alexander Litvinenko remains an impenetrable mystery. But at least it has thrown a flickering light on the borders of the shadowlands, a pale fire in which we can dimly perceive the ugly machinations, the violence and deceit, the crime and corruption that lie beneath the gilded images of the movers and shakers of the world. Chris Floyd is an American journalist. His weekly political column, "Global Eye," ran in the Moscow Times from 1996 to 2006. His work has appeared in print and online in venues all over the world, including The Nation, Counterpunch, Columbia Journalism Review, the Christian Science Monitor, Il Manifesto, the Bergen Record and many others. His story on Pentagon plans to foment terrorism won a Project Censored award in 2003. He is the author of "Empire Burlesque: High Crimes and Low Comedy in the Bush Imperium," and is co-founder and editor of the "Empire Burlesque" political blog. Reproduced from: www.Rense.com
|
.
