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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Why Litvenenko, and why now?
Early on, the story included the tidbit that he was getting evidence to show who killed the female russian journalist whose name I can't recall.
If Litvenenko had such information, or was about to have it, there are probably more than a few people who would want to send a message to the effect that inquiring into her death is not a healthy thing to do.
Contrary to what "experts" are saying, it would be very, very easy to extract the Po210 from anti-static brushes. It is basically sandwiched between two layers of gold. This makes it very safe, because there is practically no way it could be released accidentally, and gold is very resistant to corrosion and will not dissolve in most chemicals. However a simple acid mixture called aqua regia, know since the time of alchemy, will dissolve gold as well as the polonium contained therein. There would definitely be enough contained in several of the brushes to get the job done, just one contains 500 microcuries of Po210, which is 16666 times the maximum acceptable body burden. One would simply have to dissolve the gold elements in a small amount of acid and mix it in someone's drink. Aqua Regia is some nasty stuff, but the amount would be small enough (a couple of drops or so) not to be tasted or cause any immediate ill effects. Since the polonium would be a water soluble salt at this point, it would be absorbed readily into the body, where it would hang around for quite a while. It would be almost childishly simple to do.
Dissolve the brushes with Aqua Regiae -- this is not a simple compound or process at all. Aqua Regiae is a mixture of very concentrated sulphuric and nitric acid -- nasty stuff -- makes lots of fumes. Good chance you would inhale all sorts of stuff, plus contaminate the hell out of your lab or fume hood. Disolving brushes in this is not a good idea!
Looks like the old Physics 101 classes are rearing their ugly heads around here.
Think about it -- Yukos Oil, run by a CEO whose head of security assassinates the corporate opposition.
Read up on these "dissidents" please:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/4393003.stm
The kind of people who would run their oil business like this would have no compunction about murdering Politkovskaya and Litvinenko if it served their interests.
Look up Politkovskaya's book on Amazon.com. She doesn't seem to have been a serious journalist. Her book makes her look more like Russia's answer to Ann Coulter.
It doesn't make sense that Putin would bother to assassinate someone who was already regarded as a crackpot by the mainstream.
By the way, as was revealed in that movie on HBO about those two American conservative political consultants who (in real life) worked to help Yeltsin get reelected, there were many American conservatives who bought shares of Yukos Oil.
That could explain why the commentators at Fox News took Khodorkovsky's side during his trial, and didn't focus on Pighugin's murder convictions at all.
Watch that HBO movie and you'll see those two conservatives knew perfectly well that they were dealing with organized crime.
That was the movie. Dick Dresner and George Gorton get hired by a man who is pretty obviously a mobster. He offers them drugs and prostitutes as a form of hospitality but they decline.
They get a tip to buy Yukos Oil but the stock will only be valuable if they can get Yeltsin reelected.
They lose faith a critical point and sell the stock, and end up regretting it.
According to the film.
...why Putin would want to damage the reputation of his country and of himself by so obviously assassinating dissidents in this manner. OTOH, the US just recently invaded a country, killed at least hundred thousand people, and buried itself in a hopeless quagmire, basically just to tell off a few guys in a cave. And we didn't even try to hide it.
I'm not really saying Putin COULDN'T have done it. I'm just saying that if I were in charge of the investigation, I would include on my list of avenues to investigate the avenue I have described here.
Maybe it's not about Chechnya, maybe it's really about oil.
In Spinning Boris, Dresner and Gorton save Yeltsin's behind by running ads painting his Communist foe Zyuganov as a Stalinist who would order massive crackdowns on all civil liberties if elected.
Zyuganov never promised any such thing, but Dresner and Gorton discovered through polling that many potential voters feared this might happen nonetheless.
So they ran ads that inflamed this fear and made Zyuganov look like a Stalinist. That was how Yeltsin managed to win in 1996, despite the fact that most voters loathed him.
The only hope the so-called "Khodorkovsky camp" would have of freeing their leader and regaining their share of Russian oil wealth would be if Putin's annointed replacement, whoever it is, loses the next election.
The more Putin looked like a Stalinist, the better chance they'd have.
Just a thought. Maybe I'm too much of a mystery fan.
Look up Pichugin, Gorin, and Nevzlin.
This is what I found on a blog about the murder of the Gorins:
http://www.russiablog.org/2006/08/exyukos_security_chief_gets_20.php
In 2002, Sergei Gorin was a senior manager at Menatep Bank's branch in the city of Tambov, where he arranged several lucrative off-the-books deals between Yukos and local businesses. These arrangements seemed to have worked fine until Mr. Gorin got ambitious and asked Mr. Pichugin to either bring him on board as a well-compensated Yukos employee or give him $100,000 cash in severance pay.
At this point, a criminal court found, Pichugin went to the Gorins residence, beat up their terrified children, then locked the kids in a bathroom while he waited for the parents to come home. When the Gorins arrived, they were dragged into another room and murdered, and then the killer disposed of the bodies.
Pichugin was the security chief for Yukos, the company Dick Dresner and George Gorton were advised to buy shares of when they were "spinning Boris" to reelection in 1996 by making his opponent look like a Stalinist.
By the way, Leonid Nevzlin was one of the main contributors and organizers of that campaign.
It goes on further about Nevzlin:
However, state prosecutors have claimed that Mikhail Khodorkovsky's senior partner Leonid Nevzlin was complicit in the murder of the Gorins and ordered Pichugin to kill and intimidate several other people. One of the victims of this violent campaign was Valentina Korneyeva, who owned a business called "The Tea Shop" and was murdered for refusing to sell her space in downtown Moscow to the Yukos-affiliated Menatep Bank. Another victim was Olga Kostina, whom the BBC describes as "a one-time adviser to Mr. Khodorkovsky who went to work for Moscow's city government." Actually, Mrs. Kostina had taken a job working in Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov's office of communications. Nevzlin may have feared that Mrs. Kostina had too much kompromat (dirt) on her former boss.
Finally, from today's news:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,231898,00.html
Nevzlin — a former shareholder in the Yukos oil company — told Israel's daily Haaretz newspaper on Friday that Litvinenko had visited him for a meeting.
He said he had passed on documents related to the campaign of criminal charges and tax claims against Yukos shareholders and officials, including now-jailed founder Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Nevzlin told the newspaper he feared the ex-agent's death could be connected to the probe.
Nevzlin was charged by Russian prosecutors with organizing murders, fraud and tax evasion, and lives in self-imposed exile in Israel to evade prosecution.
So who was more dangerous: Litvinenko's friends or his enemies?
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The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
219 Democrats and one Republican join in favor of the legislation, which passed by a narrow margin
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