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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20061203/ts_afp/britainrussiaspy
The Observer and the Mail on Sunday both suggested a possible link between Litvinenko and the Russian oil company Yukos, which has seen a series of deaths and accidents involving those associated with it.
The first said the US Federal Bureau of Investigations had accompanied Scotland Yard detectives during questioning of another Russian exile, former KGB agent Yuri Shvets, in Washington.
Shvets -- who has links to dissident Russian billionaire Boris Berezovsky -- reportedly compiled a file Litvinenko had in his possession containing potentially damaging revelations about Moscow and the state takeover of Yukos.
It also quoted a London-based Russian academic as saying Litvinenko wanted to blackmail senior Russian intelligence, business figures and "corrupt officals and sources in the Kremlin" with that secret information.
That could have made him an enemy not just of big business but of the Kremlin, too, it suggested.
If you Google "Pichugin Gorin" and look at the dates when those murders and disappearances began, they started way before Putin ever knew he was going to end up President.
This is crazy. These people are getting away with this outrageous spin - making it look like Putin was somehow behind all of the murders and disappearances of human obstacles to the growth of Yukos in the nineties -- because the American press for some reason is cleaning up after them.
Either that or American journalists are too dumb to Google "Nevzlin" and come up with the goods on Pichugin.
You are quite right; looking back at what I wrote, it was a little unfair. Your letter, at least, was straightforward and analytical in tone, even though I might disagree with some of the substance. I apologize for any offense given or taken.
When I wrote the letter you refer to I was mainly reacting to an entire series of letters (previous to yours) that were chockful of uninformed charges and outright errors (Like the one I discussed in my 2:30pm, Sat. letter, "Labcoat Pundits", on p6).
My remark about folks getting a "rush" from hammering Large might well have been ill-considered but was not intended as a cheap shot. The phenomenon of "piling on" is just a part of "human nature". Whenever I think I get a whiff of it, I feel like being the foil, the devil's advocate! Again, I apologize for any offense.
May I suggest that the principle of parsimony that you so eloquently recommend be employed with respect to the political aspect of this affair?
I believe there is a strong resistance, from a number of sources, to charging the Putin Regime with this crime. It would in fact be premature to do so; the facts aren't in yet. But it would make a difference whether or not Putin were just an autocrat with basically good intentions, on the one hand, or a megalo-maniac who murders his political opponents, on the other hand. How would G.W. Bush, for one, feel about facing this reality about the man whose eyes he had looked into and caught a glimpse of the soul of a man he could trust?
Alternatively, the possibility of a plot of the sort discussed by Patricia Schwarz in her posts must be considered. The psychology of terrorism involved in the employment of such a bizarre means of execution might well be common to both an autocratic regime and a cabal of dispossessed oligarchs with a point to make. The thundering silence of the Putin Regime thus far is also an interesting feature of this affair.
It is depressing to think that Putin might think that he could do something like this with impunity. But that might well prove to be the case.
At this very moment analyses are going forward. Sample masses will be determined to femto-gram precision. Relative proportions of isotopes will be determined. Then, both the relatively rare beta gamma emissions and the far more representative alpha emissions will be monitored over time. The "DNA" of the material will be precisely determined. Then, it will just be a matter of how much classified knowledge our intelligence agencies possess of the kinds of facilities that may have produced the material in such quantity (let's remember, the stuff seems to be scattered all over the place; there was evidently an incredible amount of it). (On a side-note, was the leakage accidental? If so, as seems likely-- think of a fluoride gas or very finely divided powder with compromised containment-- one wonders about the conditions of the agent or agents involved!)
Call me a cynic but, after all that anyalysis and investigation, we never find out who did it, then we'll know for sure who did it.
Thank you for your obviously sincere apology, which I fully accept.
I agree with you that Putin had both the means and the motive to do this murder, and that his history of violence makes him a prime suspect. He is not a nice man.
The New York Times reports this morning:
THE trail of clues in the mysterious death of Alexander V. Litvinenko may lead to Moscow, as the former spy claimed on his deathbed. But solving the nuclear whodunit may prove harder than Scotland Yard and many scientists at first anticipated.
The complicating factor is the relative ubiquity of polonium 210, the highly radioactive substance found in Mr. Litvinenko’s body and now in high levels in the body of an Italian associate, who has been hospitalized in London. Experts initially called it quite rare, with some claiming that only the Kremlin had the wherewithal to administer a lethal dose. But public and private inquiries have shown that it proliferated quite widely during the nuclear era, of late as an industrial commodity.
“You can get it all over the place,” said William Happer, a physicist at Princeton who has advised the United States government on nuclear forensics. “And it’s a terrible way to go.”
Personally, I would give Litvinenko's claims about the FSB orchestrating those apartment bombings a LOT more seriously if he had come out with them BEFORE he hooked up with Beresovsky. Beresovsky is like Ken Lay meets Tony Soprano. He paid Litvinenko to write that book and then published it himself.
That's what bothers me here. Beresovsky has enormous self interest at stake. And does anyone really believe he gives a hoot about Chechnya or Chechens? What charity benefits has he thrown to raise money for the refugees?
What Putin has been trying to do is get this corrupt oligarchy under control, so that Russian big business will pay their taxes and the government can function and pay its workers and there won't be round after round of corporate homicide exploding on the streets of Moscow like there was back during the Yeltsin/Yukos years.
Much of the bad press about Putin seems to emanate from this group. And the American press seems to accept it all uncritically.
Look at this:
http://www.kommersant.com/page.asp?idr=529&id=698453
In summer 1998, Alexey Pichugin carried out Leonid Nevzlin’s order and found men through Gorin, Shapiro and Volgograd’s gangster Arkady Goritovsky (killed in 2002) to murder Nefteyugansk Mayor Vladimir Petukhov. The mayor demanded that YUKOS pay taxes to the local budget in full. Former paratrooper Evgeny Reshetnikov and convicted criminal Gennady Tsigelnik agreed to execute the order for $10,000.
On June 26, 1998, Reshetnikov shot the mayor dead with a machine gun, wounding his security man. Some time later, Tsigelnik and Reshetnikov were hired to assault Vladimir Kolesov, a business manager of Rosprom, investigators say. The manager was severely beaten up as “his career achievements ran against Nevzlin’s interests”.
In fall 1998 and spring 1999, Reshetnikov and Tsigelnik made two murder attempts on Evgeny Rybin, executive at East petroleum handelgas GmbH. The businessman wanted YUKOS to return $100 million that his company had invested in the development of the Zapodno-Poludennoye and Krapivinskoye oil fields. In the first attempt, the killer missed. Later, the killers threw a bomb and fired on the car where only Rybin’s bodyguards were riding in. The driver died and two security men were injured.
Now look at the way all of this is being spun by the people around Litvinenko.
They're try to hint around, using these mythical documents that Litvinenko supposedly brought Nevzlin in Israel, that Putin or the FSB was actually behind the murders and disappearances associated with Yukos.
Well why would the FSB murder a bureaucrat who was trying to get Yukos to pay their tax bill?
Any FSB agent who did that would have to have been working for the benefit of Yukos, not Putin. And in 1998 the government was still run by Yeltsin, whose 1996 campaign was largely financed and run by Nevzlin.
These guys have the cojones, I'll say that.
That doesn't mean they're behind Litvinenko's murder. But you see here from Nevzlin's statements to the press that they are definitely trying to use Litvinenko's murder to their own advantage to create more suspicion about Putin and the tax evasion charges against Khodorkovsky.
This is what oil wealth does to people, I guess.
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
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
Once seen as a lunatic fringe, reactionary anti-women groups are courting respectability
Salon headlines in your mailbox
