Top US Spy points finger at Putin

Relations between the US and Russia appeared to sink to a new low yesterday after Moscow angrily dismissed accusations that democracy in Russia had taken a "back step".

Too damn right. At least democracy exists in Russia, even if it isn't perfect in every way. The United States, on the other hand, having abandoned what semblance of democracy it had, is busy projecting its flaws onto others.

Russia's foreign ministry called the accusation by Mike McConnell, Washington's national intelligence director, in a speech to the US Senate's armed services committee on Tuesday, "outmoded" and "totally groundless".

Such silly and petty accusations were never in mode and have lways been totally groundless. It still doesn't stop Uncle Sam's megaphone merchants from trying to paint Russia as a demon though.

Mr McConnell, an expert on the former Soviet Union,

An expert, along the lines of the Russian expert Condi "Lizard" Rice, who can barely speak a few lines of basic Russian without making fundamental mistakes?

said Russia's president, Vladimir Putin, was preparing to fix next year's presidential elections so that the Kremlin's preferred candidate would win.

The fixing of elections is far more likely to happen in Washington than it would in Moscow. Sorry, McConnell, but the evidence paints a different picture. As they say, don't point the finger, as there are four more pointing back at you.

"The march to democracy has taken a back step. And now there are more arrangements to control the process and the populace and the parties and so on, to the point of picking the next leader of Russia," Mr McConnell said, at a hearing to discuss global threats to the US.

All your bad-mouthing of Russia simply won't wash, McConnell. The truth of the matter is that Russia is regaining her power after the US-inspired/aided rape and pillage of the country during the presidency of the idiot Yeltsin. Russia is doggedly independent and won't bow to the snakes in Washington. That bothers the likes of you, doesn't it, McConnell?

"That's my worry, is the march toward democracy, the way we understand it ... now being controlled in a way that it is less of a democratic process."

Unless this statement was put in context, I would have no choice but to assume that it was written about the United States. As it is in the context of an attack on Russia, it comes across as yet another instance of the projecting of the flaws of the United States onto others.

Mr Putin had surrounded himself with "extremely conservative" advisers suspicious of America, he said.

Would you blame him? Would you blame any country for being suspicious of a belligerent, sociopathic bully? Would you blame the Russians for being extremely suspicious when the self-appointed spreader of "freedumb and demonocracy" has established bases in practically every country bordering Russia?

Yesterday the Kremlin accused Mr McConnell of harbouring obsolete and outmoded notions about Russia. The intelligence chief's assessments were "totally unfounded", the foreign ministry's spokesman, Andrei Krivtsov, said. The exchange came amid a sharp deterioration in US-Russian relations to what analysts said yesterday was probably their worst level since the US-led Nato bombing of Serbia in 1999.

Relations between Russia and United States certainly have become much frostier. However, anyone with two eyes in their head and a brain to match can see who the instigator of this "new cold war" is.

Moscow has been angered by the US administration's plans to site two anti-missile interceptor and radar bases in Poland and the Czech Republic.
Mr Putin has ridiculed America's claim that the sites are meant to deter a possible rogue attack by North Korea or Iran and has said they are clearly aimed at Russia and its vast nuclear arsenal.
Last month he delivered his most scathing attack yet on US power. Speaking in Munich, he accused the US of acting unilaterally and seeking to become the world's sole decision-making "master".
Analysts said yesterday that public opinion on both sides was hardening.

Public opinion around the world is hardening and is shifting rapidly against the United States. As much as it might irritate the likes of McConnell, Vladimir Putin is winning this little war of words being played out on the world stage.

"In Russia, Putin's speech has produced a tremendous effect among those who want Russian primacy and think in terms of Russia's empire," said Victor Kremenyuk, deputy director of Moscow's US-Canada Institute.

It is important to those who are thinking in terms of Russian independence and ability to defend itself. If Kremenyuk wants to call that primacy, he is welcome to use the terminology of his choosing.

"In the US, a growing number of people think that Russia has outwitted them.

Duh, gee, really? Dag Nabbit!

Instead of becoming a normal democratic state it has become an energy superpower.

What the freakin' hell constitutes a normal democratic state to these poisonous neocon types? One where elections are routinely stolen and rights abrogated on a daily basis?

They see it both as a threat to the US and its allies in Europe."

McConnell, Kremenyuk and their ilk can speak on behalf of their own. Any sensible European knows where the real threat comes from.

Other observers said they expected the chill in US-Russian relations to go on beyond the Bush-Putin era. "I think we are very close to an arms race," Ivan Safranchuk, head of the Moscow bureau of the World Security Institute, a US thinktank, told the Guardian. "Neither side trusts the other. Russia reacts to the missile defence sites. The US reacts to Russia's reaction."

I would be naturally suspicious of any US think tank, and in particular one that calls itself "The World Security Institute", given Uncle Sam's demonstrated penchant for double-speak.

The government-owned newspaper Rossiiskaya Gazeta said on Wednesday that Russian scientists were alarmed by the US's High-frequency Active Auroral Research Programme, or Haarp. They believed US scientists were close to developing a system that would allow them to disrupt an enemy's entire nuclear capability using ionic rays. Russia was determined to develop a similar technology, the paper reported.

This is not unexpected. That's how it works. The US builds some nasty new weapon and others feel compelled (by their own need for security) to play catch-up.

With increasing talk of a new cold war, Russia's political parties, including the Communists, agreed this week to suspend their differences on foreign policy.

That's good. It is nice that the United States can have a positive influence in the world and even bringing some Единство to the Duma.

"Russia has become stronger and America doesn't like it," Konstantin Kosachev, the head of parliament's foreign affairs committee, told Moskovsky Komsomolets, a mass-circulation daily. "They still have the same notions from the 1990s, when American became the only political power centre on the planet."

Kosachev is right on the money there. The United States wants to be the world power and does not take kindly to any challenges to that power. All empires come to an end, all brutal regimes fall. The end is coming for the ruling junta in the US, and with it will go any future hope of American primacy. Now if only the United States would wake up and smell the coffee before they remain without a friend in the world.

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Poisonous Minds

The ongoing war of propaganda against Vladimir Putin being played out in the editorial offices and television studios of the western mainstream media plumbs new depths with every passing day. The barrage of differing explanations for the condition and subsequent death of Alexander Litvinenko - with the suspected cause changing almost on a daily basis - looks very much like a classic use of misdirection. First it was thalium, then radioactive thalium and now the story has, for the time being at least, settled on a radioactive isotope, Polonium 210. The only one consistent theme in an otherwise constantly morphing story is the presumed guilt of Vladimir Putin.

The official reason for the all the finger pointing directed at Putin is that Litvinenko, a well-known fierce critic of Putin, had apparently been investigating the murder of journalist Anna Politkovskaya, another strident critic of Putin, who was gunned down at her Moscow apartment last month. In the absence of any substantive evidence - the circumstantial evidence that Litvinenko and Putin were far from the best of chums is far from substantive - the Russian president has been indicted, tried and found guilty by a media chorus. A large number of aspects of this case should give any thinking person cause for disquiet.

Public Spectacle
The “hit” was designed from the outset to be a public spectacle. If… and this is an if of monumental proportions… if Putin wanted Litvinenko dead for whatever reason, why on earth would those charged with carrying it out do it in such a sloppy and unprofessional manner? There are those who will argue that it was played out publicly as a warning to others, but this is a specious line of reasoning, not least because there is an assortment of methods for communicating such threats other than via the media in countries that are frequently hostile to Russia and Russian interests.

If he really did choose to publicly execute such a vocal critic, Putin would have to be masochistic beyond belief. As for the method, there are far more reliable methods of “getting the job done” than playing around with dangerous radioactive isotopes. Most if not all of the world’s secret services are well-versed in techniques designed to be indistinguishable from death by natural causes. So again, why choose such a novel and potentially unreliable method?

Attempts by the likes of the BBC to create a link between the Litvinenko case and a tiny number of poisonings carried out during the cold war serve only to add weight to the suspicion that this is a propaganda exercise aimed unfairly and squarely at Russia.

A rare isotope
Polonium, which apparent is the method of assassination du-jour, is considered a very rare element, and is present in uranium ores at around 100 micrograms for every metric ton, making it about 500 times less abundant than radium. It is so rare that it is estimated that only about 100 grams are produced per year. The polonium 210 isotope has a half-life of approximately 138 days, and emits enormous quantities of energy during its decay, sufficient energy to take the temperature of half a gram above 750 Kelvin, in other words, in excess of 470 Celsius. The energy is released in the form of alpha particles, which are hazardous to health only if ingested.

Experts in nuclear chemistry have suggested that large-scale processing equipment, such as a nuclear reactor, would be needed to produce amounts of Polonium 210 sufficient to result in death. According to Dr Andrea Sella, a lecturer in chemistry at University College London, "It is not as simple as the idea that somebody might have broken into a radioactivity cabinet at some local hospital and walked off with some polonium".

Assuming that a nuclear reactor was required to produce the substance, that reactor could just as easily be in Los Alamos or Dimona as it could be in Sarov.

A fierce critic, or a crank?
The charges made by Litvinenko against the Putin administration have frequently been lacking in hard evidence and on occasion have lapsed into bizarre fantasy. He co-authored a book “Blowing up Russia : Terror from Within” in which he accuses the Putin administration of actually responsible for the terrorist attacks on apartment blocks in various Russian cities, for which Chechen terrorists were officially blamed. However, having made the allegation, he failed miserably at producing even a prima-facia case to support his allegations. He also made the ludicrous claims that the FSB was behind the events of September 11th, 2001 and that senior Al-Qa'eda officials were actually agents of Russian intelligence. Litvinenko had a piece published by the now defunct Chechen Press in July of this year where he made the (unsubstantiated) claim that Putin was a paedophile.

Not a Russian Modus Operandi
According to Nigel West, a British intelligence expert, “neither the FSB nor the KGB has ever killed a defector on foreign soil and their predecessors, even under Stalin, did so only once in the case of Walter Krivitsky in Washington in 1941”. He stated that he would be “most surprised if the FSB had tried to kill Mr Litvinenko because it would fly in the face of 65 years of Soviet or Russian practice”.

The Israel connection
According to Israeli news media, Litvinenko had been passing documents to a former Yukos CEO in Israel in the months before his death. The suggestion by this former CEO that the information was harmful to the Russian administration is only to be expected and should be taken with a pinch of salt. After all, it was Putin who put an end to the reign of the kleptocrats, so it is not beyond belief that they would be committed in their attempts to besmirch his reputation.

You can tell a lot about a man from his choice of friends
Boris Abramovich Berezovsky. Need I say any more? Berezovsky is Russian Jewish billionaire who had served as Secretary of the Russian National Security Council, and who went into exile when it seemed he would be a victim of Putin's campaign against shady business practices. In an article entitled "Godfather of the Kremlin?" by Paul Klebnikov, published by Forbes magazine, Berezovsky was portrayed as a mafia don who thought nothing of having his rivals murdered. Although Berezovsky sued the magazine for libel and the magazine subsequently retracted both claims. Klebnikov made similar allegations in a book with the same title as the article. Berezovsky did not legally contest the claims made by Klebnikov in that book. Klebnikov went on to become the editor of the Russian edition of Forbes and was gunned-down in Moscow on the July 9th 2004.

Who benefits?
The web of intrigue weaved by the media on the death of Litvinenko reads like a thriller, albeit a third-rate bargain-basement offering written without the either the panache or knowledge of the likes of John Le Carré. Given the complete absence of substantive evidence, there is only one reliable way of getting close to what might be the truth behind images produced with smoke and mirrors – that is to ask “Cui Bono... Who benefits?” or to put it another way, "follow the money".

There is no shortage of potential candidates and Putin certainly is not one of them. The burgeoning Russophobe club has a diverse membership, ranging from assorted oligarchs and bankers - people who are almost universally reviled amongst ordinary Russians - who are very upset that their playthings have been taken from them and that Putin has put a stop to their perfidious theft. After that there are a host of multinational companies and their shareholders who have been denied unfettered access to Russian resources. Finally we come to the Chechens, and their assorted hangers-on in the west, many of who are hailing from the neo-con camp, such as the American Committee for Peace in Chechnya.

Russia has also proven to be an extremely tough nut to crack in energy supply negotiations and a persistent thorn in the side of the axis of hypocrisy, both in respect to their invasion of Iraq and to the putative invasion of Iran. Indeed, Putin has also had the audacity to enter into sizeable contracts to supply advanced weaponry to Iran.

There are plenty of individuals, organisations and governments who would prefer that Russia and her leadership tow the line. Those same individuals, organisations and governments want Putin to permit, if not actively encourage, the pillage of Russian resources by multi-national corporations. There is no shortage of parties who would stoop to such a low in order to punish a recalcitrant Putin.

Much like the poisoning of Yushchenko, the demise of Litvinenko will be continually discussed and disected in the media, with the narrative shifting as required, but the blame remaining locked on to the Kremlin. However, no serious effort will be made to find the perpetrators or solve the crime, as it is far easier to continue to use the affair as a foreign policy stick with which to beat Putin, demonise the FSB and force Russia to once again open its doors to wholesale larceny.

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