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Today's
Stories
October
31, 2007
Bill
Quigley
New Orleans' Broken Criminal Justice
System
October
30, 2007
David
Price
Pilfered Scholarship Devastates Gen.
Petraeus's Counterinsurgency Manual
M.
Shahid Alam
The Pakistan Question
Andy
Worthington
The Epiphany of Matthew Waxman: a Government Insider Turns Against
Gitmo
Patrick
Cockburn
The Bicycle Bomber of Baquba
Anthony
Papa
The Twisted Logic of Drug Laws
Floyd
Rudmin
What "All Options are on the Table" Really Means
Sherwood
Ross
Giuliani and Torture
Website
of the Day
The Worst Lobby? You Decide
October
29, 2007
Lisa
Hajjar
Inside Israel's Military Courts
Joe
DeRaymond
The Politics of Lethal Injections
Patrick
Cockburn
The High Stakes in Iraqi Kurdistan
Isabella
Kenfield /
Roger Burbach
Corporate Murder in Brazil
Fred
Gardner
The Frivolous Investigation of Dr. Sterner
Farzana
Versey
Caricaturing Islam
Stephen
Fleischman
The Greening of the Oligarchy
Marcelle
Cendrars
The Congressional Rip Cord
Eamonn
McCann
Dan Keating, the Last of the Republican Irreconcilables
Martha
Rosenberg
For Halloween, Ann Coulter Dresses as .... Ann Coulter!
Website
of the Day
Campaign 2008
October
27 / 28, 2007
Alexander
Cockburn
So Much for Islamo-Fascism Awareness
Jeffrey
St. Clair
The Dam That Isn't There
James
Bovard
Breaking Down an Innocent Man: The FBI's Right to Threaten Torture
Ralph
Nader
Beyond the Rule of Law
M.
Reza Pirbhai
The Wahhabis are Coming, the Wahhabis are Coming!
Robert
Sandels
Pay the Invaders! Cuba, Claims and Confiscations
Jacob
G. Hornberger
Ruling By Decree
Missy
Beattie
The Arsonists in the West Wing
John
Ross
U.S. Eyes on Oaxaca
Robert
Fantina
Condi Rice, the Imperial Cheerleader
Ron
Jacobs
Labor at the Crossroads
Ali
Moayedian
In Search of Logic About Iran
David
Michael Green
What If We Had a President Who Didn't Give a Damn About Terrorism?
Poets
Basement
Block, Davies and Ford
Website
of the Day
Bring 'Em Home: a Music Video
October
26, 2007
Brian
Cloughley
Revenging Bloodshed
Saul
Landau
Portrait of Rudy
Ahmad
Al-Akras
Getting Justice in the HLF Case
Franklin
Lamb
Does "Loving" Lebanon Mean Never Having to Say You're
Sorry?
Mike
Whitney
Murdoch's Cuckoo's Nest
Dave
Lindorff
Home of the Brave? Reducing US Casualties By Killing More Civilians
Alan
Farago
A Castro Behind Every Bush
Yifat
Susskind
Conscripting Feminism into the War on Terror
Website
of the Day
Dead Life in a Political Prison
October 25, 2007
Jeffrey
St. Clair /
Joshua Frank
Iraq's Environmental Crisis
Manuel
Garcia, Jr.
Homes of the Crash Test Dummies
Paul
Craig Roberts
The Fraudulent War on Terror
Col.
Dan Smith
The Politics of Paranoia: Jane Harman's War on the First Amendment
Alan
Farago
The Way to Paradise?
Chris
Kutalik
The Lesson of the Chrysler Rebels
Brian
McKinlay
John Howard and the Curse of Bush
Cindy
Sheehan
Pete, Nancy, George and WW III
Website
of the Day
Support the America's Program!
October
24, 2007
Natalie
Washington-Weik
White Fantasies About Race-Based
Intelligence
Andy
Worthington
The Guantánamo Suicides
Michael
Birmingham
What Happened in Nahr Al Bared?
Corporate
Crime Reporter
The Nuclear Democrats
Tariq
Ali
Bush's Cuba Detour
Farzana
Versey
Imagining Serfdom in a Scarf
Dave
Zirin
White Noise
James
Murren
What "Support Our Troops" Means
Todd
Chretien
Looking Reality in the Face
Martha
Rosenberg
What Came First, the Chicken or
the Cage?
Website
of the Day
Hillary Clinton on Nuclear Power
October
23, 2007
Ralph
Nader
Bush's Catastrophic Rhetoric
Lawrence
R. Velvel
Goldsmith Stands Convicted--By His Own Mouth: How a Harvard Law
Professor Justified Rendition at the Bush Justice Dept.
Vijay
Prashad
The Nuke Deal is Dead
Bonnie
Bricker /
Adil E. Shamoo
The True Cost of War for Oil
Dave
Lindorff
Christopher Dodd's Make or Break Moment
Mike
Whitney
The Big Squeeze
Farzana
Versey
Race with the Devil
Stanley
Heller /
Ben George
Something New from the Antiwar Movement
Marcelle
Cendrars
You Too Can Confront the Holy Executive
Regan
Boychuk
Burma and Haiti: Comparing the Media Response
Website
of the Day
King Corn
October
22, 2007
Ishmael
Reed
Should Blacks Go Green?
Marjorie
Cohn
Mukasey and the Constitution: Another Loyal Bushie
Rannie
Amiri
Is There a Method to Bush's Middle East Madness?
Diane
Farsetta
Time to Pay for Payola: the FCC and Pundit-for-Hire Armstrong
Williams
Todd
Alan Price
Renewing No Child Left Behind: A Hurricane Katrina Aimed at Public
Education
Robert
Jensen
The Quagmire of Masculinity
Stephen
Lendman
The UAW Leadership Sells Out Its Workers
Jemima
Khan
The Kleptocrat in an Hermes Headscarf
Sunsara
Taylor
David Horowitz Can't Handle the Truth
Binoy
Kampmark
No Ideas, Please: the Australian Elections
Website
of the Day
Support the Center for International Policy
October
20 / 21, 2007
Alexander
Cockburn
The Man Who Builds Hillaryworld
Tariq
Ali
A Massacre Foretold
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Greetings from Echo Park
Andy
Worthington
The Shame of Diego Garcia
Mike
Whitney
Housing Flameout
Daniel
Wolff
Play It As It Lays
David
Rosen
Deviants on Parade: Folsom St. Fair and America's 4th Sexual
Revolution
Saul
Landau
David and Goliath in Iraq
Ron
Jacobs
COINTELPRO and the Panthers
Robert
Fantina
The Strange Love of Mitt Romney and Bob Jones
David
Heleniak
Erring on the Side of Hidden Harm
Joe
Allen
Hoffa Brown-Nosing at UPS
Prairie
Miller
Lions for Lambs
Poets'
Basement
Gibbons, Holt and Buknatski
Website
of the Weekend
Crash!
October
19, 2007
John
Ross
Che's Mexican Legacy
Sheldon
Rampton
Shared Values Revisited: a Case Study in the Limits of Propaganda
Rahul
Mahajan
A Tale of Two Atrocities: Blackwater and Haditha
Devra
Davis
Deadly Secrets: Chemical Pollution and Cancer
Christopher
Brauchli
Blasphemous Science
Wadner
Pierre
Haiti After the Deluge
Bill
Quigley
Jailed for Justice
Website
of the Day
Textbook Sticker Shock
October
18, 2007
Saree
Makdisi
Academic Freedom is at Risk
Meg
Dwyer
What I Learned from 9/11: Who Wouldn't Want Us Dead?
Alevtina
Rea
Sketches of Russian Life
Norman
Solomon
The United States of Violence
Kristoffer
Larsson
Something is Rotten in Sweden
Harvey
Wasserman
Nukes are Back and So are We
Website
of the Day
Eve Ensler: "A Filibuster Would Stop This War"
October
17, 2007
Steve
Niva
Counter-Insurgency, American-Style
Andy
Worthington
The Case of Mohamed Jawad
Alan
Farago
The Credit Shock
Russell
Mokhiber
The New Billionaire-Criminal Class
Sharon
Smith
Democrats, AWOL When It Mattered
Mike
Whitney
Time for the Banks to Face the Hangman
Robert
Fantina
Iraq, Iran and the US: Business as Usual
Chris
Irwin
Where Have All the Rednecks Gone?
Website
of the Day
Sex Ed at Oral Roberts University
October
16, 2007
Peter
Linebaugh
Doris Lessing and the Dynamite
Prize
Paul
Findley
Follow the Leader: The Open Secret About the Israel Lobby
Robert
Bryce
Inconvenient Corrections: Al Gore's Wacky Facts
Uri
Avnery
The Mother of All Pretexts
Paul
Craig Roberts
The Iraqi Genocide
Ray
McGovern
What Did Nancy Pelosi Know About NSA Spying and When Did She
Know It?
Norman
Solomon
The Pro-War Undertow of the Blackwater Scandal
Martha
Rosenberg
The Curse of Cymbalta
William
S. Lind
Out of the Frying Pan
Joel
S. Hirschborn
Time to Boycott Voting
Website
of the Day
Pipeline Through Paradise: Big Oil's Arctic Play
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October
31, 2007
Litvinenko and
the New Cold War
Poisonous
Espionage
By ERIC WALBERG
Four Russian diplomats were expelled
from Britain this summer as a pressure tactic to try to force
Russia to extradite Andrei Lugovoi, the key suspect in the death
of a former KGB officer and proud new UK citizen, Alexander Litvinenko.
The expulsion came shortly after Russian President Vladimir Putin
announced that Russia was pulling out of the Conventional Forces
in Europe (CFE) treaty and as Polish President Lech Kaczynski
was visiting Washington to finalise the US missile bases in Europe.
What a coincidence.
Yet another coincidence: less than 48 hours before the expulsions,
ex-US Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and George Schultz,
Chevron Chairman David O'Reilly and assorted friends had discussions
with President Putin in Moscow at a conference "Russia-USA:
A view on the future", which the US side later described
as "frank", meaning Putin didn't give an inch on anything.
In case Kissinger didn't get the message, Putin slipped out of
the conference to meet Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi who
agreed with him that China wants a "multipolar world"
and even more trade with Russia. Chinese-Russian trade has increased
by almost 50 per cent annually the last few years.
It seems all the Western guns available weren't able to budge
the Kremlin, so the British bulldog, or in today's world, poodle
was called in to bark and make a scene.
A spokesman for the Russian Foreign Ministry said that the expulsions
were "a well-staged action to politicise the Litvinenko
case" and pointed out that the government of Britain had
refused to extradite two prominent opponents of the Kremlin who
live there: a businessman, Boris Berezovsky, and Akhmed Zakayev,
the exiled Chechen leader -- both friends and mentors of poor,
dead Litvinenko.
Although both sides expelled diplomats in 1996 on accusations
of spying, the latest turn of events seemed far more serious,
reminiscent of 1985, when Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher expelled
24 Soviet diplomats, prompting CPSU General Secretary Mikhail
Gorbachev to do the same, despite their mutual admiration.
This is all vintage Le Carre. You could easily mistake 2007 for
1967 or better 1937. Though on his deathbed Litvinenko purportedly
accused Putin of ordering his murder, even his widow Marina doesn't
agree, though she does think it was planned in Moscow. It could
very well be that the KGB's successor, the FSB, is implicated
in this cloak-and-polonium affair, just as the CIA, KGB, Mossad
and their ilk were and are active in hundreds of assassinations
of their enemies.
After 18 years as a model KGB/FSB officer he seems to have cracked,
beginning with a theatrical press conference in November 1998,
where he publicly accused his superiors of ordering the assassination
of oligarch Boris Berezovsky, "the Jew who'd robbed half
the country". Critics say the accusation was fabricated
to help Berezovsky blacken enemies in the FSB. Litvinenko was
fired and later joined Berezovsky in the UK, where he was granted
political asylum and citizenship. He soon published The FSB
Blows up Russia (2001) which claims agents from the FSB rather
than Chechen terrorists coordinated the 1999 Russian apartment
bombings that killed more than 300 people.
His accusations against Putin and the FSB continued to come thick
and fast. In his next book, Gang from Lubyanka (2002),
he alleged that Putin was personally involved in organised crime.
With regard to the July 2005 bombings in London, Litvinenko said
that, "terrorist infection creeps worldwide from the cabinets
of the Lubyanka Square and the Kremlin" and accused Putin
of being a paedophile, comparing him to the notorious rapist
and serial killer Andrei Chikatilo. In October, he publicly accused
Putin of assassinating crusading journalist Anna Politovskaya.
Two weeks later, on 1 November 2006, Litvinenko suddenly fell
ill and was hospitalised. Alex Goldfarb, who had arranged Litvinenko's
defection from Moscow in 2000 and is now director of Berezovsky's
International Foundation for Civil Liberties, emerged as his
official spokesman using Berezovsky's PR agency, Bell Pottinger.
Through them, Litvinenko stated that he met three former KGB
agents on the day he fell ill, including Andrei Lugovoi.
Litvinenko died three weeks later of lethal polonium-210 radiation
poisoning. A senior official said investigators had concluded
the murder was "a 'state-sponsored' assassination orchestrated
by Russian security services." On 28 May 2007, the British
Foreign Office officially submitted a request to the government
of Russia for the extradition of Lugovoi. On 31 May Lugovoi held
a news conference at which he accused MI6 of attempting to recruit
him and blamed either MI6, the Russian mafia, or fugitive Kremlin
opponent Boris Berezovsky for the killing, saying he is a "victim
not a perpetrator of a radiation attack". This claim was
dismissed at the time by Western media and, of course, MI6 as
nonsense. Now it appears that the Russian version of events was
spot on. Sir John Scarlett, who is now the head of MI6 and was
once based in Moscow, was fingered as Litvinenko's recruiter,
according the the Daily Mail.
Some of Litvinenko's accusations have a ring of truth -- possible
FSB assassination attempts on Berezovsky, Politovskaya, and others.
Others, while far-fetched, merit further investigation -- FSB
blowing up a Moscow apartment building and blaming Chechens,
and the Moscow theatre hostage-taking abetted by Chechens working
for the FSB. However, his claims of FSB training Al-Qaeda number
two Ayman El-Zawahri in Dagestan in the years before 9/11 or
that the Kremlin had ordered the Beslan massacre or that Putin
is a paedophile suggest he was paranoid and obsessed with stirring
up personal animosity towards Putin, to the point of invoking
his own death.
Whatever the truth about Litvinenko, he was clearly off the deep
end by the end. A Russian student friend at University of Westminster,
Julia Svetlichnaja, said she received more than 100 e- mails
from him in the months prior to his death, proposing that she
enter into a business deal with him and "make money".
Despite his MI6 stipend, he was low on money and his anti-Putin
campaign was going nowhere. He was courting death, whether from
the FSB, his purported friends or his own doing. And just as
it was tragic that many well-meaning people -- East and West
-- were caught in the superpower meatgrinder in the Old Cold
War, it is sad today that many people, disgusted with the horrors
taking place everyday, go crazy and/or become victims of the
harsh world of political intrigue.
It's very doubtful that this tale will ever be unravelled --
perhaps the Western media account of his death is true, though
Lugovoi's assertion is looking pretty good these days. Even if
it was some rogue FSB agent, what difference does it really make?
Just as the Soviet Union played a positive role in world politics,
a counterveiling force to Western imperialism in its Hitlerian
incarnation and its softer US/European variants, Russia under
Putin is playing a positive role on the world stage today. All
the Litvinenkos in the world, packaged by their PR managers,
can't change that fact. And there are Western assassinations
every bit as suspect -- David Kelly, the British scientist whose
mysterious "suicide" implicated the British government,
and which was airbrushed out of the picture by a very partisan
government "investigation", for one. Politics is a
dirty business, and threats to the powers- that-be often suffer
ill fates.
While we can cherish British traditions of free speech and democracy,
we must remember Britain is also crafty political animal, deeply
implicated in US imperial plans, as the "coincidences"
above suggest. We can also cherish the haven free from the imperialist
mindset that the SU once provided, and that Russia provides to
some extent today. It is not a benign place -- it is the home
of corruption, violence, bureaucracy and, yes, political and
Mafia-style assassinations, the legacy of the SU and its collapse.
But it is also the home of much greater freedom of thought than
the West, now in the grip of US-Israeli brainwashing. And its
influence -- political and economic (it is currently the biggest
oil and gas producer in the world) -- is spreading rapidly in
a world tired of US-led serial wars and bullying. Putin's recent
trip to Teheran and warning that no country in the region would
allow an invastion of Iran to take place from its soil is only
the most recent indication of this remarkable resurgence of Russia
under his leadership.
It is a shame that Litvinenko died his gruesome death, but he
was courting disaster, from his flamboyant press conference onwards.
His actions were not well-thought out; he was impulsive and emotional,
to the point of touchingly converting to Islam in sympathy with
the Chechens as he lay dying. I wonder of Goldfarb and Berezovsky
had a hand in that little PR stunt? He is a reminder that the
world of international politics is one of intrigue and danger.
He played the game and lost. Just as Soviet dissidents had little
real influence on events -- they were more gadflies or weathervanes,
so are the likes of Litvinenko today.
Another "coincidence": the day after the Russians announced
they were expelling four British diplomats, the media solemnly
reported that fighter planes from Britain and Norway scrambled
Friday to keep watch on Russian Uf-95 bombers that were approaching
the countries' air space, though a Norwegian military official
admitted this was actually routine. Yes, "the Russians and
coming!" Let's build some nice US bases in eastern Europe
and, in the meantime, scurry to take protection under Great Britain's
generous skirts. Ho-hum.
Eric Walberg is a Canadian journalist at Al-Ahram Weekly
in Cairo. You can reach him at his site www.geocities.com/walberg2002/
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