Latest Anglo-Russian spat is all about targeting Putin
by Justin Raimondo
What in the name of all that’s holy is going on with Russia and the Brits? The British government has recently expelled four Russian diplomats, supposedly in retaliation for the Russkis’ refusal to extradite Andrei Lugovoi – a suspect in one of the most bizarre murder cases of all time.
It all started with the alleged murder of Alexander Litvinenko, a sometime Russian “dissident” who made a career out of hurling the most fantastic charges against Vladimir Putin. Litvinenko was the Rosie O’Donnell of Russian politics, albeit with much less visibility than the loquacious American television personality: Litvinenko regularly accused Putin of launching terrorist attacks on his own people and trying to cover it up by attributing it to those lovable Chechens. Not very believable.
Litvinenko was an employee of exiled Russian billionaire Boris Berezovsky – whose ill-gotten empire included a Russian syndicate of car-dealerships that had more than a nodding acquaintance with the Chechen Mafia – but was being slowly cut out of the money pipeline. Big-hearted Boris, who had initially put him on the payroll as anti-Putin propagandist, was evidently getting sick of him, and the out-of-work “dissident” was reportedly desperate for money. Litvinenko had several “business meetings” with Lugovoi in the months prior to his death, and, according to this report, he hatched a blackmail scheme targeting several well-known Russian tycoons and government officials. Litvinenko was also a partisan of the Chechen cause, and some reports have him converting to Islam on his deathbed.How he got to his deathbed, however, remains the most baffling aspect of this case – he was poisoned with a massive dose of polonium-210, a radioactive substance used for nuclear triggers, among other things, which could only have been stolen from a large-scale production facility, in all likelihood one owned and operated by a state entity. Russia is a prime source of this substance.
If Litvinenko was poisoned, it was the clumsiest assassination in all of recorded history, because the assassins left a radioactive trail that stretched from Germany to Heathrow airport and from there snaked across Europe, contaminating airliners, hotels, private homes, and god knows where else: hundreds were examined for polonium-210 traces.
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=11320