A Place to Stand

The story about the alleged assassination of Litvinenko by Putin's intelligence service has been developing with much more heat than light. It sarted with the papers telling us that he had been poisoned at a meeting with Russians in his hotel/a bar & grew from there.

The Mail on Sunday claims he became ill after having a meeting with an associate at a restaurant in Piccadilly.

The Sunday Times says he had three times the maximum limit of deadly metal thallium in his body.

This, according to the Sunday Telegraph, was "an audacious attempt" to murder a fierce critic of President Putin.

In due course it turned out that he had no thallium & that far from being a serious critic he was Berezovsky's flack whose "revelations" included Putin's responsibility for the London Underground bombs & had a long history of paedophilia.

Over the years, Litvinenko had charged, among many other things, that the Kremlin had trained al-Qaeda's top leaders prior to 9/11; that Putin was behind last year's subway bombings in London; that the FSB was responsible for the 2002 Moscow theater massacre and the horrific 2004 slaughter at the Beslan schoolhouse; and that Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi was a long-time KGB agent. This summer, when Putin was filmed playfully smooching a small boy's belly, Litvinenko rushed out a piece declaring that Putin was a paedophile - a proven fact that he and other FSB officials had known for years, he said, although he didn't explain why he had refrained from revealing this damning information before.

Since then we have been informed by his wife that he was almost unconscious well brore his deatn, that his dying words were a particularly coying speech against Putin & that wrote a letter saying the same & signed it as he died.

None of this seems to surprise our media, but after all they pretended to believe the government story about Milosevic's murder too.

What also really gets me is that though we keep being told that this that person/place has been found to have a "significant" amount of radiation the police never mention figures. It should be obvious from readings of Po whether we are dealing with an amount spilled, or an amount carried from somewhere else on boots etc, or whether it is from a physical contact with somebody.

Another minor point is that these allegedly patriotic pro-Putin assassins traveled by British Airways. This is not particularly impossible but it does seem unlikely.

An alternative scenario which, for some reason has not been mentioned in our MSM would be that the poisoning occurred when Litvinenko & his Italian friend, probably in the sushi bar were handling & possibly opened a vial of the stuff. This would mean that far from being the victim of the Russian government he was part of a conspiracy to use it against the Russian government. If so most other things seem to fit with themain difficulty being where did whoever supplied it get it. Here we come to this article in Asia Times involving an actual expert (Yale Professor) which ends.

KKT: Well, there's plenty of polonium-210 available - any place there's a bomb-maintenance facility - and it's always manufactured. It is a sophisticated thing to know that polonium-210 is dangerous, but that's been known because it did a lot of harm to people throughout the Manhattan Project.

Beyond that, I have no idea. I was surprised that somebody was clever enough to look for polonium-210 during the investigation. If you were looking for alpha emitters, there is a diagnostic energy for polonium-210 no one would mistake. But the act of looking into that shows some insight into what might have been used, and I have no idea how they got that insight. Maybe they knew something about this person or the people he hung around with.

Maybe the police did. Maybe the security services told them. Which would raise the question - if our security services knew these guys were or might be handling Polonium, in London & our government is capable of supplying it then did they do so to help this conspiracy to kill Putin's friends?

The police have, however, now officially decided that it was definitely murder rather than an accident. On the other hand when announcing this they said they had made this decision not on the basis of new evidence & that they did not know the means, motive, method or who did it which suggests a rush to judgment. Somewhat different from the Milosevic murder when they did know the means - rifampicin, the motive - the difficulty of convicting without evidence & who had the opportunity - limited to those who were imprisoning him under 24 hour video coverage. On that occasion the Dutch police naturally jumped to the suicide conclusion because that, while obviously untrue, was the politically acceptable one. Have the London police done the same?

Some comments I have put elsewhere. I think,though I have changed my view slightly, I have been more consistent with the developing facts than our official media.

C4 poisoning
http://community.channel4.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/503603557/m/9410035476
Milosevic & the new poisoning storyon Channel 4 forums?

On Tim Worstall http://timworstall.typepad.com/timworstall/2006/11/alexander_litvi.html#comment-25532970

More on "poisoning" http://community.channel4.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/503603557/m/4830019476
Poisoning http://community.channel4.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/503603557/m/4830019476

Poisoning http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=1742832006
"Poisoning" http://scotlandonsunday.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=1751882006

Poisoning http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=1762282006

Both parties poisoned, so who did it http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=1787322006

Poison http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=1808032006

Poisoning http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=1829082006