Litvinenko – Worth More Dead Than Alive By Finian Cunningham

[Proserpina]

http://sputniknews.com/columnists/20160121/1033511869/litvinenko-worth-dead-than-alive.html

So now Russian President is a cold-blooded assassin, as well as Europe’s “new Hitler”, the saboteur of civilian airliners, sponsor of drug abuse in sports and the friend of Middle East butcher-dictators. Can the list of demonic epithets for the Russian leader get any longer? Just when you think it couldn’t, the good old British master of dirty tricks pulls out the “evil assassin” card...Putin is fingered for ordering the murder of Alexander Litvinenko, a former member of Russia’s security service FSB.

The British so-called public inquiry published this week only said Putin “probably” ordered the killing of Litvinenko in London nearly 10 years ago. But the intended innuendo implanted in the public mind is plain: Putin is an assassin. As the Russian Foreign Ministry said in derisory response to the British report, it is all so predictable. The politicization of a criminal matter is so flagrantly transparent, it is almost cringe-making in its clumsiness. The inquiry was ordered by the British government in October 2014, and is anything but “public”. It is based on secret evidence presented behind closed doors by anonymous British intelligence figures.

No verifiable proof worthy of a proper legal court is presented. It is based entirely on “circumstantial”, that is subjective, inference by a former British judge sitting in private, but who is then given ample media exposure to broadcast his “findings”. To call this a “judicial ruling” is a farce and an insult to the public’s intelligence. Yet following the announcement of the inquiry’s “conclusions”, the British government immediately censured Russia over “a blatant and unacceptable breach of international law”. This is not only typical British arrogance, it is a dangerous, reckless misuse of a country’s dubious legal procedures to project an international political jurisdiction...The corny Cold War stereotypes of “ex-KGB spies seeking revenge” is the first giveaway that this is a “psyops job”, in addition to the scripted political reaction by the British government. This latest smear fits consistently with the long-running running Western-led propaganda vendetta against Vladimir Putin...Of the many absurdities in the British report on the death of Litvinenko, perhaps the main one is the alleged use of radioactive Polonium as a lethal poison...if, as the British claim, it was the work of cold-blooded, professional Russian assassins under orders from their bosses in the Kremlin the fatal contradiction in this claim is that the apparent murder was carried out with extraordinary amateurishness. Traces of radioactive polonium were allegedly found in the London hotels where the accused Russian men stayed and even the planes they travelled on. If professional assassins were to use radioactive poison they would keep the lethal dose in a lead capsule to prevent emission of radioactivity. Our putative Russian assassins in London must have been throwing the deadly substance around themselves like aftershave, if we are to believe the findings of the British judge.

On the contrary, what careless radioactive traces in hotels, planes and elsewhere strongly suggest is that someone was laying an incriminating path to frame up the Russian men. And even at that we don’t really know if traces of radioactivity were actually found because, as noted the un-public nature of the British inquiry was based entirely on secret, unverifiable “evidence”. This is the same kind of legal “standard” that the West uses to accuse Russian warplanes of bombing hospitals in Syria or Russian tanks rolling across Ukraine – with no verifiable evidence. It’s all down to politicized assertion and bombast...Who is to say that his British handlers did not bump off the Russian “former spy” with their own supply of radioactive polonium? And given Litvinenko’s personal umbrage with the Russian government for being sacked from the FSB, he could be relied on by the British to give a plausible-sounding death bed statement imputing Putin for his demise...This has all the hallmarks of a time-honored British psychological operation. Pile up the smears to then undermine the moral authority of your opponent in order that concessions can be extracted.

For the British, Alexander Litvinenko is definitely worth more dead than alive.

It also sounds like the antics of J. Edgar Hoover. Exploding cigars for Castro, etc...

[Proserpina]

1. Comments on the above:

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article44010.htm

One of the interesting things about the report is the identification of the so-called Polonium 210. The scientist that supposedly made the id is never named nor is the laboratory nor is the method by which the tests were conducted. Scientific enquiry requires that all of these things be named so that the result can be duplicated in any other lab in the world.

Polonium 210 is the last step in the decay of Uranium and with a half life of 138 days decays to Lead. So given the time spans it is unlikely that Polonium would have been discovered anywhere. Moreover the so-called evidence for the detection of the Polonium was a Geiger counter tube count. The problem with that is the Geiger counter counts all background radiation from any source whatever. Go to a fruit market and you would be surprised to learn that fruit and vegetables are also alpha emitters. SO whatever the Geiger counter was picking up some months later is certainly an unknown. Yet the report says they swabbed the surfaces and found Polonium. How that was done, by who and by what methodology is not given. As science frankly it does not pass the smell test.

The traces of Polonium in the hotel where the alleged assassins were staying is a dead give-away. This stuff is exceedingly rare and a professional assassin with access to that kind of poison would never be identified so easily. You certainly wouldn't be finding traces of it in the hotel the assassins stayed at.

The British claims are laughable. If Putin wanted to kill the guy why would he go thru this idiotic radiation poisoning scheme that obviously requires access to very hard to get materials and leaves the victim able to talk for a couple of weeks before they die and that clearly has propaganda value as we now see. Why wouldn't they just arrange to shoot the guy and be done with it. Or use some other poison in his tea. Surely if someone is doing this on orders from putin they could supply them with some kind of poison that is far more common and more difficult to claim had to come from Putin. The reasonable conclusion here is the British were the assassins and did it this way to lay a path to Russia.

Putin is extremely popular with the people in Russia. He is also liked by many in the West as well. Naturally the West does not like this & wishes to destroy his reputation. I can't think of any other Western leader who enjoys the same popularity.......except for the new Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, with the Canadian public....so far.

That the UK is behind the murder and frame up makes sense, they also have a nice supply of such dastardly substances and not so much use for them as they have all the nuclear weapons they can handle already. though not sure of the science here, is it a fuel of reactors or a necessary ingredient for bomb making ? either way, they have handy access and these never ending false flag murders to further their little causes. Plus, if 2 FSB agents met for tea, they obviously had easy access to the guy and likely plenty of opportunity to snuff him in a variety of ways. So why this stupid way that might point fingers back at them. Not very likely.

[DetlefK]

4. Re:

Re the first comment:
1. The commenter has obviously no idea how science works. All these double-check things and the posting of everything is done when it comes to proving that your experiments are correct. But we aren't talking about a scientific experiment here. This was a criminal investigation. There is no procedural obligation whatsoever to make their tests "repeatable".
2. The commenter has obviously never used a Geiger-counter. There is a clear difference between radioactive materials and naturally occuring radioactivity. And the most radioactive substances you can find in real-life are granite kitchen-counters and cement. Funny how this self-appointed science-expert doesn't know that.

Re the thrid comment:
Why, oh why, would someone possibly want a traitor to suffer a slow and gruesome death?
And why would they use a method for which there is absolutely no possible cure within the few horrible weeks that the victim has left to live?

Re the fourth comment:
Putin popular in the West. Citation needed.

Re the fifth comment:
Yeah, because the UK is the only country with radioactive materials.
"these never ending false flag murders to further their little causes." Citation needed.

[DetlefK]

2. AHAHAHAHA! Sputniknews complains about spyops with a spyops-article. HAHAHAHA.

Who called Putin the "new Hitler"?

"Saboteur of civilian airliners"? I guess that is an intentionally ridiculous take on what happened to the airliner that was shot down over Ukraine?

"Friend of Middle East butcher-dictators"? Hey, let's ask Putin if he's friends with Assad and let's ask Syrians whether Assad is a butcher-dictator? What? The Assad-regime is bombing civilian areas and tens of thousands of Syrians have been disappeared into torture-dungeons? How dare anybody bring that up! It's a partisan attack on Putin!




The article complains about "innuendo implanted into the public's mind". And goes on with this:
"the good old British master of dirty tricks", "politicization of a criminal matter" (a former secret-agent who became a problem for a government was killed with a nigh-impossible to obtain substance), "not only typical British arrogance", "This has all the hallmarks of a time-honored British psychological operation." ...

Oh, and what a counter-argument: It cannot possibly have been professional russian assassins because they didn't properly handle the radioactive material. (Sputniknews cannot possibly be a propaganda-outlet: Their literary methods are way too clumsy for that. If Sputniknews were a propaganda-outlet, it would use far more subtle means of psychological manipulation.)
Wait, professional russian assassins would be so good that they would handle the Polonium in accordance with safety-standards, but they wouldn't be that good to leave a false trail of clumsiness to pretend that they aren't professional assassins?

Yeah, right. It could only have been russian assassins if they had had juuuuuust the right level of competence. Neither too good, nor too bad.




"Russian tanks rolling across Ukraine"
Too bad it's really different to verify witness-accounts in a warzone. Like Ukrainians reporting of soldiers in russian uniforms, russian soldiers going "on vacation" in a warzone, a russian soldier posting a selfie from inside a military vehicle with metadata that locates him in Ukraine, the ZDF made a documentary where a russian soldier reported fighting in Ukraine, the russian government took security-steps to make it impossible to know whether the russian army is actually fighting in Ukraine or not, Putin said in an interview that military personell is in Ukraine but refused to elaborate how many and what they are doing there...





"Pile up the smears to then undermine the moral authority of your opponent..."
Oh, nice. Just the other day Sputniknews had an article how the military commanders of the US are evil psychopaths who are always wrong. Oh, and ISIS is a mercenary-force of the US.

[Proserpina]

3. 12 Prominent People Who Compared Putin To Hitler Circa 1938

http://www.businessinsider.com/people-who-compared-putin-to-hitler-2014-5

Here are 12 prominent instances where Putin has been compared to Hitler recently:

• Prince Charles to a woman whose ancestors were murdered in the Holocaust: “And now Putin is doing just about the same as Hitler.”

• Former Secretary of State and 2016 presidential contender Hillary Clinton: “Now if this sounds familiar, it’s what Hitler did back in the 30s. ... Hitler kept saying German citizens abroad were not being treated right. I must go and protect my people and that’s what’s gotten everybody so nervous.”

• German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble: "We know all about that from history. Those are the methods that Hitler used to take over the Sudetenland."

• Former Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili: "In the 1930s, Nazi Germany occupied part of neighboring Czechoslovakia under the pretext of protecting ethnic Germans. Today, Russia is claiming to protect ethnic Russians… in Crimea or Georgian territories… Many in the West are talking about the need to reach some kind of compromise with Russia, an option that smacks of Munich 80 years ago."

• Vladislav Inozemtsev of The Moscow Times: "Like Hitler before him, Putin has no new ideas on how to create a stable global system in place of the current one. He only wants to secure new territory as Hitler tried to guarantee a vast Lebensraum for the German people."

• Former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezisnki called Putin "a partially comical imitation of (former Italian Prime Minister Benito) Mussolini and a more menacing reminder of Hitler."

• Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.): ""If Putin is allowed to go into a sovereign nation on behalf of Russian-speaking people, this is the same thing that Hitler did prior to World War II. "

• Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.): "Claims that [Russia] needed to move into a neighboring country to protect an ethnic group tied to them is certainly similar to the argument that Hitler made in the 1930s.”

• Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.): "If you could go back in time, would you have allowed Adolf Hitler to host the Olympics in Germany? To have the propaganda coup of inviting the world into Nazi Germany and putting on a false front?"

• Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper: "We haven't seen this kind of behavior since the Second World War."

• Russian activist and former chess champion Garry Kasparov: "Intentionally or not, the Putin regime has followed the Berlin 1936 playbook quite closely for Sochi."

• Washington Post Editorial Writer Charles Lane: "Superficially plausible though the Hitler-Putin comparison may be, just how precisely does it fit? In some respects, alarmingly so."

Additional supporting links:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/charles-lane-is-vladimir-putin-truly-a-modern-day-hitler/2014/03/05/1666bd12-a47a-11e3-8466-d34c451760b9_story.html

http://www.theglobalist.com/uncomfortable-parallels-hitler-and-putin/

http://observer.com/2014/12/is-vladimir-putin-cool-or-hitler-or-both/

http://www.forbes.com/sites/currentevents/2014/04/16/is-vladimir-putin-another-adolf-hitler/#7a031433709f

There are more...but I'm sure such a dedicated researcher as you are would know how to google your own supporting information, if you were actually interested in anything approaching reality.

[DetlefK]

5. Oh, wow. You just disproved the least important of my 7 arguments.

[Proserpina]

6. NO, I proved mine, that there is a concerted propaganda campaign to equate

the President of Russia with the little Austrian Corporal in the Western, US and UK dominated press.

[DetlefK]

7. Any comment on my examples how Sputniknews is spyops accusing others of spyops?

[Proserpina]

8. No links, no comments

[DetlefK]

9. A fair warning in advance: You will dismiss my links outright as western propaganda.

None of the links I would use would be from Russia Today or Sputniknews.

[Proserpina]

10. OH, you mean, I already posted them?

[DetlefK]

13. I'm so tired with you willfully ignorant, self-righteous conspiracy-theorists.

Goole "Assad Putin friends".

http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2015/09/economist-explains-22
Tight ties between Russia and Syria stretch back more than four decades. During the cold war, a newly independent Syria aligned with the Eastern block. ... A lucrative arms pipeline started flowing; when Bashar came to power, he expanded the contracts, turning Russia into Syria's biggest supplier. The Syrian government also allowed the Soviet Union to build a resupply station at the port of Tartus, which is now Russia's sole remaining naval base in the Middle East and on the Mediterranean sea. Syria is also an important Russian military-intelligence base and listening post. Cultural connections elevated the relationship beyond the obvious strategic and commercial interests. Scores of Syrians came to study in the Soviet Union; many married and raised mixed families.

Yet Russia's support for Mr Assad has less to do with Syria per se, than with the West. The Kremlin watched the Arab Spring in horror, seeing uprisings against authoritarian leaders as American conspiracies. While Mr Putin harbors no particular personal affection for Mr Assad, the Syrian leader has become a symbol of resisting "colour revolutions" and attempts at "regime change". Having backed Mr Assad thus far, allowing him to fall now would mean that Mr Putin is "retreating under American pressure, which is the one thing he cannot do," argues Georgy Mirsky of Moscow's Higher School of Economics.


Google "Assad dungeons"
https://www.hrw.org/news/2011/05/04/assads-dungeons
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/01/they-were-torturing-to-kill-inside-syrias-death-machine-caesar

Assad's regime is torturing people to death.

And Putin is supporting that guy because he wants to look tough.

Conclusion: Putin is a "friend of Middle East butcher-dictators" and Sputniknews is talking bullshit.





And for Ukraine?

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/30/world/europe/ukraine-russia-donetsk.html?_r=0
There are people in russian uniforms running around in Ukraine.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/08/28/russians-troops-fighting-in-ukraine-naw-just-on-vacation/
Russian soldiers fighting Ukraine forces on vacation.

http://www.npr.org/2015/06/21/416208144/snapshot-sleuthing-confirms-russian-military-presence-in-ukraine
http://www.businessinsider.com/russian-soldier-ukraine-2014-7?IR=T
Russian soldiers posting selfies from Ukraine.

http://www.huffingtonpost.de/boris-reitschuster/putin-zdf-doku_b_8854296.html
(article in german)
The german public TV-channel ZDF makes a documentary and interviews a Russian who says he fought in Ukraine. Russia immediately denounced the interview as fabrication and launched a media-campaign to brand the ZDF as liars. In their desperation they even fabricated a quote of german journalist known to be critical of Russia.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/paulroderickgregory/2015/09/02/if-russian-soldiers-arent-dying-in-ukraine-why-did-putin-make-casualty-stats-a-state-secret/#4acdbd785519
Russia declares the number of russian dead soldiers a state-secret... just as questions pop up whether russian soldiers died in Ukraine. What a coincidence.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/dec/17/vladimir-putin-admits-russian-military-presence-ukraine
Putin says there is russian personell active in Ukraine, just not regular soldiers.


Conclusion: Sputniknews is talking bullshit.





And Sputniknews laments about badmouthing and propaganda while doing exactly that. See my examples cited in a previous post and this:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10027543028

Conclusion: Sputniknews is talking bullshit.





And now, please explain to me why you consider Sputniknews a trustworthy news-source.

[uhnope]

15. willfully ignorant, self-righteous conspiracy-theorists.

not to mention fascism-supporting and anti-democratic

[ErisDiscordia]

16. Victoria Nuland

[DetlefK]

17. Yes, that sounds like a legit name.

Care to make an actual argument backed up by sources?


Or do you have evidence that despite my examples of propaganda Sputniknews really isn't propaganda?

[uhnope]

14. awesome comeback. nt

[geek tragedy]

11. Hannah Bell or Go West Young Man? nt

[Odin2005]

12. Pure Putinist Propaganda.

[Oneironaut]

18. Sputnik news is hilarious

They've gone into full "Leave Putin Alone!!1!" mode.

Also, the homophobic autocratic thug ruins his own reputation.