at-Largely

"Many dark actors playing games," again?

Yes, I have no idea what this means and yes, I have a very bad feeling about this death:

"MANCHESTER, England (AP) - A city police chief who led an investigation into charges that Britain cooperated with secret CIA flights to transport terrorism suspects without formal proceedings has been found dead, his deputy said Tuesday.

Manchester Chief Constable Michael Todd, 50, was found dead in Snowdonia, about 240 miles northwest of London, Deputy Chief Constable Dave Whatton said. He had been missing since going out for a walk Monday during his day off.

Whatton said the body, which was found Tuesday afternoon, had not yet been formally identified but he believed it was Todd."

What amazes me is how similar the "missing after going for a walk" thing is to Dr. David Kelly's death. If you recall:

"At about 15:00, Kelly told his wife that he was going for a walk, as he did every day. He appears to have gone directly to an area of woodlands known as Harrowdown Hill about a mile away from his home, where he allegedly ingested up to 29 tablets of painkillers (co-proxamol, an analgesic drug). He then allegedly cut his left wrist with a knife he had owned since his youth."

I am incredibly curious how this will play out, as we still don't have solid confirmation that it is in fact Todd.

Terror Roundup Saturday...

Is it me or does this level of threats and "suspicious packages" as well as actual attacks appear higher than normal? I will group by color those that are threats (red), those that are still unknown (blue), and those that are actual incidents (black). So, over the last few days:

California: apartment complex evacuated after envelope with suspicious powder found

California: 2 home-made explosive devices found at UC Davis

Florida: grenade thrown into a nail salon

Mass: company gets bombing threat

Nebraska: federal judge gets suspicious package at home

Nevada: police investigating Ricin scare

New York: small bomb sets off explosion at Times Square

North Dakota: one bomb goes off, police looking for others in Power Lakes

Pennsylvania: convention center evacuated after bomb threat

Ohio: voting disrupted after a polling location gets bomb threat

Oregon: court house evacuated after Anthrax threat and letter

Rhode Island: URI building evacuated because of a bomb threat

South Carolina: passport office on lock-down after a box of passports applications is found to have "white powder."

Tennessee: bomb threat at Walmart

Texas: neighborhood evacuated after a suspicious package is found under a bench

Texas: store evacuated after bomb-threat

Utah: Ricin found

And on incident in Canada:

Explosives found and detonated by police

##

Is this out of the norm, if anyone knows?

Mukasey's law...

We have Godwin's law, which argues that:

"As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one" (Wiki).

Now we have something else, something I never thought an American leader would say in public, let alone argue in front of Congress. What we now have is Mukasey's law, which I will define as such:

"When a democracy is in decline, the increasingly illegal and immoral acts of its leaders will be justified by the same arguments used by the Nazis to justify their illegal and immoral acts."

The Attorney General of the United States quite literally turned to the Nazi defense in order to argue why he won't allow the Department of Justice to investigate war crimes committed by US military and intelligence personnel under the orders of the US President. The argument that Mukasey presents is summarized in this Boston Globe article as follows:

"Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey said yesterday that he will not allow the Justice Department to investigate whether CIA interrogators broke an antitorture law when they subjected detainees to simulated drownings, a controversial interrogation technique known as waterboarding that the Bush administration this week acknowledged it has used in the war on terrorism.                                                        

Testifying before the House Judiciary Committee, Mukasey said it would be inappropriate to investigate the interrogators because the Justice Department had issued secret memos concluding that President Bush's wartime powers made waterboarding and warrantless surveillance legally permissible.

"Essentially, it would tell people, you rely on a Justice Department opinion as part of a program, then you will be subject to criminal investigation when and if the tenure of the person who wrote the opinion changes or, indeed, the political winds change," Mukasey said. "And that's not something that I think would be appropriate, and it's not something I will do."'

In other words, what Mukasey is saying is that the White House, DOD, and CIA all relied on a bad legal opinion of John Yoo (the DOJ hack),  and as a result, they should not be held accountable.  Before I get to the truly sinister background of this argument, let me first point out that every department's, cabinet's, and even White House's own legal council signed off on the legal permission slip to torture issued forth by John Yoo.

In fact, David Addington, Dick Cheney's legal council was promoted. Alberto Gonzales, the White House council was also promoted. Yoo went off to get a full professorship at Berkley. Not only have the legal minds behind the US torture program escaped accountability, so have their leaders and the actors who carried out the orders of those leaders. Everyone from inception to execution has been given a pass. And even though Yoo is being blamed now entirely, he too has yet to face any questions. He has not been disbarred even.  It is a slap in the face of justice to watch this charade play out on the public stage, for the world to see.

More importantly, it is a failed argument already tested in the world court by morally deranged politicians, lawyers, doctors, and others we have come to call war criminals.

You see, during the Nuremberg trials, the legal minds who crafted legal advice for Hitler and his machine of evil were charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity.  Moreover, the Nazi leaders who used those legal rulings to issue orders and the underlings who subsequently followed them were also found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity.  Even  German leaders of industry were put on trial and convicted for crimes against humanity because they aided their government in the "war effort."

In other words, at every stage - from planning to execution - everyone who made it possible for people to be tortured, disappeared, and murdered were held accountable. The Nuremberg trials showed the future that the evils of history could be avoided -  if punished and diligently watched for - and needed to be avoided if humanity was to survive.

Yet we are to believe that Dick Cheney's push for torture chambers all over the world, the use of secret flights (via industry help) to kidnap and transport prisoners from chamber to chamber and ultimately to grave, the destruction of evidence clearly documenting these crimes being committed, and the litany of other crimes in between that allow one man's evil vision to be realized has been defended by Mukasey as the fault of a single lawyer giving bad legal advice?

My god, what have we become when the only argument available to a government claiming to be a democracy is the argument used by Nazis to justify their crimes? Think about this and let it sink in fully. Really consider this.

And if your mind fails to realize what I am talking about, then let me once again share photos taken by our own people showing exactly what Mukasey is including in his defense of simulated drowning. You do realize that when he says "waterboarding," what he means is the whole host of crimes of which waterboarding is only the most visible, right?

Start with the Italian...

There is a fascinating article out in the Guardian (h/t to Chris for the heads up) about the Litvinenko case, which I had covered for a while.  First let's go through the main points of what my investigation uncovered:

"Former KGB officer Alexander Litvinenko, who passed away late last week from what many intelligence officials have indicated they believe to be a state-sponsored assassination, was likely the victim of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki (SVR)"

And likely FSB IMHO, by I digress - as I often do:

"Specifically, two former Cold War CIA officers, who still on occasion provide consulting work for the CIA, point to the S Directorate of SVR, which is in charge of black operations and other allegedly highly illegal transnational activities. They believe that the murders are closely tied to terrorist activities within Russia, and likely do involve Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Litvinenko died of radiation poisoning from a rare and highly concentrated isotope, polonium-210. It is alleged that prior to the poisoning he had been in receipt of documents that were also in the possession of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya when she was found dead of multiple gunshot wounds in her Moscow apartment building in October of this year."

<snip>

"However, one British intelligence officer, who wished to remain anonymous given that the investigation is still ongoing, suggested a different possibility. "You should start," says this source, "with the Italian." The Italian in question is Mario Scaramella, the contact whom Litvinenko met at the sushi bar to discuss the case of Anna Politkovskaya.

Scaramella, an expert on the former Soviet Union, does indeed appear to have both a relationship with the Russian FSB and some knowledge of radioactive materials. According to an account by BBC International Monitoring, originally from an Italian source, in 2004 Scaramella brought to the attention of Italian police an attempt to smuggle highly enriched uranium into Italy"

And I did...

Suspected Polonium Hit-Man Elected to Russian Parliament...

Well isn't this special?

"With the nationalist Liberal Democratic Party clearing the 7 percent threshold to enter Parliament, one of its new leaders, Andrei K. Lugovoi, is expected to receive a seat.

Mr. Lugovoi is the former K.G.B. officer accused in Britain in the fatal radiation poisoning of Alexander V. Litvinenko. Britain has sought Mr. Lugovoi’s extradition, but Russia has refused. Once he enters Parliament, Mr. Lugovoi will have immunity from prosecution in Russia.

Among the most startling results from the election Sunday were those in the war-torn republic of Chechnya, which is run by a strongman leader installed by Mr. Putin. United Russia won 99.4 percent of the vote in Chechnya, officials said, with a turnout of 99.5 percent."

Thanks to dqueue for pointing this out in the comments.

'I feared I'd end up dead in the woods like Dr Kelly'

Posted by Kathy

From the Daily Mail:

"An EU expert on biological warfare has told how she fears ending up 'dead in the woods' like scientist Dr David Kelly after an alleged campaign of intimidation by members of MI6 and the CIA.

Jill Dekker, a bio-defence expert based in Brussels, has reported a string of sinister incidents – including the parking of a hearse outside her house – after making a speech critical of British and American policy in the Middle East."

<snip>

"Dr Dekker says the 'intimidation' against her started in March, as she was flying to Florida to give a speech on Syria's weapons programme to an intelligence summit. She says she was subjected to a 'heavy-handed' interrogation by a man she suspects of being a British intelligence operative.

She believes the speech made her powerful enemies because she argued that billions of dollars spent by the US government to develop a smallpox vaccine has been wasted because scientists – including British experts – have used a different viral strain to the one she believes is being developed in Damascus."

For more on Dr. Kelly, see Here.

Raimondo attacks...

Update at end

##

Justin Raimondo - whom I respected a great deal until yesterday, wrote an article claiming that the "Russians were framed" by the Neo-Cons in the Litvinenko death. I wrote a very long comment about Raimondo's piece, during which I repeatedly stated that I respected his work and him as a person. And what you folks don't know, is that I sent him a very kind email explaining why I wrote my piece and again expressing my respect for him and his work. What I wrote can be read HERE.

In response to my polite explanation as to why Raimondo's assertions are not accurate, he in turn wrote a  commentary that was  basically more of an insult than an honest response. He titles his piece Litvinenko Revisionism, which I read as the pejorative, in which facts are manipulated for illegitimate reasons. Clearly, the respect I had expressed for Raimondo in my piece was not returned in kind in his own work.

His piece does little to address the key points I make, and he does use trite and often sexist cutsie language to address me: "the lovely Larisa," or "My dear Larisa," and so forth. We are not doing a class on Nabokovian stylings here, so the lilting language is really unnecessary. But I digress as I often do. In response to Raimondo's response (to my response and so forth), his fan club stopped by to spam my comments. Lucky for me I have set up an approval system for comments, so I managed to delete most of the garbage and left some of the more rational posts. So, to make a long blog entry even longer, here is my latest response to Justin's hallucinations:

Enough with the Putin hug festival...

UPDATE: AT END OF POST

(note: let me apologize in advance as this thing turned into a novel in length)

##

Seriously, if one more person defends Putin based on the single reason that Putin stands up to Bush, I shall pull my hair out. Putin standing up to Bush is like two crime syndicates hashing it out, neither one or the other falling into cleanly defined categories of  "good" and "bad."

It does not give me pleasure to do this since I respect the writer a great deal. Justin Raimondo and I have differing political positions, he is a Libertarian, I am a Humanist, but we respect one another and admire the work that the other does.

But the latest from this fine writer and thinker is really disconcerting. Raimondo believes that the "Russians" have been framed for the Litvinenko murder.  By the Russians, he means Putin and the FSB, who are really a mix of KGB and organized crime elements, sadly parading their Russian roots and exploiting their nationality for criminal ends. They happen to be Russian by accident of birth.

Kind of like Cheney and the OSP just happen to be "Americans"  by birth, when in fact they are a mixture of neo-fascism and organized crime.  I just wanted to point out the obvious flaw in the "Russians framed" analysis before we delve into the factual problems of Raimondo's analysis.  Raimondo is, again, someone whom I respect greatly, but who is doing a great injustice to truth by his latest piece. Let's begin with the faulty premise that the victim of a crime should be tarred and feathered postmortem:

Busy Poring over NIE

Reads rather strangely to be quite honest. You can take a look Here. I am really a bit stunned at what it says and how it describes things. Will post more about this later.

Britain expels 4 Russian diplomats...

Following up on my earlier post, 4 Russian diplomats are being expelled from Britain:

"A flavour of the Cold War returned last night after Britain announced it would expel four Russian diplomats in response to Moscow's refusal to hand over the ex-KGB spy accused of murdering fellow former agent Alexander Litvinenko in London.

Vladimir Putin's government swiftly reacted by branding the move "immoral" and "provocative", warning there would be "the most serious consequences".

The expectation at Westminster is that Moscow will retaliate and announce tit-for-tat expulsions of UK staff from missions in Russia. Sources expected a response as early as this morning."

How is Mother Russia taking this news?

"Russia heavily criticized the move, with Foreign Ministry spokesman Mikhail Kamynin warning that the 'provocative acts will not go unanswered, and will have serious consequences for British-Russian relations'."

Um, Condi... now would be a good time to practice your Russian and diplomacy skills.