Litvinenko

[Diomedes]

Bush needs to go first.  He's the bigger villain.

[mussa]

Bush is just an idiot.  His sidekicks are the real villians.  Putin is an ex- KGB spy as we all know and has done unknown countless shady acts with his owns hands and orders.

[MadMarchHare]

Well, so was Litvinenko.  What's your point?
They both may feel they are serving their country's best interest, even if they aren't.  Just like I'm sure GW does (I agree with you, mussa, that Cheney and Rove are the problem).

Hard to tell truth from fiction.  But I don't think a group wanting to implicate Putin/Russia could've gotten their hands on Po210.  It's way too hard to access.  Maybe Putin thought that the London cops would never figure out the poison.  Otherwise, use something more common.  There's plenty of lethal poisons out there, that work quickly enough Litvinenko can't spill his guts before he's martyred.

[QB Eagles]

'Former Russian PM poisoned'

Putin is really settling all family business lately.

[mussa]

Well, so was Litvinenko.  What's your point?
They both may feel they are serving their country's best interest, even if they aren't.  Just like I'm sure GW does (I agree with you, mussa, that Cheney and Rove are the problem).

Hard to tell truth from fiction.  But I don't think a group wanting to implicate Putin/Russia could've gotten their hands on Po210.  It's way too hard to access.  Maybe Putin thought that the London cops would never figure out the poison.  Otherwise, use something more common.  There's plenty of lethal poisons out there, that work quickly enough Litvinenko can't spill his guts before he's martyred.

The point is Putin is russia's president. We were comparing Bush and Putin. 

[Diomedes]

They're comparable...except Bush has brought hella more ruin to the world than Putin could ever dream of..

[Butchers Bill]

They're comparable...except Bush has brought hella more ruin to the world than Putin could ever dream of..

[Diomedes]

150,000 dead innocent Iraqis.
damn near 3000 dead U.S. soldiers
tens of thousands injured
billions wasted and billions funnelled into war making corporations
civil liberties in U.S. abolished
Iraq infrastructure completely demolished


yeah...I'm a drama queen.

[dis12]

Fascinating story. Someone should write a book.

isn't that why you are going to college for journalism?

[Sgt PSN]

Yeah, I'm not buying into the argument that Bush is only guilty of being clueless and that it's the people around him who are really at fault.  Yes, lot's of things happen in the government that the president is unaware of.  No matter how good or bad a president is, there's always going to be shady things going on that he doesn't know about.  It's just the nature of the beast.  But Bush is responsible for a lot of the mistakes being made by this administration.  And the bottom line is he's the friggin President and is ultimately responsible for everything that happens on his watch.  He's had plenty of opportunities to fix his mistakes and he hasn't....because he thinks he's doing the right thing. 

Geez, now I feel like I'm talking about Reid.  And that pisses me off even more. 


FIRE BUSH!!

[MURP]

Litvinenko's Wife tests positive


Mario Scaramella, an Italian security expert who met the Russian exile on the day that he fell ill. - also tests positive

[PhillyPhreak54]

© 2006 WorldNetDaily.com


Alexander Litvinenko before he was poisoned

LONDON – Reports that KGB defector Alexander Litvinenko converted to Islam before his mysterious poisoning with radioactive polonium 210 is raising suspicions that he may have been involved in a plot to smuggle the deadly substance to terrorist groups willing to pay millions even for a gram, Joseph Farah's G2 Bulletin is reporting today.

Scotland Yard detectives are now trying to discover if Litvinenko had any secret links with Islamic extremist terror groups, the London Sunday Express is reporting.

Their biggest fear, the paper reports, is that Litvinenko, who died of polonium-210 poisoning in a London hospital, may have been helping al-Qaida or other extremist groups get hold of radioactive material to be used in a devastating "dirty" atom bomb.

Britain's secret intelligence service MI6 had earlier learned that al-Qaida was prepared to pay $3 million a gram for polonium 210, G2 Bulletin reported last week.

Litvinenko's friend Mario Scaramella now says the late spy helped smuggle radioactive material from Russia to Switzerland in 2000. Litvinenko was also known to have sympathies with Chechen rebels, seeking to break away from Moscow and create an independent Muslim state.

Litvinenko's conversion to Islam was announced by his next-door neighbor, moderate Muslim and Chechen dissident Akhmed Zakayev, who revealed: "He was read to from the Koran the day before he died and told his wife that he wanted to be buried in accordance with Muslim tradition."

Litvinenko's body is still so "radiologically hot" that an autopsy cannot yet be conducted. It is stored in a lead-lined vault in a London morgue.

Polonium 210 has been identified in five separate locations around London.

One is the luxury Millennium Hotel, near the U.S. Embassy. Another is a building in Mayfair that houses the office of Boris Berezovsky, a close friend of Litvinenko, and now an avowed enemy of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

While the government has insisted there is no cause for panic, MI6 and Britain's internal security service, MI5, have jointly launched a top-priority hunt on how further quantities of Polonium 210 could be smuggled by al-Qaida.

The hunt began a week ago in Peshawar. The ancient Pakistan city hosts a joint MI6/CIA surveillance operation supported by America's National Security Agency satellite surveillance.

Using the latest cyber-technology, the intelligence officers in Peshawar picked up a short-burst transmission from somewhere in Peshawar's Old Town. It was in response to a call that appeared to have come from beyond the towering Khyber Pass, possibly from Afghanistan.

The call was automatically recorded on one of the computers in the offices the MI6/CIA team share.

Just as automatically, it was dispatched down the line through cyberspace to GCHQ, the British Government Headquarters in the Cotswold town of Cheltenham. Simultaneously it reached America's NSA at Fort Meade, Md.

The words from Peshawar were part of the trillions of words in 500 languages that the GCHQ/NSA super computers are programmed to listen to, shift, reject or retain so they can be analyzed by the thousands of experts both GCHQ and NSA employ.

By late last week, MI6 knew of al-Qaida's offer to purchase Polonium 210.

[Seabiscuit36]

I have to believe that is a planted story.  Put it out there that he was really a Terrorist. 

[MadMarchHare]

What farging bullshtein.  Come on.  Polonium 210 is an alpha ray emitter.  Alpha rays can't penetrate the dead skin on your body.  The worst it can do, unless it is ingested, is cause chemical burns to the skin.  And that would require significant exposure times.

A group like Al Qaida would want a gamma emitter, like uranium or plutonium.  A dirty bomb with an alpha emitter would be largely useless.

And as a poison, there are a hell of a lot cheaper, mundane and equally effective poisons out there.  Christ, slip a guy a couple grams of acetaminophen (Tylenol) and he'll die of liver failure over the course of about a week.  If you want a guy to suffer....

[mpmcgraw]

So...why exactly did they use Polonium 210?