Polonium 210 at Berezovsky's office

News Item - Financial Times: Traces of the radioactive substance believed to have killed a former Russian spy have been found in an office belonging to Boris Berezovsky, the former oligarch, and other locations in London, it emerged yesterday. Police investigating the death from poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko last week are understood to have detected traces in the office in Down Street, Mayfair. A spokesman for the multi-millionaire exile said Mr Litvinenko had visited Mr Berezovsky within hours of a lunch on November 1 when he is thought to have ingested polonium 210.

David Seaton's News Links
Curiouser and curiouser, as Alice used to say. Again, for me, finding myself in full agreement with Pat Buchanan is one of the strange side effects of the war in Iraq and the endless disasters that flow from it. Buchanan asks the correct question: why would Putin shoot himself in the foot so clumsily? What is objective fact is that Putin has started deliveries on the TOR antiaircraft missiles to Iran that, according to Israeli sources, will make it impossible for Israel and or the USA to attack Iran when fully deployed within the next six months. And we saw from Haaretz that the Litvinenko story immediately connected to Tel-Aviv and Yukos oligarchs. To follow these lines of investigation, it is very useful to take the "license number" of all the commentators that are howling for Putin's blood before there is any hard evidence to link him with Litvinenko's death and then determine their previous position on the war in Iraq. A lot could be learned from this. As Buchanan says, "America has a vital interest in this Scotland Yard investigation. What it discovers may tell us more about the character of the man into whose eyes George Bush claimed to have stared, and seen his soul, or it may tell us who the real enemies of this country are, who are out to restart the Cold War, and perhaps another hot one.". DS

Patrick Buchanan: Is Putin Being Set Up? - Creators Syndicate
Abstract: What benefit could Putin conceivably realize from the London killing of an enemy of his regime, who had just become a British citizen? Why would the Russian president, at the peak of his popularity, with his regime awash in oil revenue and himself playing a strong hand in world politics, risk a breach with every Western nation by ordering the public murder of a man who was more of a nuisance than a threat to his regime? Litvinenko, after all, made his sensational charges against the Kremlin "that the KGB blew up the Moscow apartment buildings, not Chechen terrorists, as a casus belli for a war on Chechnya and that he had refused a KGB order to assassinate oligarch Boris Berezovsky" in the late 1990s. Of late, Litvinenko has been regarded as a less and less credible figure, with his charges of KGB involvement in 9-11 and complicity in the Danish cartoons mocking Muhammad that ignited the Muslim firestorm. Yet, listening to some Western pundits on the BBC and Fox News, one would think Putin himself poisoned Litvinenko. Who else, they ask, could have acquired polonium 210, the rare radioactive substance used to kill Litvinenko? Who else had the motive to eliminate the ex-agent who had dedicated his life to exposing the crimes of the Kremlin? Indeed, no sooner had Litvinenko expired than his collaborator in anti-Putin politics, Alex Goldfarb, was in front of the television cameras reading Litvinenko's deathbed statement charging Putin with murder: "You may succeed in silencing one man, but the howl of protest from around the world will reverberate, Mr. Putin, in your ears for the rest of your life. ... You may succeed in silencing me, but that silence comes at a price. You have shown yourself to be as barbaric and ruthless as your most hostile critics have claimed." Litvinenko's statement is awfully coherent and eloquent for a man writhing in a death agony. But if he did not write it, who did? All of which leads me to conclude Putin is being set up, framed for a crime he did not commit. But then, if Putin did not order the killing, who did? Who else could have acquired the polonium 210? Who else would kill Litvinenko to make Putin a pariah? These are the questions Scotland Yard, which also seems skeptical that Putin had a hand in this bizarre business, has begun to ask. As the predictable effect of Litvinenko's death has been to put a cloud of suspicion over Putin and a chill over Russian relations with the West, one must ask: To whose benefit is the discrediting of Putin? Who would seek a renewal of the Cold War? (...) America has a vital interest in this Scotland Yard investigation. What it discovers may tell us more about the character of the man into whose eyes George Bush claimed to have stared, and seen his soul, or it may tell us who the real enemies of this country are, who are out to restart the Cold War, and perhaps another hot one. READ IT ALL