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Former Spy Poisoned By Radiation In UK
An anonymous reader writes "BBC new is reporting the death of the ex-Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko with a major dose of radioactive polonium-210. But nobody knows how it got there. Suspicions have fallen upon the Russian security services (who deny involvement). The task of the pathologists now is to unpick what really killed him and how it was administered. Quite what techniques they will use to solve this puzzle is unclear." From the article: "A post-mortem examination on Mr Litvinenko has not been held yet. The delay is believed to be over concerns about the health implications for those present at the examination. But Roger Cox from the HPA said a large quantity of alpha radiation emitted from polonium-210 had been detected in Mr Litvinenko's urine."
He's been labelled a heckler, when he may well have a genuine issue at hand. The same thing, perhaps a little more dramatic, happened at a press conference regarding the demise of the Kursk.
When Russia (yes, even modern-day Russia) gets its hands near an investigation, the result is usually indeterminate or irrelevant, never indisputable.
WANRING: This warning is misspelt.
Or more likely, he's just not being honest.
Mr Putin himself has said Mr Litvinenko's death was a tragedy
Mr. Litvinenko was apparantly more than your average former KGB agent - he's accused Putin of pedophilia, among other things. Even if Putin weren't behind this poisoning (which he almost certainly is), he probably wouldn't consider Mr. Litvinenko's death a tragedy at all.
Isn't it strange how Putin's most vocal critics inside Russia are just dropping like flies...
The real question is what seasonings they use to cover up the taste
For the curious, Thallium is odorless and tasteless. I guess animals just don't evolve receptors for substances not usually found in nature.
Now, also what he could mean is that there are not conclusive evidence to tell if was he was killed, or it was accidental (touching dust/old things from work/whatever and then food?), or was an intentional suicide (dont think so, but still odds are not nil)
Of course, this is unrelated with if Putin was sincere or not saying so, just my understanding of that semantic.
Not over the counter, but how about on the internet? Only $69!
Wrong answer. This may be intended as a very public warning to other possible defectors and traitors not to follow in Litvinenko's footsteps. The same deal as the (apocryphal?) story Oleg Penkovsky (GRU double agent in the 60ies) being burnt alive and a film of the execution being shown to all new KGB recruits to discourage disloyalty.
-b.
It is for a death from radiological causes. To kill someone in mere days requires obscenely high doses of radiation,
But as far as I understand it, it is not claimed that he died from the radiation, but from the fact that Polonium is also very toxic.
Interesting question - what if he's found to have some other terminal disease at the autopsy? What if he knew he was going to die within a few months anyway and decided to suicide in a rather spectacular manner that would embarrass the fuck out of the Russian government? Wild speculation here of course.
-b.
I know you're making a joke but this isn't as far fetched as I bet you think it is....It COULD have been done that way. The CEDE for ingested polonium (comitted efective dose equivalent) is an astounding 2,000 mREM/microcurie or 2,000 REM/millicurie (a lethal dose of radiation to 50% of people is only ~500 rem). He would need to ingest only .5-1 millicurie of Po-210 to get a lethal dose and each anti-static brush contains how much Po? .2-.5 millicuries per brush apparently.... I'm not saying that's how it happened, I'm sure the KGB has access to far larger amounts of Po that they would have used but it does give an idea of just how incredibly tiny an amount is needed to do harm. Even a THOUSAND TIMES the lethal dose of .5 mCi would be a mere tenth of a milligram.
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
http://www.cbsnews.com/sections/i_video/main500251 .shtml?id=1760111n
There's a video there of Putin kissing the 5 year old boy's stomach. This started a lot of speculation and I have read that the KGB gathered video from a hotel room proving that he was from years ago. When Putin headed the KGB all these videos obviously disappeared. There is stuff about it on teh web if anyone needs to do some research. I suspect it's true.
spoonerize "magic trackpad"
They did try a Geiger counter but it wouldn't detect alpha radiation. As alpha radiation poisoning is so uncommon and unheard of it wasn't an obvious option, also as alpha radiation wouldn't even escape out of his body through his organs and skin the only way to detect it was if traces of it left his body through other methods - i.e. his urine which is where they eventually found it.
What truly puzzles me here is why exactly any secret service such as the FSB would be stupid enough to poison some Kremlin critic with a really hard to acquire substance such as Polonium. It should be assumed that the British WILL find out what killed Litvinenko, and when it is something as obscure as Polonium, it's got to be the Russians. You're practically implicating yourself by being too good at what you do.
The guy is far more valuable to his cause as a confirmed martyr than some loud-mouthed expat living in Britain. If I were Putin, I probably wouldn't bother, and if I wanted to bother, I would want it to look like a traffic accident or a random mugging. The tinfoil hat guy in me actually is willing to believe this was a CIA job that wants to implicate the FSB. Let's face it, if you want to make Russia look bad, this is what you'd do.
Unless, of course, I REALLY wanted to make a point of Russia's reach, but in that case, Putin's guys are simply miscalculating...
I want to play Free Market with a drowning Libertarian.
Even a THOUSAND TIMES the lethal dose of .5 mCi would be a mere tenth of a milligram.
At 9196 kg/m^3 ~= 9 mg / mm^3, that's about a hundredth of a cubic millimeter, assuming it was given in elemental form.
The sheer quantity of alpha radiation it produces also explains why it's used in satellites - "The power density of polonium is unique and made it attractive as a power source. One pound of polonium-210 occupies a volume of approximately 3 cubic inches and produces heat at the rate of 3.6 x 10^8 British Thermal Units (BTUs) per minute or about 64 kilowatts of electric power."
For some synthetic elements (like Pu, Np, etc.) the abundance of isotopes in the material can be an identifier of the production site, and in some cases, of the particular reactor that made the material. Is anyone here enough of a nuclear synthetic chemist to know if what is nominally Po210 actually has enough other minor Po isotopes that one might identify the production site by the mix, or secondarily, by looking at the decay product mix?
Why would I use polonium?
/. : the majority of the people seem to assume the Russians to be behind it, just for the reason that this kind of substance was used.
To make it seem like the Russians were the guilty ones.
As can be seen from
Qui bono, I mean really?
One side to benefit from making Putin seem bad, is USA&UK. We remember that in the Caspian and Caucasus area there is, surprise surprise, oil, on which both sides are eyeing. So it would be beneficial for the Bush&Blair to weaken the political power of Russia even a little.
Just thinking this for the sake of balance, and not to forget this possibility.
I read another article in which Litvinenko suspected the poison was in the tea served to him.
Also, Litvinenko and Putin have a long history:
November 21, 1998New York Times: (from the archives, paid registration required)
Report of Plot to Kill Tycoon Leads Yeltsin to Call Inquiry
By MICHAEL WINES
President Boris N. Yeltsin ordered an inquiry today into spectacular charges leveled earlier this week -- so far without evidence -- that Russia's equivalent of the F.B.I. plotted to kill one of the country's most influential tycoons.
The tycoon is Boris A. Berezovsky, an oil magnate and director of Russia's biggest television network, who was a leading supporter of Mr. Yeltsin during the last presidential campaign in 1996.
Mr. Berezovsky, who is still alive, released a letter last week asserting that the Federal Security Service, a spinoff of the old Soviet K.G.B. that is responsible for domestic law enforcement, plotted last winter to murder him.
On Tuesday the source of Mr. Berezovsky's information, a Security Service colonel named Aleksandr Litvinenko, called a news conference to elaborate on the accusation and warn that a rogue element was running wild within the agency.
...
The list of very prominent people who once opposed Putin and suffered extremely nasty reversals of fortune is growing conspicuously long:
Ironically, an interview of Litvinenko from December 15 2004 included this prophetic quote:
"The view inside our agency was that poison is just a weapon, like a pistol," said Alexander V. Litvinenko, who served in the K.G.B. and its Russian successor, the Federal Security Service, from 1988 to 1999 and now lives in London. "It's not seen that way in the West, but it was just viewed as an ordinary tool."I believe in this case Mr Putin used term "nasilstvennaya smert'" which basically means someone else killed that person. While "nasilstvennaya" has the same root as "nasilie" = violence, the meaning is "forced upon someone" versus "estestvennaya" (which would mean "natural causes" i.e. old age or an illness). Means of inflicting premature death could be violet (hacked with a saw) or not-so-violent (sleeping pills poisoning) but in both cases it would be an "unnatural cause of death"/"nasilstvennaya smert'".
Of course it's way more fun to use "violent" in articles, as it paints Russian President as a fierce person who doesn't think that deaths not involving excessive violence are worthy of an investigation.
Frankly I personally don't know what to think about this whole story. It's some sort of James Bond in real life. If it was really an evil plot, why did they use highly exotic means? Why not just shoot him during "robbery" or "accidentally" run him over with a car? To give him enough time to make an accusation? Did perpetrators they take into account his hate toward Russian government and simply used him for their own purposes? Or they knew we'd think that and reality is even more twisted? I don't think he'd do it on purpose -- sacrificing one's life is a very high price for a political statement to make.
So my only option is to wait for the final results of the autopsy and then hope that source of the radioactive material will be found quickly, to prevent any other radiation poisonings.
Hyperom.com
Polonium 210 is difficult to obtain from it's natural sources. In fact it's so difficult to purify that you need a full blown nuclear laboratory to separate the element. There are only a dozen labs in this world capable of extracting it. All of these labs are state controlled. So if it's very difficult to purify, can only be obtained from a limited number of state run laboratories, do you honestly believe that anyone other than a head of state could have ordered the poisoning? What about the Ukraine and the orange revolution? Yushchenko was poised by Russia, of that there is no doubt, it just didn't kill him. It obvious to me that they decided giving someone a cup of dioxin wouldn't kill them so they moved onto something that they knew would and would actually prevent an autopsy for fear of contaminating the doctors doing it.
The Kremlin Pedophile
By Alexander Litvinenko
A few days ago, Russian President Vladimir Putin walked from the Big Kremlin Palace to his Residence. At one of the Kremlin squares, the president stopped to chat with the tourists. Among them was a boy aged 4 or 5.
'What is your name?' Putin asked.
'Nikita,' the boy replied.
Putin kneed, lifted the boy's T-shirt and kissed his stomach.
The world public is shocked. Nobody can understand why the Russian president did such a strange thing as kissing the stomach of an unfamiliar small boy.
The explanation may be found if we look carefully at the so-called "blank spots" in Putin's biography.
After graduating from the Andropov Institute, which prepares officers for the KGB intelligence service, Putin was not accepted into the foreign intelligence. Instead, he was sent to a junior position in KGB Leningrad Directorate. This was a very unusual twist for a career of an Andropov Institute's graduate with fluent German. Why did that happen with Putin?
Because, shortly before his graduation, his bosses learned that Putin was a pedophile. So say some people who knew Putin as a student at the Institute.
The Institute officials feared to report this to their own superiors, which would cause an unpleasant investigation. They decided it was easier just to avoid sending Putin abroad under some pretext. Such a solution is not unusual for the secret services.
Many years later, when Putin became the FSB director and was preparing for presidency, he began to seek and destroy any compromising materials collected against him by the secret services over earlier years. It was not difficult, provided he himself was the FSB director. Among other things, Putin found videotapes in the FSB Internal Security Directorate, which showed him having sex with some underage boys.
Interestingly, the video was recorded in the same conspiratorial flat in Polyanka Street in Moscow where Russian Prosecutor-General Yuri Skuratov was secretly video-taped with two prostitutes. Later, in the famous scandal, Putin (on Roman Abramovich's instructions) blackmailed Skuratov with these tapes and tried to persuade the Prosecutor-General to resign. In that conversation, Putin mentioned to Skuratov that he himself was also secretly video-taped making sex at the same bed. (But of course, he did not tell it was pedophilia rather than normal sex.) Later, Skuratov wrote about this in his book Variant Drakona.
spoonerize "magic trackpad"
Because shooting a spy with a gun does not instill a new fear into the population. Nasty stuff happens day in and day out, all over the world, but I'm always curious to see what the media wants to emphasize, and try to poke at what the motives must be. Spies are killed left and right and you never get to know about it. The important part here is that da man through his media channels decided to make a story about it, meaning it will probably have a desired effect. One effect I can think of is the "proliferation" of nuclear poisons and materials, giving you another reason to get stripsearched at an airport. It used to be that cops just tossed a small bag of white powder in your car, and you were caught redhanded, possessing drugs. You can swear you never saw that thing in your car, right, all pepople in prison swear they are innocent. But the penalties for finding powder on you are only nominal, there needs to be something that automatically takes you out of circulation for good, without parole. Soon you'll see people on "cops" caught carrying 2 mg of polonium! Wee! And the law enforcement is ready to counter the threat for your protection! It's like IE7 with "anti-phishing" measures! Gotta have some excuse, something latest and greates and novel to push something on you, getting stripsearched for drug possession is so old-fashioned and boring, but hey, not you'll be "phished" for polonium! Wee! That's the new vogue to get arrested for!
Yes, I have heart of people visiting the "liquidators"(people who were sent to clean up the mess) from Chernobyl. Some had gotten so much radiation, that they got cooked alive -- their flesh had lost all feeling was just coming off the bone like you see on an overdone turkey. Pretty sick, doctors just prescribed wine and vodka and waited for them to die. All my mom's plants on the balcony turned yellow, I wonder if my children would have to heads...
BTW communists were not gentleman - they might appear to follow agreement for their propaganda purposes. Communists are gone (mostly) now and there is no reason Putin would pursue old days agreements.
I can tell you that when 9/11 happened, the overwhelming feeling over here was "yankees got what they deserved". I remember the results of the polls published soon afterwards showed the same reaction on the large scale. It was really scary. It seems that the hatred towards America and the West in general was so deeply indoctrinated to everyone in the USSR that it didn't took much for it to surface again.
What's worse, in the last few years, there has been a large-scale Westernophobia campaign coming from the government. They're telling us about how morally corrupt European countries and the U.S. are, denouncing Western liberalism (that's social liberalism - freedom of religion/speech/press etc - not economical) which is "morally harmful" and "destabilizing society", and then go ahead to tell how superior Russia is in going our own "special" way - reminds you of something going on in some other parts of the world mayhap, say, Iran, or North Korea? Oh, apparently we also need some special kind of democracy for our country - "sovereign democracy" is the official term for it - somehow distinct from the evil and corrupting Western democracy.
The worst part of it is that most people here seem to support this political course. So, yes, you should be worried about this. But there's nothing you can really do - we've got nukes, and lots of them too. And nuclear subs. And other nasty stuff like biochem weapons. And people shall willingly take the arms and fight against NATO forces if it ever comes to a war to "defend the country against foreign aggression" (and with it, the corrupt regime).
So your leaders will keep smiling to Mr.Putin, and they will always be good friends, and Russia will always be just a special kind of democracy, absolutely unlike Iran or NK.
Disagreeable though Putins reign may be I dont automatically think this apalling act was comissioned by him. If you take a look on Wikipedia at Polonium 210 you will see that it is used in commercial elctrostatic dissipators. If I was AlQuaida I could buy these things and dissolve the Polonium in Hydochloric acid and make a Polonium salt. This material is 5000 times more toxic than radium and totaly leathal if you can get a pin heads worth to be drunk by your victim.
The assasination would be a handy political thing for Al Quaida, to stop Russia from supplying Europe with oil and gas and force Russia to sell to China and India instead. That way you would be more likely to see a continued occupation of Iraq and a continued running sore between the West and the Moslem world - not to mention the increased likelyhood of war between the West and oil supplying Arab states. All this is grist to the mill of Al Quaida which needs continued conflict in order to exist. Remember that their winning card is that their warped religion allows them to kill as many of their own people as the enemy in order to achieve their goals - and to get away with doing this.
Putin is the obvious source of this assasination but its an increadibly stupid move if you want to increase the value of your oil and gas revenues where the more customers there are the higher a price you can charge. I dont think it was at the behest of Putin. Though its always possible it was done by a stupid Russian criminal who hoped to gain favour. My guess is that it was commissioned by a chezen cell under the direction of Al Quaida.
Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
I think perhaps in all the very, very politically correct talk about how the United States is really just the same morally as other countries like Syria, Uganda and Russia is how incredibly _evil_ the KGB was/is. It is just not politically correct to say bad things about the ex-Soviet Union.
However, having been to Berlin a few days after the Wall came down, and having talked to people from the former Soviet Union, I can tell you that this remote academic theorizing is so much ear's wax, and some people really need to get outside more. In some ways it is fitting that the last of the ugly huge Lenin posters, etc, are by Chernobyl.
Pretty much everyone knows that PC conceals truth. What's the truth?
Putin rose to head the KGB because he's the chief scum of some extremely evil scum. They were the enforcement arm of a political system that killed more people, and enslaved more people, than any other this world has ever known.
The Soviet Union, which crashed Dec. 25 1991, has become a Third World country. I have friends who have left that place because they were under death threats to pay up or be killed. Another friend tried to set up an export business but was stopped by the Russian Mafia. The Museum of Soviet Spaceflight was burned to the ground because it could not pay off two rival "protection" gangs. The Buran "Space Shuttle Clone" sits in a park as a plaything.
So, do I think Putin would off this guy with polonium? Yep. It had a good chance of not being detected.
Has the KGB offed other people who gave them a bad time in England? Yep. They whacked Georgi Markov in 1978. He had a radio show that intensely annoyed them.
Did the KGB try to whack the Pope with a Bulgarian hitman? Yep. The East Germans were notified of this pre-whack try to cover themselves; this was found in their files.
It is within a pattern of consistent behavior for Putin and his KGB/NKVD/FSB buddies to whack this guy. People on this list are supposed to be rational. Pattern recognizers. If a Unix system kept popping the same output at the same time of day each day, you'd say, "Cron is doing something". If the KGB keeps killing people, you'd say, "Gee, that KGB keeps killing people."
But amazingly, given the evidence, people keep saying, "Why, no, that KGB has changed from its institutional roots, from the sociopath Laventina Beria under Stalin to now, and is now peaceful, cuddly, and furry."
Crap. They're killers.
-- thank you, have a nice day.
David Small