Posts Tagged ‘Litvinenko’

The Salisbury Poisoning: A Pretext for War with Russia?

March 21, 2018

This alarming idea occurred to me yesterday, when I started wondering just how far the Tories are prepared to push their allegations that Russia is responsible for the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal. So far, there’s precious little evidence that the Russians are responsible. Skripal had many enemies, and the Novichoks nerve agent used was created by the Russians, but the international chemical weapons authorities confirmed that they destroyed their stocks years ago. The poison wasn’t manufactured in Russia, but in Khazakstan, and after the collapse of the Soviet Union the ability to use and produce it spread to any number of other states. Including America and Israel. The government has so far refused to hand over a sample of the toxin over to the UN authority, so they can independently verify whether it is Novichoks, and Porton Down refused to follow the Tory line that the poison was definitely Russian, insisting instead that it was of a type developed by Russia. This last episode is very much like the way Tony Blair and New Labour ‘sexed up’ the MI6 report about Saddam Hussein and his non-existent weapons of mass destruction, so they could have the pretext they needed for the planned invasion of Iraq. Which makes you wonder how far the Tories are prepared to push this.

National security doesn’t seem to come into it. This seems to me to be just part of the new Cold War, started by Killary and the Democrats in America to take attention away from the fact that Clinton and her corporatist friends are horrible candidates that the American public didn’t like, and largely didn’t want in power. Ramping up tensions with Russia is useful to the Tories on this side of the Pond, as so many people have pointed out, because too many people are sick and tired of them, their cuts and their lies. And so it looks like they’re deliberately manipulating the crisis, so they can present themselves as the true, patriotic defenders of Britain, standing up to evil foreign dictators. Just like Maggie during the Falklands War.

And all the while smearing Corbyn as an evil Commie traitor in league with the Czechs and Russians. Cue the BBC and its carefully altered imagery on Newsnight to show Corbyn looking as sinister as possible.

I’m starting to worry how far the Tories are going to be prepared to push this. A couple of years ago there were NATO generals confidently predicting that by May last year, this country would be at war with Russia. Indeed, one of them even published a book about it with that as the very title. The idea was that the Russians would invade one of the Baltic States – I think it was Latvia. Mercifully, that never happened. But I am worried in case the same people on our side of the geopolitical divide nevertheless still think that a genuine, hot war will be a good idea.

Putin is a thug, and I don’t doubt for a single minute that he was behind the Litvinenko poisoning, and probably the murders of the 14 other Russians, who have died over here in suspicious circumstances. But there are very good reasons for remaining sceptical about their responsibility for the attack in Salisbury. And I don’t think ‘national security’ is the prime reason why they are blaming Russia. I read elsewhere that much of the hostility towards Russia comes from American multinationals. These poured hundreds of millions into Russia under Boris Yeltsin, when he was trying to transform it into a western-style democracy, and privatising anything that wasn’t nailed down. The Americans expected that they would be able to dominate the Russian economy. Putin stopped that, and kept Russia firmly out of America’s economic claws. Hence the massive resentment of the Russian president in American business and political circles.

It looks to me very much like the Tories and transatlantic multinationals are trying to force a confrontation with Putin, but not necessarily a war, simply for their own political and economic advantage. National security, and the poisoning and contamination of Salisbury, is just an excuse, a convenient pretext for this. Quite apart from NATO’s determination to prop up an increasingly blatant Nazi government in Ukraine, all the while keeping its true nature hidden from the rest of us. ‘Cause after all, the vast majority of severely normal Brits, Europeans and Americans very definitely would not want to back a bunch of genuine Nazis, goose-stepping around in the very uniforms their predecessors in the SS wore during World War II when they were murdering Jews and anybody else they decided was ‘subhuman’.

There’s a lot of very squalid politics going on here, and I do wonder how far the Tories and their allies are prepared to push this so they can weaken the Russian president.


Private Eye: MI6 Killed Congo President, Patrice Lamumba

February 6, 2016

Away from it’s cover spoofing Trump, there’s a rather more serious, and very interesting little article, Killing Times, on page 20 of this fortnight’s Eye. It’s about the American’s refusal to get drawn into supporting Britain’s denunciation of Putin for ordering the assassination Litvinenko. The Eye ascribes this to the Americans recognising that if they did so, Putin would respond by reminding them of their own sordid history in these matters. Such as the various CIA assassination attempts on Fidel Castro, and a 1960 plot, instigated by President Eisenhower, to kill the first democratically elected president of the Congo, Patrice Lamumba. The article goes onto inform it’s readers that it wasn’t just the Americans, who wanted to kill the African premier. The article goes on:

The British would never sanction such “uncivilised behaviour”, of course. Except, er, they did. In September 1960 Howard Smith of the Foreign Office’s Africa department wrote a memo to senior Whitehall officials and the Lord Privy Seal, Edward Heath, advocating a “simple way to stop Congo’s PM getting too friend with the USSR – “ensuring Lumumba’s removal from the scene by killing him. This should in fact solve the problem.” Was Smith instantly dismissed for his illegal proposal? He later became ambassador to Moscow and then head of MI5.

Soldiers from Belgium, the old colonial power, were present at the eventual murder of Lumumba in January 1961. But Britain did its bit. In 2013 the Labour peer Lord Lea revealed in the London Review of Books that three years earlier, shortly before her death, he had discussed Lumumba with Daphne Park-fellow peer, MI6 stalwart and British consul in Leopoldville at the time of the killing. “I mentioned the uproar surrounding Lumumba’s abduction and murder and recalled the theory that MI6 might have had something to do with it.’ We did,’ she replied, ‘I organised it’.”

See that, Mr Putin? That is how truly civilised countries behave.

This is interesting and important. America and the CIA are notorious for organising a series of assassinations and coups throughout the developing world. The various attempts to kill Castro are perhaps the best known, along with the overthrow of President Allende in Chile by General Pinochet and the coup against Benz in Guatemala. But in fact you can add a long string of other nations, including Brazil and Iran. In a speech I reblogged, the Democratic presidential candidate, Bernie Sanders, criticised this history of political murder and made it clear that for the sake of peace it should be abandoned.

You hear much less about British involvement in these matters, and you could be forgiven that we don’t do any such thing. This piece from the eye show how wrong this assumption is. Britain was involved with the coup against Mossadeq in Iran in 1953. Lobster has also covered in its pages a plot against Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe in 1979 or so, as well as what seems to have been the assassination of Republican leaders by death squads deep within the British army in Northern Ireland. But that’s it. Mostly such pieces are confined to Lobster, which gets its information from bits and pieces released in the press, and tucked away in books about foreign policies, or the memoirs of former spies, ministers and civil servants. This secret history isn’t as well known as America’s. My guess is that the main reason for this is, unlike America, the ruling class were better over here at maintaining the cloak of secrecy. We didn’t have a Freedom of Information Act until Tony Blair, and that was rather milder than the American version. And unlike America, Britain hasn’t suffered the trauma of seeing a head of state impeached and put on trial, like Nixon at Watergate. The lives and reputations of the politicos and mandarins, who may have organised atrocities like Lamumba’s assassination have been preserved, because the British public have been kept – and most likely are still being kept – from finding out about them.