[note to mods - I wasn't sure whether to post this in the UK or World politics forums, so please move if appropriate]
The case of Litvinenko drags on. The refusal of the Russian authorities to extradite the key suspect in the Litvinenko murder, Andrei Lugovoi, has resulted in the UK expelling four Russian diplomats. The BBC article states "the BBC understands they are intelligence officers". Yet - irritatingly, not only does the BBC article contain no further information, or mention the background of possible intelligence agency chicanery, it also fails to bring up the name of Berezovsky.
The Guardian article provides much more comprehensive background. And the key, for me, is this claim: "Litvinenko left Russia after claiming that Russian intelligence agents, rather than Chechen rebels, had organised a series of apartment block bombings in Moscow in 1999."
That's a bona fide accusation of 'false flag' from someone who is likely to have proof (or access to it) one way or the other. This is one of the elephants in the living room that appears to violate the groupthink here on Urban. The intelligence agencies play a (if not the) key role in both domestic and international politics. While I can understand the hostility to baseless speculation (not to mention convictions held to as an article of faith), discussion of this very important area appears to be off the radar.
Consider what Matthew Norman said of the UK Police Force in his article "The Police and their protection racket" (Independent, Fri Jan 2006, p.33) - he said:
"Protecting the police is what successive governments have slavishly done since Margaret Thatcher politicised them during the miner's strike 20 years ago. Whether they should be better paid than teachers and nurses is debatable. What can hardly be disputed is the danger of allowing them to remain answerable to nobody but themselves, and completely unsackable.....
....Since there is no real independent body reviewing their work, one tends to rely on anecode-fuelled suspicion... in this case that the British police are over-indulged by government for reasons of pure political expediency; that fuelled by the resulting sense of invulnerability, they are increasingly arrogant and hostile towards the public; that they are overpaid...prone to idleness, and more susceptible to stress than the very queeniest of stage actors."
You may or may not agree with the above. However a lot of discussion on these boards focuses on police behaviour. Poor Detective Boy ends up as the whipping boy for police action on here, and as often as I disagree with him I'd miss his apologist stance if for no other reason than that it demonstrates that there is a clear audit trail for the police, a path of accountability.
Where do you start with the 'intelligence agencies'? How much do you know about their activities? Why is the default assumption that they are (at least domestically) benevolent? The police are hammered all the time on here and yet I barely see a whisper about the actions of state intelligence. Perhaps more to the point - in a globalised world, how much sense does it make to assume this benevolence (and thereby abdicate all interest in their actions), when it is very difficult to define what the 'national interest' means any more?
It seems to me that in many situations where intelligence interests are at stake, there is a trail of bizaare oddities linked to the case(s). The Lugovi / Litvinenko is a classic case where we are dazzled with claim, counter-claim and oddity after oddity.
You don't have to look far to see bizaare turns to all this. Notwithstanding the Prime Minister's claim that this is about "justice and the rule of law" rather than intelligence activities (where the latter is, for once, blatantly the case), there's other oddities - such as Russian claims regarding a UK spy ring in early 2006. Or the Kremlin claiming that the Litvinenko and Politskaya murders are linked, implying the work of foreign powers in both cases.
Another aspect perhaps worth considering is the issue of energy. The U.K. does not have the same level of dependency on Russian energy as the continent. Would the U.K. have been able to expel diplomats / spooks in this way if it was more dependent? Is it completely out of the question to consider, for example, Russia's recent annexing of part of the North Pole as a possible piece of the realpolitik puzzle?
The case of Litvinenko drags on. The refusal of the Russian authorities to extradite the key suspect in the Litvinenko murder, Andrei Lugovoi, has resulted in the UK expelling four Russian diplomats. The BBC article states "the BBC understands they are intelligence officers". Yet - irritatingly, not only does the BBC article contain no further information, or mention the background of possible intelligence agency chicanery, it also fails to bring up the name of Berezovsky.
The Guardian article provides much more comprehensive background. And the key, for me, is this claim: "Litvinenko left Russia after claiming that Russian intelligence agents, rather than Chechen rebels, had organised a series of apartment block bombings in Moscow in 1999."
That's a bona fide accusation of 'false flag' from someone who is likely to have proof (or access to it) one way or the other. This is one of the elephants in the living room that appears to violate the groupthink here on Urban. The intelligence agencies play a (if not the) key role in both domestic and international politics. While I can understand the hostility to baseless speculation (not to mention convictions held to as an article of faith), discussion of this very important area appears to be off the radar.
Consider what Matthew Norman said of the UK Police Force in his article "The Police and their protection racket" (Independent, Fri Jan 2006, p.33) - he said:
"Protecting the police is what successive governments have slavishly done since Margaret Thatcher politicised them during the miner's strike 20 years ago. Whether they should be better paid than teachers and nurses is debatable. What can hardly be disputed is the danger of allowing them to remain answerable to nobody but themselves, and completely unsackable.....
....Since there is no real independent body reviewing their work, one tends to rely on anecode-fuelled suspicion... in this case that the British police are over-indulged by government for reasons of pure political expediency; that fuelled by the resulting sense of invulnerability, they are increasingly arrogant and hostile towards the public; that they are overpaid...prone to idleness, and more susceptible to stress than the very queeniest of stage actors."
You may or may not agree with the above. However a lot of discussion on these boards focuses on police behaviour. Poor Detective Boy ends up as the whipping boy for police action on here, and as often as I disagree with him I'd miss his apologist stance if for no other reason than that it demonstrates that there is a clear audit trail for the police, a path of accountability.
Where do you start with the 'intelligence agencies'? How much do you know about their activities? Why is the default assumption that they are (at least domestically) benevolent? The police are hammered all the time on here and yet I barely see a whisper about the actions of state intelligence. Perhaps more to the point - in a globalised world, how much sense does it make to assume this benevolence (and thereby abdicate all interest in their actions), when it is very difficult to define what the 'national interest' means any more?
It seems to me that in many situations where intelligence interests are at stake, there is a trail of bizaare oddities linked to the case(s). The Lugovi / Litvinenko is a classic case where we are dazzled with claim, counter-claim and oddity after oddity.
You don't have to look far to see bizaare turns to all this. Notwithstanding the Prime Minister's claim that this is about "justice and the rule of law" rather than intelligence activities (where the latter is, for once, blatantly the case), there's other oddities - such as Russian claims regarding a UK spy ring in early 2006. Or the Kremlin claiming that the Litvinenko and Politskaya murders are linked, implying the work of foreign powers in both cases.
Another aspect perhaps worth considering is the issue of energy. The U.K. does not have the same level of dependency on Russian energy as the continent. Would the U.K. have been able to expel diplomats / spooks in this way if it was more dependent? Is it completely out of the question to consider, for example, Russia's recent annexing of part of the North Pole as a possible piece of the realpolitik puzzle?
