Our new best friend Vlad: to power via low-rent Reichstag? Via NY Transfer News * All the News That Doesn't Fit Our new best friend Vlad: to power via low-rent Reichstag? [Well, this is a story that I remember the BBC covering very briefly at the time it was happening, then suddenly not mentioning again: the suggestion that a series of attacks on apartment buildings in Russia in the months leading up to Putin being elected president and reigniting the brutal attacks in Chechnya were in fact done by people far too professional to be garden-variety terrorists, namely, the FSB acting at Putin's instruction, as a pretext for a reinvasion of Chechnya and his election as a war leader. Now we have someone in the UK who claims to have evidence to back up that read. I must admit that when the apartments were being leveled, I was very suspicious of the professionalism and the repeat performance aspects of the bombings. I don't know if this guy is for real or a nutjob, but it's interesting to see it come back, now that Vladimir is busy cozying up to washington eight ways from sunday, getting a blank check in Chechnya, and pulling out of the Lourdes and Cam Ranh Bay facilities in Cuba and Vietnam. The Economist paraphrased Kipling about Chechnya at the time to explain the all-too-humanitarian West's aggressive "pro-Muslim, humanitarian" behavior in Kosovo and their silence as the photos of Grosny, the scene of tremendous destruction, emerged: "the Russians have the atom-bomb, the Yugoslavs have not." Takes the edge right off the hypocrisy to chant that over your gin and tonic, I suppose. As long as we can find the irony in it, then it wouldn't make sense to really complain, now would it? -- Peter Bell] AP via The New York Times - May 15, 2002 http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Russia-Spies-or-Terrorists.html Russian Accuses Government of Attacks By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Filed at 3:09 a.m. ET MOSCOW (AP) -- When Alexander Litvinenko worked for Russia's main security agency, his job was to try to infiltrate and topple terrorist networks. Today he is fighting what he claims is the country's biggest terrorist group: his former employer. From London, where he fled in November 2000, Litvinenko, 39, talks to anyone who will listen about the Federal Security Service's alleged role in apartment-house bombings that killed more than 300 people in Russia in 1999. He claims to have vital evidence stashed in a suitcase waiting for independent investigators. Many Russians have questioned the official version of the 1999 events, which blames the bombings in Moscow and the southern city of Volgodonsk on Chechen rebels. But prosecutors have shown little interest in the contents of Litvinenko's suitcase. On Tuesday, the Prosecutor General's Office issued a final dismissal of the claims, saying it had thoroughly investigated the security service's actions and had found no evidence of wrongdoing. The announcement followed parliament's recent refusal to set up its own commission to investigate the bombings. Nevertheless, Litvinenko's case against the Federal Security Service, or FSB, could soon see daylight. Skeptics of the government version, including five lawmakers, have formed their own commission, and Litvinenko says he will give them important documents, as well as audio and video recordings of witness testimony. Ultimately, these allegations could damage the image of President Vladimir Putin, who is holding a summit with President Bush in Russia next week. Putin, who headed the FSB until a month before the bombings, was not president when they happened, but they helped to re-ignite the war in Chechnya, which spurred his rise to power. Putin has dismissed as "delirious nonsense" the idea that the FSB organized the bombings as a pretext for launching a new Chechnya offensive. "The very allegation is immoral," he said to the Kommersant newspaper shortly before his election in March 2000. Speaking to The Associated Press by telephone recently, Litvinenko said his evidence would implicate the top leadership of the security service in Russia's deadliest terrorist attacks. "The FSB is a terrorist organization," Litvinenko said. "I am first and foremost an anti-terrorism officer." Litvinenko acknowledges a personal vendetta against the FSB. In 1998, he publicly accused his superiors of ordering him to kill tycoon Boris Berezovsky, at the time a powerful Kremlin insider and now a prime exponent of the theory that the FSB was behind the bombings. Since then, four criminal cases have been opened against Litvinenko -- all fabricated, he maintains. In 1999-2000, Litvinenko spent nine months in jail on charges of abuse of office, for which he was ultimately acquitted. He then fled to Britain, where he was granted asylum. In the latest case, he stands accused of beating a suspect during an interrogation. Russian officials say he will be tried in absentia. Litvinenko, who joined the FSB's predecessor, the KGB, in 1988, says he witnessed a slew of illegal plots hatched within the security service -- most notably to kill Berezovsky. By the time of the apartment-house bombings, Litvinenko was long out of the agency. He acknowledges he has no proof Putin was involved but believes he must have known the truth. Litvinenko and other government critics base their allegations on an incident in the city of Ryazan in September 1999, shortly after the bombings. Police there discovered what they took to be explosives in an apartment building basement and ordered an evacuation. Afterward, security service chief Nikolai Patrushev said the alleged explosives were only sacks of sugar planted as an anti-terrorism drill. "I have direct proof that in Ryazan there was not sugar in the building, but hexogen; that the explosive device was not a dummy, but real; and that the explosive device was put there by FSB officers on instructions from their superiors," Litvinenko said. Hexogen was the explosive used in the Moscow and Volgodonsk bombings. The Prosecutor General's Office said Tuesday that it completed its own probe of the Ryazan affair without looking at Litvinenko's evidence, and it confirmed Patrushev's version. As for the Chechen rebels, Litvinenko said the FSB missed its chance to uncover their activities. He said that in 1995 he recruited a Chechen agent to infiltrate a group allegedly connected to rebel warlord Shamil Basayev, but his superiors abruptly canceled the operation. "If in 1996 they had let this Chechen infiltrate that ring, we would have known for sure if it was the Chechens who blew up the houses," he said. ================================================================= NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org e-mail: nyt@blythe.org ================================================================= nyteeu-05.15.02-17:19:01-3508