Probably worthwhile raising people's awareness of toxidromes, and how physicians try to recognize and think through these syndromes. There is a fantastic review article out this past year that helps to concisely put things together to improve your ability to distinguish nerve agents, mustard agents, etc. Quick recognition of the likely class of agent based on symptoms is important, because the treatments (and the risks to responders) differ.
At this point, are we really surprised at the way some people who perceive themselves as above the law (apply this to any political or commercial leaders you see fit) will behave?
We have passed a turning point at which previously reprehensible behaviors have become tolerated. And as an English speaker living in the Netherlands has come to learn, some of us have an ingrained inclination to avoid directly calling out what to most people would be an obvious problem (to avoid potentially offending).
Putin's Russia kills people. It imprisons people. It poisons people. It cheats, it steals (from masses of poor people). It lies in the face of the world (bare chested). For some reason we now tolerate this without calling it for what it is.
And now we have an American government that has for so long not only avoided calling it out but instead has celebrated non-virtues while avoiding contagious fatal flaws that we forget how wrong for civilization the behavior is. Not only that, but we've begun to celebrate the virtues of dictators - not benevolent ones (if they exist), but previously-OBVIOUS horrible self-serving ones.
So, trying to shut the rant down, it's all quite f-d up. We should not only not be surprised, we should be up in arms. Ironically, the people who should be up in arms are the ones who wisely have realized that arming the civilians is a net-negative. But at least in the US, the right to bear arms is exactly to undo situations like the one we are clearly headed toward.
The US most definitely called out Putin for the assassinations in the UK, and had a stronger response than most of Europe.
Italy, Estonia, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, Lithuania, Romania and Finland also expelled between one and three diplomats each.
President Donald Trump on Monday ordered the expulsion of 60 Russian diplomats the US identified as intelligence agents and the closure of the Russian consulate in Seattle
Meanwhile, US-legal sanctions against Russia have simply not been enacted by the Trump administration.
Unless you're willfully living under a rock, you must admit that it strongly appears that Trump is beholden to Russia in the same way that a middleman is under the thumb of his mob boss. Based on the available financial evidence (the countless companies and countless financial failures and defaulted loans), it's quite plausible that Trump owes some wealthy Russians a lot of money. His house of cards is built on OPM.
Really there's no point debating this. Those who cannot see this are either extremely young and naive, or they are wilfully ignorant. I don't care what political figure it is on what side... thinking people can observe behaviors and identify patterns that illustrate (highly) likely back stories. Trump has a LOT of back stories. You need only to research his US endeavors to see that he has never, at least until becoming President, built a successful business on his own. Now, of course, he has the benefit of the perceived promise of his customers having access to him (a la Mar a Lago, for example).
That is just the military industrial complex spending public money. Russia is doing the same thing. The loss of lives is clearly irrelevant to the leaders of the two countries.
You said, "US-legal sanctions against Russia have simply not been enacted by the Trump administration". I just showed you, from a neutral source, that they had been enacted.
It is plausible that Trump owes some wealthy Russians a lot of money, but on the other hand, there is zero actual evidence that it is true. Lot's of things are plausible. It is plausible you are a Russian agent planting propaganda to undermine faith in the government, but there is zero evidence of it being true, so I wouldn't go around claiming it.
They are hardly the only group guilty of that, Americans did it last year in the German election, and there isn't evidence that this is an example of Russian propaganda.
Your first example is really poor one (although this is not your fault) because there is nothing to indicate that this outcome was a factor in executive decision-making, as opposed to an unexpected outcome at ground level. Let me recommend this article as a cynical but in-depth examination of the political and military calculus surrounding the incident: https://warontherocks.com/2018/07/the-puzzle-of-russian-beha...
We know Russia was called, during and before the battle, so at a minimum, we know there was high level DoD involvement, almost certainly Mattis and McMaster. We also know Trump bragged about it afterwards.
Russia wasn't called. The local commander of American forces called the local Russian commanding officer, and asked them whether the advancing columns were theirs. They said no. He then ordered a strike on the column, deeming it hostile (and rightly so). After that, Russian command started frantically calling back and demanding that the attack stop.
Not exactly, the call was to the Russian High Command in Syria (I stand corrected)on the "deconfliction line", but the attack was ordered from Washington, by Mattis.
Still a pretty good upgrade from the large scale horrors that were happening in that country 70 years ago. But lots of work to do still. Silver linings.
Sure, rent is more expensive and income inequality is worse...
But I certainly wouldn't trade my life currently for the 1960's in a second -- going tremendously backwards with civil rights and LGBTQ attitudes, the Vietnam War debacle, no internet, missing out on five decades of health care advances and new treatments, vastly safer cars, I could go on and on and on...
Really not sure what trend you're talking about. If you say the "trend" has been negative since the 1960's, you're saying things are worse today than the 1960's... and I just fail to see how that's true except in very specific areas like student debt or healthcare spending, but certainly not overall.
I would say there's a negative trend from the beginning of the 80s. Yes, there has been some amount of progress in civil rights (though it's been very slow) and inevitably there will be technological/medical advances, but the economic position of all but the rich is significantly worse than in, say, the mid-70s.
In real terms this was an illusion. It was the beginning of the new age of personal debt (which then rose like a rocket during the Clinton years).
The best realization of the American dream was on the decade after the end of WW2.
Incidentally, it was a period with comparatively high corporate taxes. Now we have historically low corporate taxes, not even counting maneuvers like the Irish/Dutch indefinite tax deferment scheme.
What has been promoted as common free market wisdom at least since the 80s has no subsantive evidence to back it up. If you want a current example of reality vs "common wisdom" economics, compare California to Wisconsin, Kansas, or Texas.
> The best realization of the American dream was on the decade after the end of WW2.
An essential caveat: That only would apply if you were a white male, a Christian to a significant extent, and possibly a Protestant. For women, African-Americans, and many other minorities, the American Dream was far out of reach. African-Americans were still being lynched.
> Incidentally, it was a period with comparatively high corporate taxes.
An excellent point, and don't forget much higher regulation.
> If you want a current example of reality vs "common wisdom" economics, compare California to Wisconsin, Kansas, or Texas.
Yes, I try to point out: Name one great American industry that came out of a 'red' state, other than extractive industries like oil. Does the whole country want an economy and human welfare like Alabama or like Massachusetts?
Yes, I try to point out: Name one great American industry that came out of a 'red' state, other than extractive industries like oil. Does the whole country want an economy and human welfare like Alabama or like Massachusetts?
Ok, let me try.... Semiconductors in California?
California was a red state up until the 1992 presidential election. Long after the birth of the semiconductor and computer age.
What do I win?
And looking back to earlier in the 1900s, it was states like Ohio, Michigan, Illinois (all red states back then) that were major economic powerhouses.
I would argue that states like NY and CA are economic powerhouses in spite of their politics, not because. Just take a look at what democratic policies have done to NJ. It's been on the decline for a long time.
> And looking back to earlier in the 1900s, it was states like Ohio, Michigan, Illinois (all red states back then) that were major economic powerhouses.
But at that point in time the Republicans would have been the blue guys and the Democrats the red guys.
(Though the contemporary US colour scheme doesn't make much sense since historically/elsewhere the left is associated with red and the right with blue. But my point is that the Democrats were the more conservative party at that point in time and the Republicans the more progressive party.)
The best realization of the American dream was on the decade after the end of WW2.
Yeah, surprising how being the only Western power not destroyed economically can do that. Your theory of higher corporate taxes is just cherry picking numbers. Yes rates were higher, but there were way more ways to get around them than there are now.
It's not a new thing at all. For a lot of the 20th C the US was doing precisely that. Fighting democracy and supporting dictators. There are dozens of countries where that happened. The accounts are depressing, horrifying. Which, yes, has happened with such regularity that you could say the US
kills people. It imprisons people. It poisons people. It cheats, it steals (from masses of poor people). It lies in the face of the world (bare chested).
One quick way to get some sense of the reality is to look at the voting in the United Nations, (GA and SC). I did that once for votes in the 80s and 90s. Typically, there's a vote on something that almost every country in the world thinks is a good idea, except for 1 or 2 of the worst dictatorships...and the USA. It's quite amazing to see that in 'black and white'. Nothing like the God-Is-On-Our-Side picture painted on the US news TV shows.
I don't know what America you're living in, but I'm not sure I know a single person on either end of the political spectrum who doesn't view Russia as extremely corrupt. Some will say "we are just as bad", to which I disagree, but no one is out there claiming Putin is a paragon of virtue.
For a while I shared the mentality that Russia was unequivocally bad and the anti-thesis of all Western values of freedom. It was like common knowledge to me.
But with every breathless proclamation like yours of Russia as a cartoon villain I started to have doubts. It seemed like everything was suddenly Russia's fault--they were the absolute root of all evil in the world. Anyone who disagreed was obviously a Russian bot.
The last straw for me was when Theresa May declared, without any doubt, that the Russian state had attempted to assassinate two British citizens using nerve agents (10 days after the fact, before the conclusion of any investigation and without any concrete evidence to implicate Russia).
This Russia-phobia is dangerous. We have made a bogeyman and a scapegoat out of a desperate, nuclear-equipped nation that less than 30 years ago had its federation, economy and national identity shattered. I'm afraid that this delusion won't stop until a full on conflict breaks out which should be a much scarier prospect than yet-another-evil-dictatorship.
I think you both have valid points. Russia is not always a good global citizen. It’s had a history of ignoring protocol if it got in their way. They have had cheerleaders when they were Soviet, they have a few chearleaders now (ME, for example).
But we, in the West, and countries aligned with the West, fail to understand their motives. Like China, they have internal motives that while they look like they are strategizing against the West in particular, at times it’s just due to internal issues.
Russia didn’t anex Crimea to poke the West. They took it because not having it exposed them militarily (as well as domestically made them looked weak).
For all his faults, Kissinger understands those things better than most public figures in their public speaking (are willing to admit, at least).
> But we, in the West anc countries aligned with the West fail to understand their motives.
It's dangerous to assume this only holds true for one side, imho it's much more likely all the involved players think like that and act accordingly.
Case in point: Many Russian people also don't understand "Western motives" and they actually feel backstabbed due to cultural differences leading to, rather massive, geopolitical misunderstandings like that whole "No NATO Eastward Expansion" promise during German reunification talks. [0]
While Russians think "A word is a word", most Western responses to this pretty much boil down to a lawyered "nothing was ever ratified" response, which might be formally correct but is the diplomatic equivalent of flipping somebody off you just scammed.
There are so many barriers at work here, not just in terms of language, but also the cultural context, also ain't helping that pretty much everybody is running communication and information interference, so finding common ground is actively fought against.
It's advantageous to have a warm deep water port [Sevastopol] so you can mobilize your navy easily in the middle of winter --as well as allows for the trade of good during winter months-- both things which allow offensive and defensive options.
This point about Theresa May doesn't make sense. She's the Prime Minister of the UK. She has access to intelligence before it goes on the public record (and to intelligence that never goes on the public record). And whatever the timeline, we now know definitely that the Russian government was behind the poisoning, so she wasn't wrong.
I hope that the globe is capable of separating the Russian people, 99.99% of whom are not calling the shots as far as geopolitics go, from the country's plutocrats, who do call them.
The last straw for me was when Theresa May declared, without any doubt, that the Russian state had attempted to assassinate two British citizens using nerve agents (10 days after the fact, before the conclusion of any investigation and without any concrete evidence to implicate Russia).
I don't follow you here. The toxin in question is known, or at least widely assumed, to be produced and controlled exclusively by state-sanctioned facilities in Russia.
So, scenario one is that Putin's agents committed the assassination attempt. That's obviously bad.
Scenario two is that Putin has lost control of his country's WMDs, and that they are being deployed in foreign countries by rogue actors without his permission. That's arguably even worse.
Except that Iran [1] and the US [2] have successfully synthesized Novichok, and a Cornell professor of organic chemistry stated that any organic chemist with state-backing could synthesize the agent [3].
(Shrug) I'm sure both countries are more than up to the technical challenge of synthesizing small quantities of pretty much anything in a research laboratory. But why would either country have sent people to the UK to assassinate the Skripals and pin it on Russians? What's the motive?
it's an uphill battle, even the HN audience, at first glance consisting of people capable of independent thinking, is brainwashed and uncritical beyond belief.
I'm Russian. For a while, I shared the mentality that my country was just in a bad spot, but it would dig itself out. Especially during and after the 2011 protests.
Then 2014 came. I was wrong. Russia is exactly what the majority of its citizens want it to be. And what they want it to be is something that others are afraid of.
Yeah, in America you make up sex scandals - much less bloody and way more effective these days. Anyway, America is not better - it's just more polished and sophisticated at these kinds of things.
You're being down voted on HN. Not surprising. No doubt the comment thread will do their best to academically miss the point and spiral the conversation into nothing but empty rhetoric and logical labyrinths.
>Ironically, the people who should be up in arms are the ones who wisely have realized that arming the civilians is a net-negative.
I've worded this differently. Turns out the people that claimed they would fight the government are actually the one's who would support the government becoming a haven for sycophants and tyrants in the first place. Turns out that the American populace is actually pretty toxic and not all that exceptional. We could be. We can be. It's just going to take a lot of self-reflection and growing up.
When people tell you who they are, believe them. As Americans not enough of us cared to vote, and enough of us didn't care enough to push out the literal human garbage fire that is Trump.
Poison in the System[1] is the first part of Buzzfeed's investigative journalism series on many unexpected deaths related to Russia since 2003. The entire series is worth a book.
>It doesn't always seem to kill the victim and makes it easy to identify the perps as state actors.
Quick and effortless death by a bullet don't terrify peons as much as death after weeks of excruciating agony.
In this case, it is also to send intimidation message to the country hosting them: hey look, we just wetted a man guarded by a squadron of crack bodyguards on your soil, now, think what we can do to you
Don't excuse people that are bad at their jobs. Poison is meant to kill people, which proves to be more difficult than it sounds. If you don't believe me, read up on capital punishment in the US and how often it fails.
> It doesn't always seem to kill the victim and makes it easy to identify the perps as state actors.
As others have said, identifying a state actor is a feature, not a bug. However, what others have neglected to point out, is that it's unreliable - and that is a feature, too. We can't easily identify the state actor. Polonium-210 pointed at Russia obviously, but Russia has also utilized dioxides (vs. Shchekochikhin), and opioids (fentanyl) (to wipe out the hostage-takers in the Dubrovka theater).
The result is that Russia sends a message: we will reach out and kill our critics and defectors.
Bullets don't have the same effect: a critic dies in his sleep. Was it a drop of fentanyl? Maybe. Maybe. The absence or presence of poison will be speculated on; the absence or presence of bullets is clear-cut.
Through the use of poisons which vary in their ability to point the finger at Russia, any death of a critic that could plausibly be linked to a poisoning now raises the specter of Russian intervention. The result is that their psychological warfare is extended far beyond their actual reach.
The KGB/FSB has always had a very significant attention to psych-ops. Their actions should not be interpreted strictly at face value.
Poison can also be deployed by untrained individuals coerced into service, and bypass metal detectors as well as bullet-proof vests used by paranoid targets.
And an obvious point: Russia wants important enemies to die slow, painful deaths, and to send a message that other enemies will suffer a similar fate. Killing Litvinenko or Skripal with a bullet to the head probably wouldn't have been satisfying or vengeful enough.
> Russia wants important enemies to die slow, painful deaths
> wouldn't have been satisfying or vengeful enough
You know this how ?
Alexander Litvenenko springs to mind, followed by Viktor Yushchenko, Alexander Perepilichny, Anna Politkovskaya (later shot to death), Vladimir Kara-Murza (twice!), the Skripals, Georgi Markov (Ricin... nasty), Karinna Moskalenko, and on and on.
I know this is a common oversimplification when talking about governments, but please, could we at last use "Kremlin" instead? Russia is a large country with many people just like us, who want to live, love and have a wonderful time. Sure, at times the public opinion is stirred when some atrocities are reported and you can hear some vocal groups online, but Russians are not different from any other nation in this respect.
Their leaders, however, are a different story. You could say Russians have had bad luck with respect to their rulers for centuries. When you look back at what Lenin, Stalin and others did, Putin starts to look like a savior. But they all have a certain attitude and ambitions. So could we please stop saying "Russia" when we don't mean Russian people at all, and common Russians are actually victims of bad policy of their rulers.
I see your point but "Kermlin" is a bit over specific - when people like Magnitsky get killed you know it's Russians but not whether the Kermlin or mobsters or what. Elements within Russia perhaps.
Seeing as Russia has been a democracy for 25 years, isn't this just absolving the Russian populace of any guilt or responsibility over their choice in government, or the actions of said government?
I do not know, do you? I'm guessing that neither of us have observed their election process in person, or are experts in the fairness of their, or any other democratic process. If you are, please school me, I'm a willing student.
I am a US citizen, my birth nation has "elected" two presidents who failed to win the popular vote. 2% of my fellow citizens are unable to vote due to felony convictions. On top of this, the practice known as gerrymandering is essentially carte blanche for a state's ruling power to ensure continuous victories due to the complicated nature of an inconsistent federalist voting system.
The US's election system has many issues, but Russia's system (at the present moment) is a complete charade.
At least with the US system, the rules and loopholes (as stupid as they are) are transparent, known, and understood ahead of time. There's no funny business behind the curtain.
In Russia, elections are secretly manipulated by the state. The US is a sometimes-dysfunctional democracy, but Russia doesn't have a democracy at all.
Well, to be a little bit pedantic, the USA doesn't have a democracy either, we have a representative republic.
You're speculating as to the state of Russia's democracy. Have you any specific proof of your allegations? I'm guessing your proof lays primarily with that which is published in the media, and the strong statements / research which come out of NATO and other anti-Russian establishments?
I can't believe people would vote for Trump, but let's face it, they did because they believed his economy promises. I can't believe people voted for Putin, but Russia's economy has flourished under his reign, before him, people literally starved to death. I can't believe people vote for Erdogan, but Türkiye's economy is magnitudes stronger and fairer than it was before the AKP reign. Perhaps these democracies are working as intended, and people just cast short-sighted, greed-driven votes?
The same way most Americans don't approve of or want to be associated with Trump. Democracies allow more freedom of choice, but large minorities or even small majorities in democracies can be ruled by people they see as detrimental to the country or opposed to their own personal views.
I'm sure this is compounded by voter intimidation, limits on free speech, etc.
We have a long way to go in the US and Russia until every person is directly represented by either themselves or someone they ideologically agree with. Winner take all democracies are certainly better than aristocracies or dictatorships, but still result in the misrepresentation of huge portions of the population.
An unfortunate one though and akin to saying "white people" or "poor people". Sweeping generalities about mass groups of people although faster usually break down communication.
Considering the poison is extremely deadly, that other uninvolved UK citizens died and were injured as a result of exposure, that the poisoning was almost definitely ordered or approved by Putin, and that Putin and other government officials have spoken at length about killing traitors no matter where they go, it seems very likely they intended to kill him but failed.
Just making him "really sick" doesn't make much sense, I think. Especially when you consider someone unrelated did die after being exposed.
Sure, somebody did something with a poison to get a couple of people sick and dead, for sure. Maybe the intention was to instill fear? To me that is just as plausible as a murder attempt. Also, you'd think that the Russian secret service is not as amateurish as to screw up a job that should be pretty easy for them.
And, well, I'm just not very convinced of the "almost definitely ordered or approved by Putin" part, nor the "Putin and other government officials have spoken at length about killing traitors no matter where they go" piece. I have never seen evidence of the former, and honestly never saw or heard the latter either.
I have a hypothesis that the polonium poisoners weren't planning on being detected.
Polonium has no side effects other than radiation poisoning which can't be detected outside the body. To diagnose it, one would have to go looking for trace amounts in the body or in contaminated areas. If the poisoners weren't aware of the extreme sensitivity of alpha-particle detection -- reliably accurate to the single particle level -- they might have thought polonium would be undetectable and untraceable. Or they might of thought nobody would ever think to look for it. By some accounts, they almost didn't.
You're spot on here. As I understand, the Russian state was quite surprised at the capabilities of Western detection science. It was certainly not common knowledge that low-concentration alpha emitters (still plenty poisonous) could be detected in blood, nor that the assassins could be tracked all the way back to Russia just from their limited exposure.
The science is actually old and certainly known to physicists around the world. Such detectors are readily available to university physics laboratories, for example. But if you don't have a physics background, it might never occur to you that such technology exists.
> opioids (fentanyl) (to wipe out the hostage-takers in the Dubrovka theater)
They used Carfentanil (100x more potent than fentanyl) to wipe them out. Unfortunately medics didn't have enough antidote on hand to reboot all people.
Your comparison is completely unalike. Yes the US drone war program is bad. Yes the endless war on terror is bad. But these are not the same as a tyrant poisoning anyone who becomes inconvenient to him.
The closest comparison I think you could validly make would be something like the harsh treatment of Chelsea Manning or Reality Winner (or Drake, or Snowden, etc). None of which were taken out with poison or a Hellfire missile.
(Edit: that’s not to excuse the treatment of those people either.)
No, it's exactly the same.
Both are extrajudicial and state-sponsored killings aka assassinations.
Just because many people have blind trust in the US government and the validity of its kill list aka "disposition matrix" [0] doesn't change the basic injustice of the act, which is just as unjust as poisoning some "enemy of the state".
The international laws and human rights broken in both cases are exactly the same, the only difference is the methodology of the final "execution".
> None of which were taken out with poison or a Hellfire missile.
It's extremely naive to assume we know every drone victim ever, it's not like the US drone program is a shining beacon of transparency.
Putin targets Russian citizens that are his personal enemies because they speak up, protest, or otherwise embarrass him. He does it using poison in a manner to make sure everyone knows who did it and what the consequences are if you cross him.
The US drone program does not target US citizens who speak up, protest, or embarrass the president of the USA, at the behest of just the president.
(Stating the obvious, but that’s not a defense of the drone program. You’ve outlined its problems. But it’s just clearly not the same thing.)
> The US drone program does not target US citizens who speak up, protest, or embarrass the president of the USA, at the behest of just the president.
How do you know that? Does the US publish its list? No, it doesn't, so you are making that statement on literally nothing but good faith.
While at the same time you use bad faith to frame the Russian version as something where Putin personally orders people killed for slighting him or some other mundane reason.
The reality is both are killing "enemies of the state", justified and regulated by their own, internal, rulesets and governmental institutions. They and others have been doing so openly, and covertly for decades. Heck, this kind of stuff even has been glorified as a pop-culture export from the UK as "the agent with a license to kill".
In that context, there's literally no difference if it's an Obama, Trump, Putin or their UK equivalent giving the final "okay" or if the target is a US/UK/Russian national who's a terrorist/pedophile/traitor/whatever.
It's about the lack of accountability, the lack of due process, the lack of recourse. All these issues exist regardless of the US, Russia or anybody else doing something like this.
In that context, the US drone war is pretty much the overt manifestation of a practice that used to be kept covertly due to its inherent controversy. But in the zeals of a war on terror, where even torture became openly condonable, too many people have lost their moral compass.
> The US drone program does not target US citizens who speak up, protest, or embarrass the president of the USA, at the behest of just the president.
How do you know that?
Well, there's simple occam's razor - if drone strikes were doing this, we'd probably have heard about it. On the other hand we have a rising body count of journalists, artists, and ex-spies with real names and histories.
No matter how you feel about drone strikes, you can't compare these things.
We do have quite a lot of info on who are "US citizens who speak up, protest, or embarrass the president of the USA" and who get killed by drones. They don't overlap much. You don't get Drones trying to take out Mueller and the Taliban types who get hit are much more like military/terrorist enemies than political foes.
Here is a US citizen and journalist that is on the kill list. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/how-...
He has been lucky to survive so far. But he is struggling to even get a case before the courts to learn why he is on the list.
There is no proof that he is on any kill list what so ever other than his claims of being too close to too many drone strikes which given what he does isn’t that surprising.
If he is not on a kill list, the US government should say so. If they don't want to give out person specific information, they can give a categorical statement like 'no US citizens on a kill list' or 'no US citizens in Syria'.
How do you get evidence that you are on a kill list anyway? The lists are top secret, maintained by world class intelligence agencies...
The US has killed US citizens before e.g. Anwar al-Awlaki; if he’s on the list then it’s not because he is a journalist if he is nothing more than that then he ain’t on any list.
There is no reason for the US to publicly state if he is on any kill list or not technically.
Really, one kind of assassination is very much like another. I'm not saying that to be edgy; I sometimes wonder if a limited number of obvious assassinations isn't better than an open-ended number of casualties in conventional war (viz/ Syria for example).
It's true that drones tend to be military rather than espionage assets, and as insignia-bearing military hardware in a designated battle zone they're legally equivalent to a sniper successfully killing a distant target. However battlefield snipers generally make opportunistic choices based on tactical considerations, with little regard to the identity of their targets. A great many drone attacks begin with intelligence about a specific target and then deploy the resources to eliminate that person, which for me puts it closer to assassination. (This is an idiosyncratic definition and I doubt it lines up with accepted laws of war.)
We ought not engage in whataboutism here. Both Russian poising and the US drone program are terrible for different reasons and we ought to demand an end to both.
Yes, certainly we should discuss them and there is definitely a difference morally. It’s clear extrajudicial killings of political opponents is wrong. Drone strikes are wrong because in a sense they are also extrajudicial. At least, the threshold for lethal force is too low, in my opinion
Every man above 16 tends to be labeled a combatant in the drone programs. No requirement that they have harmed anyone.
Sure there are differences, but also similarities.
No one drops bombs on their domestic political opposition. Russia isn't poisoning it's military enemies, it's poisoning Russians. There really is an important distinction.
Because the point isn't necessarily to kill the victim, but to induce fear in the general population. Poisoning is similar enough to illness to be imaginable but different enough to be scary, and we tend to associate poisonings with horrible suffering rather than sudden and painless expiration.
As an aside, you also just opened a can of worms here.
Things that can be so 'easily' attributed to a given state actor can also then be used to try to frame said actor. Look at all the evidence, now obviously completely fake, that magically appeared when we wanted to 'prove' Iraq had WMD, even though they did not. For that matter look at the list of United States involvement in regime change [1] which is gradually turning into a novel. We make no secret, or at least declassification makes no secret, of overthrowing democratically elected governments, falsifying evidence to hurt sovereign nations, complicity to support of assassination of 'innocent' individuals, and lots of other great stuff.
I think people don't understand that propaganda doesn't mean some crackly speaker in a third world nation spewing daily praise for the divine leader. It comes and all shapes and forms, and the US is actively involved in domestic propaganda that ensures we never really appreciate all the awful things we do. In a way we, as in our intelligence agencies, are probably protected by their own impudence. Many of the things I'm listing even I have trouble believing we'd do, yet declassified documents and open acknowledgement make it complete and crystal clear that we do.
The point of this is not to say whether any party or another was involved in whatever event, but rather that trying to gauge things as an outsider based on the filtering of a news media which hungers both for clicks and war is unlikely to yield anything remotely resembling an educated opinion. We can even look to the history of Pussy Riot or this case as further examples. The victim here is not a member of Pussy Riot. His ex wife was a member. And the band themselves were not arrested for anything they said, but their behavior. They decided to stage a 'guerilla concert' inside a cathedral obviously completely against the wishes of the church and without their permission. They were charged with 'holliganism motivated by religious hatred' and sentenced to 2 years. They were released early on amnesty from the Russian duma/congress after serving most of their sentence. [2] Quite amazing what a different picture was spun by the media when all this was happening.
It makes it quite difficult to identify the origin. For example, in Skripal's case, we still don't know from where the Novichok came[1] or the assassins were Russians or not[2][3].
Any indication of what type of poison was used? The symptoms sound horrific. Blindness, and continued hallucinations after days. Must be very traumatic.
Media reported that he "may have been poisoned with strychnine", but there's no official diagnose yet.
EDIT: I'm badly mistaken. It was reported about Russian-British couple in Salisbury. I've got confused, since there are three different poisonings being discussed in the media daily. Normal day in Russia(
Any news about the Russian government should be read with the understanding that the Western political establishment is desperate to find a pretext for entering the war in Syria and deposing the Assad regime, which has the military backing of Russia.
Not the OP, but the obvious interpretation is that the Trump administration is not only not equivalent to, but in opposition to, the "Western political establishment".
Can certain types and angles of reporting be incentivized by the deep state and/or public fervor without direct "collaboration"? Or is every article a state sponsored propaganda-or-nothing deal?
When I see stories like this, I think of this editorial written by Lasantha Wickrematunge, a leading Sri Lankan journalist, to be printed in the event of his being killed:
And Then They Came For Me
No other profession calls on its practitioners to lay down their lives for their art save the armed forces and, in Sri Lanka, journalism. In the course of the past few years, the independent media have increasingly come under attack. Electronic and print-media institutions have been burnt, bombed, sealed and coerced. Countless journalists have been harassed, threatened and killed. It has been my honour to belong to all those categories and now especially the last. ...
It's a powerful essay that challenges not only authorities but also simplistic hero/villain narratives about them, about journalists, and about their readers. Highly recommended:
If you remember nothing else, remember this: The [Sunday] Leader is there for you, be you Sinhalese, Tamil, Muslim, low-caste, homosexual, dissident or disabled. Its staff will fight on, unbowed and unafraid, with the courage to which you have become accustomed. Do not take that commitment for granted. Let there be no doubt that whatever sacrifices we journalists make, they are not made for our own glory or enrichment: they are made for you. Whether you deserve their sacrifice is another matter. As for me, God knows I tried.
1. In Russia, nobody really knows or cares about pussy riot. The western fascination with them is a kind of exoticism. Nadya Tolokonnikova can fill a 1000-5000 seat lecture hall in a major american city, but in Moscow it'd be a surprise if 100 people showed up. This isn't out of fear or anything like that; think what kind of attendance a young, white, American punk woman doing art pranks in America would draw on the American speaking circuit. It's the same in Russia, to most people they're just not that interesting.
2. In Russia, nobody knows or cares about zona.media. This article says "...Media Zone quickly established itself as one of the country’s most reliable sources of information," but it's basically the modern Russian equivalent of IndyMedia: a protest calendar that only a very small contingent of activists pay attention to with the normal levels of radical infighting and articles written for the echo chamber. Nobody "on the street" has even heard of it.
3. Putin has a slight growing problem with young people who didn't experience the "before" and "after" of his taking power in the 90s, but for the most part nobody cares about these stories. If you ask people "on the street" whether they think Putin was responsible for the apartment building bombings referenced here, most will straight up say "even if he was, I don't care, he's still amazing." There was even a podcast (radiolab?) that actually did these interviews.
However, I am very prepared to believe that the Russian state poisoned Pyotr. What I never understand about these recent actions, though, is why? Why go out of your way to poison a no-name activist that operates in fringe circles for researching a story that nobody would care about, even if Putin were to confess live on TV channel 1?
> Why go out of your way to poison a no-name activist that operates in fringe circles for researching a story that nobody would care about, even if Putin were to confess live on TV channel 1?
A message to the West perhaps?
> The western fascination with them is a kind of exoticism.
But the West is important to them. They know the fascination and they know the West is watching so they just showed everyone they can be ruthless.
It could play on the angle that Westerners should be careful about supporting too much someone like that as their popularity could end up killing them. For example, say Harvard wanted to invite Verzilov to give a talk. Now they might think twice - it would be nice to have him, but would they be painting a target on his back because of it? So it has kind of a secondary chilling effect.
Another reason:
> Verzilov had been working on an investigative story about the deaths of the three Russian journalists, Alexander Rastorguev, Orkhan Dzhemal, and Kirill Radchenko.
It wasn't that he was particularly dangerous because of his political stance but because he started to dig into other journalists' suspicious deaths. So he might have been a no-name but got close enough to uncover things.
One more reason:
Eliminate the troublemakers early. Don't wait till they become popular. Have someone monitor the media and detect who is becoming "dangerous" and eliminate them before they have a huge following.
> Verzilov had been working on an investigative story about the deaths of the three Russian journalists, Alexander Rastorguev, Orkhan Dzhemal, and Kirill Radchenko.
This is the most likely reason, because:
> Russian journalists killed in Central African Republic were researching military firm with Kremlin links, their editors say
>In 1981 he was sentenced to twelve years imprisonment under articles of robbery, fraud, and involving teenagers in prostitution.
>His ties to Putin go back to at least 2001: He’s worked on everything from election interference to setting up pro-Putin newspapers to sending Russian mercenaries to Syria to fight on behalf of Bashar al-Assad’s regime.
> It wasn't that he was particularly dangerous because of his political stance but because he started to dig into other journalists' suspicious deaths. So he might have been a no-name but got close enough to uncover things.
This is exactly what's confusing about these actions. What I'm trying to say is that Americans still don't understand is how little that kind of news would matter if it broke in Russia.
The polls are not rigged, and people are not afraid to speak freely: Russians love Putin. They do not love him for his human rights record, for his stance on democracy, for his actions against corruption. None of that matters. They love him because he dramatically transformed the economic and physical security of almost everyone in the country. He could proudly claim responsibility for these deaths and it wouldn't change anyone's mind.
> A message to the West perhaps?
What is the message, and why send it this way? If they care about western opinion, as you suggest, then poison does not seem like the best strategy. The poison is the only reason anyone in the west knows who Pyotr is.
> Why go out of your way to poison a no-name activist that operates in fringe circles for researching a story that nobody would care about, even if Putin were to confess live on TV channel 1?
I don't want to support or disagree with the following. I just mention that the possibility exists.
In such groups there are also lots of infighting. The more extreme a group becomes the more the extreme leaders also fight each other. So it's totally possible as well, that these guys killed and harmed each other. E.g. the guy killed the three guys and a friend of them poisoned him, or similar.
Purely speculation, but I suspect that Pussy Riot gets some sort of covert support from Western 3 letter organizations to support the image of an oppressive regime in Russia.
I always like to ask, "who wins?". News gets out that Russia is poisoning people critical of it. Who wins? Do they achieve their goals of silencing criticism? Obviously people think negatively of them and think twice before visiting the country. So, who wins?
Good question. In my eyes Russia indeed has really no motive to do this. On the other hand, given the constant demonization of Russia over the last years, this perfectly fits that narrative.
But if the goal was this demonization of Russia, then yeah, that's a lot of motive right there.
137 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 210 ms ] threadOriginal at https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMra1705224
Full repost hosted presumably by one of the authors at http://www.dickyricky.com/Medicine/Papers/2018_04_26%20NEJM%...
You can pretend it's for when you get shot as a spy (Like the three in the story) but also use it for boring everyday things like car accidents.
As for physicians, I'd work on getting them to just wash their hands correctly, a lot of needless deaths there.
But Chemical-Weapons Attacks are fun too, I just wouldn't say it's on the list of important things to learn, more on the fun side.
We have passed a turning point at which previously reprehensible behaviors have become tolerated. And as an English speaker living in the Netherlands has come to learn, some of us have an ingrained inclination to avoid directly calling out what to most people would be an obvious problem (to avoid potentially offending).
Putin's Russia kills people. It imprisons people. It poisons people. It cheats, it steals (from masses of poor people). It lies in the face of the world (bare chested). For some reason we now tolerate this without calling it for what it is.
And now we have an American government that has for so long not only avoided calling it out but instead has celebrated non-virtues while avoiding contagious fatal flaws that we forget how wrong for civilization the behavior is. Not only that, but we've begun to celebrate the virtues of dictators - not benevolent ones (if they exist), but previously-OBVIOUS horrible self-serving ones.
So, trying to shut the rant down, it's all quite f-d up. We should not only not be surprised, we should be up in arms. Ironically, the people who should be up in arms are the ones who wisely have realized that arming the civilians is a net-negative. But at least in the US, the right to bear arms is exactly to undo situations like the one we are clearly headed toward.
Italy, Estonia, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, Lithuania, Romania and Finland also expelled between one and three diplomats each.
President Donald Trump on Monday ordered the expulsion of 60 Russian diplomats the US identified as intelligence agents and the closure of the Russian consulate in Seattle
https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/26/politics/us-expel-russian-dip...
Unless you're willfully living under a rock, you must admit that it strongly appears that Trump is beholden to Russia in the same way that a middleman is under the thumb of his mob boss. Based on the available financial evidence (the countless companies and countless financial failures and defaulted loans), it's quite plausible that Trump owes some wealthy Russians a lot of money. His house of cards is built on OPM.
Really there's no point debating this. Those who cannot see this are either extremely young and naive, or they are wilfully ignorant. I don't care what political figure it is on what side... thinking people can observe behaviors and identify patterns that illustrate (highly) likely back stories. Trump has a LOT of back stories. You need only to research his US endeavors to see that he has never, at least until becoming President, built a successful business on his own. Now, of course, he has the benefit of the perceived promise of his customers having access to him (a la Mar a Lago, for example).
U.S. Forces Killed More Than 200 Russian Fighters in Syria Attack
https://www.thedailybeast.com/report-us-forces-killed-more-t...
And there are sanctions:
Trump administration slaps more sanctions on Russia after Skripal poisonings
https://www.cnn.com/2018/08/08/politics/us-state-department-...
It is plausible that Trump owes some wealthy Russians a lot of money, but on the other hand, there is zero actual evidence that it is true. Lot's of things are plausible. It is plausible you are a Russian agent planting propaganda to undermine faith in the government, but there is zero evidence of it being true, so I wouldn't go around claiming it.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/16/us/politics/russians-indi...
https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-reportedly-bragged-abo...
It doesn't suggest someone beholden to Russia.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5rgqSEVVIU
In the US, quite honestly, the trend has been negative since the mid 1960s. That's not ideal for those of us in the prime of our lives now.
If you look at the US trends in the late 50s, it was far better than the trends in the 90s, 2000s, and beyond.
But I certainly wouldn't trade my life currently for the 1960's in a second -- going tremendously backwards with civil rights and LGBTQ attitudes, the Vietnam War debacle, no internet, missing out on five decades of health care advances and new treatments, vastly safer cars, I could go on and on and on...
Really not sure what trend you're talking about. If you say the "trend" has been negative since the 1960's, you're saying things are worse today than the 1960's... and I just fail to see how that's true except in very specific areas like student debt or healthcare spending, but certainly not overall.
It seems like people view the 1950s to 1980s with rose colored glasses now.
The mood in the late 1980s and early 1990s was much better than it has been the last few years. And better than it was in the 1970s.
The best realization of the American dream was on the decade after the end of WW2.
Incidentally, it was a period with comparatively high corporate taxes. Now we have historically low corporate taxes, not even counting maneuvers like the Irish/Dutch indefinite tax deferment scheme.
What has been promoted as common free market wisdom at least since the 80s has no subsantive evidence to back it up. If you want a current example of reality vs "common wisdom" economics, compare California to Wisconsin, Kansas, or Texas.
An essential caveat: That only would apply if you were a white male, a Christian to a significant extent, and possibly a Protestant. For women, African-Americans, and many other minorities, the American Dream was far out of reach. African-Americans were still being lynched.
> Incidentally, it was a period with comparatively high corporate taxes.
An excellent point, and don't forget much higher regulation.
> If you want a current example of reality vs "common wisdom" economics, compare California to Wisconsin, Kansas, or Texas.
Yes, I try to point out: Name one great American industry that came out of a 'red' state, other than extractive industries like oil. Does the whole country want an economy and human welfare like Alabama or like Massachusetts?
Ok, let me try.... Semiconductors in California?
California was a red state up until the 1992 presidential election. Long after the birth of the semiconductor and computer age.
What do I win?
And looking back to earlier in the 1900s, it was states like Ohio, Michigan, Illinois (all red states back then) that were major economic powerhouses.
I would argue that states like NY and CA are economic powerhouses in spite of their politics, not because. Just take a look at what democratic policies have done to NJ. It's been on the decline for a long time.
But at that point in time the Republicans would have been the blue guys and the Democrats the red guys.
(Though the contemporary US colour scheme doesn't make much sense since historically/elsewhere the left is associated with red and the right with blue. But my point is that the Democrats were the more conservative party at that point in time and the Republicans the more progressive party.)
Yeah, surprising how being the only Western power not destroyed economically can do that. Your theory of higher corporate taxes is just cherry picking numbers. Yes rates were higher, but there were way more ways to get around them than there are now.
we've begun to celebrate the virtues of dictators
It's not a new thing at all. For a lot of the 20th C the US was doing precisely that. Fighting democracy and supporting dictators. There are dozens of countries where that happened. The accounts are depressing, horrifying. Which, yes, has happened with such regularity that you could say the US
kills people. It imprisons people. It poisons people. It cheats, it steals (from masses of poor people). It lies in the face of the world (bare chested).
One quick way to get some sense of the reality is to look at the voting in the United Nations, (GA and SC). I did that once for votes in the 80s and 90s. Typically, there's a vote on something that almost every country in the world thinks is a good idea, except for 1 or 2 of the worst dictatorships...and the USA. It's quite amazing to see that in 'black and white'. Nothing like the God-Is-On-Our-Side picture painted on the US news TV shows.
But with every breathless proclamation like yours of Russia as a cartoon villain I started to have doubts. It seemed like everything was suddenly Russia's fault--they were the absolute root of all evil in the world. Anyone who disagreed was obviously a Russian bot.
The last straw for me was when Theresa May declared, without any doubt, that the Russian state had attempted to assassinate two British citizens using nerve agents (10 days after the fact, before the conclusion of any investigation and without any concrete evidence to implicate Russia).
This Russia-phobia is dangerous. We have made a bogeyman and a scapegoat out of a desperate, nuclear-equipped nation that less than 30 years ago had its federation, economy and national identity shattered. I'm afraid that this delusion won't stop until a full on conflict breaks out which should be a much scarier prospect than yet-another-evil-dictatorship.
But we, in the West, and countries aligned with the West, fail to understand their motives. Like China, they have internal motives that while they look like they are strategizing against the West in particular, at times it’s just due to internal issues.
Russia didn’t anex Crimea to poke the West. They took it because not having it exposed them militarily (as well as domestically made them looked weak).
For all his faults, Kissinger understands those things better than most public figures in their public speaking (are willing to admit, at least).
It's dangerous to assume this only holds true for one side, imho it's much more likely all the involved players think like that and act accordingly.
Case in point: Many Russian people also don't understand "Western motives" and they actually feel backstabbed due to cultural differences leading to, rather massive, geopolitical misunderstandings like that whole "No NATO Eastward Expansion" promise during German reunification talks. [0]
While Russians think "A word is a word", most Western responses to this pretty much boil down to a lawyered "nothing was ever ratified" response, which might be formally correct but is the diplomatic equivalent of flipping somebody off you just scammed.
There are so many barriers at work here, not just in terms of language, but also the cultural context, also ain't helping that pretty much everybody is running communication and information interference, so finding common ground is actively fought against.
[0]http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/nato-s-eastward-ex...
Ok, I'll bait - it exposed them to what?
Any other "exposures"?
I don't follow you here. The toxin in question is known, or at least widely assumed, to be produced and controlled exclusively by state-sanctioned facilities in Russia.
So, scenario one is that Putin's agents committed the assassination attempt. That's obviously bad.
Scenario two is that Putin has lost control of his country's WMDs, and that they are being deployed in foreign countries by rogue actors without his permission. That's arguably even worse.
So, which is more likely, in your opinion?
[1] http://www.spectroscopynow.com/details/ezine/1591ca249b2/Ira...
[2] https://medium.com/@gregclay/usa-synthesized-novichok-in-199...
[3] https://twitter.com/davidbcollum/status/998613563680882694?l...
Are the Swiss in on it, too? https://www.reuters.com/article/us-swiss-russia/russian-agen...
Then 2014 came. I was wrong. Russia is exactly what the majority of its citizens want it to be. And what they want it to be is something that others are afraid of.
Less messy than poisoning I suppose.
>Ironically, the people who should be up in arms are the ones who wisely have realized that arming the civilians is a net-negative.
I've worded this differently. Turns out the people that claimed they would fight the government are actually the one's who would support the government becoming a haven for sycophants and tyrants in the first place. Turns out that the American populace is actually pretty toxic and not all that exceptional. We could be. We can be. It's just going to take a lot of self-reflection and growing up.
When people tell you who they are, believe them. As Americans not enough of us cared to vote, and enough of us didn't care enough to push out the literal human garbage fire that is Trump.
Edit: I guess people aren't interested. My bad.
[1] https://www.buzzfeed.com/heidiblake/poison-in-the-system
Exactly for these reasons:
>It doesn't always seem to kill the victim and makes it easy to identify the perps as state actors.
Quick and effortless death by a bullet don't terrify peons as much as death after weeks of excruciating agony.
In this case, it is also to send intimidation message to the country hosting them: hey look, we just wetted a man guarded by a squadron of crack bodyguards on your soil, now, think what we can do to you
Which is what makes it useful as an intimidation tactic.
As others have said, identifying a state actor is a feature, not a bug. However, what others have neglected to point out, is that it's unreliable - and that is a feature, too. We can't easily identify the state actor. Polonium-210 pointed at Russia obviously, but Russia has also utilized dioxides (vs. Shchekochikhin), and opioids (fentanyl) (to wipe out the hostage-takers in the Dubrovka theater).
The result is that Russia sends a message: we will reach out and kill our critics and defectors.
Bullets don't have the same effect: a critic dies in his sleep. Was it a drop of fentanyl? Maybe. Maybe. The absence or presence of poison will be speculated on; the absence or presence of bullets is clear-cut.
Through the use of poisons which vary in their ability to point the finger at Russia, any death of a critic that could plausibly be linked to a poisoning now raises the specter of Russian intervention. The result is that their psychological warfare is extended far beyond their actual reach.
The KGB/FSB has always had a very significant attention to psych-ops. Their actions should not be interpreted strictly at face value.
> wouldn't have been satisfying or vengeful enough
You know this how ?
Alexander Litvenenko springs to mind, followed by Viktor Yushchenko, Alexander Perepilichny, Anna Politkovskaya (later shot to death), Vladimir Kara-Murza (twice!), the Skripals, Georgi Markov (Ricin... nasty), Karinna Moskalenko, and on and on.
I know this is a common oversimplification when talking about governments, but please, could we at last use "Kremlin" instead? Russia is a large country with many people just like us, who want to live, love and have a wonderful time. Sure, at times the public opinion is stirred when some atrocities are reported and you can hear some vocal groups online, but Russians are not different from any other nation in this respect.
Their leaders, however, are a different story. You could say Russians have had bad luck with respect to their rulers for centuries. When you look back at what Lenin, Stalin and others did, Putin starts to look like a savior. But they all have a certain attitude and ambitions. So could we please stop saying "Russia" when we don't mean Russian people at all, and common Russians are actually victims of bad policy of their rulers.
I am a US citizen, my birth nation has "elected" two presidents who failed to win the popular vote. 2% of my fellow citizens are unable to vote due to felony convictions. On top of this, the practice known as gerrymandering is essentially carte blanche for a state's ruling power to ensure continuous victories due to the complicated nature of an inconsistent federalist voting system.
At least with the US system, the rules and loopholes (as stupid as they are) are transparent, known, and understood ahead of time. There's no funny business behind the curtain.
In Russia, elections are secretly manipulated by the state. The US is a sometimes-dysfunctional democracy, but Russia doesn't have a democracy at all.
You're speculating as to the state of Russia's democracy. Have you any specific proof of your allegations? I'm guessing your proof lays primarily with that which is published in the media, and the strong statements / research which come out of NATO and other anti-Russian establishments?
I can't believe people would vote for Trump, but let's face it, they did because they believed his economy promises. I can't believe people voted for Putin, but Russia's economy has flourished under his reign, before him, people literally starved to death. I can't believe people vote for Erdogan, but Türkiye's economy is magnitudes stronger and fairer than it was before the AKP reign. Perhaps these democracies are working as intended, and people just cast short-sighted, greed-driven votes?
I'm sure this is compounded by voter intimidation, limits on free speech, etc.
We have a long way to go in the US and Russia until every person is directly represented by either themselves or someone they ideologically agree with. Winner take all democracies are certainly better than aristocracies or dictatorships, but still result in the misrepresentation of huge portions of the population.
Just making him "really sick" doesn't make much sense, I think. Especially when you consider someone unrelated did die after being exposed.
And, well, I'm just not very convinced of the "almost definitely ordered or approved by Putin" part, nor the "Putin and other government officials have spoken at length about killing traitors no matter where they go" piece. I have never seen evidence of the former, and honestly never saw or heard the latter either.
Polonium has no side effects other than radiation poisoning which can't be detected outside the body. To diagnose it, one would have to go looking for trace amounts in the body or in contaminated areas. If the poisoners weren't aware of the extreme sensitivity of alpha-particle detection -- reliably accurate to the single particle level -- they might have thought polonium would be undetectable and untraceable. Or they might of thought nobody would ever think to look for it. By some accounts, they almost didn't.
They used Carfentanil (100x more potent than fentanyl) to wipe them out. Unfortunately medics didn't have enough antidote on hand to reboot all people.
Way more lethal, way more collateral, quite obvious to identify as the act of a state actor, still common practice barely anybody takes issue with.
The closest comparison I think you could validly make would be something like the harsh treatment of Chelsea Manning or Reality Winner (or Drake, or Snowden, etc). None of which were taken out with poison or a Hellfire missile.
(Edit: that’s not to excuse the treatment of those people either.)
Just because many people have blind trust in the US government and the validity of its kill list aka "disposition matrix" [0] doesn't change the basic injustice of the act, which is just as unjust as poisoning some "enemy of the state".
The international laws and human rights broken in both cases are exactly the same, the only difference is the methodology of the final "execution".
> None of which were taken out with poison or a Hellfire missile.
It's extremely naive to assume we know every drone victim ever, it's not like the US drone program is a shining beacon of transparency.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposition_Matrix
The US drone program does not target US citizens who speak up, protest, or embarrass the president of the USA, at the behest of just the president.
(Stating the obvious, but that’s not a defense of the drone program. You’ve outlined its problems. But it’s just clearly not the same thing.)
How do you know that? Does the US publish its list? No, it doesn't, so you are making that statement on literally nothing but good faith.
While at the same time you use bad faith to frame the Russian version as something where Putin personally orders people killed for slighting him or some other mundane reason.
The reality is both are killing "enemies of the state", justified and regulated by their own, internal, rulesets and governmental institutions. They and others have been doing so openly, and covertly for decades. Heck, this kind of stuff even has been glorified as a pop-culture export from the UK as "the agent with a license to kill".
In that context, there's literally no difference if it's an Obama, Trump, Putin or their UK equivalent giving the final "okay" or if the target is a US/UK/Russian national who's a terrorist/pedophile/traitor/whatever.
It's about the lack of accountability, the lack of due process, the lack of recourse. All these issues exist regardless of the US, Russia or anybody else doing something like this.
In that context, the US drone war is pretty much the overt manifestation of a practice that used to be kept covertly due to its inherent controversy. But in the zeals of a war on terror, where even torture became openly condonable, too many people have lost their moral compass.
How do you know that?
Well, there's simple occam's razor - if drone strikes were doing this, we'd probably have heard about it. On the other hand we have a rising body count of journalists, artists, and ex-spies with real names and histories.
No matter how you feel about drone strikes, you can't compare these things.
How do you get evidence that you are on a kill list anyway? The lists are top secret, maintained by world class intelligence agencies...
There is no reason for the US to publicly state if he is on any kill list or not technically.
It's true that drones tend to be military rather than espionage assets, and as insignia-bearing military hardware in a designated battle zone they're legally equivalent to a sniper successfully killing a distant target. However battlefield snipers generally make opportunistic choices based on tactical considerations, with little regard to the identity of their targets. A great many drone attacks begin with intelligence about a specific target and then deploy the resources to eliminate that person, which for me puts it closer to assassination. (This is an idiosyncratic definition and I doubt it lines up with accepted laws of war.)
Is killing a civilian who uses words to critique a government not different than killing an enemy who is at war with a government?
Maybe drones are terrible way to accomplish the latter (too many civilian collateral damage).
Things that can be so 'easily' attributed to a given state actor can also then be used to try to frame said actor. Look at all the evidence, now obviously completely fake, that magically appeared when we wanted to 'prove' Iraq had WMD, even though they did not. For that matter look at the list of United States involvement in regime change [1] which is gradually turning into a novel. We make no secret, or at least declassification makes no secret, of overthrowing democratically elected governments, falsifying evidence to hurt sovereign nations, complicity to support of assassination of 'innocent' individuals, and lots of other great stuff.
I think people don't understand that propaganda doesn't mean some crackly speaker in a third world nation spewing daily praise for the divine leader. It comes and all shapes and forms, and the US is actively involved in domestic propaganda that ensures we never really appreciate all the awful things we do. In a way we, as in our intelligence agencies, are probably protected by their own impudence. Many of the things I'm listing even I have trouble believing we'd do, yet declassified documents and open acknowledgement make it complete and crystal clear that we do.
The point of this is not to say whether any party or another was involved in whatever event, but rather that trying to gauge things as an outsider based on the filtering of a news media which hungers both for clicks and war is unlikely to yield anything remotely resembling an educated opinion. We can even look to the history of Pussy Riot or this case as further examples. The victim here is not a member of Pussy Riot. His ex wife was a member. And the band themselves were not arrested for anything they said, but their behavior. They decided to stage a 'guerilla concert' inside a cathedral obviously completely against the wishes of the church and without their permission. They were charged with 'holliganism motivated by religious hatred' and sentenced to 2 years. They were released early on amnesty from the Russian duma/congress after serving most of their sentence. [2] Quite amazing what a different picture was spun by the media when all this was happening.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pussy_Riot
1. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/mar/15/uks-claims-q...
2. https://www.businessinsider.in/British-military-scientists-c...
3. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-britain-russia-stockpiles...
EDIT: I'm badly mistaken. It was reported about Russian-British couple in Salisbury. I've got confused, since there are three different poisonings being discussed in the media daily. Normal day in Russia(
c.f. the "Deep State".
True or not, it's a charitable read of OP.
And Then They Came For Me
No other profession calls on its practitioners to lay down their lives for their art save the armed forces and, in Sri Lanka, journalism. In the course of the past few years, the independent media have increasingly come under attack. Electronic and print-media institutions have been burnt, bombed, sealed and coerced. Countless journalists have been harassed, threatened and killed. It has been my honour to belong to all those categories and now especially the last. ...
It's a powerful essay that challenges not only authorities but also simplistic hero/villain narratives about them, about journalists, and about their readers. Highly recommended:
https://web.archive.org/web/20180120100014/http://www.thesun...
If you remember nothing else, remember this: The [Sunday] Leader is there for you, be you Sinhalese, Tamil, Muslim, low-caste, homosexual, dissident or disabled. Its staff will fight on, unbowed and unafraid, with the courage to which you have become accustomed. Do not take that commitment for granted. Let there be no doubt that whatever sacrifices we journalists make, they are not made for our own glory or enrichment: they are made for you. Whether you deserve their sacrifice is another matter. As for me, God knows I tried.
1. In Russia, nobody really knows or cares about pussy riot. The western fascination with them is a kind of exoticism. Nadya Tolokonnikova can fill a 1000-5000 seat lecture hall in a major american city, but in Moscow it'd be a surprise if 100 people showed up. This isn't out of fear or anything like that; think what kind of attendance a young, white, American punk woman doing art pranks in America would draw on the American speaking circuit. It's the same in Russia, to most people they're just not that interesting.
2. In Russia, nobody knows or cares about zona.media. This article says "...Media Zone quickly established itself as one of the country’s most reliable sources of information," but it's basically the modern Russian equivalent of IndyMedia: a protest calendar that only a very small contingent of activists pay attention to with the normal levels of radical infighting and articles written for the echo chamber. Nobody "on the street" has even heard of it.
3. Putin has a slight growing problem with young people who didn't experience the "before" and "after" of his taking power in the 90s, but for the most part nobody cares about these stories. If you ask people "on the street" whether they think Putin was responsible for the apartment building bombings referenced here, most will straight up say "even if he was, I don't care, he's still amazing." There was even a podcast (radiolab?) that actually did these interviews.
However, I am very prepared to believe that the Russian state poisoned Pyotr. What I never understand about these recent actions, though, is why? Why go out of your way to poison a no-name activist that operates in fringe circles for researching a story that nobody would care about, even if Putin were to confess live on TV channel 1?
A message to the West perhaps?
> The western fascination with them is a kind of exoticism.
But the West is important to them. They know the fascination and they know the West is watching so they just showed everyone they can be ruthless.
It could play on the angle that Westerners should be careful about supporting too much someone like that as their popularity could end up killing them. For example, say Harvard wanted to invite Verzilov to give a talk. Now they might think twice - it would be nice to have him, but would they be painting a target on his back because of it? So it has kind of a secondary chilling effect.
Another reason:
> Verzilov had been working on an investigative story about the deaths of the three Russian journalists, Alexander Rastorguev, Orkhan Dzhemal, and Kirill Radchenko.
It wasn't that he was particularly dangerous because of his political stance but because he started to dig into other journalists' suspicious deaths. So he might have been a no-name but got close enough to uncover things.
One more reason:
Eliminate the troublemakers early. Don't wait till they become popular. Have someone monitor the media and detect who is becoming "dangerous" and eliminate them before they have a huge following.
> Verzilov had been working on an investigative story about the deaths of the three Russian journalists, Alexander Rastorguev, Orkhan Dzhemal, and Kirill Radchenko.
This is the most likely reason, because:
> Russian journalists killed in Central African Republic were researching military firm with Kremlin links, their editors say
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/aug/01/russian-journa...
>Wagner’s forces remain outside the Russian armed forces, following the whims of their master, the oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/08/ru...
And re Prigozhin:
>In 1981 he was sentenced to twelve years imprisonment under articles of robbery, fraud, and involving teenagers in prostitution.
>His ties to Putin go back to at least 2001: He’s worked on everything from election interference to setting up pro-Putin newspapers to sending Russian mercenaries to Syria to fight on behalf of Bashar al-Assad’s regime.
>... personally approved a Russian mercenary attack on US forces stationed in eastern Syria in early February https://www.vox.com/world/2018/2/26/17044930/yevgheny-prigoz...
Probably not the kind of guy who'd worry too much about having an investigative journalist hit.
This is exactly what's confusing about these actions. What I'm trying to say is that Americans still don't understand is how little that kind of news would matter if it broke in Russia.
The polls are not rigged, and people are not afraid to speak freely: Russians love Putin. They do not love him for his human rights record, for his stance on democracy, for his actions against corruption. None of that matters. They love him because he dramatically transformed the economic and physical security of almost everyone in the country. He could proudly claim responsibility for these deaths and it wouldn't change anyone's mind.
> A message to the West perhaps?
What is the message, and why send it this way? If they care about western opinion, as you suggest, then poison does not seem like the best strategy. The poison is the only reason anyone in the west knows who Pyotr is.
Amen, comrade!
I don't want to support or disagree with the following. I just mention that the possibility exists.
In such groups there are also lots of infighting. The more extreme a group becomes the more the extreme leaders also fight each other. So it's totally possible as well, that these guys killed and harmed each other. E.g. the guy killed the three guys and a friend of them poisoned him, or similar.
But if the goal was this demonization of Russia, then yeah, that's a lot of motive right there.