Putin: Once A KGB Thug, Always A KGB Thug

Crude assassinations, espionage and power grabs are Kremlin calling card
By Steve Watson
Infowars
Nov. 22, 2006

It may not be called the Soviet Union anymore, however its leadership is infested with old school Russian thugs and KGB criminals. As the London Guardian reports, the poisoning of former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko in a London restaurant is the latest in a line of attacks on the Kremlin's opponents abroad. The "defectors" who have fled the criminality and now speak out against the pantomime of Russian democracy in the name of freedom and human rights are failing to be given safe haven by the West as our governments cozy up to Vladimir Putin's tyrannical regime.

Litvinenko, an ex FSB (post Soviet KGB) operative, has seemingly been subjected to three times the fatal dose of thallium, a tasteless, odourless killer used in rat poison until, in the 1970s. It is unclear whether he will survive.

his friends and ex colleagues, most probably fearing they are next, have directly blamed the Russian government for the poisoning. They say Russia wanted to stop Litvinenko investigating last month's assassination of the campaigning journalist Anna Politkovskaya, whom he was also friends with. They believe the Kremlin was also to blame for Politkovskaya being shot outside her Moscow apartment.

During a recent debate at the Frontline club , a private members' club for foreign correspondents in London, on the murder of Anna Politkovskya, Mr Litvenenko was filmed standing up from the audience and saying: "I can directly answer you - it is President Putin of the Russian federation who has killed her". He goes on to make several more allegations against both Mr Putin and the Kremlin.

Anna Politkovskaya was Putin's most prominent critic, and at the time of her death was about to publish a powerful story about torture and abductions in Chechnya. Her death brings to at least 13 the number of journalists killed in contract-style killings since Putin came to power in 2000, according to the New-York based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). This systematic silencing of journalists, in addition to killing off all independent TV news networks, represents the destruction of the very short lived free press in Russia.

Politkovskaya had accused Putin of stifling freedom and failing to shake off his past as a KGB agent, possibly working in conjunction with the East German Stasi. According to the Washington Post:

"Putin defends the Soviet-era intelligence service to this day. In recent comments to a writers' group in Moscow, he even seemed to excuse its role in dictator Joseph Stalin's brutal purges, saying it would be "insincere" for him to assail the agency where he worked for so many years. Fiercely patriotic, Putin once said he could not read a book by a Soviet defector because "I don't read books by people who have betrayed the Motherland."

It comes as little surprise that Alexander Litvinenko has thus been targeted for speaking out about Politkovskaya. Protesters around the world have denounced Putin as her murderer.

Politkovskaya herself had previously been poisoned by the secret services as she attempted to report on the unfolding Beslan school massacre in 2003, an event which the majority of Russians now believe was a staged government psy-op involving Intelligence and military police, aimed at once again smearing Chechen separatists and securing more state powers for Putin's government.

This is a long favoured strategy of Putin's government which came to power as a result of an FSB plot in the autumn of 1999 which involved blowing up apartment blocks all around Russia and blaming the attacks on Chechen separatists, thus playing on Russian fears of the fierce Muslim Chechens both to start a new war in Chechnya and to win Putin the presidential elections.

Litvinenko's book, Blowing Up Russia, details this claim, another reason for his attempted assassination. The ex-operative, who Russia says was removed from the FSB for corruption, claims he left because he did not want to carry out an FSB order to assassinate the man who was then Putin's political Enemy Number One - Exiled Russian media tycoon Boris Berezovsky. Berezovsky had detailed Putin's direct involvement in the terrorist act that eventually brought him to power.

In a London Telegraph article, Oleg Gordievsky, a former KGB colonel today states:

I know that today the KGB has tried to kill my friend. Tomorrow it could be me and the day after it could be another London-based critic of Mr Putin's government. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the KGB, my old employer, has been renamed the FSB. But I know its methods are unchanged from those perfected in the darkest hours of Stalin's reign of terror.

He knows that the west has failed to call his government to account for the suspicious circumstances surrounding Ms Politkovskaya's murder. Indeed on the day she died, President Bush trumpeted Russia's acceptance into the World Trade Organisation. Yet Mr Putin is eliminating his opponents with the same ruthless determination displayed by Adolf Hitler in the 1930s. Western leaders are pursuing a hypocritical policy of appeasement that is encouraging the ruthless instincts of Russia's leaders.

Despite his criminal rise to power, his KGB past and such systematic dismantling of democracy by Putin, he and George Bush are "best friends". After meeting in 2001, Bush declared that he had peered into his soul and liked what he saw there.

The friendship continued as Putin urged US voters to re-instate Bush in 2004.

The reason Putin, a man who finds rape admirable, likes Bush so much is that he can get away with whatever he wants without worry of recrimination. As prominent Russian experts have stated, there is an agreement between the two whereby in return for Russian acquiescence in the war on terror agenda in the middle east, the Bush administration has ignored Putin's undemocratic, freedom restricting takeover of the country and the EU.

Despite a hideous human rights record, a total crackdown on civil rights, and the fact that it is now the world's largest exporter of arms to the developing world, which includes $700 million in surface-to-air missiles to Iran and new aerial refueling tankers to China, Russia has been welcomed into the World Trade Organisation with open arms.

This is because the Russian style of "democracy" is the globalists' chosen model for Europe. The EU is being "harmonised" to this system. As Putin declared in 2003 at the EU summit:

"Only by acting together can Russia and the enlarging European Union direct the process of the formation of a new world order, common values and interests."

The Bilderberg agenda of artificial hiking of oil and gas prices in europe over the last two years and rising the cost of standard of living is directly geared towards benefiting the Russian, and beyond them the Chinese, models of "democracy" where the state is all powerful and the middle class really becomes non-existent.

The fact that our governments appease such criminal and ruthless acts of state sponsored murder and terror should be enough of a wake up call, without even touching upon the fact that we have also caught them engaging in them.