also kills scruples with indignation
I wouldn’t describe the polonium incident as subtle. It literally left a radioactive trail across London. The suspected perpetrator was expelled, and is now a Russian MP. It’s precisely this track record of brazen indifference to the norms of international behaviour that puts Russian security agencies in the frame for this. They have, as we say, “previous”.
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Got there before me. I thought his description of its effects on him were particularly chilling as well as the long term health effects which eventually killed him.
"“Circles appeared before my eyes: red and orange. A ringing in my ears, I caught my breath. And a sense of fear: like something was about to happen”
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I haven’t heard any substantive ideas about what should be done about Putin. I don’t like Trump doing nothing, but I am not sure that anyone else in the office would do more. We did not do a hell of a lot when ho took over the Crimea.
The Russians want people to know it was them. They cannot admit it outright, but the denials come with a knowing wink.
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Yes. Russian response to the accusations has not been the one of an innocent party, but rather along the lines of “Good luck proving that we did it.”
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He should know better than anyone that nations don’t necessarily operate at the level of proof in courts of law. Perhaps he thinks he’s inviting the British into a war of assassination that he thinks Russia will win.
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Organophosphorus agents cause widespread damage throughout the CNS besides the irreversible inhibition of acetylcholinesterase. Notable are the effects on mitochondrial calcium transport (never a good thing!) which result in oxidative damage and cell death. That is one of the dreary realizations about organophosphorus chemoprophylaxis: we might be able to keep the victim breathing, but large chunks of the CNS may be ablated anyway.
When Putin wants to be subtle, he does something like dump millions of refugees on the west, while amplifying the Islamophobia echo chamber.
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The only ones Pooty-Poot fools are the Russian citizenry, who seem to think he’s some sort of demigod. He knows that and he’s fine with it.
The attack on this man and his daughter was a horse’s head put in Trump’s bed. A classic mafia reminder about who is in charge and what they can do. Manafort will have got that message too.
Curiouser and curiouser.
What is your opinion on Osama Bin Laden’s assassination in Pakistan by the USA under Obama?
Complicated.
Is it less complicated if we use Castro as the example? The CIA tried to assassinate him quite a few times.
The analogies are far from perfect, but… Castro was head of state. The CIA was clearly wrong, per international law of the time. So it’s good they failed. (Yes, I’d like to see CIA wet ops forced to justify their actions in an international court of law. I tend to be rather inflexible about that.) But removal of the head of state has been a tool within the war box for 4000 years. At least. And the Cold War was War. None of this was clean.
OBL was not a head of state. The closest analogy is international crime boss. If the Thieves’ Guild existed, OBL would run it. He wasn’t in his citizenship jurisdiction, was in a jurisdiction that seemed to be willfully ignoring his presence. The crimes he organized and implemented & produced (in the sense of film production) were not against his citizenship jurisdiction or his unofficial haven state, and he did not reside within any of his target states. Those target states were widely dispersed, with far differing resources and abilities to get cooperation and assistance. So… capturing OBL was always going to be jurisdictionally nightmarish. I think he should have been captured, not killed; an old man with health issues is not that hard to cuff and contain. But I wasn’t there,
The elder Skripal was an ex spy and whistle blower/informant - not head of state, not crime boss. He provided and gathered information. Yulia was a completely private citizen, uninvolved Their destruction was revenge on him for following his conscience and choosing to leave his abuser. (Read Russian intelligence orgs as abusive, controlling spouses willing to kill the spouse who goes for divorce and you’ve got a behavioral model.). The Skripal have as much in common with Castro and OBL as my cats have with the big cats of the Savannah.
So… complicated. Most simply, no organization, including state, has the right to extend their jurisdiction over another country’s citizens or guests, in that second country, without the permission of the second country (which US had for OBL) With agreement, it get more complex again.
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Some notable differences:
UBL was a wanted criminal with multiple international arrest warrants in hiding in Pakistan. Skripal had already served time and was legally living in the UK after a prisoner exchange.
Officially at least, Operation Neptune Spear was a failed attempt at an extraordinary rendition and UBL died quickly after he was shot resisting capture. Skripal and his daughter were covertly poisoned, and according to one of the nerve agent’s creators will have an unpleasant and lingering death.
After its completion the United States publicly announced the existence of Operation Neptune Spear, and Obama openly stated while running for president that he would order such an operation. Russia not only officially denies any involvement with the Skripal attack, they blame it on the UK.
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Although information on Novichok nerve agents is limited some information has made its way into the public domain thanks to Russian whistleblowers. This may be the generic structure of a Novichok agent (above)
The generic Novichok chemical structure has some similarity to the structure of other nerve agents such as VX, seen above
