Nobody does it better than the Chicago Tribune.
Prime Minister Theresa May and colleagues in Britain’s government reconfirm the quality and effectiveness of her nation’s police and intelligence work.
Sorry, but that one had us in stitches for so long that we had to take a twenty minute break before continuing.
On Sept. 5, the British government issued warrants for the arrest of two Russian nationals, Ruslan Boshirov and Alexander Petrov, for attempted murder. Massive evidence has been assembled through high-tech means and old-fashioned, human-insight police work.
Oddly enough, exactly zero of that “massive evidence” has been offered to anybody amid all of the hysterical accusations. Except, it would occur, to Mr. Arthur Cyr of the Chicago Tribune, who absolutely knows for a fact that it exists. Odd, though, that in a high profile case such as this one, not even a scintilla of it would be offered to bolster Her Majesty’s Government’s case, no?
The despicable effort in early March to murder Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in England provides a grim reminder that the Cold War may be over, but Russia remains a dangerous and ruthless adversary. A police officer found the father and daughter unconscious on a park bench in Salisbury, a city near London.
Which goes against everything that anybody with even the barest minimum of knowledge of the effects of various chemical substances on the human body knows, which is that it doesn’t affect two different individuals exactly the same way. Ever. Why do you think that your doctor always has to carefully adjust any medication you’re given until the optimum dosage for you, personally, can be determined? Because he’s bored and just wants you to come back for more visits?
Yet Sergey and Yulia both collapsed at the exact same moment. They must have, right? Unless, of course, Yulia, for instance, just watched her dad collapse unconscious and thought to herself that he probably just had one too many and would be back to normal in a moment, rather than call for help.
And don’t even get us started upon how nerve agent works. We’ll just say that there typically isn’t a delay of several hours until they kick in.
The Skripals and the police officer required hospitalization in intensive care. A Novichok nerve agent poisoned them. Novichok is the label for a highly lethal series of nerve agents developed by the Soviet Union, beginning in 1971.
…and the formula for which was published in 1992 or 1993, depending on whom you ask.
Novichok is an extremely rare chemical not readily available to the public,
Extremely rare? We should hope so. But it’s nevertheless not particularly hard to synthesize. Provided you have the formula, available to interested parties for the past 26 years, as well as access to a high school chemistry lab.
The military nerve agent remains a product of Russia.
Much as the Colt 1911 remains a product of the United States which means, using the same logic, that every single death caused by one of those was orchestrated by the CIA.
Four months after the attack, residue of the poison left behind by the attackers struck down two more British citizens, in no way tied to government intelligence or security agencies, one of whom died.
Facts about nerve agents known to anybody with even the faintest level of understanding of them: 1) They kill very quickly, almost instantly, not within hours of exposure. 2) They dissipate quickly, as in “definitely within months’ worth of exposure to the elements.” Otherwise they’d be pretty useless to the military, wouldn’t they? We mean, having to keep your troops out of an area where they’d been deployed for months on end after the attack doesn’t seem to be all that viable as a strategy, does it?
“Oh, but the perfume bottle was sealed from the elements!”
Yeah, about that. So those super spy assassins sprayed the agent on the door handle of the Skripal residence while said Skripals weren’t at home, hoped that it wouldn’t dissipate as such nerve agents do, then carefully resealed the murder weapon inside the cellophane wrapping they got it from (remarkable for covert operatives to not merely travel with the murder weapon in their luggage but to go to the trouble of having it sealed in the first place), after all we have the word from the druggie “victim” who found the bottle later stating that he had to open the wrapping to get the bottle out, then tossed the primary evidence of their crime in a common bin?
Seriously?
Oh, and going back to the tweaking dummy who found the “murder weapon”, he stated that he sprayed it on his hands but it was OK, he just rinsed it off with a bit of water and survived.
Really? Well fuck us sideways with a crowbar! If we had known that nerve agents were that fucking easy to neutralize, we would have jammed those bloody great Atropine syringes that our Sergeant Major forced us to test on ourselves (they only had saline in them) into his mouth and told him to rinse! Actually, we wouldn’t have, he would have killed us without even breaking a sweat, but we digress.
Still, seriously. Have you fucking SEEN one of those Atropine syringes? If you served, you have. They’re fucking TERRIFYING! And they hurt like a bitch too. If we’d only known that all we’d need to do was to piss on the exposed skin and we’d escape with some R&R in the infirmary…
Boshirov and Petrov allegedly flew to Britain two days before the attempted murders and entered the country on Russian passports. The British government worked quickly, identified them early, and continued to collect evidence.
Not all that quickly. Putin had them identified within a couple of days in spite of having nothing to go on except for their pictures and “false” names, seeing as how the British refused to pass on any information to the Russkies that might help them solve this case of utmost importance.
Skripal worked for the GRU, the military intelligence arm of Russia’s government, until he retired in 1999. Later, he confessed to working as a double agent for British intelligence from 1995.
In 2006, a court in Russia convicted him and imposed a prison sentence of thirteen years. In 2010, authorities freed him as part of a U.S.-Russian spy swap, following the exposure of a ring of Russian espionage agents in the United States.
We’ve mentioned this before, but it’s important. Skripal was actually arrested in 2004, giving Putin a full 6 years to arrange for an “accident” to happen (and he certainly would have been capable and willing had he had the desire to), and not a single fuck would have been given. Yet he allegedly swapped him, then spent another 8 years grumbling about it before he decided to murder him, thus making any future swaps impossible AND hurting his nation’s image right before a major sporting PR event, all to rub out somebody whose knowledge had become obsolete at least a decade prior to the hit.
Sure.
Pull the other one. It plays Jingle Bells.
Anyway, now the ball is in the British court. The Russkies have stated that the Brits can request an interview with Boshirov and Petrov if they so desire. Oh sure, the Brits will say that it’ll be turned down, but wouldn’t that serve to bolster your so far laughably ridiculous case? After all, that surely would prove that the Russkies were trying to hide something, wouldn’t it?
We doubt that they will, though. Up until now, Her Majesty’s Clowns at Scotland Yard have proven remarkably uninterested in actually investigating this case.
Thatisall.
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