Litvinenko

At risk of making (more of) a fool of myself, I want to stand up for the “rational” types here. I always thought the rule was that when in doubt, it’s good to bet on cock-up rather than conspiracy. (This is obviously better advice if you live in places where people do screw things up on a regular basis. I grew up in Australia.) But it’s hard to see what the doubt is here. Polonium doesn’t get into people’s sushi by accident, so this one has gotta be murder.

On the more substantive question, I’d be interested in knowing what Daniel thinks of the “rogue element” theory, that this wasn’t something ordered by Putin or anyone close to him but was someone much further down the food chain of the secret service either doing his boss a “favour” or exacting some personal revenge? “Bad apple” theories have a really bad track record I think, especially when applied to apples in large, secretive organisations, so I’m inclined to be suspicious. But given Litvinenko’s apparent lack of influence before he was murdered, it’s hard to see what the payoff is for Putin (or those around him) here. Now Putin doesn’t always act in his own best interests, but he does so more often than a few other world leaders we could name. So perhaps this really wasn’t something that was ordered from particularly on high?

The “bad apple” theory manages to be both conspiracy (amongst the murderers) and cock-up (from the view of the Russian security service as a whole) but that probably just means it has all the flaws of both kinds of theory.

You’re barking up the wrong tree folks – it was Hitchens.

I will stick to my theory that the 9/11 hijackers all had their idea independently and found themselves on the same planes at the same times coincidentally. Anything else deserves to be dismissed as a conspiracy theory.

One odd thing among many:

Imagine yourself as the agent of a corrupt government, and with all of the rusting James Bond-y gizmos of the Cold War at your disposal. You’re ordered to kill someone—someone very visible—in a nearby, ostensibly friendly country. Would you:

a) Use an extremely unusual, hard-to-obtain weapon, one which is specifically associated with government agencies in ex-Cold War countries?

b) Run him over on a dark night with a nondescript car?

The choice, of course, depends on whether it’s an ordinary assassination, or an open letter and threat to would-be critics. If the intention was the latter, it seems like the perpetrators hit the nail right on the head. If it was the former, they may have screwed up by assuming, e.g., that the cause of death wouldn’t be found, or that it wouldn’t make the evening news.

No idea about Litvinenko, but some of Daniel’s assumptions seem a little straw-mannish. Cock-up vs conspiracy: are we forced to choose in this case, if we love both apples and oranges?
“you can’t put together any big plan without someone talking about it” – well, yes, but was the Litvinenko killing a Big Plan? Rigging an election or a casus belli is a big plan. Killing a private individual on neutral, unguarded ground may represent a very small plan, especially for a large organisation with specialist experience.

And has anyone except Pollyanna hacks claimed that there is something intrinsically weird or tin-foil-hattish about assuming that political ends of one sort or another are often advanced by illegal means? Is this what “level-headed” types are saying? Whatever happened to “realists”?

Hmmm. The Russian government is saying that IT IS in fact a conspiracy.

About Stross’s theory, these two passages seem in tension:

To do any damage, [polonium] needs to be up close and personal, inside the victim

What this is, is a warning: “we have the capability to detonate a dirty bomb in central London any time we feel like it, so don’t fuck with us”. (Just take Polonium and add a little TNT.)

If polonium has to be ingested to harm someone, then a bomb seems like an ineffective way to deliver it.

The main effect of dirty bombs is to scare people. After all, “haha – now you have a 10% chance of getting cancer in the next 50 years” is hardly a threat in the same category as “give me your money or I’ll shoot you.”

13: in order to turn that anti-static source into a poison, you need to do some somewhat complicated chemistry with very good lab technique, lest you poison yourself instead of your intended victim.

Didn’t the KGB have the Bulgarian Secret Police stab some former spy who defected in the leg with an umbrella that had a needle with ricin on the tip?

The message of “If you used to work for the KGB, leave, and turn against us, we will hunt you down and kill you in a particularly gruesome and unpleasant way” seems to have been reinforced.

I find it very unlikely that someone with the dedication to kill a former KGB agent via Po-210 poisoning would be unaware that it would look like the Russians did it. Implausible, even.

Not that there couldn’t be someone with a grudge against Litvinenko who decided killing him this way meant that he’d never get caught… but even the dude who poisoned the Tylenol to kill his wife got caught eventually. The Russians, on the other hand, aren’t really going to get in trouble for this even if they get unambiguously fingered.

engels — I think the parenthetical “(it seems)” is a bit overcautious there. They’re not going to sue you, you know!

Yes, as Walt implies, fear of litigation is pretty far down the list of reasons not to badmouth the KGB.

I mean that the domestic population could be kept in the dark in the past about such things, not that the people whom the security services would want to know about it wouldn’t know about it.

Markov was also a broadcaster whose anti-communist views made him a target. The somewhat comical, 007 style assassination by umbrella, demonstrates the KGB fetish for doing the act in public, and yes as someone mentioned above, it very often is designed to cower other dissidents who are thinking of committing indiscretions.

I think there is some truth to the rogue/cock-up angle, but it could also have been orchestrated to appear that way. It’s highly unlikely that Putin would ever play godfather by picking up the phone and ordering a murder of this sort. But in the KGB (now FSB) culture in which he rose to the rank of Lt Colonel, permissions of this sort don’t always have to be spelled out, for obvious reasons. So the golden boy’s displeasure could be taken as a nod by those in the know.

However I don’t think it was always so indirect. It seems inconceivable to me that so many Putin detractors have suffered poisonings, shootings and car bombing (the Qatr incident alluded to above involved then President of Chechnya, Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev, who was living in exile) without Putin being more directly involved.

Prior to being gunned down in her apartment building in Moscow, Anna Politkovskaya was actively engaged in preparing a major expose of human rights abuses in Chechnya (according to the newspaper for which she wrote, Novaya Gazeta).

I did a post on these assassinations on my blog and someone sent me an excellent Times article going back a few years, that talks about the KGB tradition of public assassinations. Find it here:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,18389-1610952,00.html

We will never know if Putin had a hand in the dioxine poisoning of Viktor Yushchenko, but if you were really twisted, you might think that the poison had been chosen so poor old Viktor would be forced to appear in front of the world looking like a fried tomato with a sudden hair loss issue. It’s hard to believe that any plan would include anything quite so diabolical as adverse media exposure designed to make the victim look like a dick, but Russian agents seem to enjoy an audience.

As someone earlier pointed out, there is very little likelihood a European government will go the distance in attempting to expose this type of operation, let alone nail the perps, if it means making Russia look bad. Putin knows this, and it no doubt contributes to the impunity demonstrated by his agents.

Are there any realistic possibilities other than a) the Russians did it, or b) someone else did it to make it look like the Russians did it?

Consider my pet theory – Iran.

Why do it? Because it sends a message to the US and whoever might still be supporting them should they decide to attack saying “don’t fuck with us, bitches”

Why poison someone? Because explicitly screaming “dirty bomb” would panic significant parts of the Western population and force a response.

Why poison that guy? Why not? It gives an immediate diversion of attention away from Iran for the benefit of the media, and “Putin is an assassin” is plausible.

Is is certain that a hit-and-run “accident” would have been simpler and less traceable than spraying something on to sushi, given that London is stacked with traffic cameras and presents a motorist with relatively few opportunities to reach a fatal speed discreetly?

A spectacular poisoning is obviously and frighteningly an assassination, and I’m sure the killers want that. But if they’re powerful enough that they doesn’t need to source poison from anyone talkative, it’s going to be hellishly difficult to investigate and formally pin blame.

Consider my pet theory – Iran.

Ummm, what’s the point of “sending a message” if you’re going to deliberately obscure who the message is from?

Ironic that we have an authoritarian populist with a background in a Stalinist organization in charge of the British Home Office, giving briefings about an alleged hit ordered by another authoritarian populist with a background in a Stalinist organization.

Also ironic that, as Justin Raimondo notes, Mr. Litvinenko was a bit of a conspiracy theorist himself. He (Raimondo) provides this link:

The right hand of bin Laden, the Number Two in “Al-Qaeda” was trained at the secret base of the Russian secret services on Caucasus, the former Lieutenant Colonel of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) Alexander Litvinenko told the Polish Rzeczpospolita newspaper.

Brian wrote:

“I always thought the rule was that when in doubt, it’s good to bet on cock-up rather than conspiracy. ”

Why? If you’re really in doubt, perhaps the rule should be to acknowledge that the matter is unsettled. The assumption of cock-up tends to be self-fufilling as far as public knowledge is concerned. For example, during the California power outages, two broad theories abounded: the “years of neglect” theory, i.e. cock-up, and the “evil corporations” theory, i.e., conspiracy. Years of investigation finally proved the conspiracy theory correct, but only because government officials took the theory seriously enough to conduct those investigations. If the government had followed the advice of the cock-up school and refused to attribute to malice what could plausibly be explained by incompetence, why the cockupers would still think they were correct. It would be a mighty victory for self-fufilling ignorance.

Ian wrote:

““you can’t put together any big plan without someone talking about it” – well, yes, but was the Litvinenko killing a Big Plan? Rigging an election or a casus belli is a big plan.”

Well, yes, it’s not a good example of that point, but we do have plentiful examples of rigged elections and fudged cases for war, not least recently. We also have huge efforts like Cointelpro and MK Ultra successfully kept secret for years. The notion that someone inevitably snitches posits that humans are poor at optimizing prisoner’s dilemma situations. Were that true it’s hard to see how we could develop complex societies or elaborate moral codes – two of our striking characterisics as a species, it seems.

Tracy wrote:

“As stated, to refute the hypothesis that “most suspicious things are a case of cock-up rather than conspiracy” you would have to collect a database of suspicious things and identify which are clearly caused by conspiracy rather than cock-up and discover that most are caused by conspiracy, not cock-ups.”

True, and since our knowledge about the world is always incomplete, and the terms of this debate are themselves ambiguous, there is no rigorous and fair way to settle which is more common. But it doesn’t matter much if most conspiracy theories are false; the same is true of most theories of all sorts. There simply are more wrong than right answers.

Daniel,

Thanks for framing the post in this way. It’s a good jumping off point. On the assasination itself, I have not looked into it really, so I have no opinion.

If your goal is to avoid a war, you want the opponent to know the consequences of starting it will be high, but you don’t want nimrods like Jeff Goldstein or Glenn Reynolds jumping up and down

This assumes a) that the targets of the message will be able to read it accurately (which would be odd given that the primary target is famously proud of being obtuse and uninformed), b) that nimrods like Jeff Goldstein and Glenn Reynolds come by their obsessions independently instead of just echoing whatever IngSoc’s two-minute hate of the moment happens to be, and c) that the Iranians don’t already assume the Western public is largely anti-Iranian. Those all seem like pretty large assumptions.

Brian wrote:

Why? If you’re really in doubt, perhaps the rule should be to acknowledge that the matter is unsettled.

If you are betting on something being more likely, by definition the matter is unsettled, you are just intrinsicly stating an opinion of which option you think is more likely.

Ruthenium was named after Ruthenia. Not Russia.

Two questions:

1. what are the symptoms of a dose of polonium ten, or a hundred, times smaller than the one Litvinenko got?
2. Over the last 10 years, who died quietly in their sleep from symptoms like that?

Symptoms could be anything from nothing, via lung cancer, to acute radiation sickness. Link

Lots of people, possibly. But if you just wanted to kill someone in a way that looked un-suspicious, why wouldn’t you just push them under a bus? This is an incredibly stupid way to do it.

wikipedia: the answer to all life’s problems. There will come a day in class when a student’s going to respond to argument with: “but that’s not wikipedia says.” Actually, it’s probably already happened.

Didn’t the KGB have the Bulgarian Secret Police stab some former spy who defected in the leg with an umbrella that had a needle with ricin on the tip?

Only his leg defected? Hardly seems worth poisoning him over that…

> make the victim look like a dick

Speaking of dick—Phillip K. Dick, that is–can someone remind me of title the PKD novel, in which someone is killed by a miniturised A-bomb (as suggested might have happened in this case) ?

frank,
[Martin Cruz Smith spoiler warning]
This incident is exactly the key plot device in the Martin Cruz Smith novel “Wolves Eat Dogs”, published November 2004.

Cranky

“putting a full-stop’s worth of polonium in somone’s food and they ‘probably’ die of cancer within 6 months, would actually be a very sensible and unrisky way of bumping off someone”

I agree, if the radiation does indeed become undetectable (or is unlikely to be tested). This could, I think, be even more discreet than just shooting the guy (in a staged mugging, for instance).

Clearly polonium wasn’t named after Poland but after Polonia.

Mr Litvinenko’s father Walter tells reporters his son was killed by a “tiny little nuclear bomb”.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6179074.stm

The Japanese restaurant where he was allegedly poisoned serves Dynamite miso soup, but otherwise the menu is quite conventional.

‘imperative and absolute’, but also literally correct.

If you _can_ explain something by incompetence, you can’t _assume_ malice.

In general, you can explain pretty much anything by malice, even plausible malice. Unfortunately, that would leave no room for anything ever to happen by accident or incompetence, which seems contrary to my, and presumably your, personal experience.

Of course, ultimately it is proverbial wisdom, not strict logic. ‘Look before you leap’ doesn’t come with 47 pages of closely typed footnotes listing the cases where ‘he who hesitates is lost’ has precedence.

Doesn’t anyone else find it very suspicious that this assassination should happen exactly at a time when OJ Simpson is again in the news? Does OJ like sushi? Where was he during that lunch? Are the movements of the top people at NASA all accounted for? We should be told!

Consider my pet theory – Iran.

You are Michael Ledeen, and I claim my ten shillings.

Informed opinions solicited, the other sort welcomed…

So after 70 odd posts I am very surprised: nobody here seems to have anything to say about who killed Litvinenko that amounts to anything more than empty speculation! On the plus side, there has been an extended discussion of the etymology of the term “Ruthenium”. The days of the MSM are numbered, I tell you!

Engels, I don’t remember seeing blog triumphalism at CT. It’s generally only right-wing blogs that seem to believe they’ll be replacing the MSM in any area other than opinion writing (or, as you say, empty speculation).

The days of the MSM are numbered, I tell you!

Wrong venue. Try re-wording for “MSM credibility, R.I.P.” and go here.

Make that polonium

@72

The broader point which I understood Daniel to touch on is this: while “conspiracy theorizing” in the baroque form we know today (we all know the examples, or at least the caricatures of them), is clearly a reductive form of cause-effect thinking which primitively decomplexifies a massively complicated world, sneering at “conspiracy theorizing” is frequently a way of not-too-subtly removing credibility from political analyses you don’t like.

Say that oil may play some role in American policy in the Middle East and you’ll get “Oh, so the chairman of Exxon just, like, calls up the President, does he, does he?” Or suggest that the lone-nutter type of assassination is historically not the norm and you get asked is there a significant pool of people…or people who believe that JFK’s death was due to a blood vessel spontaneously bursting?

Check out, for example, Blair and Howard’s comments after this summer’s ban on hand-luggage on airlines. When people expressed skepticism as to the timing and the over-dramatic staging of the thing, both prime ministers answered along the lines of “oh, you believe in conspiracy theories, do you, then?” Which among other things says: if you question the version of events spooned out by official spokesmen and lapped up by the lazy media… you have poor personal hygiene, live alone with your mother and nobody wants to have sex with you.

[ps: can people stop starting their comments with “Umm…”? It keeps happening lately. It’s akin to saying “Like, duh!” and adds no more to the conversation than that would.]

Hmmm, now it says:

The name derives from Ruthenia, a historical area which includes present day Ukraine, Belarus, and parts of the Russia, Baltics, Slovakia and Poland.

Lol. I changed history. Thank you, Crookedtimber Dot Org, you’re a time machine.

Well, actually in the Kennedy assassination incident you would have to accept not one but two straightforward motivations: Oswald’s and Ruby’s. And this really does diminish the odds, doesn’t it?

And the JFK assassination provides a good example of why non-conspiracy theories so often fail to provide satisfactory explanations. Oswald had defected twice — once from the USA to the USSR, and once back again. How many people in the world are there who had done that? Moreover, in Texas he had a friend (a Russian emigre) who knew Jackie K. How many of the people who had defected twice in the 1950s were just one step away from the wife of the US President.

Of course, such facts may be just coincidental to his being a lone gunman. But the lone gunman theory does not provide an explanation which includes these facts, while various of the conspiracy theories do (he was a cleverly-chosen patsy; he was a Soviet sleeper agent; etc, etc). That is a key reason for the continued attraction to conspiracy theories: they purport to explain more of the known facts.

Why the assymetry?.

It’s not asymmetrical, it is proverbial reasoning. The equal and opposite proverb is ‘qui bono?’.

Deciding which of the two contradictory principles applies is an exercise in skill and judgement.

The fact that you can’t accurately describe how to thrive in the the world with 40 bytes of ASCII text is the reason evolution has so far been unable to optimise out the human brain and replace it with a radically simpler mechanism.

Doctors suspect former Russian PM was poisoned

Doctors have determined him to have been poisoned with,”a poison unknown to civilian medicine”

Speculation is running rampant as to whether or not this is connected to the Russian spy killed by radiation.

Anatoly Chubais, the influential head of Russia’s state electricity company and a longtime associate of Gaidar’s, connected the former premier’s illness with Litvinenko’s death and the recent murder of journalist Anna Politkovskaya, suggesting the Kremlin’s enemies were behind all three.

Uh-huh, here you go, a counter-conspiracy-theory: Kremlin’s enemies behind all three.

You find it surprising that noone has made that allegation in public??? How naive you are, Richard, how naive you are…

soru,

But these two adages are not, in fact, treated equally in our culture at the present time. Go read the wikipedia entries for Hanlon’s Razor and Cui Bono. The latter has many paragraphs expressing qualification and skepticism regarding its applicability to politics; the former has none of this. Try to make the Hanlon’s entry more balanced and you will have an edit war. Because both of biases of the intellectuals and the interest of the powerful in discrediting skepticism of officially-promulgated truth (as astrongmaybe pointed out in #85). Our proverbial “wisdom” has too much Hanlon and not enough Cui bono.

Isn’t it clear? The Polish are trying to send a message.

That’s what the Plutonians want you to think…

Color me naive, but one of the many things I don’t understand is how they discovered it was polonium210. I mean, you don’t exactly go looking for it do you?