THE RUSSIAN WAY?:

Stay on Putin's good side (Charles Krauthammer, 12/11/06, Seattle Times)

In science, there is a principle called Occam's razor. When presented with competing theories for explaining a natural phenomenon, one adopts the least elaborate. Nature prefers simplicity. Scientists do not indulge in grassy-knoll theories. You don't need a convoluted device to explain Litvinenko's demise.

Do you think Anna Politkovskaya, the journalist who was investigating the war in Chechnya, was shot dead in her elevator by rogue elements? [...]

True, Litvinenko's murder will never be traced directly to Putin, no matter how dogged the British police investigation. State-sponsored assassinations are almost never traceable to the source. Too many cutouts. Too many layers of protection between the don and the hitman. [...]

If we were not mourning a brave man who has just died a horrible death, one would almost have to admire the Russians, not just for audacity, but for technique in Litvinenko's polonium-210 murder.

'Munich,' the Travesty (Charles Krauthammer, January 13, 2006, Washington Post)

It is an axiom of filmmaking that you can only care about a character you know. In "Munich," the Israeli athletes are not only theatrical but historical extras, stick figures. Spielberg dutifully gives us their names -- Spielberg's List -- and nothing more: no history, no context, no relationships, nothing. They are there to die.

The Palestinians who plan the massacre and are hunted down by Israel are given -- with the concision of the gifted cinematic craftsman -- texture, humanity, depth, history. The first Palestinian we meet is the erudite translator of poetry giving a public reading, then acting kindly toward an Italian shopkeeper -- before he is shot in cold blood by Jews.

Then there is the elderly PLO member who dotes on his 7-year-old daughter before being blown to bits. Not one of these plotters is ever shown plotting Munich, or any other atrocity for that matter. They are shown in the full flower of their humanity, savagely extinguished by Jews.

But the most shocking Israeli brutality involves the Dutch prostitute -- apolitical, beautiful, pathetic -- shot to death, naked, of course, by the now half-crazed Israelis settling private business. The Israeli way, I suppose.

MORE:
Ghosts of Chechnya loom large Litvinenko's death (DANICA KIRKA, 12/08/06, AP)

Former spy Alexander Litvinenko counted some of the fiercest critics of the Kremlin among his friends and reportedly even asked to be buried on Chechen soil.

But how did a former KGB agent turned opponent of President Vladimir Putin come to sympathize with a separatist cause that has killed so many Russians, including some of his own former fellow agents? And did his attachment to the Chechens have anything to do with his death?

“He was really a guy (with a) mission,” his friend Andrei Nekrasov said, adding Litvinenko was the “odd man out” in their circle of intelligentsia and human rights defenders in London, a robust man of action in a room full of academics.

Litvinenko had served as an agent in Chechnya and knew the work of security services there well. He used that knowledge once he sough asylum in Britain in 2000, forging a friendship with Chechen rebel envoy Akhmed Zakayev.

At the time he was poisoned with the radioactive substance, polonium-210, Litvinenko was reportedly investigating the October murder of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, a Kremlin critic known for her hard-hitting work on Chechnya.

His experiences, both in Chechnya and after, made him sympathetic to the cause, said Vladimir Bukovsky, Litvinenko’s friend and another Putin critic. The ex-spy was so moved that his dying wish was that his corpse be moved to Chechnya once peace was at hand.

“On his deathbed, he asked to be buried when the war is over in Chechen soil,” Bukovsky said after a memorial service at a London mosque. “He was a fierce defender of Chechnya and critic of the Kremlin.”

Litvinenko was well-known for his book on Chechnya, a mostly Muslim oil-producing region in southern Russia where two wars have been fought in the past 12 years between the Russian military and separatist rebels increasingly espousing extremist Islamic ideology.

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 11, 2006 8:29 AM