Why Bush & Putin Were So Frosty.

Reichstag fire, anyone?

Realigning the global power game

By Gwynne Dyer

snip

The Russian-American relationship is not thriving, and the proof of it is the fact that the United States granted political asylum a month ago to Alyona Morozova, a Russian citizen who claims that her life is in danger because of her role in investigating a series of “terrorist” bombing attacks that killed 246 Russians in September 1999. The chief suspect in the bombings, according to her, is Vladimir Putin.

Three apartment blocks in Russian cities were destroyed by huge bombs that month, including one that left Alyona Morozova’s mother and boyfriend dead under the rubble. There had been peace between Russia and the breakaway republic of Chechnya since 1996, and no Chechen claimed responsibility for the bombings, but then-prime minister Vladimir Putin immediately blamed the atrocities on the Chechens and launched a second war against them that continues to this day.

snip

Alyona Morozova (and many others) claim that Putin’s old friends at the FSB carried out the apartment bombings themselves, in order to give their man a pretext to declare war on Chechnya and make himself a national hero in time for the presidential elections. It would be just one more unfounded conspiracy theory – except that only days after the big Moscow bomb, a resident at a similar apartment building in the city of Ryazan spotted three people acting suspiciously and called the local police.

The police founds sacks in the cellar that they initially said contained hexogen, the explosive used in the other bombings, together with a timer set for 5.30 am. They also discovered that the three people who had planted the explosives were actually FSB agents. Nikolai Patrushev, the head of the FSB, insisted that the sacks contained only sugar and that the whole thing was a training exercise, and the local police fell silent, but there was no proper investigation. Alyona Morozova fears the Russian government’s wrath because a number of other people who have tried to investigate the incident have been murdered or jailed on trumped-up charges of “espionage”. So she asked for political asylum in the United States: nothing surprising in that. It’s much more surprising that the US government actually granted her asylum, because it is implicitly acknowledging the possibility that President Vladimir Putin, in addition to being a mass murderer of Chechens, may also be a mass murderer of Russians.

more@link

would not surprise me if Putin were behind it. There are a lot of evil men in this world.

they are unalike.

This thought was unimagineable to me when, soon after 9/11/01, rumors started surfacing that the Bush regime let it happen, or even made it happen.

But I am a firm beleiver now.

So Putin killing his people to further his ambitions doesn't surprise me, either.

Whatever happened to Peace on Earth?

after the school incident, Vlad was pretty angry with * for "mid level US officials meeting with Chechen rebels"

http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/europe/09/07/putin.us/index.html

<snip>
Russian President Vladimir Putin has said that mid-level officials in the U.S. government were undermining his country's war on terrorism by supporting Chechen separatists, whom he compared to al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

<snip>
But Putin said each time Russia complained to the Bush administration about meetings held between U.S. officials and Chechen separatist representatives, the U.S. response has been "we'll get back to you" or "we reserve the right to talk with anyone we want."

<snip>
Putin blamed what he called a "Cold War mentality" on the part of some U.S. officials, but likened their demands that Russia negotiate with the Chechen separatists to the U.S. talking to al Qaeda.

Yes, there are a lot of evil people in the world.