Pictures of my son, Sgt. Armand Luke Frickey, late of the 256th Infantry (Louisiana) Brigade, US Army and Louisiana National Guard, who with his squad mates who died when their Bradley Fighting Vehicle (armored personnel carrier) struck a roadside bomb made of three large Iraqi artillery shells wired to a remote detonator, and his memorials.

My son Luke was a good man, just as my son Eric is a good man, a good and loving father to our grandson Brandon.  Just as Eric lives to care for his son and protect him, Luke died to protect all of us.   Just as Eric is a generous, hearty, loving person with nothing mean or little about him, Luke was also a good man.  Not a day passes that I don't miss him so badly it hurts.  And I am prouder of both of my sons than I can say.

In a little while I'll post pictures from the ceremony at which the troopers of the New York National Guard's 69th "Wolfhound" Infantry Brigade did my son Luke and the others of his unit the honor of induction into their unit as honorary members.

The officers and men of the 69th Infantry couldn't have been nicer to us or more gallant in their tribute to our war dead, or more hospitable to us in inviting us to join with them in the induction ceremony.  I plan to take enough time to convey the rich history of that unit and its contributions to our nation's military prowess. 

Suffice it to say that the fallen Blacksheep of the 256th (Louisiana) were at home next to the honored dead of the Irish Wolfhounds of New York's Fighting 69th.

Posted by V.P. Frickey at 12:56 PM MST

Updated: Wednesday, 28 November 2007 1:38 PM MST

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Man on this earth has a mission - to survive and go on getting worse."

"Cradle Song," Samuel Hoffenstein

It's interesting to note that rats and cockroaches were not only found alive on an island in the Pacific which scientists visited a year after a nuclear weapon was detonated on it, but were found thriving.

Human beings seem to be the same way. God tends to call the good ones home early sometimes, leaving those of us who need a little finishing work on what Ursula K. LeGuin called "The Lathe of Heaven."

When my younger son and the other men who were in the Bradley Fighting Vehicle with him were murdered in Iraq by terrorists, I was stumbling around half-numb, half in agony.

My son's body wasn't cool from having been locked in a burning armored vehicle for hours before we started getting calls... and calls... and calls... from my mother-in-law demanding that we order my son's wife to put notice of a second memorial service, one that neither our daughter-in-law nor I nor my wife had asked for or authorized.

Apparently my wife's mother, whose last direct communication with my son was an Email to him in Iraq griping about the fact that he left a party at her house too early (he didn't want to be there at all because of rude and hurtful remarks my wife's family had made about him and his wife over a period of months), and my wife's father decided that they should make Luke's funeral arrangements.

That was the impression they had given several newspaper reporters on the day Luke died, anyway (it seems never to have occurred to them to defer to Luke's widow's judgment in the matter of divulging information about Luke or in the matter of his funeral details).

I had misunderstood Luke's final wishes myself and talked to reporters, conveying that misunderstanding here in Denver. Then I heard from our daughter-in-law that she and Luke had discussed the matter before he died, so I wrote several letters to papers in the area sorting out the misimpression that several people in the family had managed to create.

God bless the Army and the National Guard - they stood by our daughter-in-law and made sure her wishes were respected.  Everything the Army did for Luke was according to his and our daughter-in-law's wishes.  The same goes for several prominent businessmen in the area who support the Louisiana National Guard's mission and without whose help we'd never have gotten through the tragedy of my son's death.  They were there for us.

Apparently that wasn't good enough for my wife's mother, though. She didn't have much to say to my son Luke but complaints when he was alive, but (again) his body wasn't cool before she was on local television bawling about how tragically he had been taken from us, and how they hadn't even given her a grandchild!

Anyway, starting a few hours after the notification team from Ft. Carson had left us, we started getting calls from my wife's mother demanding that we get our daughter-in-law to put a notice into our son Luke's obituary of a SECOND memorial service to be held at HER church. The implication was that the Army's memorial service just wouldn't cut it as far as my wife's parents were concerned.  Nor would Luke's own religious preferences - which were not the same as my wife's parents.

Again, my wife's mother knew nothing and cared even less about Luke's own religious preferences but was going to push a sectarian memorial service on him and the rest of us survivors against his will, against the wishes of the widow, against my wishes - my poor wife was the only person who wasn't actively opposed to this dog-and-pony show, probably because she was too tired and grief-stricken to fight her Mom on the issue.

I was the poor guy who took calls at our home in Denver that horrible day, which meant that I got to field the increasingly pushy and abusive calls from my wife's mother regarding the second, unsolicited, UNWANTED second memorial service held by clergy of a religious denomination to which Luke did not even belong.  Finally, my wife's mother called me to demand my SISTER'S phone number, supposedly so she could call her to tell her when the memorial service would be.

Having been married to this woman's daughter about 26 years, I could recognize a fake and end run when I saw it - the idea apparently was to get my family to try to help bully my daughter-in-law into letting my wife's mother run all over her. I told my wife's mother that I would be glad to give her number to my sister and have her call my wife's mother back if she needed any further information apart from the time of the memorial service, which I would gladly pass along.  I was as courteous as a man who just found out one of his sons had just died could manage.

My offer elicited an ominous silence, after which there was an incredulous gasp, then three increasingly angry repeats of the demand for my sister's phone number. I repeated my offer to give my wife's mother's phone number and the time of the memorial service to my sister three times.

After each iteration, my wife's mother got more upset. About fifteen minutes later, my older son called me from Florida (where he lived at the time), telling me that my wife's mother told him I had been rude to her on the phone. Apparently my wife's mother had confused "not getting her way" with "someone was rude to her."

I thought my wife's mother had been raised with more consideration and empathy for others, and possibly an ability to distinguish her whims from laws of nature, so I'm at a loss to explain her confusion and anger.

I was much nicer to my wife's mother than she deserved after several increasingly pushy, demanding and inconsiderate telephone calls, that's for sure.  I wish I hadn't wasted the politeness on her, because she seems to take such consideration as her due.

Telling her what I thought of her boorish behavior toward a newly bereaved father and mother and war widow would have been much more satisfying, but might have been used as an excuse to abuse my wife over the telephone (it's happened before, and my wife didn't need any more pain that day), so I declined to let her have it.

The morning of my son's actual viewing, the day after we and our son's remains had both gotten back into Terrebonne Parish, I got a screaming phone call from my wife's mother informing me in a ragged shout that I was NOT going to lose my temper at her (I hadn't said a word to her yet) and that I was going to get the all-important notice of her second, unsolicited, unasked-for memorial service into my son's obituary.

My sister-in-law got the receiver away from her and said something I can't remember - nicer than what my wife's mother said, but then my sister-in-law Anne is an unfailingly nice person.

My youngest son died just before he turned 21. He hadn't celebrated his first wedding anniversary, hadn't had a chance to start college, hadn't done so many things we all take for granted. He DID do a lot of things, though. He earned two military occupational specialty qualifications, or MOS-es - he was trained as an artillery fire director at Ft.Sill and as an Infantryman while with the Louisiana Army National Guard.

My son was an expert marksman with the standard infantry rifle and a self-taught linguist who had tested out very well on the Army's linguistics aptitude test. However, he decided that the best thing to do was to complete his tour as a rifleman. He went to Germany while with the Louisiana Guard (where he had a pretty good time and would have had a better time if he'd learned any German at all before going, because real Germans kept on walking up to him and asking him questions in rapid-fire Deutsch) to train.

He went to Iraq, and his death counted for something. He went out of his way a week before he died to tell me how happy he was with what he was doing. He wasn't perfect, but he was pretty darn good, if I do say so myself. It seems as though a couple of hundred people, in and out of uniform, singled me out privately to tell me I should be proud of my son. I knew that, but it was nice to hear confirmation from so many people.

I also have several big grocery store boxes of letters and cards, some from dear friends of Luke's and ours, some from people in Luke's chain of command, some from politicians (and while I'm a pretty cynical guy, I respected and appreciated the fact that these people thought of our son and of us).

Against all of the good stuff, I got yelled at on the telephone by my mother-in-law. someone whose last contact with my son was to hang a guilt trip on him about leaving a party early, a party that he only attended to stop my wife's mother from verbally abusing his MOM if he didn't attend. He only went to the party to save my wife from being screamed at over the phone by her mom.

Of all the stupid, self-centered, fatuous, venal things to bother someone who is in actual combat with - and I had to put up with snottiness from my wife's niece and nephews (her brother's kids) when they showed up for the viewing.  I yearned to shove draft cards in their fat little hands and ask W. to start that lottery up again.

Those kids should have stayed home if they couldn't have behaved better.  No one would have missed them.  When Luke was as old as the oldest of those kids, he was already signed up in the Indiana National Guard and going on weekend drills and summer training camp, exercising and following fad diets to lose weight and pass his service physical.

And while he wasn't perfect, Luke was NEVER rude to the family of a dead soldier at his funeral. You have to wonder what these kids - who are not usually unpleasant - heard at home about their cousin, his wife, and my wife and me to have been as disrespectful as they were.

My son gave his life to defend these people.

Another fear and loathing at my in-laws' moment: one of my wife's mother's friends came into the viewing room, very impatient and irritated-looking, trying to find my wife's mother.  When she couldn't, my daughter-in-law says that she started asking around for the "family," managing to make the word sound like a social disease.  Got to wonder what she heard about us from my wife's mother.  When my daughter-in-law identified herself, the woman thrust an envelope in my daughter-in-law's hands and brusquely said "Tell Peggy I came," then quickly spun on her heel and left.

My daughter-in-law threw the envelope into the nearest trash pail, showing again that my son had chosen wisely. My older son retreived it - it had a card and check in it - and my daughter in law STILL told him to chuck it.

My son said he was going to try to call the woman in question in order to ask why she felt it necessary to add more pain to that we were already feeling. I'll have to ask what reason, if any, she came up with for crapping all over a war widow at the viewing of the dead man's casket.

Anyway, my son showed his decency in the most extreme way possible - by dying in combat to defend the rest of us. Even after that, though, there were people for whom that wasn't good enough - who had to go around making demands of the dead man's widow and parents and were rude to us, even screamed at us when we didn't jump through the hoops they held out so imperiously.

These people did not venture out into Iraq and were not shot, nor even shot at, and yet they demonstrated an attitude of unjustified superiority toward my son and those of us who were there to pay our respects to a man who had just made the transcendental act of sacrificing himself so these people showing attitude in the viewing room could do so in safety.

Samuel Hoffenstein's lines in the "Cradle Song" - "Man on this earth has a mission - to survive and go on getting worse" - seem to have been borne out twice in the story of my son's death:

- once in the case of the cowardly little shit who killed my son and the others in the Bradley by remote control,

- then again in the cases of the people who showed up or called around the time of my son's funeral specifically to show us how superior they thought they were to us, we who had just lost a son, a brother, a husband, that they could scream at us and be rude to us with impunity.

I did not attend the second "memorial service" organized by my wife's mother. Attending that service, or paying it any attention whatsoever would have been an insult to my son's memory in my opinion. My son knew from the complaining Email he got from my wife's mother while he was doing combat patrols in Iraq how my wife's family remembered him.  They had already gotten their chance at a memorial in advance - and were simply interested in pretending they hadn't done it.

The fact that these people are all fat and happy feeds a sense of skepticism to the idea of a just God who remembers what passes on Earth.  My son dies and his widow, mother and father are crapped on by those he died to defend - all with the blessing of a Church which supposedly frowns on such behavior.  Mea culpa, my ass.

Commemorating that with anything but a blistering tirade directed at galling, obscene, fatuous hypocrisy - a tirade I had promised my surviving son I would not deliver to placate him after he had just been lied to about me by my wife's mother - would have dishonored my son.  So until now, I remained silent - just dealt with all of the anger and confusion, and the deep sadness at losing a wonderful, caring son.  There will never be another Luke.

So far, at least in our family's exposure to the War on Terror, my son Armand Luke Frickey's life was taken by gutless cowards in Iraq so that, during the viewing of his closed casket, people with an unaccountable sense of superiority toward my son and his close, immediate family could behave in a rude, inconsiderate manner towards us.

If this is going on across the nation with all of the war dead, Gresham's Law will have its say - the bad will drive out the good, as the good get blown up or shot overseas so that snotty cretins can grow up to be decision-makers and live out the fantasy that they might be entitled to say and do the disrespectful things at the viewing of real war dead. Again, the rats and cockroaches on that island in the Pacific where a nuclear weapon went off weren't only alive, they thrived.

This, to me, is Nature's metaphor - decency, honor and self-sacrifice aren't necessarily survival traits.  If we don't push them back to the forefront of our national value system, we just may not deserve to survive.  Sooner or later we're going to run out of folks like my son Luke - and then we'll be defenseless.

Posted by V.P. Frickey at 8:32 AM MDT

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From the Newspaper of Record:

"Teenager Released in Louisiana Case

THE NEW YORK TIMES
Published: September 28, 2007

NEW ORLEANS, Sept. 27 — One of six black teenagers arrested in the racially charged beating of a white youth in Jena, La., was released on bail on Thursday, a week after the case drew thousands of protesters to the small town in the central part of the state.

The release on $45,000 bail came shortly after the district attorney in Jena, Reed Walters, announced that he would not seek to maintain adult charges against the teenager, Mychal Bell.

Mr. Bell, 17, was convicted of aggravated second-degree battery as an adult, but that conviction was thrown out by a state appeals court, which said he should have been tried as a juvenile.

Mr. Bell still faces the same charges in juvenile court, but instead of a possible sentence of 15 years in prison he can now be held only until he is 21.

Others involved in the December beating of Justin Barker also still face charges. Mr. Barker, knocked unconscious in the beating, has $14,000 in medical bills, according to lawyers in the case. "

______ 

Sharpton just keeps on trying.  He couldn't frame those guys for raping the girl in New York, so when 6 other guys jumped a school kid and beat him unconscious, doing $14,000 in medical damage, it's Al Sharpton to the rescue.  Not to the kid who was left for dead, but his attackers.

And the mainstream, liberal press is printing everything Sharpton says as gospel. 

It sounds evil when you leave race out of it.  

Put race back into it and it's even worse.  Thousands of people have converged on a small Louisiana town to try to get six would-be murderers out of jail.  Why? 

Six thugs beat one kid unconscious.   Why?

Because three kids with too much time on their hands tied three pieces of rope to a tree.  

Idiotic, hateful, sure.  Racist?  No doubt, and psychotic to boot.  But no reason to beat another kid unconscious.  Why, then?

Racism is STILL at work.

Al Sharpton and his followers are full of it.  Racism caused a stupid prank to be blown up into a week of violence and racism caused six men to try to kill a high school kid in the modern equivalent of a lynching.

And racism is dressing up the attempt to rescue these men from justice as something other than an attempt to create a monumental injustice and free six would-be killers.

How would Sharpton and the press feel if it were six white men who had beaten a black student unconscious?  Oops, we already know that one.  Sharpton gave us the answer to that one in the Tawana Brawley case.

There was a song that went like this:

"Free your minds and the rest will follow...  " 

Pity everyone forgot how it went.   It's almost as though the song didn't mean a single thing.  Just a lot of noise made to sell records.

Posted by V.P. Frickey at 3:54 PM MDT

Updated: Friday, 28 September 2007 4:34 PM MDT

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We haven't heard much about the assassination of former Russian agent Aleksandr Litvinenko at the hands of persons unknown who just happen to have had ready access to a fast-decaying radioactive byproduct of a major national nuclear weapons program.  Well, it's an old story, and Gospodin Litvinenko is still dead.

But in the meantime, the Russians have been burning up press time with denunciations of the United States of America of a tenor unheard of since Communism in Europe self-destructed and the Russian state effectively went on international welfare.

Ok, you might be forgiven for thinking "Money talks, bullshit walks" - that this stuff is for home consumption, in order to make the Russian voter think his best chance is still with a paranoid murderer who pines for the good old days of the Soviet Union. 

This is obviously why

- Russia has resumed long-range reconnaissance patrols of the North Atlantic - a Russian "Bear" recon bomber was recently intercepted by Royal Air Force fighters near British airspace, and

- why they're running exercises simulating nuclear cruise missile attacks on the continental United States, and

- why Russia and China are running joint military exercises simulating action against... well, against us.

(that was a sarcastic remark, folks.)

So I've decided to try to fill in the background on a disturbing trend where Russia has decided to resume its old role as an active military threat to the national security of the United States of America with a page from my Weapons of Mass Destruction Web site. 

Perhaps it's time to consider which is the greater threat - Al-Qaeda with NO nuclear weapons as of yet (though the Russian-provided Iranian nuclear program may change this), or Russia, with over 6,000 nuclear weapons, most of them which can be re-targeted to strike us in a matter of minutes, and which is now holding exercises to simulate nuclear strikes on the US mainland and indulging in some of the most provocative and threatening rhetoric against the US since the Khrushchev regime.

Then it's time to consider cutting off the flow of American tax money to Russia via such pointless programs as the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction program.  While we're pissing money away helping the Russians clean up their antiquated nuclear weapons program, the closed cities have never stopped making new nuclear weapons, and whole new units of Topaz-M ICBMs are coming on line, at the behest of Putin, who has all but promised to aim them at us.

We really do have better uses for the money.  Under Vladimir Putin's leadership, Russia is becoming part of the problem, not the solution.

 
Polonium-210 and other Assassination Poisons

The practice of assassination spans the gap between individual deaths and use of weapons of mass destruction; while assassins normally murder one or two people at a time, they sometimes use chemical, biological and radiological warfare agents (by definition, a poison is a chemical or biotoxic agent, even though the point is not often made).

In December of 2006, former Russian intelligence operative Aleksandr Litvinenko was murdered by what proved to be ingestion of polonium-210, (Table of the Nuclides entry on Polonium-210 (courtesy Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute), showing the particles it emits during radioactive decay and other pertinent information) a costly and rare radioactive isotope normally available only in lethal quantities in nations with heavy water reactors (with only a few exceptions, these would be nations with nuclear weapons production facilities because of polonium 210's usefulness in manufacture of nuclear weapons). Scientists familiar with his case estimate from the time it took Litvinenko to die after onset of symptoms and the amounts of the isotope detected that he absorbed a microgram (1/1,000,000 of a gram) of polonium-210.

Polonium-210 emits alpha radiation, which is not dangerous unless taken internally. Once inside the body, though, polonium-210 seeks out the spleen and liver. Depending on how large a dose is taken in, polonium-210 can kill within days to years by causing various cancers. Irene Joliot-Curie is thought to be the first person to die from the radiation effects of polonium. She died in the 1950s, ten years after a sealed capsule of the element exploded on her laboratory bench. Between 1957 and 1969, several laboratory workers also died in Israel after exposure to trace quantities of polonium-210 from leaks at the Weizmann Institute laboratory in 1957.

The problem with polonium-210 is that it emits a LOT of alpha radiation, and each alpha particle emitted by polonium-210 decay is expelled with a very high energy - which can cause even tiny amounts of the substance to disperse throughout its surroundings, eventually entering the air bystanders breathe and the surfaces that they touch.

Polonium-210 is infamously difficult to contain safely in the laboratory environment, probably explaining how the material which killed Litvinenko also managed to contaminate locations throughout London and multiple aircraft. Adequate precautions against dispersal of polonium-210 into the environment after a poisoning would have been impossible to take without immediately arousing suspicion.

Finally, as polonium concentrates in liver and spleen rather than being distributed more evenly throughout the human body, a little of it goes a long way. The comments in the news media about "a large amount" of polonium being necessary to kill someone are somewhat misleading - as I stated earlier, British medical authorities and scientists estimate that only a millionth of a gram was required to kill Litvinenko.

While this is a lot of polonium-210 by commercial standards (United Nuclear here in the United States sells safe, fairly innocuous "exempt quantities" of polonium-210 to anyone with US$69 for 0.1 microcuries of activity - which is about 0.18 trillionths of a gram of the isotope), one suspects that the stuff doesn't cost anywhere near as much to make as it sells for. And the Russians are getting it wholesale. Anyway, nobody's going to tell the President of the Russian Republic "Volodya, do you have any idea how much a lethal dose of that stuff COSTS? Why can't we just put a .22 bullet in his brain pan?"

Then again, Russia exports about 8 grams of polonium-210 a month to the US, or eight MILLION times the amount that killed Litvinenko. It is not difficult to imagine how, with a flow of that much material, a microgram or two could be diverted without tripping too many alarms - especially since the Russian mafiya has a very large and influential presence in the "closed cities" which comprise the Russian nuclear industry. It would not be particularly surprising if the security system which was so expensively procured for the Russian nuclear program by the United States has largely or even completely been infiltrated and co-opted by the mafiya to allow profitable diversions of many special nuclear materials.

Why?

Aleksandr Litvinenko was a vocal critic of Russian president Vladimir Putin, having accused Putin of complicity in the murder of a Russian woman journalist and assorted other mopery and dopery. He had met with another former Russian security operative just before falling ill - a man who is now himself contaminated with polonium-210, as is Mrs. Litvinenko. While neither of the latter two is probably going to die soon, their chances of expiring from cancer ten years from now are, unfortunately, excellent.

Another prominent Russian critic of Putin's, politician and economist Yegor Gaidar, also fell ill in Ireland not long after Litvinenko and is in hospital in Russia at this time. Mr. Gaidar is not thought to have ingested polonium-210. He and his daughter have publicly stated their belief that opponents of the Putin administration are responsible for his poisoning. I will discuss that theory later.

Poison is a traditional means for the Russian government to deal with people that it finds troublesome. Among several other methods tried in desperation, cyanide crystals sprinkled on the frosting of a cake were used in an attempt to kill the cultist monk Grigori Rasputin during the reign of Tsar Nikolai II just before the Revolution.

After the revolution and throughout the history of the Soviet Union, Soviet security services used poison to murder dissidents and defectors when more direct methods were not practical.

The US Central Intelligence Agency has also used poison in assassination attempts, at least twice to try to kill Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. Also, CIA pilots and other spies were sometimes given extremely rapid-acting poison darts to allow them to commit suicide rather than be captured in enemy territory - the U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers had to warn his KGB captors to be careful in handling a hollowed-out coin containing a lethally-poisoned needle which was confiscated from him shortly after he was shot down by Soviet anti-air missiles.

The range of these poisons is impressive - from relatively simple inorganic poisons such as arsenic and thallium to highly-toxic biotoxins extracted from the glands of puffer fish, and at least two types of radioactive material chosen for their rapid decay, intense radioactivity, rapid concentration in vital organs, and elimination from the body, making a diagnosis of poisoning very difficult unless the use of radioactives was suspected.

Did Putin order the assassination? Is it a red herring (no pun intended)?

Litvinenko's death seems a very cruel and cynical act, since polonium-210 is so expensive and difficult to obtain in lethal quantities that it virtually amounts to a "signature hit" pointing to Russia (or another country with an active nuclear weapons program). Who besides the Russians would want to see Litvinenko dead badly enough to use a million dollars' worth of a highly specialized radioisotope to kill him? We in the US might peel that much money off the roll to kill Osama bin Laden, and getting Zawahiri may have cost somewhere in that neighborhood when you figure in the airstrikes, the intelligence operation, the cost of overrunning his compound... but even if we were in the business of killing overseas dissidents, we probably wouldn't go to that expense to do it.

Was Litvinenko's murder authorized by Vladimir Putin - or are we seeing an impressively realistic campaign to destabilize Russia and destroy relations between the Putin administration and the West?

The simplest and most plausible explanation is that this assassination and the ones that came before it were and are official acts of the Russian state. Their unsubtlety and arrogance may reflect basic differences in power psychology between Russia and the West, or even stability issues within the Russian leadership.

Vladimir Putin has stated publicly that the fall of the Soviet Union was "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century." We must assume that he is interested in returning Russia to the status quo ante 1990 - if not Communist by ideology, certainly an authoritarian government with what we would consider an expansionist foreign policy (as demonstrated by the attempted assassination in 2004 of the democratically-elected president of the Ukraine in an apparent attempt to prevent that country from moving away from Russian hegemony).

Certainly, the public utterances of leadership figures in Russia are veering away from conciliation with the West lately. An increasingly anti-Western and anti-American bias in the Russian print and electronic media is troubling. Much more troubling than what Putin and company are saying, though, is what they are doing. Despite assurances to the contrary, Russia seems to be supplying Iran with an increasing flow of nuclear technology. Without Russian assistance, Iran would never have gotten as far as it has already toward a fully-functional nuclear weapons production program.

The ugly truth is that assassination may be one of the signs that the world is sliding into another worldwide conflict - it may be up to the historians to decide exactly when World War III began.

A short and sketchy list of poisons used in assassination and other covert operations:

KGB/FSB (Russian spy and secret police agencies)

US Central Intelligence Agency

criminals

terrorists
anthrax (biological terror by mail campaign, fall 2001, US)
sarin nerve gas (Aum Shinrikyo Supreme Truth cult subway attack, Tokyo, 1992; Iraqi terrorists, 2005)

Carey Sublette, author of the Nuclear Weapon Archive, has published an interesting analysis of the Litvinenko murder: http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/News/PoloniumPoison.html

Since Mr. Sublette has researched nuclear weapons and related issues extensively (and polonium-210 is used for, among other things, neutron sources to increase the efficiency of nuclear weapons) his views on the origin and quantity of the polonium-210 used in the Litvinenko hit are worth reading.

Mr. Sublette estimated in a post to the USENET newsgroup alt.war.nuclear that far from the million-dollar plus figure mentioned for the quantity of polonium-210 needed to induce Mr. Litvinenko's rapid death, the necessary quantity would have been contained in about $4,000 worth of consumer-grade "Staticmaster" antistatic brushes made for cleaning of phonograph records. (see http://www.2spi.com/catalog/photo/statmaster.shtml for corroborative details)

Mr. Sublette's post:

"Chris wrote:

'http://www.mosnews.com/news/2006/12/18/poloniumprice.shtml

$10 Million Worth of Polonium Used to Poison Former Russian Agent Litvinenko - Paper

Created: 18.12.2006 13:26 MSK (GMT +3), Updated: 13:26 MSK, 4 hours 28 minutes ago...

British investigators on Litvinenko`s case believe the radioactive substance used to poison former FSB agent cost in excess of 10 million U.S. Dollars, The Times newspaper reported on Monday.

Preliminary results from the post mortem on Litvinenko's body have discovered he was given more than ten times the lethal dose of polonium 210. Large quantities of the radioactive substance were found in his urine.

"You can't buy this much off the internet or steal it from a laboratory without raising an alarm, so the only two plausible explanations for the source are that it was obtained from a nuclear reactor or very well-connected black market smugglers," said an anonymous British security source.'

On Nov. 24, the day the polonium poisoning was announced, I estimated in my post to this newsgroup (Fri, Nov 24 2006 6:29 pm): "I think that 50 millicuries is about the right dose for the observed effect (there are 4490 curies/g for Po-210), this would be 11 micrograms. This about 200 times the amount in a Staticmaster® Brushes: http://www.2spi.com/catalog/photo/statmaster.shtml"

Anyone reading this post, and following the Staticmaster link would find that the real cost was more like $4000. Or if they had read William Broad's Dec. 3 article in the New York Times, they would have seen his estimate of $212 (he was estimating for a single lethal dose, not the 10X dose I was using).

I guess the "anonymous British security source" does not read the New York Times.

Note that the description of symptoms from the initial news reports in November allowed one to conclude that the dose administered was about 10 times the lethal dose (the approx. 50 millicuries I estimated on Nov. 24, above), which is what the autopsy results just reported.

I put a page up on my website last week walking the interested reader through the analysis that supports this conclusion: http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/News/PoloniumPoison.html

Carey Sublette"

Note: The US$1 million figure was obtained by multiplying the price per exempt quantity - 0.1 microcurie - source from the United Nuclear Web site by the number of such sources required to make up the estimated dose given to Litvinenko - which resulted in a grossly inflated estimate of the cost of the Litvinenko hit.

It would be much easier, economical and probably safer for someone wanting to have access to useful quantities of polonium-210 to grind down the source containers from inside several Staticmaster® brushes than to get it from United Nuclear's line of exempt quantity sources. As an added bonus, Staticmaster® brushes are probably not as tightly monitored as United Nuclear's product line.

The recent public assurances that polonium-210 is essentially unavailable to the public in lethal quantities are empty.

Posted by V.P. Frickey at 2:36 PM MDT

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Mr Obama warned today that if he is elected president, he would order US forces to hit extremist targets on Pakistan's frontier with Afghanistan if embattled military ruler President Pervez Musharraf failed to act.

"Such statements are being made out of sheer ignorance," Pakistan's Minister of State for Information, Tariq Azeem, said.

"They are not fully apprised about the ground realities and not aware of the efforts by Pakistan."

Islamabad has bristled against a string of similar threats in recent weeks by the administration of US President George W. Bush, whose top counter-terror official in July refused to rule out US strikes in Pakistan.

Mr Musharraf, struggling to contain a wave of Islamist violence unleashed by the army's bloody storming of the radical Red Mosque in Islamabad three weeks ago, himself firmly rejected any US action last week.

"We have said before that we will not allow anyone to infringe our sovereignty," Mr Azeem said.

"If there is any actionable intelligence they should tell us and only our forces will take action on it and they are quite capable of it."

The minister suggested that Mr Obama's comments were prompted by Washington's inability to curb the ongoing Taliban insurgency in neighbouring Afghanistan, where US-led forces toppled the hardline regime in late 2001.

"This seems to be a reaction to their own failure in Afghanistan to control the US casualties and instead of addressing the situation there, they are finding scapegoats and damaging their own cause," Mr Azeem added.

Pakistan foreign ministry spokeswoman Tasnim Aslam today warned against "point-scoring" by US presidential candidates on vital security issues.

Mr Musharraf abandoned Islamabad's support for the Taliban in the wake of the 9/11 attacks on the US.

He has said that a top US official warned that Pakistan would be bombed back to the "stone age" if it failed to join Washington's "war on terror".

Posted by V.P. Frickey at 6:13 PM MDT

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Mood:  incredulous

A sports anchor at Cable News Network (CNN) was accused by a Headline News commentator of saying that dogfighting is worse than rape. 

Aren't you glad they cleared that up, folks?

In a CNN Headline News segment about Atlanta Falcons' Michael Vick (recently arrested for running a dogfighting ring), commentator Nancy Grace accused Larry Smith (one of CNN's sports anchors) of saying that the dogfighting-related crimes were worse than rape.

I'm not so sure he said that, reading the transcript.  The feminist blogs have, of course, hit the ground running to portray this as a relative endorsement of rape when it may well have been more a case of hoof-in-mouth disease.  It wouldn't be the first time a well-meaning sports announcer simply got tangled up in the English language.

The remarks in question followed a short bite of Kobe Bryant denying the rape charges (probably intended as an example of how Vick should respond to the allegations in the media):

"SMITH: Yes, well, that’s — he’s been in a lot of trouble lately, when you think about all the other incidents, and this is just the worst one of all.  

Keep in mind, too, that while Kobe Bryant is a situation we can sort of compare this to, this really is much worse. Not only can you argue that the crimes are much worse in terms of, you know, killing dogs and that kind of thing, but as an NFL starting quarterback, you are the most visible face in that city. I’ve said all along, in fact, you know, if you go through and, you know, very quickly name 10 mayors of major cities in the country…

GRACE: Larry Smith, did I just hear you say…

SMITH: … you could have a harder time doing that…

GRACE: … mistreatment of…

SMITH: … than naming 10 NFL starting quarterbacks.

GRACE: Did I just hear Larry Smith, CNN sports correspondent and anchor, state that crimes on a dog are much worse than crimes on a woman? Did I hear that?"

OK.  I didn't see how Larry Smith could reasonably be accused of saying what Nancy Grace says he said.  

What I saw was a compound-complex sentence whose diagram would look like a map of the London Underground. 

Smith was obviously (to me, anyway) trying to say that Vick's position as starting QB of the Falcons made him more visible than Kobe Bryant AND the mayors of many major American cities, and that he should have conducted his private life accordingly.  (Of course, that analogy gets all snarled up when you consider the sterling examples of Rudy Giuliani, Marion Barry, Ray Nagin and other mayors of large US cities, but.... )

You really (again, in my humble opinion) had to be anticipating, even wishing, that Mr. Smith would say something that could be taken as diminishing the seriousness of rape. 

You can't get to what Nancy Grace accused Larry Smith of saying without some help along the way - she jumped on remarks which barely managed to convey their intended meaning, much less what she accused him of saying, and carried the ball all the way for a touchback - 180 degrees away from where the sentence was going.

(Also, last time I checked, Bryant had formally been cleared of rape in a Colorado court, despite echoes of the O.J. Simpson trial which seemed to confirm that if you want to get away with hurting a woman, you should bring your national championship ring, your checkbook and some of the Dream Team to court with you.)

I think the worst Larry Smith can be accused of is minimizing Michael Vick's offenses to "doing the wrong thing, at the worst time, from the most visible public forum possible." 

That's true, but Vick also provided the place, time and physical resources for incredible cruelty against dogs - a species whose main defect is trusting humans too much for their own good.  And Vick's attempt to say that all of this was happening on his property without his knowledge over that long period of time is crap, pure and simple.

By comparison, Nancy Grace committed a much graver offense - against both Larry Smith personally and against journalistic ethics in general.  She either carelessly or knowingly impugned a colleague's character on camera, accusing him of saying something that he never intended to say.

There's plenty of callousness toward female victims of crime in the press, in popular music and other public forums, without falsely accusing people of the act - a reciprocal callousness toward those who mis-speak with no intent to harm anyone, simply because an opportunity to make easy rhetorical points presents itself.

Shame on you, Ms. Grace.  Shame on you.

Posted by V.P. Frickey at 7:10 PM MDT

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Mood:  irritated

http://iranvajahan.net/cgi-bin/news.pl?l=en&y=2004&m=04&d=24&a=6

The Fruits of Appeasement
Victor Davis Hanson

Imagine a different November 4, 1979, in Teheran. Shortly after Iranian
terrorists storm the American embassy and take some 90 American hostages, President Jimmy Carter announces that Islamic fundamentalism is not a legitimate response to the excess of the Shah but a new and dangerous fascism that threatens all that liberal society holds dear. And then he issues an ultimatum to Teheran’s leaders: Release the captives or face a devastating military response.

When that demand is not met, instead of freezing Iran’s assets, stopping the importation of its oil, or seeking support at the UN, Carter orders an immediate blockade of the country, followed by promises to bomb, first, all of its major military assets, and then its main government buildings and residences of its ruling mullocracy.

The Ayatollah Khomeini may well have called his bluff; we may well have tragically lost the hostages (151 fewer American lives than the Iranian-backed Hezbollah would take four years later in a single day in Lebanon). And there may well have been the sort of chaos in Teheran that we now witness in Baghdad. But we would have seen it all in 1979—and not in 2001, after almost a quarter-century of continuous Middle East terrorism, culminating in the mass murder of 3,000 Americans and the leveling of the World Trade Center.

The twentieth century should have taught the citizens of liberal democracies the catastrophic consequences of placating tyrants. British and French restraint over the occupation of the Rhineland, the Anschluss, the absorption of the Czech Sudetenland, and the incorporation of Bohemia and Moravia did not win gratitude but rather Hitler’s contempt for their weakness. Fifty million dead, the Holocaust, and the near destruction of European civilization were the wages of “appeasement”—a term that early-1930s liberals proudly embraced as far more enlightened than the old idea of “deterrence” and “military readiness.”

So too did Western excuses for the Russians’ violation of guarantees of free elections in postwar Eastern Europe, China, and Southeast Asia only embolden the Soviet Union. What eventually contained Stalinism was the Truman Doctrine, NATO, and nuclear deterrence — not the United Nations—and what destroyed its legacy was Ronald Reagan’s assertiveness, not Jimmy Carter’s accommodation or Richard Nixon’s détente.

As long ago as the fourth century b.c., Demosthenes warned how complacency and self-delusion among an affluent and free Athenian people allowed a Macedonian thug like Philip II to end some four centuries of Greek liberty—and in a mere 20 years of creeping aggrandizement down the Greek peninsula. Thereafter, these historical lessons should have been clear to citizens of any liberal society: we must neither presume that comfort and security are our birthrights and are guaranteed without constant sacrifice and vigilance, nor expect that peoples outside the purview of bourgeois liberalism share our commitment to reason, tolerance, and enlightened self-interest.

Most important, military deterrence and the willingness to use force against evil in its infancy usually end up, in the terrible arithmetic of war, saving more lives than they cost. All this can be a hard lesson to relearn each generation, especially now that we contend with the sirens of the mall, Oprah, and latte. Our affluence and leisure are as antithetical to the use of force as rural life and relative poverty once were catalysts for muscular action. The age-old lure of appeasement — perhaps they will cease with this latest concession, perhaps we provoked our enemies, perhaps demonstrations of our future good intentions will win their approval—was never more evident than in the recent Spanish elections, when an affluent European electorate, reeling from the horrific terrorist attack of 3/11, swept from power the pro-U.S. center-right government on the grounds that the mass murders were more the fault of the United States for dragging Spain into the effort to remove fascists and implant democracy in Iraq than of the primordial al-Qaidist culprits, who long ago promised the Western and Christian Iberians ruin for the Crusades and the Reconquista.

What went wrong with the West—and with the United States in particular—when not just the classical but especially the recent antecedents to September 11, from the Iranian hostage-taking to the attack on the USS Cole, were so clear? Though Americans in an election year, legitimately concerned about our war dead, may now be divided over the Iraqi occupation, polls nevertheless show a surprising consensus that the many precursors to the World Trade Center and Pentagon bombings were acts of war, not police matters. Roll the tape backward from the USS Cole in 2000, through the bombing of the Khobar Towers and the U.S. embassies in East Africa in 1998, the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, the destruction of the American embassy and annex in Beirut in 1983, the mass murder of 241 U.S. Marine peacekeepers asleep in their Lebanese barracks that same year, and assorted kidnappings and gruesome murders of American citizens and diplomats (including TWA Flight 800, Pan Am 103, William R. Higgins, Leon Klinghoffer, Robert Dean Stethem, and CIA operative William Francis Buckley), until we arrive at the Iranian hostage-taking of November 1979: that debacle is where we first saw the strange brew of Islamic fascism, autocracy, and Middle East state terrorism—and failed to grasp its menace, condemn it, and go to war against it.

That lapse, worth meditating upon in this 25th anniversary year of
Khomeinism, then set the precedent that such aggression against the United States was better adjudicated as a matter of law than settled by war.  Criminals were to be understood, not punished; and we, not our enemies, were at fault for our past behavior. Whether Carter’s impotence sprang from his deep-seated moral distrust of using American power unilaterally or from real remorse over past American actions in the cold war or even from his innate pessimism about the military capability of the United States mattered little to the hostage takers in Teheran, who for some 444 days humiliated the United States through a variety of public demands for changes in U.S. foreign policy, the return of the exiled Shah, and reparations.

But if we know how we failed to respond in the last three decades, do we yet grasp why we were so afraid to act decisively at these earlier junctures, which might have stopped the chain of events that would lead to the al-Qaida terrorist acts of September 11? Our failure was never due to a lack of the necessary wealth or military resources, but rather to a deeply ingrained assumption that we should not retaliate — a hesitancy al-Qaida perceives and plays upon.

Along that sad succession of provocations, we can look back and see
particularly critical turning points that reflected this now - institutionalized state policy of worrying more about what the enemy was going to do to us than we to him, to paraphrase Grant’s dictum: not hammering back after the murder of the marines in Lebanon for fear of ending up like the Israelis in a Lebanese quagmire; not going to Baghdad in 1991 because of paranoia that the “coalition” would collapse and we would polarize the Arabs; pulling abruptly out of Somalia once pictures of American bodies dragged through the streets of Mogadishu were broadcast around the world; or turning down offers in 1995 from Sudan to place Usama bin Ladin into our custody, for fear that U.S. diplomats or citizens might be murdered abroad.

Posted by V.P. Frickey at 9:26 PM MDT

Updated: Saturday, 22 September 2007 7:43 PM MDT

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Carjacking remains a problem of national importance, yet only one national television news network seems to care about it.   Care to guess which one?

Since the left is still making excuses for criminals such as carjackers by saying that social factors explain their conduct, this conduct qualifies as political terrorism.   And we should treat it in the same way. 

Thursday, June 28, 2007

Posted by V.P. Frickey at 11:31 PM MDT

Updated: Friday, 29 June 2007 11:34 PM MDT

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