Russian Terror Victims Ask for Truth

In 1999, a series of apartment bombings shook Russia and propelled the country headlong into the Second Chechen War. Nearly nine years after the attacks, which claimed 292 lives, many Russians remain unconvinced by the official version of events, which holds that Chechen separatists were responsible.

Two sisters, who lost their mother in the attack, have written an open letter to President Dmitri Medvedev, urging him to mount a fully open, independent investigation. The sisters, Tatyana and Alyona Morozov, currently reside in Missouri. Their appeal (below) was published in the Wall Street Journal newspaper on May 30th.

In three coordinated bombings of apartment buildings in Moscow and Volgodonsk in September 1999, 292 people were murdered, including our mother Lyubov Morozova. We are writing this open letter to call on you, Dmitry Anatolyevich, to order an independent, open and full investigation of these attacks.

Although these crimes were blamed on Chechen terrorists and used to justify the resumption of a full-scale war against Chechnya later that month, there are numerous indications that Russian security services may have been involved. There is also clear evidence of a cover-up by the authorities. We do not consider this case solved.

• On September 23, 1999, police arrested three Federal Security Service (FSB) agents who had planted a detonator and RDX – the same explosive used in the earlier bombings – in the basement of a residential building in the city of Ryazan. The FSB explained the agent’s activities as a “training exercise,” claiming the sacks of explosives actually contained only sugar. The investigation was dropped and all evidence classified “top secret.”

• At about the same time, a Russian soldier discovered RDX in sacks labeled as “sugar” at his army base near Ryazan. The incident was never investigated and the evidence classified.

• On September 13, 1999, the Speaker of the Duma, Gennady Seleznev, announced that an apartment house in Volgodonsk had been blown up – three days before the attack actually occurred.

• Mark Blumenfeld, the property manager of our house on Guryanova Street in Moscow that was blown up, told our lawyer and several journalists that FSB agents had “talked him into” changing his testimony. The agents showed him a photo of Achemez Gochiyayev, a Chechen he had never seen before, and under pressure he “identified” him as the man who had rented storage space in the basement.

• The composite sketch based on Mr. Blumenfeld’s initial description of what the real suspect looked like disappeared from the police file and was replaced with the photograph of Mr. Gochiyaev. Meanwhile, our attorney Mikhail Trepashkin, himself a former KGB agent, told reporters that he had recognized FSB agent Vladimir Romanovich from the police sketch. Romanovich was subsequently killed in Cyprus in a hit and run incident that was never solved.

• In November 2003, on the eve of the trial of two Chechens later convicted for transporting the explosives used in the Moscow bombings, Mr. Trepashkin was arrested after a gun had been planted in his car. This prevented him from submitting Mr. Blumenfeld’s statement to court that the FSB agents had pressured him to give false evidence. The trial of the two Chechens was not convincing to us or the world as it was held behind closed doors and human rights groups noted numerous violations of due process. Mr. Blumenfeld’s statement and the replacement of the police sketch with the photo of Mr. Gochiyayev was never reviewed by a Russian court.

• Four people investigating the FSB’s possible involvement in the bombings were assassinated. Duma Deputy Sergei Yushenkov was shot dead in Moscow in April 2003 and his colleague Yuri Schekochihin died of apparent poisoning three months later. Journalist Anna Politkovskaya was gunned down in October 2006 in her Moscow apartment block and a month later, former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko died of poisoning in London.

Many Russians have come to the conclusion that the bombings may have been the work of Russian security services. As for our family, our initial trust in the official version of a “Chechen trail” is long gone. We have come to believe that our mother and neighbors were sacrificed for a political end: To justify the war in Chechnya and help Vladimir Putin become president the following year. Only an objective investigation could make us change this view.

Mr. President, we are writing this open letter because we would like to believe that your ascent to the presidency will end this dark period in Russian history. You were not involved.

We realize that you owe the previous regime a debt of loyalty and gratitude. But the powers of the state were entrusted to you not to protect possible murderers. You are now in control of Russia and your position imposes a higher responsibility. Before history, the people and the memory of innocent victims, you have an obligation to find and tell the truth about these crimes.

• A Record Harvest of Spies
• An Open Letter to the Federal Security Service (FSB) of Russia
• Opposition Activist Revealed as FSB Agent
• Beslan Rights Group Charged With Extremism
• Russian Immigration Agency Knew Nothing About Morar’s Deportation
• Investigative Journalist Barred From Returning to Moscow
• Kasparov on His FSB Interrogation

Blowing up Russia: The Secret Plot to Bring Back KGB Terror
by Alexander Litvinenko, Yuri Felshtinsky, Geoffrey Andrews and Co (Translator), Geoffrey Andrews and Co. (Translator)

Synopsis:

Blowing Up Russia contains the allegations of ex-spy Alexander Litvinenko against his former spymasters in Moscow which led to his being murdered in London in November 2006. In the book he and historian Yuri Felshtinsky detail how since 1999 the Russian secret service has been hatching a plot to return to the terror that was the hallmark of the KGB. Vividly written and based on Litvinenko's 20 years of insider knowledge of Russian spy campaigns, Blowing Up Russia describes how the successor of the KGB fabricated terrorist attacks and launched a war. Writing about Litvinenko, the surviving co-author recounts how the banning of the book in Russia led to three earlier deaths.

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Blowing-up-Russia/Alexander-Litvinenko/e/9781594032011

_______________________________________________________

Putin's Poison?
by Peter Brookes, November 27, 2006
The death of former Russian spy, Alexander Litvinenko, last week from radioactive Polonium-210 poisoning is the latest in a series of politically motivated attacks on the outspoken opponents of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
http://www.heritage.org/Press/Commentary/ed112706a.cfm

FROM TODAY'S WALL STREET JOURNAL EUROPE (May 30, 2008)
Article: Dear President Medvedev
By TATYANA MOROZOV and ALYONA MOROZOV
"In three coordinated bombings of apartment buildings in Moscow and Volgodonsk in September 1999, 292 people were murdered, including our mother Lyubov Morozova. We are writing this open letter to call on you, Dmitry Anatolyevich, to order an independent, open and full investigation of these attacks."
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121209647875130625.html

The Federal Security Service (FSB - Federal'naya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti, previously known as Federal Counterintelligence Service - FSK) is the most powerful of the successors to the KGB.
http://www.globalsecurity.org/intell/world/russia/fsb.htm

just know that what you are pushing is a mirror image of the 9/11 truther movement, that claims 9/11 was in fact a plot by the USA government (or jews?).

Nonsense. Russia was probably behind those 911 rumors so to cover their own butts for the sort of crap they have a long history of doing. In fact, the KGB were apparently the source for the rumors that the CIA invented the AIDS virus to kill black people.

Jeremiah Wright’s Controversial AIDS Charge
AIM Column | By Cliff Kincaid | April 28, 2008

Asked during the question-and-answer period following his National Press Club speech on Monday why he charged the U.S. Government with manufacturing the AIDS virus to kill black people, Barack Obama’s 'former' pastor Jeremiah Wright cited a 1996 book by Leonard Horowitz, Emerging Viruses: AIDS and Ebola. This rang a bell. I had exchanged correspondences with [Leonard] Horowitz several years ago because I caught him promoting an old Soviet disinformation theme that has been disavowed by former Soviet and KGB officials.

Is Wright parroting communist propaganda? If so, he may also have seen it on the CBS Evening News with Dan Rather.

The charge that AIDS is a plot against blacks has been used by people like Jeremiah Wright and Louis Farrakhan to inflame race relations. Louis Farrakhan’s newspaper, The Final Call, ran an article (December 15, 1999) quoting Horowitz as saying that AIDS is a “genocidal plot” against blacks. The paper’s on-line version carried a link to the Horowitz website. Horowitz claims a copy of his book was used in the Will Smith movie, “I Am Legend,” about a plague that kills most people on earth and transforms some that are left into mutants.

As a skeptic of some of the claims about AIDS, I examined the Horowitz book. Horowitz, who has quite a following and speaks around the country, raises some legitimate questions about AIDS, vaccines, and the medical establishment. The U.S. certainly studied the feasibility of using viruses or germs as weapons. But the claims about AIDS being manufactured by the U.S. Government as a weapon of population control have been debunked. I told him the evidence showed the Soviets had used the AIDS charge against the U.S. to divert attention from their own biological weapons program.

He replied, in part: “I am happy to learn that the Nation of Islam’s The Final Call, a newspaper that issues Louis Farrakhan’s concerns regarding HIV/AIDS as genocide, has a direct link to our website. I applaud Minister Farrakhan, and a half dozen other Black leaders, who have grasped the truth about HIV/AIDS as a utilitarian population control plot, and have the guts to say it.”

Horowitz released another book, Death in the Air, which purports to include information about the “intentional targeting of black Americans and Africans for population control, including depopulation, as is being accomplished by the AIDS epidemic today.” The release for the book cited an alleged “secretly dispatched National Security Memorandum 46 to cabinet chiefs only” from Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was national security adviser in the Carter Administration. The release said, “This document, the most telling, authorized the FBI and CIA to initiate genocidal policies.”

This document was reproduced in “Soviet Active Measures: Hearings before the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, House of Representatives, Ninety-Seventh Congress, Second Session, July 13, 14, 1982.” These 1982 hearings produced evidence that the document was a forgery, possibly of Soviet origin, designed to hurt U.S. relations with Africa. An analysis showed that one of the individuals involved in its distribution was a former member of the Communist Party USA who became affiliated with the World Peace Council, a Soviet front.

The document, an obvious hoax, included no reference to genocide. Rather, it outlined a bogus government effort to monitor and provoke blacks at home and abroad. There was an authentic Presidential Review Memorandum 46, but it concerned events in Central America. It can be found in a listing of Carter presidential National Security Council documents.

Wright isn’t the first public figure to repeat the claim that AIDS is a U.S. weapon to kill people. The claim that AIDS was manufactured by the United States was reported by CBS Evening News anchor Dan Rather on a March 30, 1987, broadcast. Rather was widely criticized for playing into a Soviet KGB disinformation campaign. The charge had appeared in a number of Soviet and Third World publications before Rather picked it up.

Horowitz went farther than Rather, suggesting the charge is backed up by “evidence.” In his book, Emerging Viruses, on page 363, he wrote that “For years preceding the end of the Cold War, the KGB gathered evidence, that Russian officials ultimately reported, suggesting an American origin of AIDS. Officials alleged that the AIDS virus had been a Pentagon invention―a germ unleashed for political purposes in Zaire.”

The Soviet KGB had planted charges in a propaganda operation designed to conceal the hand of the KGB. This is the nature of an “active measures” campaign. A report on this matter is “Soviet Influence Activities: A Report on Active Measures and Propaganda, 1986-87,” published in August 1987 by the U.S. Department of State. The published hearings of the House Intelligence Committee are also very useful.

The Horowitz book, on page 364, reproduced a Soviet “Pravda” cartoon depicting the “American origin” of the AIDS virus. He gave “courtesy” credit to Covert Action Information Bulletin. In fact, he cites individuals associated with Covert Action Information Bulletin as legitimate sources of information on this topic. Yet this publication, according to 1980 hearings of the House Intelligence Committee, published a Soviet forgery of a NATO document as if it were authentic. Covert Action Information Bulletin was associated with Philip Agee, the CIA defector who collaborated with the Cuban Communists.

The AIDS charge against the Pentagon was disavowed in late 1987 by then Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, who said, “No more lying. No More disinformation,” in an effort at a more open foreign policy. (In fact, the Russians have continued these disinformation campaigns since the fall of the old Soviet Union, as the book, Comrade J, documents).

At the time, however, Russian officials were trying to put on a fresh face. In fact, four years before the Horowitz book was published, Yevgeni Primakov, former head of the KGB, admitted that “the KGB planted stories in the late 1980s which alleged that the HIV virus was the result of a Pentagon experiment.”

In 1992, two former officers of the East German intelligence service, the Stasi, published a book in which they described how they collaborated with the KGB to promote the AIDS disinformation, using Russian-born East German professor Dr. Jakob Segal. This is mentioned in John O. Koehler’s 1999 book, Stasi: The Untold Story of the East German Secret Police.

Former KGB officer Oleg Gordievsky admitted the Soviet KGB role in spreading the AIDS charge against the U.S. in his 1990 book, The KGB - The Inside Story. Gordievsky called the charge a “fabrication” that “also took in some of the Western media.” The leading Soviet AIDS expert, Viktor M. Zhdanov, also repudiated the anti-American charge.

All of this is not to say that questions should not be raised about the science behind and even origin of AIDS.

Journalist Celia Farber wrote a provocative piece, “Out of Control: AIDS and the Corruption of Medical Science.” The daughter of famed radio talk-show host, Barry Farber, she will be honored by the Semmelweis Society on May 13 in Washington, D.C., with its Clean Hands Award. The organization is dedicated to ethical conduct in science and medicine.

April 23 was “Rethinking AIDS Day,” dedicated to questioning the basic HIV=AIDS connection. There is a growing “HIV Survival” movement of people who have been diagnosed with HIV but avoid AIDS treatments and lead healthy lives.

It would be a tragedy if Wright’s wild charges prevent an open and honest debate about the nature of AIDS. After all, 24 years after HIV was declared at an April 23, 1984, Washington news conference, as the probable cause of AIDS, there is still no cure or vaccine. About $200 billion has already been spent by the U.S. Government on HIV/AIDS but investigations have found corruption in the various programs that test and distribute anti-AIDS drugs. The United Nations has been caught red-handed inflating the number of AIDS cases, even while a U.N.-backed international airline tax is being implemented country by country to spend even more money.

But now that Wright has reaffirmed his belief in the outrageous claim that AIDS is a weapon waged by the U.S. against black people, Senator Obama should be asked by the media what he thinks of it.

If the media want an issue in this campaign, they’ve got it.

Cliff Kincaid is the Editor of the AIM Report and can be reached at cliff.kincaid@aim.org

http://www.aim.org/aim-column/jeremiah-wrights-controversial-aids-charge/

just know that what you are pushing is a mirror image of the 9/11 truther movement, that claims 9/11 was in fact a plot by the USA government (or jews?).

From a well-referenced wikipedia article...

Theory of Russian government involvement

The bombings happened over a span of two weeks in 1999 and stopped when three FSB agents were caught by the local police while planting a similar bomb in an apartment block in the city of Ryazan. Russian Minister of Internal Affairs Vladimir Rushailo congratulated citizens with preventing the terrorist act soon after the incident, but FSB Director Nikolai Patrushev declared that the incident was a training exercise, when he had learned that the FSB agents were caught. The next day, President Boris Yeltsin received a demand from 24 Russian governors to transfer all state powers to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, according to Yushenkov.[87] Second Chechen War began on September 23, a week after the last bombing and a day after Ryazan incident. This war made Putin very popular, although he was previously unknown to the public, and helped him to win a landslide victory in the presidential elections on March 26, 2000.

These events were a successful coup d'état organized by the FSB to bring future Russian president Vladimir Putin to power according to a theory that was put forward by writer David Satter, political scientist Vladimir Pribylovsky, historian Yuriy Felshtinsky, former FSB officer and writer Alexander Litvinenko, Russian Duma lawmaker Sergei Yushenkov, film maker Andrei Nekrasov, investigator Mikhail Trepashkin, and others. Some of them described the bombings as typical "active measures" practicised by the KGB in the past. David Satter[88] stated during his testimony in the United States House of Representatives that:

"With Yeltsin and his family facing possible criminal prosecution, however, a plan was put into motion to put in place a successor who would guarantee that Yeltsin and his family would be safe from prosecution and the criminal division of property in the country would not be subject to reexamination. For “Operation Successor” to succeed, however, it was necessary to have a massive provocation. In my view, this provocation was the bombing in September, 1999 of the apartment building bombings in Moscow, Buinaksk, and Volgodonsk. In the aftermath of these attacks, which claimed 300 lives, a new war was launched against Chechnya. Putin, the newly appointed prime minister who was put in charge of that war, achieved overnight popularity. Yeltsin resigned early. Putin was elected president and his first act was to guarantee Yeltsin immunity from prosecution."[89]

According to book by Felshtinsky and Pribylovsky, the September 4 terrorist attack in Buynaksk was probably conducted by a sabotage unit of twelve Russian GRU officers who acted on the orders of Colonel-General Valentin Korabelnikov.[1][90] They referred to the testimony of GRU officer Aleksey Galkin. According to this version, all other attacks were organized by FSB forces based on the following chain of command: "Putin (former director of the secret service, future president) - Patrushev (Putin's successor as director of the secret service) - secret service General German Ugryumov (director of the counter-terrorism department)." FSB officers Vladimir Romanovich, Ramazan Dyshenkov and others directly carried out the bombings. Several Chechens were recruited by FSB agents to deliver explosives disguised as bags of sugar to Volgodonsk and Moscow: Adam Dekkushev, Tysup Krymshamkhalov, and Timur Batchaev. The Chechens believed that apartment buildings were merely temporarily storage places, and that the explosives would be used against federal military targets. Ethnic Karachai Achemez Gochiyaev rented the apartment basements as storage spaces on request from FSB agent Ramazan Dyshenkov.[1]

Article title: Russian apartment bombings
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_apartment_bombings

And you believe a book by an author who is a muslim convert ally of radical muslim terrorists in Chechnya? Maybe his assassination by Russians is quite understandable in that light.

Are you also pleased that this female journalist (Anna Politkovskaya) was murdered?

From the Washington Post, Saturday, October 7, 2006:

Russian Who Reported on Chechnya Killed

MOSCOW -- A journalist who chronicled Russian military abuses against civilians in Chechnya, garnering awards and accolades from around the world, was found shot to death Saturday in her apartment building. Prosecutors suspect her killing could be connected to her investigative reporting.

Anna Politkovskaya, 48, was found dead in an elevator in the building in central Moscow, police, prosecutors and a colleague said.

Prosecutors have opened a murder investigation, said Svetlana Petrenko, spokeswoman for the Moscow prosecutor's office. Investigators suspect the killing could be linked to her work, Vyacheslav Rosinsky, Moscow's first deputy prosecutor, said on state-run Rossiya television.

Rosinsky said a pistol and bullets were found at the site of the crime. The RIA-Novosti news agency, citing police officials, reported that Politkovskaya was shot twice, the second time in the head.

The ITAR-Tass news agency reported that work was under way on a composite sketch of the attacker based on footage recorded by a security camera at the building. The assailant, believed to have acted alone, wore black.

Politkovskaya, who wrote for the Novaya Gazeta newspaper, chronicled the killings, tortures and beatings of civilians by Russian servicemen in Chechnya in reports that put her on a collision course with the authorities but won her numerous international awards.

"People sometimes pay with their lives for saying out loud what they think. People can even get killed just for giving me information," Reporters Without Borders quoted her as saying at a press freedom conference in Vienna in December.

In Washington, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said the United States was shocked and profoundly saddened by the murder of a journalist who devoted much of her career to "shining a light on human rights abuses and other atrocities of the war in Chechnya" and the plight of Chechen refugees.

"The United States urges the Russian government to conduct an immediate and thorough investigation in order to find, prosecute, and bring to justice all those responsible for this heinous murder," McCormack said in a statement.

Politkovskaya also wrote a book critical of Russian President Vladimir Putin and his military campaign in Chechnya, documenting widespread abuse of civilians by government troops. And she was a persistent critic of Chechnya's Moscow-backed Prime Minister Ramzan Kadyrov, accusing his security forces of kidnapping and torturing civilians.

In "Putin's Russia," Politkovskaya wrote of more than a million soldiers and officers who have passed through the Chechnya experience.

"Poisoned by a war on their own territory, they have become a serious factor affecting civilian life. They can no longer simply be left out of the social equation," she wrote.

Politkovskaya began reporting on Chechnya in 1999 during Russia's second military campaign there, concentrating less on military engagements than on the human side of the war. She wrote about the Chechen inhabitants of refugee camps and wounded Russian soldiers _ until she was banned from visiting the hospitals, said Oleg Panfilov, director of the Moscow-based Center for Journalism in Extreme Situations.

"Whenever the question arose whether there is honest journalism in Russia, almost every time the first name that came to mind was Politkovskaya," he said.

Politkovskaya had frequently received threats, Panfilov said. A few months ago, unknown assailants had tried unsuccessfully to break into a car her daughter, Vera, was driving, he said.

In 2001, she fled to Vienna, Austria, for several months after receiving e-mail threats alleging that a Russian police officer she had accused of committing atrocities against civilians was intent on revenge. The officer, Sergei Lapin, was detained in 2002 but the case against him was closed the following year.

"There are journalists who have this fate hanging over them. I always thought something would happen to Anya, first of all because of Chechnya," Panfilov said, referring to Politkovskaya by her nickname.

In 2004, she fell seriously ill with symptoms of food poisoning after drinking tea on a flight from Moscow to southern Russia during the school hostage crisis in Beslan. Her colleagues suspected the incident was an attempt on her life.

She was one of the few people to enter the Moscow theater where Chechen militants seized hundreds of hostages in October 2002 to try negotiating with the rebels. She later devoted much of her investigative reporting to that crisis, in which 129 victims died, the overwhelming majority succumbing to the gas used by special forces to knock out the hostage-takers.

"Anna was a hero to so many of us, and we'll miss her personally, but we'll also miss the information that she and only she was brave enough and dedicated enough to dig out and make public," said Joel Simon, executive director of the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists.

The 46-nation Council of Europe, a leading human rights watchdog whose executive body is currently led by Russia, called for her death to be investigated quickly and convincingly.

"We have all lost a strong voice of the kind which is indispensable in any genuine democracy," said the council's secretary general, Terry Davis.

Politkovskaya's murder is the highest-profile killing of a journalist in Russia since the July 2004 slaying of Paul Klebnikov, editor of the Russian edition of Forbes magazine.

Russia has become one of the deadliest countries for journalists. Twenty-three journalists were killed in Russia between 1996 and 2005, many in Chechnya, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. At least 12 have been murdered in contract-style killings since Putin came to power, Simon said.

"None of those have been adequately investigated," he said. "We do know that record creates an environment where those who might seek to carry out this murder would feel that there would be few likely consequences."

The intimidation and murder of 12 journalists in Russia in the past six years, including American citizen Paul Klebnikov on July 9, 2004 is an affront to free and independent media and to democratic values.

In addition to her daughter, Politkovskaya is survived by a son, Ilya, Panfilov said.

During her career, Politkovskaya received more than 10 awards and prizes, including an award for human rights reporting from the London-based Amnesty International; a freedom of speech award from the Paris-based watchdog Reporters Without Borders; and a journalism and democracy award from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/07/AR2006100700301_pf.html

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.