NYC Subway Bomb Plotter Says He Was Set Up By Paid NYPD Informant

Information Liberation | Jan 12, 2007  

Attorneys for Siraj said he was entrapped by a paid police informant who cajoled and inflamed him to lure him into the conspiracy and that it was the informant who pushed the bombing. Siraj had no explosives, no timetable for an attack and little understanding about explosives.
 
A high-profile case here in New York is raising questions around police tactics and sting operations in pursuing terror cases.

On Monday, a twenty-four year-old Pakistani immigrant was sentenced to 30 years in prison for plotting to bomb the Herald Square subway station. Shahawar Matin Siraj was arrested days before the Republican National Convention in 2004 and held without bail. This past May, he was convicted on four counts of conspiracy, including the most serious, plotting to bomb a public transportation system.

Attorneys for Siraj said he was entrapped by a paid police informant who cajoled and inflamed him to lure him into the conspiracy and that it was the informant who pushed the bombing. Siraj had no explosives, no timetable for an attack and little understanding about explosives. They also criticized the NYPD’s tactics of sending informers and the undercover detectives into mosques to cast a wide net in search of radical Islamists.

The police department hailed the 30-year sentence, which is the maximum allowed under federal sentencing guidelines. Commissioner Raymond Kelly said the decision “says that those who conspire against New York will pay a severe price.”

Spy party aims to cement Putin’s power

Toledo Blade | Jan 14, 2007 

 

Josef Stalin with Averell Harriman

Harriman invested in the USSR soon after the revolution in defiance of federal laws and regulations. The investment firms, Guaranty Trust and Brown Brothers, Harriman—both dominated by “Bonesmen”—were involved in the early financing of Communist Russia. They financed industries, established banks and developed oil and mineral resources. Later, as Minister to Great Britain in charge of Lend-Lease for Britain and Russia, Harriman created a program, that shipped entire factories into Russia and—according to some who were involved in the deal—was responsible for the transfer of nuclear secrets, plutonium and U.S. dollar printing plates to the USSR.
http://www.ctrl.org/boodleboys/boodleboys1.html

The secret services – which Mr. Putin returned to the highest echelons of power – were staving off the ghosts of the many millions put to death by the secret services under the Soviet leader Josef Stalin as well as of those political prisoners who died in detention during the Cold War.

Russia’s extended winter holidays were finally over last week. For many, they were almost three weeks of binge partying.

That included Christmas and New Year’s celebrations – according to both the Gregorian and the Julian calendars.

For Russia’s notorious secret services, the holiday season was even longer.

They had limited reason to celebrate after recent assassinations of several Russian bankers, a leading Moscow journalist, and a renegade Russian spy.

After all, the secret services are the prime suspect.

Nevertheless, they were the beneficiaries of a lavish party that President Vladimir Putin – himself a former KGB spy in East Germany – threw for them in the Kremlin on Dec. 20.

Mr. Putin praised their “patriotism, competency, a high degree of personal and professional decency, and an understanding of the importance of their work for the good of their Fatherland.”

The spy party brings to mind the Feast of the Lemures.

Wikipedia defines it as “a feast during which the ancient Romans performed rites to exorcise the malevolent and fearful ghosts of the dead from their homes.”

The secret services – which Mr. Putin returned to the highest echelons of power – were staving off the ghosts of the many millions put to death by the secret services under the Soviet leader Josef Stalin as well as of those political prisoners who died in detention during the Cold War.

That’s what you and I might think.

But let’s not forget that Mr. Putin has earned his reputation as a pragmatist, even if a self-serving one.

It is not the dead whom he fears, but the living.

In that, he is not unlike his notorious predecessor Stalin, who used to say, “Death solves all problems – no man, no problem.”

Stalin followed that principle when he had most of the party members who had appointed him to power exterminated to make sure he had no rivals.

Their elimination was just a prelude to the purges that killed millions of Russians before Stalin’s own death in 1953.

Woman locked up for depression

Independent | Jan 14, 2007  

Tough new laws control the mentally ill

Despite her protestations and those of her husband, Ms McHugh was detained in a lock-down ward, under close observation by nurses. When her husband tried to rescue her, she was held in a headlock while a doctor discussed her case with him.

One sweltering hot morning in May, Anna McHugh visited her doctor’s surgery. Having undergone an intensive cycle of IVF in Australia, where her husband’s family is from, she was anxious and depressed. The night before she’d had a heated argument with her husband.

“We’d been trying to have a baby,” said the 27-year-old, who lives in Hampstead, London. “When I came back [from Australia] I was pregnant but I didn’t know it. That was one of the problems – I had tested too early and the test was negative. I was very upset.

“So I went to my GP and said: ‘I’m having a hard time. I don’t know if I can cope. I suffer from depression. Can you help me?'” Four hours later she found herself admitted to St Pancras Hospital. Then, having admitted to the attending doctor that she had contemplated suicide, she was sectioned under Section 5.2 of the Mental Health Act.

For the next 18 hours, despite her protestations and those of her husband, Ms McHugh was detained in a lock-down ward, under close observation by nurses. When her husband tried to rescue her, she was held in a headlock while a doctor discussed her case with him.

This week, as the House of Lords debates new mental health legislation that proposes tough new laws to control the mentally ill, her experience – which she likens to rape – has left her convinced that the law should be applied less severely, rather than more.

Johnny Depp to make film about murdered ex-spy Litvinenko

Scotsman | Jan 14, 2007 

ACTOR Johnny Depp is about to produce a film about Alexander Litvinenko, the former Russian spy who was poisoned in London with a rare radioactive isotope as he investigated the assassination of a Moscow journalist.

Warner Bros bought the film rights to a book on Litvinenko for Infinitum Nihil, Johnny Depp’s production company, the trade paper Variety reported. Depp will produce the film and could star in it.

The film will be based on a book by London-based New York Times journalist Alan Cowell, which is expected to be published next year.

Litvinenko died in November, several weeks after falling ill with what was later determined to be poisoning by the rare radioactive isotope polonium-210.

Litvinenko was a former agent in the Russian Federal Security Service, or FSB – an agency that replaced the KGB – who broke with the agency and went to Britain, where he was granted asylum. In exile, he became a fierce Kremlin critic and wrote a book claiming that the FSB had bombed Russian apartment buildings in 1999 to blame the blasts on Chechen separatists and create a pretext for resuming the war in Chechnya.

Litvinenko said he fell ill after meeting in London with an Italian security expert to discuss possible suspects in the killing of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya a month earlier. Politkovskaya was noted for her coverage of Chechnya. She was highly critical of alleged human rights violations by Russian forces and by Kremlin-backed Chechen officials.

In a deathbed statement, Litvinenko blamed the Kremlin for his poisoning. Russian officials have denied that allegation.