Office of the Independent Blogger

There’s a conspiracy theory floating around the Internet about the anthrax attacks on Congress after 9/11. It alleges that the Government sent anthrax to Tom Daschle and Pat Leahy in an effort to silence their opposition to the PATRIOT ACT. It’s a very interesting read with very interesting sources, and while I wouldn’t be surprised if it were true, I’m not going to give it much thought. Just thought I’d pass it along with this news story about the Russian spy who was poisoned in Britain.

The poison that killed former Russian agent Alexander Litvinenko was sprayed into his tea, a waiter who served the man’s table at a hotel bar said in an interview published in a British newspaper on Sunday. The witness account in The Sunday Telegraph is the first to be made public, and provides new details on how the poison, a highly radioactive substance called polonium-210, might have been delivered. Norberto Andrade, the head barman at London’s Millennium Hotel, said he believes he was deliberately distracted as he tried to serve a gin and tonic to the table where Litvinenko was sitting with Andrei Lugovoi, a Russian businessman and former KGB agent, and two other Russians, Dmitry Kovtun and Vyacheslav Sokolenko, on Nov. 1, 2006.

Though he did not see it happen, Andrade told the Telegraph he believes that at that moment the poison was sprayed into a pot of green tea on the table. He said investigators later told him that traces of the poison were found all over the table and floor and on a picture above where Litvinenko was sitting, leading him to conclude that the poison must have been sprayed. “When I was delivering the gin and tonic to the table, I was obstructed,” the paper quoted him as saying. “I couldn’t see what was happening, but it seemed very deliberate to create a distraction. It made it difficult to put the drink down.

You know, Intelligence is such a fascinating world, and I’ve always had a large interest in it. Because of this interest, I’ve always rather appreciated George H.W. Bush’s handling of the CIA as he cared for the organization and was, of course, the head of it. That’s one of the many reasons I’ve always preferred George H.W. Bush to W. Bush, as Bush doesn’t care about intelligence as much as he should. You probably don’t need more evidence to that effect, but the day provided it.

An independent oversight board created to identify intelligence abuses after the CIA scandals of the 1970s did not send any reports to the attorney general of legal violations during the first 5 1/2 years of the Bush administration’s counterterrorism effort, the Justice Department has told Congress. Although the FBI told the board of a few hundred legal or rules violations by its agents after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the board did not identify which of them were indeed legal violations. This spring, it forwarded reports of violations in 2006, officials said. The President’s Intelligence Oversight Board — the principal civilian watchdog of the intelligence community — is obligated under a 26-year-old executive order to tell the attorney general and the president about any intelligence activities it believes “may be unlawful.” The board was vacant for the first two years of the Bush administration.

That’s disturbing, and it shows us the President’s lack of regard for the CIA as well as his lack of respect for the law.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 15th, 2007 at 4:17 pm and is filed under Outside Retort (Current Affairs).