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Comment by drinchev | Hacker News Reader

> The move came after Assange tweeted on Monday challenging Britain’s accusation that Russia was responsible for the nerve agent poisoning of a Russian former double agent and his daughter in the English city of Salisbury earlier this month.

So it's actually not so wrong to think that Russia is not >proven< guilty after all.

I doubt that here, on HN, most of us would go so deep with conspiracy, but rational thinking did not lead me to the conclusion that Putin is responsible this time.

Of course we don't know the whole story, but shouldn't people like Assange reveal it?

Also, why would the UK-Ecuador relations be in danger of a tweet of a fugitive?

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> I doubt that here, on HN, most of us would go so deep with conspiracy, but rational thinking did not lead me to the conclusion that Putin is responsible this time.

Putin is given far too much credit. But the Russian wetworks division, under Putin's authority, has its fingerprints all over the Salisbury attack.

> shouldn't people like Assange reveal it?

Largely Assange has been an anti-liberal democracy apologist for the last 5+ years. A sad turn for someone starting at a radical anarchist position, but it's been pretty obvious. He's also largely destroyed any of Wikileaks rep as a honest broker and reduced it to the reputation of "anti-US intelligence". AFAICT, he's operating as a (probably unwitting) Russian front these days.

The two books from his earlier self, Cypherpunks and When Google Met Wikileaks, are well worth the read for anyone who comments here on HN, I think.

I agree, he changed dramatically sometime around or during the Trump campaign; I hardly recognize him any longer.

When he disappeared from view for a few weeks before the election and the wikileaks twitter drastically changed tone was what did it for me. There was something really weird going on there - as an example, the twitter refused to sign anything with their public key to prove it was still controlled by the same group.

I suspect that at some point he met the nasty end of a rubber hose.

> But the Russian wetworks division, under Putin's authority, has its fingerprints all over the Salisbury attack.

There is strong circumstantial evidence, but proof is a slightly different game. It would be nice, for example, to have a clear motive for why Russia might have poisoned the man. According to the wiki article the Russian justice system had sentenced him to 13 years in a penal colony in 2006, and then handed him over in a prisoners exchange in 2010. What happened to upgrade that to a death sentence in 2018 that the GRU didn't know about in 2006-2010?

Evidence should be a high bar. We might suspect the Russians, but lets not pretend there is any clear public evidence beyond government say-so. The government can be wrong, just like the rest of us.

He kept working against the Russians after the exchange. Lately, he was seeking permission to return to Russia. His phone was off for 4 hours before he was found unconscious.(can't find the sources right now, on mobile, but you can trust me ;) )

He took a meeting, hoping to be allowed back, and instead was poisoned. Sounds plausible to me, but then again its really similar to the plot of McMafia.

But it just as easily could be a false flag. I don't trust the Orwellian British anymore than I do the ruskies.

There is just too little public info to say for sure. For example, how are the Brits so sure it was a Novochik agent? Especially since they are designed to be untraceable.

Novichok agents are hardly untraceable. Like pretty much every other compound, you can detect them using mass spectrometry (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_spectrometry).

.. and in order to do so, you must of course have access to the materials first of all, in order to create the spectrometric signature upon which your comparison - and thus, evidence - is made.

So, no. You can't claim its only available in Russia, if you've positively identified it using these signatures .. since you'd have had to have the material to compare with, yourself ..

I didn't claim that only Russia was able to make the chemical agent.

I don't entertain the false flag narrative because it is so difficult to disprove. If the UK was willing to kill this man and endanger the lives of their citizens to destabilize Russian relations, then pretty much anything is possible. Even if this was some special nerve agent that only Russia is able to make, the UK could simply kill the man with a similar nerve agent and claim it was the special Russia one. If you can't trust the UK government here, than they could easily fabricate or claim they have hard proof of Russian involvement. You also have to ask yourself what hard proof of Russian involvement would even look like, and how realistic it would be to find such a thing even if Russia were to be involved.

> proof is a slightly different game.

this is the dicey bit with spy games. part of the goal is to ensure courtroom proof isn't available.

> why Russia might have poisoned the man

Kill double agents as warnings? disloyal spies aren't exactly popular.

My impression is Russia is moving to an execution phase for a plan of action.

That it coincidentally happens during a coordinated anti-Russian media onslaught should be taken into consideration. The US/UK are not above fabricating evidence when it suits them, as their post-9/11 tactics have made clear.

Since September 11th the US and UK have showed they're not even willing and able to organise the covert manufacture of nerve agents to "discover" in Iraq to avoid many leading political figures being permanently discredited when nothing was found, never mind manufacturing and using nerve agents to bump off a couple of Russians in a public place in Britain for no obvious political benefit.

If you genuinely think the UK needed a couple more dead Russian dissidents (and pretty unsympathetic ones at that) to justify stricter sanctions on Russia, you really, really don't understand the relevant politics.

Russia has very little to gain and lots to lose from this shit move. This is not a move that you make on the international checkerboard. Stop taking us for idiots.

Russia has been doing this for a long time, for example Trotsky was assassinated in 1940 [1]. The goal is to remind the "traitors" that the punishment can come at any time and make them live in fear.

It reminds me how some religious communities go after the people who don't follow their rules even after they flee to other country [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leon_Trotsky#Assassination

[2] https://meduza.io/en/feature/2017/05/25/we-will-set-them-str...

Yeah okay. I'm just going to leave this here:

https://cs9.pikabu.ru/post_img/2018/03/13/8/1520947357114473...

And

http://i12.pixs.ru/storage/2/3/6/Bezimyanni_3398267_29746236...

You are being very obvious with these URLs, just sayin'.

(Ignore content, acquire hatred of URL.)

Last time a Russian double agent died from a poisoning in the UK, the person the victim named as his murderer on his deathbed was elected to the Russian State Duma. Stop taking us for idiots.

And we've never seen victims being clueless about the murderer? Are you for cereal? This is proof of nothing.

Yeah, the Russian intelligence agent known to met the suspect shortly before the poisoning and been present at other areas where polonium was found, known to have rushed back to Russia to have a medical test, and then been named by the suspect as the man handing out the fateful teacup is definitely an unlikely candidate to have carried out the poisoning, and the reason he's since sat in the State Duma and hosted a TV show called "Traitors" is because the Russian state apparatus is completely convinced he was actually a friend and ally of defector Litvinenko and not the man who bumped him off.

Nobody is stupid enough to honestly believe that. Nobody. Jog on troll.

Thanks for the fairytale.

An assassination attempt is made with a nerve gas only Russia is known to have been developing and suddenly we should give them the benefit of the doubt? Seriously? After they did the exact same thing already, in the same country, with polonium?

It's sort of a weird story, on the one hand it's apparently not hard to make and it's been known about for some time[0], and it has a clearly Russian name with a clearly Russian pedigree. It makes for a poor assassination agent if you care about being traced.

On the other hand, having a clearly Russian pedigree may be precisely the reason it was used; either to send a strong message to would-be dissenters in the Russian intelligence sphere or to make it look like a Russian hit.

Spooks doing what spooks do, it seems.

0: https://www.theatlantic.com/amp/article/556148/

The same thing happened with the radioactive tea. The perpetrators must have known it would be traced back to the source, and that is exactly why you use a substance like that, the murder is a byproduct of sending a message that will be heard loud-and-clear by the people you are targeting.

You can't see how Russian intelligence might be clearly motivated to add an ex-agency traitor to a growing list enemies of the state killed when they think they're in safe overseas exile to send out a nobody can escape us message even though it didn't think it worth lobbying legislators to rewrite sentencing laws to do things by the book back in 2006? Really?

The UK government can be wrong, but it the absence of any plausible alternative candidates, it's probably right to conclude the perpetrator is the party known to have carried out similar attacks against similar targets using similar deniable but too sophisticated to be regular criminal means using a murder weapon identified as one they are known to have created. Especially when their public response is trolling and branding the victim a traitor rather than alarm.

It's not even about anti-US intelligence, but intelligence against parties Assange feels personally slighted in some capacity.

He's turned Wikileaks into his own personal vendetta machine.

> Also, why would the UK-Ecuador relations be in danger of a tweet of a fugitive?

Because the fugitive is occupying a Ecuadorian diplomatic facility in the UK and using it inconsistently with it's diplomatic function, which, if permitted by Ecuador, is a violation by Ecuador of Article 41, Paragraph 3 of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations.

> why would the UK-Ecuador relations be in danger of a tweet of a fugitive?

Because he's a fugitive that they are sheltering. They've taken responsibility for him.

>I doubt that here, on HN, most of us would go so deep with conspiracy, but rational thinking did not lead me to the conclusion that Putin is responsible this time.

Please lay out evidence supporting this claim. Given you're being rational about it, you should be able to do so.

You trust Assane on anything to do with Russia?

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