Posted by
Michael on Friday, November 24, 2006 7:39:44 AM
From the former Russian spy,
Alexander Litvinenko, who died yesterday:
"You have shown yourself to be unworthy of your
office, to be unworthy of the trust of civilized men and women,"
Litvinenko said in a statement read by his friend Alex Goldfarb."You
may succeed in silencing one man but the howl of protest from around
the world will reverberate, Mr. Putin, in your ears for the rest of
your life."Living in Russia (or having lived in Russia) is not just hazardous for spies, but also for journalists. Yesterday in her Thanksgiving Day post,
Michelle Malkin wrote why journalists should be thankful they don't live there:
Give thanks we don't live in Russia, where investigative journalists routinely wind up dead. Last month, unreleting reporter and Putin critic Anna Politkovskaya
was found shot dead in her apartment. In the days before her death,
Politkovskaya had been working on a story about torture in Chechnya,
according to her newspaper Novaya Gazeta. She joins a death toll that includes Paul Klebnikov,
the U.S.-born editor of the Russian edition of Forbes, who had been
investigating the Russian business underworld, and was gunned down
outside his Moscow office in 2004; Valery Ivanov,
editor of the newspaper Tolyatinskoye Oborzreniye, also shot dead after
investigating organized crime and drug trafficking in 2002; and Larisa Yudina,
editor of the opposition newspaper Sovetskaya Kalmykia in southern
Russia, who was stabbed to death by former government aides.
TRV has
written extensively on this issue.