Litvinenko's suspected poisoner, a hero in Russia, has just been elected to the Duma

LAT: Poisoning suspect a hero in Russia
By Megan K. Stack, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
January 27, 2008

MOSCOW -- If you're looking for Russia's most notorious international outlaw, try his new office in parliament. Andrei Lugovoy, the prime suspect in the 2006 radioactive poisoning death of a former Russian spy in London, is a celebrated figure these days in the Russian capital. Not only has Moscow brushed aside extradition requests from Britain, this onetime bodyguard has just been elected to the marble halls of the Duma, the lower house of parliament.

Lugovoy says he was framed. But that doesn't stop him from basking in the adoration showered on someone widely seen as a symbol of anti-Western defiance....

Lugovoy's presence in parliament epitomizes, for observers at home and abroad, the bold us-against-them atmosphere pervading Moscow. The boyish 41-year-old is a thorn in the side of the British government, which has unsuccessfully lobbied Russia to turn him over to stand trial in the killing of Alexander Litvinenko. With his sporty carriage and bashful grin, the tow-headed Lugovoy doesn't look like the embodiment of neo-Soviet tensions between Russia and the West. But when he talks, he sounds the part.

He refers to the fall of the Soviet Union as a blunder. He says he wants Russia's military might to return to the sweep and power of its Soviet heyday. He accuses U.S. intelligence agencies of plotting the Sept. 11 attacks "because they needed to create a certain mood." "I don't agree that the Cold War is back. It has never ended," he said. "Any normal Russian person in the 1990s didn't see anything from the West except insults and humiliation."...

Implicit in Lugovoy's popularity, in the public's enthusiastic reaction to his name, is the underlying assumption that he killed Litvinenko. Not that anybody ever comes out and calls him a killer. But that idea hangs over him: Lugovoy is suspected of spiking the former spy's tea with radioactive polonium-210, traces of which turned up in hotel rooms, restaurants and airplanes he was in during his trip to London.

"He would definitely become a national hero of Russia should he confess that he killed Litvinenko and that he was trying to kill (London-based Russian dissident Boris) Berezovsky," said Alexander Prokhanov, editor of the nationalist newspaper Zavtra. "In the eyes of the majority of the Russian population, both Berezovsky and Litvinenko are ugly, renegade traitors and symbols of evil."...

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-poison27jan27,0,1497346.story

if you live in one yourself.

repression anywhere in the world -- and don't hold to the notion many here seem to have that our own country holds a patent on evil.

You, in fact, note in your sig line that you may not support certain things that have gone on in Pakistan -- and I agree with you.

And apparently, disaster capitalism has traumatized the Russians back to where they were when they licked Communist boot.

But it's hard to be critical of them. Imperial Subjects of Amerika now lick Bushie boot and are on the whole, similar characters.

Just ask any Fox Noisewatcher how they feel about the innocent dead in Iraq or Jose Padilla or the prospect of nuking Iran and you would get identical authoritarian jingoes.