Irwin Cotler – a jewish lawyer, former Member of Parliament as well as a former Minister of Justice in Canada – was tin-foiling about Vladimir Putin’s Russia and its FSB security apparatus all the wat back in March 2017.
I quote part of the article in the ‘Times of Israel’ for the details.
To wit:
‘In a phone interview from his office in Montreal, Irwin Cotler – a longtime lawyer for Soviet dissidents and refuseniks – recalled that during a 2006 official visit to Moscow, he went out to dinner with a colleague and a few hours later began vomiting blood.
“He and I ate exactly the same thing,” Cotler recalled of his dinner with fellow Canadian MP Joe Comartin, during an interparliamentary trip to the Russian capital. “Later, back at my hotel, I began to vomit blood and became really sick. I called the hotel and asked for a doctor. They sent cleaning ladies instead, who cleaned up the blood.”
Cotler then called the Canadian Embassy, who sent a doctor. Cotler was rushed to the European Medical Center in Moscow, where he was hospitalized for several days, undergoing tests and injections. He subsequently flew back to Canada, where he remained ill for months afterwards. In Moscow, his liver and pancreas were X-rayed, but he received no response to his inquiries as to what had occurred, and no investigation, as he had requested. While Cotler has no conclusive proof he was poisoned, he now believes it likely.
“When it happened, I figured it was a bad case of food poisoning. Until I began to connect the dots.”
Cotler, a human rights lawyer, had represented Soviet dissidents in the 1970s and 1980s, including Andrei Sakharov, Natan Sharansky and Yuli Edelstein. In 1998 he represented accused spy and environmentalist Alexander Nikitin, who had been imprisoned by the FSB, the successor organization to the KGB, while Putin was its head.
“People say Putin has a long memory,” Cotler remarked, speculating as to why the Russian leader might have felt motivated to poison him.
Cotler first publicly discussed the incident in 2014, after he was placed on a Russian blacklist of 13 Canadians who are prohibited from entering Russia, the third time he has been so banned. Cotler’s revelation received a modest amount of publicity at the time, but has renewed relevance now, in light of the mysterious death and near death of Putin opponents and the FBI investigations about Russian interference in the US presidential election campaign.
Further connecting the dots, Cotler said he began noticing, shortly after his illness, that other outspoken critics of Putin’s regime were suffering a high rate of mortality and sickness.
Cotler’s former colleague from Yale Law School, Luzius Wilhaber, the former president of the European Court of Human Rights, became violently ill, with similar symptoms, after a three-day trip to Moscow in October 2006. Wilhaber had previously angered the Russian government by upholding the complaints of Chechen human rights activists.
A month later, former KGB and FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko died from drinking poisoned tea in London. Litvinenko had become an outspoken critic of the Putin regime and an informant for the MI6.
In 2009, Russian lawyer Magnitsky died in prison after allegedly exposing a $230 million tax fraud committed by allegedly corrupt officials colluding with gangsters in Russia. Two key Russian witnesses in the case, Valery Kurochkin and Octai Gasanov, died of liver failure and heart failure, respectively. Alexander Perepilichny, a whistleblower in the multi-million tax fraud case, died of apparent poisoning while jogging near his UK home, in November 2012.
Russian democratic opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, who had come to Canada to support his Justice for Sergei Magnitsky legislation, was gunned down on February 27, 2015. Nemtsov’s protege, a young liberal politician named Vladimir Kara-Murza has twice succumbed to severe and sudden illnesses that he believes were brought on by poisoning.
Then, last week, former Russian MP turned Kremlin critic Denis Voronenkov was gunned down on a street in Kiev. And a lawyer for the family of the deceased Magnitsky, Nikolai Gorokhov, who was about to testify in two separate Magnitsky-related trials in Russia and the US, fell from a fourth-floor balcony in Moscow last Tuesday. Gorokhov suffered severe head injuries but miraculously survived.’
“You see that Gorokhov’s injuries have to be contextualized in terms of what has happened to other people who were connected to the Magnitsky case,” Cotler told The Times of Israel.
All told, said Cotler, there are about 40 “journalists, lawyers, human rights activists, opposition leaders and dissidents who are connected to each other or all connected by virtue of the fact that they have been critics of Putin, who have been assassinated, poisoned and the like.”’ (1)
It doesn’t much to debunk Cotler’s nonsense, because he makes two key assumptions:
1) That the Kremlin exclusively uses poison to get rid of its opponents both at home and abroad.
2) Those bouts of illness in arbitrarily selected ‘enemies of the Kremlin’ are part of a Russian conspiracy to mass poison its prominent political opponents.
The first assumption can be debunked by simply pointing out that as Denis Voronenkov was gunned down not poisoned and if the Kremlin was to primarily use poison to ‘fake terminal illness’ – as Cotler argues 0 then this is a rather significant anomaly in their anti-dissident operation.
Further the case of Alexander Litvinenko was by all accounts likely killed by the FSB in the UK, but it wasn’t by ‘faking terminal illness’ – as Cotler implies – rather by slipping radioactive material into his tea, which in turn caused a condition that was unmistakable to doctors as radiation sickness and as such would never have been attributed to an illness.
This thus demonstrates that the pattern of ‘illness’ that forms the central plank of Cotler’s case is not actually all that solid, but rather it is a vague and contradicted by several anomalies that Cotler does not deign to mention let alone bother to explain.
The second assumption can be debunked by simply pointing out that many of these ‘opponents of the Kremlin’ have – as Cotler admits – seemingly survived their ‘bouts of illness’, which rather suggests that either these are not cases of poisoning by the FSB or that said agency is utterly incompetent.
If you don’t manage to assassinate your targets despite poisoning them on multiple occasions, then quite frankly you need to be fired for incompetence.
Are we really supposed to believe that the FSB is conspiring to poison ‘enemies of the Kremlin’ only to routinely give them all bad cases of the squits?
What was the FSB doing?
Were they trying to provide Russian gastroenterologists with extra work or something?
Letters on a postcard please!
References
(1) http://www.timesofisrael.com/saying-he-was-poisoned-in-russia-ex-canadian-justice-minister-fights-a-kremlin-revenge-campaign/
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