Thu Mar 29, 2018 8:24 pm
#1601256
Flint - my stony friend, what drives public opinion and what drives action WRT external "security" are two very different things.
Sometimes they converge, but that is probably luck more than anything.
Modern security forces are, TBH, more hamstrung by domestic politics than they are by what the "other side" are doing. Even the ones who are meant to do external security have been bound by domestic law for many years.
Geneva Convention? A scrabble of British lawyers will fight over whether Afghans wearing a certain colour of headgear are considered "enemy combatants" or simple civvies. Is that walkie-talkie and AK47 for keeping in touch with your cousin up the hill and looking after the goats, or for that cousin who accidentally
buried a couple of hundred pounds of HE at the roadside last night, and a GSM or IR trigger.
FFS.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not in favour of the slash and burn hang em' high and put it on the front page tactics of the Austria-Hungarian Empire circa 1915/16.
Lets also not forget that "external contractors" (aka ex service gents) from "our side" were very active in ferkin over the Soviets in the 80s in Afghanistan. The Yanks were much more active. Each Govt, from Russian, to Chinese (who furnished arms), to Brit and Yanks will all deny this, but a number of books and in my personal sphere contacts I've had over the years counter the myth that Afghanistan wasn't a target of action from pretty much every major power on Earth.
Back to the OP. Nobody knows for sure how this poor gent and his daughter (and subsequent PC) got exposed to an extremely nasty binary + military
grade nerve agent.
It didn't happen by accident.
Was the wee Russian dwarf behind it?
Probably.
Is it possible that someone else did it? Yep, but it would- as Kanga said - be someone with the resources to construct the binary components, contain them with the required biohazard levels, then actively "weaponise" those components.
That's not some muppet who jerks off to ISIS videos.
I'm old enough to understand Realpolitik.
Putin is like a school bully who beat the sh.. out of kids outside the school boundaries then said "what? prove it".
He's a cnut. Having the West/NATO finally give him a kick in the cossacks is something he's actively been looking for, for a very long time.
The last time "we" expelled so many "staff without portfolio" was in the early 70s, and what I read before this all kicked off said it was a massive disruption to intel gathering by the soviets.
Fing is....nowadays the majority of intel stuff is done from a laptop and script kiddies.
Solution? Very simple. We set up a counter-intelligence community who are a mixture of overt and covert IT black hats, tasked with being as nasty as possible (but without pulling the trigger until ordered).
It's no secret in the IT world that our Russian friends are total bad starts WRT hacking, and social media spam factories etc. "Our" response has been, TBH, a disgrace.