 |
[BBC: So, Mr Prime Minister, you think Arab Terrorists are responsible?
Blair: No, of course not. I think terrorists are terribly irresponsible. They're all a load of miserable bleeders that go around blowing up our financial centers and our privitized public transport systems and killing a lot of sorry work-a-day blokes like themselves.
BBC: Yes, of course. So . . . who do you think is behind these terrorists?
Blair: Well, frankly, we are. We've got a fair long way to go to catch up with these rotters.
************************
Garr, where are Pete'n Dud when we really need them?
Thank Garr for CM/P's Comissar of Cool Stuff out there in Lappland-West, where everything that's not frozen solid year-round is usually pretty cool quand même.
In case you were wondering just who's taking all that Chechan terrorism to the bank, cop a hook at this.--mc]
************************
[For background see Kagarlitsky's 2000 article explicitly alleging that Shamil Basayev, former Russian special forces officer Anton Surikov ("if there are former members among them" Kagarlitsky adds with parenthetic irony) and senior Kremlin official (head of the presidential administration) Alexander Voloshin met in the South of France to plot Basayev's invasion of Dagestan, triggering the 2nd Russo-Chechen war: http://geocities.com/chechenistan/conspiracy.html
Now, according to Left Russia (www.left.ru), Surikov is a "senior scholar" at Kagarlitsky's "Institute for Globalization Studies - jy]
http://left.ru/2005/11/preskonf_eng.html
In the end of June Internet weekly Left Russia published the first part of its journalistic investigation by the autonomous research group burtsev.ru. In the focus of this investigation is a group of renegade Soviet secret service officers who are allegedly involved in international drug traffiking and have ties with Western and Saudi security apparatus. Recently, this group of people made a public debut in the role of "radical communists" and "green revolutionists" (Islamic) under the cover of the Moscow Institute of Globalization Studies (IPROG) headed by the prominent Russian leftist Boris Kagarlitsky. The burtsev.ru group believes that the Institute has become one of the centers for a pro-Western coup d'etat in Russia.
Kagarlitsky Defends Himself Against Cover -Up Accusations
On July 1 2005 the organizers of the new social movement Left Front had a press conference. Participants included Boris Kagarlitsky, Ilya Ponomarev, Alexander Prigarin, and Boris Kravchenko. The correspondent for the Internet weekly Left Russia Dmitry Yakushev attended the event and asked Boris Kagarlitsky about his connections to secret services and Mr. Anton Surikov. What follows is the recording of their exchange.
DY: I have a question for Boris Kagarlitsky. In 2000 Novaya Gazeta published your article about a meeting between Voloshin and Basaev. In this article you wrote that the “former” agent of GRU Anton Surikov took part in this meeting as well. Your article links the participants of this meeting to Basaev’s invasion into Dagestan and the blowing up of residential buildings in Moscow. Now, five years after, Mr. Surikov works as a “senior scholar” in the Institute of Globalization Studies. How can you explain this? Do secret services of any country have something to do with your announced political initiative Left Front? Why did you hide these facts about Surikov from our left public?
BK: This is a very interesting question. What do mean by hiding from the left public? And where from then Mr. Yakushev learn about Surikov?
DY: We uncovered this.
BK: No, you did not uncover anything. You simply read our web site where we openly announced everything.
DY: Your web site has no information about Surikov being a secret service agent and that he was involved in that meeting between Voloshin and Basaev. This story has been long forgotten and we had to dig it out. So I repeat my question: How did it happen that Mr. Surikov works in your Institute?
BK: Now let’s talk about Surikov. You have to ask Surikov himself about the details of his biography. It is well known that I know him well and that Surikov and I collaborated together, discussed things and so on since at least 1998. And also, my relations with him became frequently visible to the public in the mid-1990s. Moreover, Surikov was often published in a number of oppositional newspapers. Now as far as the events of 1999, in the first place, I never accused anybody in anything. I simply related those facts that had become known to me. Not a single participant of those events came forward to deny those facts after I had made them public. They neither confirmed nor denied those facts. They could deny them; they could take me to court and so on. Yet they all did not say a word. Take a note that my article was published not in some marginal publication, not on the Web or some compromat.ru, but in Novaya Gazeta, a quite popular and influential press. Now, the article did not say anything bad about Surikov. He is a military man. This is a man who collaborates with and in the past belonged to organizations like GRU. He follows his orders.
DY: Does he follow his orders in your Institute as well?
BK: Ah…. It’s quite possible, but this question should be addressed to him.
DY: But he is a member of your Institute and you are the Director.
BK: I cannot deny this. But he is not on the permanent staff. His connections to secret services are his business. I believe in our country everyone either was or is in this situation. What is relevant in this situation is that Surikov is well-known journalist. He publishes regularly, makes his views public. The staff of our Institute does not necessarily share these views. Nevertheless we share a whole number of views, including political views. This is my first point. Secondly, he is simply involved in one concrete type of research in the Institute. This is his job as the head of this project. IPROG is not a one political team, but an expert community (“structure”) that includes people of different views.
Ilya Ponomarev: Allow me to say a few words. Dmitry Vladimirovich (Yakushev) should also keep in mind that we espouse the ideals of internationalism as the foundation of our activities. Our position on the conflict in Chechnya is also well known. We demand the speediest peaceful settlement. Comrade Surikov and a number of other members of our Institute do a number of research projects and not just research related to this problem in order to facilitate peace in Chechnya.
burtsev.ru comments
Clearly, Boris Kagarlitsky evades answering the question of our correspondent. He was asked to explain his decision to collaborate in a number of "left" projects with the man he implicated in a grave international crime. However, his evasion tricks raise new questions. For one, Kagarlitsky admits that Surikov may presently continue to have ties with secret services. But he seems to have no problems with this even though Surikov--using his position in IPROG--actively participates in the projects sponsored by Kagarlitsky's Institute, like the First Social Forum last spring. Apparently, Kagarlitsky's idea of left politics has become so stretchable that it includes the secret services of that very bourgeois state that Kagarlitsky and his circle claim to be in "opposition" to. We have every reason to believe that the majority of our left activists do not share his "globalist" tolerance. Yet Kagarlitsky, being one of the few leading organizers of the recent left "forums" and "movements", has failed to inform their participants that they were discussing the "future revolution" with the "former" officers of Russian secret services like Colonel Anton Surikov and General Aleksey Kondaurov. This is a serious and dangerous business. In the coming parts of our investigation we will be looking for answers to explain what made Kagarlitsky give cover to Surikov and his secret service colleagues under the roof of IPROG. For now one thing is certain. Kagarlitsky continues to stand behind his article of 2000 in Novaya Gazeta, including the part concerning Surikov. If Kagarlitsky is correct, then judging by the evidence of his article one should suspect that Surikov is not only a military criminal, but also a very dangerous and experienced provocateur.
Amazingly, Kagarlitsky claims that in his article he "did not say anything bad" about Surikov. Then why does he proceed to defend him? Kagarlitsky's arguments in defense of Surikov are neither new nor leftist. Surikov is a military man. He just obeys his orders. That's what Kagarlitsky says. We recall hearing these arguments. In Nuremberg and many other places. Is it conceivable that a man with such a level of moral development, a man surrounded by people like Surikov, can be a leading organizer and ideologist of our broad Left?
Burtsev.ru is an autonomous research group, affiliated with the Internet weekly Left.ru/Levaya Rossiia. Burtsev.ru is a proper name and has no relation to the domain burtsev.ru.
----
www.left.ru
Bad Actors in IPROG: Investigative Report, Part One: The Devil's Dozen. By burtsev.ru. --Why did Professor John Dunlop of The Hoover Institute fail to keep the minimal scholarly standarts in his essay "Storm in Moscow"? -- What made the former members of the Russian army intelligence, now selling mercenaries from CIS to U.S. private military companies KBR Halliburton and Diligence LLC, to become "political scientists" and "historians" at the Institute of Globalization Studies (IPROG), under the Director Boris Kagarlitsky, the one and only Russian Marxist, celebrated by the broad Western Left for his impeccable "internationalist" credentials?-- What did really happen at the Cote d'Azure villa, belonging to the international merchant of death Adnan Khashoggi, in the summer of 1999? These and other questions are raised in the path-breaking investigation by the autonomous research group burtsev.ru, affiliated with the Internet-weekly Left Russia. Read Russian original at http://left.ru/2005/10/burtsev127.html . We are looking for comrades to summarize this article in English, German and other languages.
Anton Surikov, veteran of secret services, "senior scholar" at IPROG, Executive Director of the All-Russian Association of Poultry Importers, and the alleged member of an organized criminal society.
Boris Kagarltsky, "leader of Russian antiglobalist movement", Director of IPROG, a journalist who in his publication five years ago had linked Anton Surikov to the conspiracies, leading to the second Chechen war and the explosions of residential buildings in Moscow.
What kind of future will Russian Left have with leaders like these?
Blair: No, of course not. I think terrorists are terribly irresponsible. They're all a load of miserable bleeders that go around blowing up our financial centers and our privitized public transport systems and killing a lot of sorry work-a-day blokes like themselves.
BBC: Yes, of course. So . . . who do you think is behind these terrorists?
Blair: Well, frankly, we are. We've got a fair long way to go to catch up with these rotters.
************************
Garr, where are Pete'n Dud when we really need them?
Thank Garr for CM/P's Comissar of Cool Stuff out there in Lappland-West, where everything that's not frozen solid year-round is usually pretty cool quand même.
In case you were wondering just who's taking all that Chechan terrorism to the bank, cop a hook at this.--mc]
************************
[For background see Kagarlitsky's 2000 article explicitly alleging that Shamil Basayev, former Russian special forces officer Anton Surikov ("if there are former members among them" Kagarlitsky adds with parenthetic irony) and senior Kremlin official (head of the presidential administration) Alexander Voloshin met in the South of France to plot Basayev's invasion of Dagestan, triggering the 2nd Russo-Chechen war: http://geocities.com/chechenistan/conspiracy.html
Now, according to Left Russia (www.left.ru), Surikov is a "senior scholar" at Kagarlitsky's "Institute for Globalization Studies - jy]
http://left.ru/2005/11/preskonf_eng.html
In the end of June Internet weekly Left Russia published the first part of its journalistic investigation by the autonomous research group burtsev.ru. In the focus of this investigation is a group of renegade Soviet secret service officers who are allegedly involved in international drug traffiking and have ties with Western and Saudi security apparatus. Recently, this group of people made a public debut in the role of "radical communists" and "green revolutionists" (Islamic) under the cover of the Moscow Institute of Globalization Studies (IPROG) headed by the prominent Russian leftist Boris Kagarlitsky. The burtsev.ru group believes that the Institute has become one of the centers for a pro-Western coup d'etat in Russia.
Kagarlitsky Defends Himself Against Cover -Up Accusations
On July 1 2005 the organizers of the new social movement Left Front had a press conference. Participants included Boris Kagarlitsky, Ilya Ponomarev, Alexander Prigarin, and Boris Kravchenko. The correspondent for the Internet weekly Left Russia Dmitry Yakushev attended the event and asked Boris Kagarlitsky about his connections to secret services and Mr. Anton Surikov. What follows is the recording of their exchange.
DY: I have a question for Boris Kagarlitsky. In 2000 Novaya Gazeta published your article about a meeting between Voloshin and Basaev. In this article you wrote that the “former” agent of GRU Anton Surikov took part in this meeting as well. Your article links the participants of this meeting to Basaev’s invasion into Dagestan and the blowing up of residential buildings in Moscow. Now, five years after, Mr. Surikov works as a “senior scholar” in the Institute of Globalization Studies. How can you explain this? Do secret services of any country have something to do with your announced political initiative Left Front? Why did you hide these facts about Surikov from our left public?
BK: This is a very interesting question. What do mean by hiding from the left public? And where from then Mr. Yakushev learn about Surikov?
DY: We uncovered this.
BK: No, you did not uncover anything. You simply read our web site where we openly announced everything.
DY: Your web site has no information about Surikov being a secret service agent and that he was involved in that meeting between Voloshin and Basaev. This story has been long forgotten and we had to dig it out. So I repeat my question: How did it happen that Mr. Surikov works in your Institute?
BK: Now let’s talk about Surikov. You have to ask Surikov himself about the details of his biography. It is well known that I know him well and that Surikov and I collaborated together, discussed things and so on since at least 1998. And also, my relations with him became frequently visible to the public in the mid-1990s. Moreover, Surikov was often published in a number of oppositional newspapers. Now as far as the events of 1999, in the first place, I never accused anybody in anything. I simply related those facts that had become known to me. Not a single participant of those events came forward to deny those facts after I had made them public. They neither confirmed nor denied those facts. They could deny them; they could take me to court and so on. Yet they all did not say a word. Take a note that my article was published not in some marginal publication, not on the Web or some compromat.ru, but in Novaya Gazeta, a quite popular and influential press. Now, the article did not say anything bad about Surikov. He is a military man. This is a man who collaborates with and in the past belonged to organizations like GRU. He follows his orders.
DY: Does he follow his orders in your Institute as well?
BK: Ah…. It’s quite possible, but this question should be addressed to him.
DY: But he is a member of your Institute and you are the Director.
BK: I cannot deny this. But he is not on the permanent staff. His connections to secret services are his business. I believe in our country everyone either was or is in this situation. What is relevant in this situation is that Surikov is well-known journalist. He publishes regularly, makes his views public. The staff of our Institute does not necessarily share these views. Nevertheless we share a whole number of views, including political views. This is my first point. Secondly, he is simply involved in one concrete type of research in the Institute. This is his job as the head of this project. IPROG is not a one political team, but an expert community (“structure”) that includes people of different views.
Ilya Ponomarev: Allow me to say a few words. Dmitry Vladimirovich (Yakushev) should also keep in mind that we espouse the ideals of internationalism as the foundation of our activities. Our position on the conflict in Chechnya is also well known. We demand the speediest peaceful settlement. Comrade Surikov and a number of other members of our Institute do a number of research projects and not just research related to this problem in order to facilitate peace in Chechnya.
burtsev.ru comments
Clearly, Boris Kagarlitsky evades answering the question of our correspondent. He was asked to explain his decision to collaborate in a number of "left" projects with the man he implicated in a grave international crime. However, his evasion tricks raise new questions. For one, Kagarlitsky admits that Surikov may presently continue to have ties with secret services. But he seems to have no problems with this even though Surikov--using his position in IPROG--actively participates in the projects sponsored by Kagarlitsky's Institute, like the First Social Forum last spring. Apparently, Kagarlitsky's idea of left politics has become so stretchable that it includes the secret services of that very bourgeois state that Kagarlitsky and his circle claim to be in "opposition" to. We have every reason to believe that the majority of our left activists do not share his "globalist" tolerance. Yet Kagarlitsky, being one of the few leading organizers of the recent left "forums" and "movements", has failed to inform their participants that they were discussing the "future revolution" with the "former" officers of Russian secret services like Colonel Anton Surikov and General Aleksey Kondaurov. This is a serious and dangerous business. In the coming parts of our investigation we will be looking for answers to explain what made Kagarlitsky give cover to Surikov and his secret service colleagues under the roof of IPROG. For now one thing is certain. Kagarlitsky continues to stand behind his article of 2000 in Novaya Gazeta, including the part concerning Surikov. If Kagarlitsky is correct, then judging by the evidence of his article one should suspect that Surikov is not only a military criminal, but also a very dangerous and experienced provocateur.
Amazingly, Kagarlitsky claims that in his article he "did not say anything bad" about Surikov. Then why does he proceed to defend him? Kagarlitsky's arguments in defense of Surikov are neither new nor leftist. Surikov is a military man. He just obeys his orders. That's what Kagarlitsky says. We recall hearing these arguments. In Nuremberg and many other places. Is it conceivable that a man with such a level of moral development, a man surrounded by people like Surikov, can be a leading organizer and ideologist of our broad Left?
Burtsev.ru is an autonomous research group, affiliated with the Internet weekly Left.ru/Levaya Rossiia. Burtsev.ru is a proper name and has no relation to the domain burtsev.ru.
----
www.left.ru
Bad Actors in IPROG: Investigative Report, Part One: The Devil's Dozen. By burtsev.ru. --Why did Professor John Dunlop of The Hoover Institute fail to keep the minimal scholarly standarts in his essay "Storm in Moscow"? -- What made the former members of the Russian army intelligence, now selling mercenaries from CIS to U.S. private military companies KBR Halliburton and Diligence LLC, to become "political scientists" and "historians" at the Institute of Globalization Studies (IPROG), under the Director Boris Kagarlitsky, the one and only Russian Marxist, celebrated by the broad Western Left for his impeccable "internationalist" credentials?-- What did really happen at the Cote d'Azure villa, belonging to the international merchant of death Adnan Khashoggi, in the summer of 1999? These and other questions are raised in the path-breaking investigation by the autonomous research group burtsev.ru, affiliated with the Internet-weekly Left Russia. Read Russian original at http://left.ru/2005/10/burtsev127.html . We are looking for comrades to summarize this article in English, German and other languages.
Anton Surikov, veteran of secret services, "senior scholar" at IPROG, Executive Director of the All-Russian Association of Poultry Importers, and the alleged member of an organized criminal society.
Boris Kagarltsky, "leader of Russian antiglobalist movement", Director of IPROG, a journalist who in his publication five years ago had linked Anton Surikov to the conspiracies, leading to the second Chechen war and the explosions of residential buildings in Moscow.
What kind of future will Russian Left have with leaders like these?
| Posted to: |
comments
Re: Kagarlitsky Outed as L'Historien de Service to Chechan Terrorism--from wwwleft.ru
by Mick Collins on Sat 09 Jul 2005 05:33 PM EDT | Profile | Permanent Link
[This came in from that learned snowback again. And it's not officially a comment, but it's so interesting that I thought it should be posted. And it's what got me to change what was my ignorant first title for this article: 'historien de service' was his idea. --mc]
Mick, I love your intro and the term Godfather nicely summarizes what Kagarlitsky *alleges* was Surikov's - and not just Surikov's - relationship to Basayev. Also nice shades of reference to Klebnikov's great book by using the term Godfather. But I would respectfully propose some amendment to the title in order to show that Kagarlitsky has engaged and leagued up with someone whom he claims was a "Godfather" to the cause of Independent Ichkeria's terrorism, namely Surikov. Kagarlitsky isn't at least directly the Godfather in this. But by his own account of 2000, he's sleeping with one.
See, Kagarlitsky's whole conceit in this is that he wrote an article for Novoya Gazeta early on in Russo-Chechen War II, in Jan. 2000 I believe, which explicitly claimed that top Kremlin and Russian intelligence people met with Basayev in the French Midi and conspired to have Basayev's ISI/CIA-trained fascist sappers invade Dagestan. Wag the Dog stuff. The "plot" according to Kagarlitsky was that since Basayev's own popularity in Chechnya was waning, he used corrupt highly-placed Kremlin contacts to "enable" a murderous invasion of and attempt to seize power in Dagestan. So Kagarlitsky's gambit is to try to put over on us that Basayev's boys weren't assets to the CIA and ISI and pro-Western oligarchs like Berezovsky (for which there's tons of evidence) but rather were the Kremlin's assets. No wonder the western trotzis love him so much. The Chechen "rebels" are wonderful voices of the masses, until they appear to do something really gross, like slaughter school kids en masse or invade North Caucasian republics where they're not welcome, in which case, they didn't really do it, it was the Kremlin who did it by remote control. You get the schtick. Just like it wasn't really Nato that bombed the RTS studio, it was Milosevic, who tricked them into it by proxy. Blah blah.
But at this press conference BK was outed for having appointed to the board of his "Ngo" one of the very same individuals whom he claimed conspired - as a Kremlin/intelligence services "insider" - with Basayev to carry out the infamous apartment bombings in Russia and the Chechen invasion of Dagestan which precipitated Russo-Chechen War II. And BKd even, in his Novaya Gazeta article of 5 yrs earlier, made sarcastic reference to the unlikelihood that there was any such thing as a "former" Russian special forces man. This is like claiming to have outed the guy who really set the Reichstag Fire and who's unapologetic about it, and then appointing him to the head of your anti-war, anti-nazi foundation for peace. It's just incredible. BK's in a journalistic and moral cul de sac. If Surikov really was a rogue element playing around with Basayev, this makes Kagarlitsky a moral midget. But if Suripov didn't conspire in the Dagestan invasion and the apartment bombings, then Kagarlitsky's a journalistic hack who deserves to live in infamy. Take your pick.
So I'd go more for something that catches the hypocrisy and complexity of the BK-Surikov relationship. Something like: Kagarlitsky claims to finger "Godfather" of Chechen terrorism, then *hires* him. Because Boris, as the Brit barristers would say, "This goes directly to your credibility, sir."
In any case, a big high-5 to Left.ru for outing this guy. BK was just working a variation of the line being worked by Zakayev, the minister of "Independent" Chechnya granted exile in Britain. He wrote some book which tried to claim that all the "Islamist" baddies around the middle east - Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad etc - were all creations of the KGB, which won him the hearts of North Atlantic neocons. We're supposed to forget that the talibs and al qaedists were basically "Cia-hadists" working for Langley in the service of counterrevolution in Afghanistan and points beyond. Nice inversion of historical truth.
Mick, I love your intro and the term Godfather nicely summarizes what Kagarlitsky *alleges* was Surikov's - and not just Surikov's - relationship to Basayev. Also nice shades of reference to Klebnikov's great book by using the term Godfather. But I would respectfully propose some amendment to the title in order to show that Kagarlitsky has engaged and leagued up with someone whom he claims was a "Godfather" to the cause of Independent Ichkeria's terrorism, namely Surikov. Kagarlitsky isn't at least directly the Godfather in this. But by his own account of 2000, he's sleeping with one.
See, Kagarlitsky's whole conceit in this is that he wrote an article for Novoya Gazeta early on in Russo-Chechen War II, in Jan. 2000 I believe, which explicitly claimed that top Kremlin and Russian intelligence people met with Basayev in the French Midi and conspired to have Basayev's ISI/CIA-trained fascist sappers invade Dagestan. Wag the Dog stuff. The "plot" according to Kagarlitsky was that since Basayev's own popularity in Chechnya was waning, he used corrupt highly-placed Kremlin contacts to "enable" a murderous invasion of and attempt to seize power in Dagestan. So Kagarlitsky's gambit is to try to put over on us that Basayev's boys weren't assets to the CIA and ISI and pro-Western oligarchs like Berezovsky (for which there's tons of evidence) but rather were the Kremlin's assets. No wonder the western trotzis love him so much. The Chechen "rebels" are wonderful voices of the masses, until they appear to do something really gross, like slaughter school kids en masse or invade North Caucasian republics where they're not welcome, in which case, they didn't really do it, it was the Kremlin who did it by remote control. You get the schtick. Just like it wasn't really Nato that bombed the RTS studio, it was Milosevic, who tricked them into it by proxy. Blah blah.
But at this press conference BK was outed for having appointed to the board of his "Ngo" one of the very same individuals whom he claimed conspired - as a Kremlin/intelligence services "insider" - with Basayev to carry out the infamous apartment bombings in Russia and the Chechen invasion of Dagestan which precipitated Russo-Chechen War II. And BKd even, in his Novaya Gazeta article of 5 yrs earlier, made sarcastic reference to the unlikelihood that there was any such thing as a "former" Russian special forces man. This is like claiming to have outed the guy who really set the Reichstag Fire and who's unapologetic about it, and then appointing him to the head of your anti-war, anti-nazi foundation for peace. It's just incredible. BK's in a journalistic and moral cul de sac. If Surikov really was a rogue element playing around with Basayev, this makes Kagarlitsky a moral midget. But if Suripov didn't conspire in the Dagestan invasion and the apartment bombings, then Kagarlitsky's a journalistic hack who deserves to live in infamy. Take your pick.
So I'd go more for something that catches the hypocrisy and complexity of the BK-Surikov relationship. Something like: Kagarlitsky claims to finger "Godfather" of Chechen terrorism, then *hires* him. Because Boris, as the Brit barristers would say, "This goes directly to your credibility, sir."
In any case, a big high-5 to Left.ru for outing this guy. BK was just working a variation of the line being worked by Zakayev, the minister of "Independent" Chechnya granted exile in Britain. He wrote some book which tried to claim that all the "Islamist" baddies around the middle east - Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad etc - were all creations of the KGB, which won him the hearts of North Atlantic neocons. We're supposed to forget that the talibs and al qaedists were basically "Cia-hadists" working for Langley in the service of counterrevolution in Afghanistan and points beyond. Nice inversion of historical truth.
Re: Re: Kagarlitsky Outed as L'Historien de Service to Chechan Terrorism--from wwwleft.ru
by Stoly on Sun 17 Jul 2005 01:33 PM EDT | Profile | Permanent Link
The "snowback" is good. Let him write us if he's interested in giving us some help. We need someone in the West with his understanding of things and skills for investigative journalism. As to Surikov's relation to Basaev, it's been well recorded and S. himself acknowledges that they were good friends, well...until the State Dept. listed B. on its terrorist list.
