This Leopard Will Not Change His Spots!

"JUST HITTING ANOTHER
BRICK WALL"

This Leopard Will Not Change His Spots!

We have often heard it said that a leopard cannot change its’ spots. How true that statement is.

Russian President, Vladimir Putin is just such a leopard. When President Bush looked into Putin’s heart, he was either blind or Putin is very adept and hiding what he really is.

When the old Soviet Union collapsed, democracy supposedly came to Russia, but did it?

Since Putin took office on the last day of 1999, 13 journalists have been murdered in Russia after defying him. Almost all of those deaths happened under strange circumstances, and no prosecutions have resulted. Other victims include a banker, a potential president of the Ukraine, and an oil executive -- all of whom were considered enemies of President Putin for one reason or another. A recent victim, right here in the U.S., was an expert on Russian intelligence who was critically injured in a shooting in front of his home in suburban Washington, D.C., just days after he charged that the Russian government was behind the death of former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko. Paul Joyal, who works for a Washington-based government consulting firm, was shot on March 1 by two men in his driveway. Days earlier he had said on "Dateline NBC" that "a message has been communicated to anyone who wants to speak out against the Kremlin: If you do, no matter who you are, where you are, we will find you, and we will silence you – in the most horrible way possible." The shooting raised suspicions of Russian involvement.

One could dismiss these suspicions were it not that it fits a disturbing pattern. Critics of Russian President Vladimir Putin -- journalists, politicians and others end up suffering violent deaths.

Joyal was an acquaintance of Litvinenko, who died a lingering and painful death in a British hospital last November. Before he expired from the effects of poisonous polonium-210, a rare radioactive isotope produced almost exclusively in Russia, Litvinenko made a shocking accusation: He stated that Putin ordered his death to silence him.

Moscow denied Litvinenko’s accusation, saying; “Why would the Russian leader do such a thing. After all, Litvinenko had exiled himself to Britain after being released from a Russian prison.”

Litvinenko was jailed in 1999 for saying publicly that Putin, then Russian prime minister and designated heir to President Boris Yeltsin, ordered buildings in Moscow deliberately blown up so he could blame Chechen terrorists. The bombings gave the Russians an excuse to launch an invasion of Chechnya that escalated the Second Chechen War and continued after Putin became acting president on the last day of 1999.

Since becoming president, Putin has been consolidating more and more power under the government and using all kinds of underhanded means to do away with private ownership of television/radio stations, banks and oil companies, and it has become apparent to Kremlin watchers that a disturbing pattern has emerged: Putin cannot tolerate criticism, so he eliminates his enemies one after another -- sometimes by poison, and sometimes by a well-placed bullet. What else could one expect from the former head of the K.G.B?

Even the establishment MSM press here in the West is suggesting that Putin is a cold-blooded killer. An in-depth article in the Jan. 29 issue of The New Yorker was headlined: "Kremlin, Inc.: Why are Vladimir Putin's opponents dying?"

Let us examine the track record:

Yuri Shchekochikhin, a reporter at the small liberal Novaya Gazeta newspaper in Moscow, was investigating tax evasion rumors involving persons hooked up to the FSB, the Federal Security Bureau, successor to the notorious KGB that once was headed by Putin.

Shchekochikhin died in July 2003 of an alleged "allergic reaction," but it was never explained what he was allergic to. His family believes that he was poisoned, according to The New Yorker.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky, head of Russia's highly successful Yukos Oil Company, was yanked off a private jet at the Novosibirsk Airport in Siberia in October 2003 by masked FSB agents.

His crime was aligning himself with Putin opponents, even speaking out against the Russian president in foreign capitals. Charged with tax evasion and fraud, after a mock trial he was condemned to serve a 9-year sentence at a remote Siberian prison.

Paul Klebnikov (an American citizen) was founding editor of the Russian version of business magazine Forbes. He had been looking into corruption within the ranks of Russian business tycoons, with possible links to the government, when he was shot dead in July 2004 while leaving his office in Moscow.

The Russians said Chechen terrorists carried out the contract-style slaying. But a former high-ranking CIA official stated that "the Russians blame everything on the Chechens." No arrests were ever made.

Yan Sergunin, a former vice-premier of Chechnya, who had reportedly promised to provide Klebnikov with information helpful to his investigation of Russian corruption, was gunned down on a Moscow street, less than three weeks before Klebnikov's murder. Again, there were no arrests.

Viktor Yushchenko was a highly popular candidate to become president of the Ukraine republic, but was firmly opposed by Putin. In September 2004, he was given dioxin, a deadly poison that left him badly disfigured and barely alive, his health destroyed.

Andréi Kozlov was deputy chief of Russia's central bank. He was highly visible in his efforts to rid Russia of banks that were organized crime fronts -- efforts that Putin considered confrontational.

As Kozlov left a company soccer match last September in Moscow, he was gunned down in broad daylight.

Movladi Baisarov, a former special forces officer in Chechnya, had political ambitions as a rival to Chechen Prime Minister Ramzan Kadryrov, a pro-Russian favorite of Putin.

Baisarov died in a hail of bullets on one of Moscow's busiest intersections last Nov. 18. Scores of pedestrians and drivers witnessed the assassination, some of them upper-echelon members of the city police. No one has been arrested.

Anna Politkovskaya was a courageous reporter for the Novaya Gazeta newspaper. Her endless printed attacks against Putin, her vivid no-holds-barred reporting about Chechnya and other matters won her praise and awards from as far away as Stockholm and New York. But she knew she was marked for death. In 2001, while she was in Vienna, a woman who strongly resembled her was shot to death in front of Politkovskaya's apartment building in Moscow. Police believe the journalist was the intended target.

In 2004 Politkovskaya became violently ill from tea she drank on a flight to Chechnya. She was transferred by private jet to Moscow for treatment, but her blood tests and other medical records disappeared en route.

Last October, as she was carrying groceries up to her apartment, she was shot four times -- two bullets penetrating her heart and lungs, a third slamming her backward into her elevator. A fourth bullet was pumped into her brain from a few inches away.

Last July the Duma, Russia's parliament, passed a law ordered by the Kremlin that allows "enemies of the Russian regime" to be assassinated wherever in the world they might be. Experts on the Russian regime insist that law is what Putin wanted.

With the collapse of Soviet Communism in 1991, excitement swelled throughout the Socialist Republics that human rights would again be recognized after so many decades of suppression. But today, Russia now has less personal and press freedom than Third World nations like Afghanistan, Zimbabwe, and Sudan.

The top American intelligence official, retired Navy Adm. Mike McConnell, told the Senate Armed Services Committee in late February: "The march to democracy [in Russia] has taken a back step. And now there are more arrangements to control the process and the populace and the parties and so on, to the point of picking the next leader of Russia."

How does Putin feel? To him, this decline of human rights is not a problem. He has called the breakup of the Soviet Union "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century." So much for the end of Communism.

Knowing all of this has to make one rethink the words of Mikhail Gorbachev, last Premier of the former Soviet Union. Speaking to the Politiburo in November of 1987, Gorbachev stated the following:

“Gentlemen, Comrades, do not be concerned about all you hear about glasnost and perestroika and democracy in the coming years. These are primarily for outward consumption. There will be no significant internal change within the Soviet Union, other than for cosmetic purposes. Our purpose is to disarm the Americans and let them fall asleep.”

Does this not explain why Russia thwarts every effort of the United States to fight the war on terror and to keep Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons? Does this not explain why Russia has been and still is the biggest arms supplier to Hezbollah and Hamas? Could it be that Vladimir Putin pulled the wool over President Bush’s eyes? Could it be that Bush only saw what he wanted to see?

Go back and read the Book of Ezekiel to find out who it is that will lead the kings of the east against Israel at the Battle of Armageddon.

She is a Hill – Bill – Y:

Sen. Hillary Clinton may have suffered a case of 'dialect confusion' while speaking Sunday in Selma, Alabama, or she is one good con-artist trying to fool the folks by making the people believe that she is “one of them”.

So Will the Real Hillary Please Speak Up?

As a college student, she traveled from Illinois to Wellesley, Mass.; as a politician's wife, she made the trek to the governor's mansion in Little Rock, Ark., and then on to Washington, D.C. as first lady; and, finally, as a senator, she moved into well-heeled Chappaqua, N.Y..

Every where she went, she made sure that she was heard loud and clear. She made sure that her voice was heard. The question is which voice is Hillary's? Has she traveled so far that she's suffering from dialect confusion?

Click here to view and listen to a clip of Hillary addressing the Democratic National Committee:

Then

Click here to listen to Hillary addressing an audience Sunday at the First Baptist Church in Selma, Ala.:

Now you tell me, is she sincere or just a hypocrite?

“Abouna” Gregori