AJ Strata has done Pulitzer-worthy work chasing down the trail of the murderers of former spy Alexander Litvenenko and journalist Anna Politkovskaya, not that the MSM will ever admit it. I cannot do better on the specifics of this case, than to point the reader to some recent examples of AJ's work here, here, here, here, and here.

But I would also like to expand on the matter to reconsider Russia in the context of Global events. It is commonly thought that if a nuclear bomb were to go off, a la "24", it would be the work of Islamofascist terrorists, a paranoid fantasy carried to grim climax by the short squat dictator in North KantFeedPeople, or perhaps a mistake resulting from the Greed of Halliburton. Statistically however, by far the most likely source of a nuke going off in an American city is Russia; it is not commonly remembered or mentioned in the media that Russia still has more warheads than any nation after the United States itself, many of them still quite capable of reaching the American homeland. Oh, and did I mention that the Russian Command-and-Control of its Nuclear armament is, well, something less than optimal?

With that happy thought in mind, we now turn our attention to the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, your old friends and mine, the KGB. What's that you say? There is no 'KGB' anymore? Well, that's actually the problem. You see, the Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki (SVR) - which replaced the KGB after Mikhail "Happy Face Comrade" Gorbachev handed over the Kremlin to Boris "Waddaya Got To Drink" Yeltsin - did not need nearly the numbers of employees that the KGB and its counterpart, the Glavnoe Razvedyvatel'noe Upravlenie or GRU used, to say nothing of some of the darker job descriptions. Many of these goons got kicked to the curb, and found employment with the only organization which desired their special talents and could afford to keep them fed; the Russian Mafia.

The Russian Mafia, or Bratva for short, owns and controls a great deal of modern Russia, and what it does not control it still influences. This brings us almost full circle, because one scenario of the Litvenenko/ Politkovskaya murders is the manipulation of President Vladimir Putin by Bratva. While it has not been proven, neither can such a possibility be ruled out; such is the reach and ambition of Bratva. Bratva gangs have been implicated in the United States in extortion schemes involving NHL players and teams, in suburban New York as long ago as 1975, and for brains and muscle, Bratya likes the 'Sword-and-Shield' for ideas and daring. Just something else to think about; the likelihood that men with no love for America but a clear lust for influence and money, not only have access to nuclear weapons, but contacts with people who would love to use such weapons on America.

Against that, a hundred Jack Bauers might not be enough.