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Bush Government to Poor Voters: We Don’t Want You to Vote

Tuesday, July 17th, 2007

The Justice Department is pressuring 10 states to purge their voter rolls, while states are ignoring laws to help low-income Americans register to vote.

State welfare offices across the country are not offering millions of low-income Americans the opportunity to register to vote when applying for public assistance despite a federal law requiring them to do so, according to an analysis of a recent federal voting registration report and experts who say the Department of Justice and states are to blame.

“It’s huge. It’s another area where the administration is failing us,” said Donna Brazile, chair of the Democratic National Committee’s Voting Rights Institute, speaking of the Department of Justice’s oversight of the nation’s voter registration laws. “They are not pushing states to recognize their voter registration responsibilities.”

At the same time, the Justice Department’s Voting Section, which enforces voting rights and supervises elections in some states, is pressuring 10 states to do more to purge voter rolls — or remove ineligible voters — before the 2008 presidential election, according to letters sent to state election officials this spring.

“We conducted an analysis of each state’s total voter registration numbers as a percentage of citizen voting age population,” wrote John Tanner, the Department of Justice Voting Section chief, in an April 18, 2007, letter to North Carolina’s top election official. “We write now to assess the changes in your voter registration list … and the subsequent removal of persons no longer eligible to vote.”

Cynthia Magnuson, a Justice Department spokeswoman, confirmed in an e-mail that similar letters had been sent to 10 states, but did not list the recipients. “The Department actively works with all states to comply with all provisions of the statutes we enforce,” she said.

Voter lists are updated because people move, die or lose their right to vote if convicted of felonies. But because this process occurs out of public view and without much regulation, it can be open to partisan abuse or produce incorrect results, such as in Florida in 2000 when more than 50,000 voters were incorrectly removed from voter registration lists.

The contrast of a Justice Department that apparently has not enforced voter registration opportunities for poor people — who tend to vote Democratic — and a department that is pressuring states to more thoroughly trim voter rolls has prompted some voting rights advocates to accuse the agency of selective enforcement and partisan bias.

“I think it’s pretty clear the Justice Department is pursing a partisan agenda to get states to purge voters while ignoring requirements to get states to register voters,” said Michael Slater, deputy director of Project Vote, a national nonprofit specializing in voter registration drives targeting low- and moderate-income families.

Voting Section chief John Tanner did return a telephone call to discuss his office’s priorities and accomplishments. On Monday, July 16, the House Judiciary Committee announced it was postponing a hearing scheduled for Tuesday, July 17 “because the Department refused to make Voting Section chief John Tanner available to testify,” its press release said.

However, Hans A. Von Spakovsky, a former assistant attorney general who served four years as a top Civil Rights Division lawyer overseeing the Voting Rights Section discussed accusations of changing “the enforcement direction of the department” in a June 29, 2007, letter to the Senate Rules Committee. He became a federal elections commissioner in December 2005, and his appointment is under review.

Von Spakovsky’s 18-page letter is a detailed defense of some of the department’s most controversial recent rulings, such as approving a Texas congressional redistricting plan and a Georgia voter I.D. law that later was blocked in court as a violation of the Constitutional amendment barring poll taxes. Nowhere in the often-technical letter is any mention in section 7 of the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), which is intended to help poor people vote by requiring state welfare agencies to offer the chance to register.

Instead, Von Spakovsky defended an aggressive stance with enforcing the NVRA’s voter purge provisions, which fall under section 8 of the law. “The division could not willfully ignore the list maintenance requirements of the NVRA,” he wrote. “It is the responsibility of DOJ to enforce these laws.”

While the national media has followed the department’s firing of U.S. attorneys who, in some cases, did not pursue voter fraud cases — another priority of longtime GOP lawyer-activists like Von Spakovsky — the department’s oversight of the nation’s voter rolls has mostly gone unnoticed. The potential impact on the 2008 election could be enormous, however, especially if millions of disenfranchised people registered and voted.

A just-released federal voter registration report reveals the stakes. In late June, the Election Assistance Commission issued a biennial voter registration report to Congress for 2005 and 2006. The report found that 16.6 million new registration applications were received by state motor vehicles agencies while only 527,752 applications came from state public assistance offices — a 50 percent drop from 2003-2004. The report also found 13.0 million voters were purged nationwide and 9.9 million were put on “inactive” status, meaning these people have to provide identification before receiving a 2008 ballot.

The potential number of public assistance recipients who could register runs into the millions. According to the Health Resources and Services Administration’s FY 2008 budget, federally subsidized “health centers” will serve an estimated 16.3 million patients, a population where “91 percent are at or below 200 percent of the federal poverty level, 64 percent are from racial/ethnic minority groups and 40 percent are uninsured.” This is the same population who typically seek a variety of federally subsidized public assistance, from food stamps to fuel assistance to welfare.

Another indication of how many poor people could register is Tennessee, whose elections are federally supervised. From 2005-2006, Tennessee registered 120,992 people at public assistance offices — nearly a quarter of the national total, the EAC reported. Tennessee registered more voters than the combined totals of welfare office registrations from California, Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia and Washington.

Karen Lynn Dyson, EAC Research director, said there were several reasons why many states have not made voter registration more available through public assistance agencies. First, the NVRA was passed in 1993, and many state and county election officials have been paying more attention to newer federal election mandates and transitioning to new voting machines. Moreover, many state welfare agencies don’t see voter registration in their job descriptions — despite the federal law. The same factors were also cited by Project Vote’s Michael Slater, who emphasized that low-income people tend to move more often than better-off Americans.

“Our organization exists to correct the problem that voting is skewed toward upper-income folks,” he said. “We are trying to make voting more representative of the population.”

Justice Department spokesperson Cynthia Magnuson cited two department enforcement actions concerning increased voter registration; suing New York in 2004 because its state universities did not “offer voter registration opportunities at those offices serving students with disabilities,” and the department’s 2002 suit against Tennessee, which led to federal oversight of its elections. The New York suit is still pending.

Scott Novakowski, a senior policy analyst at Demos, a centrist public policy group based in New York that has followed this issue for several years, said it was ironic the Justice Department cited Tennessee because that state’s welfare office registrations reveal how many potential voters could be involved if the department enforced the law.

“This is not a lot of numbers until you see Tennessee,” he said. “We have looked at how many people can feasibly get on the rolls and it is enormous. Tennessee is under a court order and is doing it right. If you look at the number of people who go through public assistance offices, in some states it is in the millions.”

The public interest groups that have tracked this issue — Demos, Project Vote, ACORN and the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law — have issued reports citing a steady downward trend in these voter registrations and met with Justice Department officials in 2005 to present their findings and concerns.

“In January 2005, we had a 10-year report, which documented the 59 percent decline from 1995 through 2004,” Novakowski said, adding follow-up letters cited violations from Arizona, Connecticut, Florida, Massachusetts, Missouri, Montana, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Tennessee. “John Conyers (now the House Judiciary Committee chairman) and 29 other representatives asked Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to look into this, and there was no response.”

This spring, after learning of Voting Section letters to North Carolina and Kentucky pressuring those states to more aggressively purge their voter lists, the same coalition called on the House and Senate Judiciary committees to investigate the “selective enforcement” of voter registration laws.

“We are concerned that the Justice Department’s Voting Section is ignoring the primary purpose of NVRA to “establish procedures that will increase the number if eligible citizens who register to vote in elections for federal office.”" it wrote in a May 8, 2007, letter. “Instead, the Voting Section is concentrating its NVRA enforcement priority on pressuring states to conduct massive purges of their voter rolls.”

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Bush Administration hacks court bloggers

Tuesday, July 17th, 2007

Ken Silverstein

The Bush Administration has installed hacks across the federal bureaucracy, with Michael Brown, the man who helped destroy New Orleans while director of FEMA, as only the most notorious example. Now the Pentagon’s public affairs division has become a dumping ground for administration cronies.

I touched upon this topic last week in an article about Dorrance Smith, a former senior advisor to President Bush 41 and now assistant secretary of defense for public affairs under Bush 43. In 2006, when the press and retired senior military officials were pummeling Donald Rumsfeld, Smith created a rapid-response team of die-hard loyalists to defend the then-defense secretary.

The rapid-response team has been shut down but several sources tell me that another of Smith’s spin projects is ongoing. This project seeks to bypass the traditional media and work directly with talk radio and bloggers, mostly those with a heavily conservative tilt. The unit, which one source says was originally called “Surrogates Operation” but was later rechristened “Communications Outreach,” also reportedly provides talking points and briefings to retired military officials who now support the administration in appearances as media pundits. (I haven’t been able to learn which blogs and individuals the unit has been working with, but urge anyone with such information to contact me via email.)

To head up the unit, Smith brought in Erin Healey, a former junior assistant press secretary at the White House. (Healey has not replied to a phone call seeking comment; if she does, I’ll update this story.) She was reportedly hired as a contractor, and later given a political appointee position. Also reportedly working with the unit is Julie George, who formerly worked as deputy coalitions director for Rick Santorum’s losing senatorial re-election campaign in 2006. Curiously, Santorum was one of only two senators to vote against the confirmation of current defense secretary Robert Gates, who Santorum said was not “up to the task” of fighting terrorism. Another person reportedly involved with the operation is Jocelyn Webster, who formerly worked in the White House’s political operation for Sara Taylor, the Karl Rove aide who now finds herself in a bit of hot water.

Webster’s name has surfaced twice in investigations led by Congressman Henry Waxman, head of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. First, she was found to be on the list of current and former White House officials who used political e-mail accounts provided by the Republican National Committee. Webster was also found to have used that e-mail account to send a message about the controversial briefing that her former boss, deputy White House political director J. Scott Jennings, gave to Lurita Doan and several dozen political appointees at the General Services Administration. The e-mail contained a copy of the slides Jennings used in the presentation and said, “Please do not e-mail this out or let people see it. It is a close hold, and we’re not supposed to be e-mailing it around.”

Healey may have some knowledge of defense matters, but she’s certainly no expert. Webster and George were described to me by one well-informed source as “very young with no background in national security or foreign affairs.” This person said that some defense officials have been “put off to say the least by these neophyte political appointees telling retired and active personnel in uniform what to say and what to think.”

All this is typical of the current dysfunction at public affairs under Smith, who has surrounded himself with inexperienced political staffers. An example came with the bungled announcement last month that Marine General Peter Pace would be replaced as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Pace was widely liked within the military, and the mishandling of his departure–he was not reappointed to his position, and submitted his resignation only after Gates announced he would be replaced–did not sit well with many in the armed forces.

The irony here is that Gates has a far better relationship with the media than Rumsfeld, who treated journalists as the enemy. But with Smith running amok, Gates’s honeymoon with the media and with the military may be coming to an end.

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Police Report: Face Recognition CCTV Unreliable

Tuesday, July 17th, 2007

By Mick Meaney
RINF Alternative News

New tests conducted by police yet again prove an increasing number of surveillance systems are unreliable.

200 people were enrolled to test CCTV face recognition software on three systems which failed to recognise 8 out of 10 people, even when the system was fed images of people standing still - one of the easiest settings often used to suggest the software is reliable.

The tests were conducted on software produced by Cognitec, Bosch and Cross Match.

The federal police in Germany who conducted the test are citing “bad lighting” as the reason for the failure and required the test subjects to be fitted with RFID tags to help with the identification process.

The final test report rightly advises against the use of the system and suggests it only be in use with the cooperation of the person being checked by the biometrics software. Currently the researchers believe that 23 false alarms per day would be an acceptable amount if only 1 or 2 real criminals were caught per week.

Such use would erode public trust in the system and is therefore being put on hold for the moment. With the right amount of light the systems only generated 0.1 per cent of false alarms by failing to recognize 4 out of 10 people, which is thought to be an acceptable rate for police work. You can view the report in German here.

Use of such systems is massively invasive as they can automatically retrieve personal information stored on a central database within seconds.

Through the use of number plate recognition, cars fitted with mandatory RFID, schools fingerprinting, biometric passports, a European biometric database and ‘Spy Drones’ monitoring street activity, we see not only Big Brother nations emerging but the creation of an entire European Big Brother continent were all movements can be tracked and recorded.

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Former Reagan Official: Bush May Stage False Flag Events To Reinstate Draft

Tuesday, July 17th, 2007

“Would a government that has lied us into two wars and is working to lie us into an attack on Iran shrink from staging “terrorist” attacks in order to remove opposition to its agenda?” asks Roberts

By Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet

Former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration Paul Craig Roberts has gone further than ever before, warning that the Bush administration could be about to stage false flag events and terror attacks in order to reinstate the draft, announce a dictatorship and attack Iran.

Roberts has been dubbed the “Father of Reaganomics” and is also a former editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, and Scripps Howard News Service.

In his weekly syndicated column, Roberts suggests that unfolding events and the nature of the rhetoric emanating from government quarters suggests that a major staged terror attack could be just around the corner.

“Ask yourself: Would a government that has lied us into two wars and is working to lie us into an attack on Iran shrink from staging “terrorist” attacks in order to remove opposition to its agenda?” writes Roberts.

If the Bush administration wants to continue its wars in the Middle East and to entrench the “unitary executive” at home, it will have to conduct some false flag operations that will both frighten and anger the American people and make them accept Bush’s declaration of “national emergency” and the return of the draft. Alternatively, the administration could simply allow any real terrorist plot to proceed without hindrance.

A series of staged or permitted attacks would be spun by the captive media as a vindication of the neoconsevatives’ Islamophobic policy, the intention of which is to destroy all Middle Eastern governments that are not American puppet states. Success would give the US control over oil, but the main purpose is to eliminate any resistance to Israel’s complete absorption of Palestine into Greater Israel.

Think about it. If another 9/11-type “security failure” were not in the works, why would Homeland Security czar Chertoff go to the trouble of convincing the Chicago Tribune that Americans have become complacent about terrorist threats and that he has “a gut feeling” that America will soon be hit hard?

Roberts concludes that coming “terrorist” events within the next year will be the means for overthrowing constitutional democracy unless Congress moves to impeach Bush and Cheney immediately.

Paul Craig Roberts

Roberts’ warning is dovetailed by a series of high profile individuals expressing the need for more terror as the only recourse for saving a doomed foreign policy and reversing anti-war sentiment in the U.S. that is now dominating the country.

In a July 8 Toronto Star piece, Lt.-Col. Doug Delaney, chair of the war studies program at the Royal Military College in Kingston, Ontario, said that “The key to bolstering Western resolve is another terrorist attack like 9/11 or the London transit bombings of two years ago.”

“If nothing happens, it will be harder still to say this [the occupation of Iraq] is necessary,” he added.

Delaney’s comments are in a similar vein to former Republican Senator Rick Santorum’s statements to a radio show last weekend, in which he said that “unfortunate events” would occur along the lines of the recent car bomb attempts in the UK, that will change American’s views of the war.

Last month, the new chairman of the Arkansas Republican Party Dennis Milligan said that there needed to be more attacks on American soil for President Bush to regain popular approval.

Yearning for more terror was also explicitly expressed in a 2005 GOP memo, which hankered for new attacks that would “validate” the President’s war on terror and “restore his image as a leader of the American people.”

It seems painfully clear that the Neo-Cons are still obsessed with the notion of using staged terror as the only ultimate means of facilitating their dark agenda, and that thousands and potentially millions of Americans could be about to pay with their lives to realize such a nightmare.

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DIY Anti-Satellite System

Tuesday, July 17th, 2007

Spacewar

Satellite tracking software freely available on the Internet and some textbook physics could be used by any organization that can get hold of an intermediate range rocket to mount an unsophisticated attack on military or civilian satellites. Such an attack would require modest engineering capability and only a limited budget. That is according to researchers writing in Inderscience Publishers’ International Journal of Critical Infrastructures.

A terrorist organization or rogue state could threaten essential satellite systems, according to Adrian Gheorghe of Old Dominion University Norfolk, in Virginia, USA and Dan Vamanu of “Horia Hulubei” National Institute of Physics and Nuclear Engineering, in Bucharest, Romania. Military satellites, global positioning systems, weather satellites and even satellite TV systems could all become victims of such an attack. Gheorghe and Vamanu have carried out an analysis of just how easy it could be to knock out strategic satellites, their findings suggest that dozens of systems on which military and civilian activities depend make near-space a vulnerable environment. The team used a so-called “mathematical game” and textbook physics equations for ballistics to help them build a computer model to demonstrate that anti-satellite weaponry is a real possibility.

Accuracy and elegance are not issues in carrying out a satellite attack, the researchers say, as long as the projectile hits the satellite. In fact, all it would take to succeed with an amateurish, yet effective anti-satellite attack would be the control of an intermediate range missile, which is well within the reach of many nations and organizations with sufficient funds, and a college-level team dedicated to the cause. “Any country in possession of intermediate range rockets may mount a grotesquely unsophisticated attack on another’s satellites given the political short-sightedness that would be blind to a potentially devastating retaliation,” the researchers say.

On January 11, 2007, China deliberately destroyed one of its own weather satellites in a test, which some analysts suggested as having the potential to revive a techno-political race believed to be defunct since the 1980s. According to Gheorghe and Vamanu that was the cool analytical view, but some hot diplomats are quoted as saying this demonstration is “inconsistent with international efforts to avert an arms race in outer space and undermining the security in outer space”.

“While it may be true that, when it comes to nuts and bolts, things may not be quite as simple as they sound here, the bare fact remains - it can be done.” Their conclusions suggest that the risk of deliberate satellite sabotage should be placed higher on the security agenda.

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Poland to host US defence shield

Tuesday, July 17th, 2007

The US president and his Polish counterpart have said parts of a missile defence system will be built in Poland despite Moscow’s objections.

George Bush and Lech Kaczynski, meeting at the White House, said that the system was not aimed at Russia but at smaller countries such as Iran or North Korea that US officials say pose a missile threat.

Bush said on Tuesday the deployment “would provide a security for Europe from single- or dual-launch regimes that may emanate from parts of the world where leaders don’t particularly care for our way of life and/or are in the process of trying to develop serious weapons of mass destruction”.

“There’s no better symbol of our desire to work for peace and security than working on a missile defence system.”

Defence instrument

Kaczynski said: “So it is really a defence instrument, missile defence instrument. And so I do hope that all this project, the whole project will be completed successfully.”

The Russian president has never been mollified by that argument and the Kremlin announced on Saturday that Vladimir Putin, the president, had signed a decree suspending Moscow’s participation in a post-Cold War security treaty.

In Poland, a survey by a publicly funded institute in Warsaw, said that 55 per cent of Poles oppose putting the base on Polish territory - a drop from the previous month, when 60 per cent were opposed.

Contradictions

Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the Polish prime minister and the president’s twin brother, said on Tuesday that the shield offered Poland a way to strengthen its alliance with the US and guarantee its security against a resurgent Russia, thus contradicting what Bush and Lech had said a day earlier.

“The point … is the status of Poland and the future of our country - whether we end up back again in the place we were for many years or whether we don’t end up there,” he said, referring to the Cold War era, when Poland was controlled by the Soviet Union.

In recent months, Moscow suggested it would target missiles at Europe if the US went ahead with the proposal for the defence system.

Agencies

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Galloway facing suspension from Commons

Tuesday, July 17th, 2007

Matthew Tempest and agencies
Tuesday July 17, 2007
Guardian Unlimited

George Galloway on July 15 2006. Photograph: Scott Barbour/Getty Images.

George Galloway should be suspended from the Commons for 18 days, the standards watchdog recommended today.The finding comes in the wake of an investigation by the commissioner for parliamentary standards into payments to the now-defunct Mariam Appeal charity.

The suspension - which would see the controversial Respect MP stripped of his salary and barred from the Commons - will now be formally voted on by the House of Commons.

The suspension is for 18 sitting days and would begin once the house returns in the autumn.

The Bethnal Green & Bow MP reacted angrily to the judgment, issuing a statement reiterating that he had never personally benefited from any monies used by the charity.

Mr Galloway said: “Once more and yet again I have been cleared of taking a single penny or in any way personally benefiting from the former Iraqi regime through the oil for food programme or any other means.

“After a four-year inquiry - costing a fortune in public funds - the report asks me to apologise for not registering consistently the Mariam Appeal I established (the Commissioner concedes that I did so, but randomly) and for using House of Commons resources allocated to me to campaign against the policies of those now sitting in judgment on me.”

The Commons standards and privileges committee of MPs acknowledges that “had these been the only matters before us, we would have confined ourselves to seeking an apology to the house”.

But the committee criticised Mr Galloway’s conduct aimed at “concealing the true source of Iraqi funding” for a charity he set up and failure to cooperate with the parliamentary commissioner for standards.

The mammoth three-volume report has more than 20 conclusions, but only two recommendations - that Mr Galloway’s use of parliamentary resources to aid the Mariam Appeal was “unreasonable” and would have resulted in a call for an apology.

However, the report states that because of Mr Galloway’s unwillingness to cooperate with their inquiry, and his attitude and “calling into question of the commissioner’s and our own integrity”, the MP had damaged the reputation of the House of Commons and should be suspended for 18 sitting days.

That punishment is expected to commence on October 8, the day parliament returns from the summer recess.

It is subject to approval from a vote of all MPs.

The specific areas in which the report agrees with the findings of the investigation of the commissioner for parliamentary standards, Sir Philip Mawer, are that Mr Galloway:

· Did not register his interest in the Mariam Appeal, or the individual donations it received above the registration threshold;

· Did not declare his interest in the Mariam Appeal on all occasions when he should have done so;

· Used his parliamentary office and staff in support of the Mariam Appeal to an excessive extent;

· Breached the advocacy rule in the terms in which it was in force at the time.

Speaking at an impromptu press conference outside parliament, Mr Galloway accepted the suspension, joking: “To be deprived of the company for 18 days of the honourable ladies and gentleman behind me [in parliament] will be painful … but I’m intending to struggle on regardless.”

But, pointing out that the suspension only came about because of the way he conducted his defence, Mr Galloway insisted: “What really upset them [the committee] is that I always defend myself.

“I am not a punchbag. If you aim low blows at me, I’ll fight back.”

He complained he had been convicted by a committee of “Sir Humphrey…Sir Bufton and Sir Tufton”.

In a 20-minute rebuttal, accompanied by a large dossier put out by Respect, Mr Galloway admitted he never asked the three main donors to the appeal, the King of Saudi Arabia, the late Emir of the United Arab Emirates and Farwaz Zureikat, where their money came from, but complained he had been convicted by a “overwhelmingly pro-war House of Commons”.

Other MPs who have in the past been suspended from the Commons include Labour’s Keith Vaz and the Tory Jonathan Sayeed.

Mr Vaz was suspended for a month for “wrongly interfering” with a second investigation by a previous parliamentary commissioner, Elizabeth Filkin, into his business dealings, while the Tory MP Mr Sayeed was suspended for taking payments for showing guests around the Houses of Parliament.

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20.5M Decisions to Classify Documents

Tuesday, July 17th, 2007

PETE YOST

There were 20.5 million decisions to classify government secrets last year, and a report to the president found serious shortcomings in the process.

The Information Security Oversight Office said more than 1 in 10 documents it reviewed lacked a basis for classification, “calling into question the propriety” of the decisions to place them off limits to public disclosure.

“The high error rate,” the ISOO said in its annual review, can only be addressed by a multifaceted effort and continuous oversight.

The report comes as the office of Vice President Dick Cheney is refusing to cooperate with the office of the National Archives. The report noted that Cheney’s office “did not report data to ISOO this year.”

Executive branch agencies give the ISOO data on how much material they classify and declassify. Cheney’s office provided the information in 2001 and 2002, then stopped.

“The reviews of actual decision making are striking, given the vice president’s refusal to report” to the ISOO, said Meredith Fuchs, general counsel at the National Security Archive, a private group advocating public disclosure of government secrets.

The White House says it’s clear that the president’s executive order on the matter never intended for the vice president’s office to be treated as an agency.

The ISOO said the Pentagon reported a 35 percent decline in its activity to classify documents, and that the amount of classification government-wide declined for the second straight year.

However, the amount of derivative classification activity rose by more than 6 million actions.

Derivative classification is the act of incorporating in a new form information that has already been classified.

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Russia says Britain has harmed anti-terror cooperation

Tuesday, July 17th, 2007

Luke Harding in Moscow and Mark Tran
Tuesday July 17, 2007
Guardian Unlimited

Russia today accused Britain of seeking a political confrontation but stopped short of an immediate tit-for-tat expulsion of diplomats over the Litvinenko affair.Russia’s deputy foreign minister, Alexander Grushko, said Moscow would “soon” inform the government of its counter-measures, but said the response would take into account the interests of “ordinary British citizens and businessmen”.

Despite what appeared to be an effort to steer the crisis away from UK-Russia economic ties, Mr Grushko used the brief news conference to deliver some jabs at Britain, warning that the diplomatic crisis could prevent the countries working together on international issues.

“What is happening makes it impossible for British and Russian agencies to cooperate on security,” he said.

“It looks as though we are being punished for preserving our own constitution [...] It is not an invitation to cooperation.”

The Russian ambassador to London, Yury Fedotov, said Russia did not retaliate today as expected because “we’re serious people, we’re not rushing”.

Speaking to reporters outside Westminster, Mr Fedotov said Andrei Lugovoi, the former intelligence official whom Britain wants extradited, might face trial in Russia and that such an offer had been made by Moscow.

At the same time the Kremlin also sketched out its probable strategy for toughing out the crisis, hinting that it would seek to divide Mr Brown’s government from its EU allies and partners - a technique Moscow has successfully employed in the past.

Mr Grushko effectively accused Britain of attempting to hijack the EU and said it was exploiting the murder of Alexander Litvinenko to achieve its own “unilateralist goals”.

“We hope that common sense will prevail in the European Union and its members will not yield to more attempts to turn relations between Russia and the EU into a kind of unique tool … which have nothing in common with real partnership interests between the EU and Russia.”

Moscow has been strikingly successful in dividing Europe over energy, making separate pipeline deals with Germany and the Czech Republic, and last week granting French energy company Total a 25% stake in developing a massive gas field in the Arctic.

The Russian resources minister, Yuri Trutnev, earlier today signalled Moscow’s intention to shelter Russia’s economic ties to Britain from the diplomatic storm.

The foreign secretary, David Miliband, yesterday told the Commons that Britain’s expulsion of the four diplomats was “proportional and it is clear at whom it is aimed”.

The diplomats are officers with one of the successor organisations to the KGB, a signal that Britain suspects Russian intelligence agencies had a hand in Litvinenko’s murder.

Russian officials said today that Russia’s ambassador to the UK, Yury Fedotov, was summoned yesterday to the foreign office and given the names of the four diplomats.

The British authorities had given them 10 days to leave Britain, the source added. He refused to name them, but said they occupied middle ranking positions.

In Moscow, Russia’s pro-Kremlin press laid the blame for the crisis on London “and the hypocritical” government of Gordon Brown.

On its front page the newspaper Isvestiya said that Britain had “declared war on Russia” next to an unflattering photo of an open-mouthed Mr Brown attempting an overambitious smash with a tennis racket.

“The language of ultimatums, threats and demarches will hardly help British authorities in their dialogue with Russia,” the paper said.

It added: “The actions of Gordon Brown and his newly formed cabinet are nothing but a policy of double standards.”

In an interview with the paper Mr Lugovoi - the man sought for extradition by the UK - dismissed claims that he poisoned Alexander Litvinenko at London’s Millennium hotel on November 1.

Over the weekend waiter Norberto Andrade told the Sunday Telegraph that Mr Lugovoi had slipped radioactive polonium into Litvinenko’s tea “turning the teapot yellow and gooey”.

But Mr Lugovoi told the paper: “It’s laughable. [Mr Andrade's] claims are either a lie or stupidity. We did not look conspicuous and left after about 15 minutes. No matter how experienced the waiter might have been, it’s strange that he should remember us for so long,”

Most ordinary Russians seemed unmoved by the crisis.

“This isn’t a big crisis, it’s a medium-sized one,” Natasha Trusova, a 35-year-old newspaper courier told the Guardian. “Generally Russians think that the UK is a peaceful country, while the US is an aggressive one.”

Others expressed sympathy with the Kremlin’s hardline stance.

“All intelligence services go round killing traitors. It’s natural,” Andrei Sakharov, 31, a project manager, said.

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