This link doesn’t work after updating my blog. Will replace it.
[Note: The video is from Russia Today, which some claim contains Russian disinformation].
Update: Russian investigators say that there was nothing wrong with the landing instruments on the plane and that it was pilot error that caused the crash. Also, it seems that the number of bodies found is 96.
Update 8:
At Asia Times, M. K. Bhadrakumar notes that as the so-called “color” revolutions in Central Asia (Ukraine, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan) have all gradually become undone, Kyrgyzstan has become destabilized, leaving the whole region from Af-Pak to Kyrgyzstan, on the very borders of China, volatile.
Point two. Like it or not, the US needs cooperation with Russia to help it out here before the excursion in Afghanistan is concluded, say, in 2011. It also needs help, as NATO expands into Central Asia, to contain both China and India, and (possibly) play them off against each other.
A strongly anti-Russian, reactionary Pole, like Kaczynski, might have been a very disturbing factor, a thorn also in the side of the much more tractable Polish PM, Donald Tusk.
Point three.
Tusk is on more amicable terms both with the Obama administration and with Russian PM Putin, with whom he met separately at Katyn last week. Tusk is also more Euro-friendly.
Point four. With Iran cementing natural gas deals not only with Pakistan, but with China and India (over US objections), and with a Euroskeptic Polish president (Kaczynski) making unexpected overtures to Russia, America’s power/leverage vis-a-vis Russia might suddenly seem less certain on both fronts, eastern and western, especially with the Russian natural gas pipeline in the Baltic, an initiative that tends to increase Russian influence in Europe.
Point five. The recent discovery of huge reserves of natural gas in Poland has foreign corporations scrambling for drilling rights there. That makes Poland a much bigger player in the region, especially in its ability to help or hurt a European recovery. Take that into account along with the recent devaluation of the Zloty, which is regarded as helpful to Polish exporters and the economy, but bad for Europe..
Update 7:
On April 8 Obama signed a new arms reduction treaty with Dmitri Medvedev (President of Russia) and met with East European heads of state, including Donald Tusk (Polish PM) to discuss the future of NATO and to allay fears Eastern Europe might have over the US-Russia deal.
In December 2009 Obama asked for stronger Polish support in Afghanistan
Update 6:
The more I think about it, the more this crash looks odd to me.
Digging for more information, I find the following:
Donald Tusk, the PM, was much less antagonistic to Russia and much more supportive of free market policies and integration of the country into the EU than Kaczynski.
From wiki:
“After being elected prime minister, relations between Tusk and President Lech Kaczynski were often acrimonious due to different political ideologies and the constitutional role of the
presidency. Using presidential veto powers, Kaczynski blocked legislation drafted by the Tusk government, including pension reform, agricultural and urban zoning plans, and restructuring state television.[16]Tusk and Kaczynski repeatedly sparred over issues ranging from European integration, homosexuality, foreign policy, to constitutional issues, with Tusk taking more socially liberal opinions than the conservative Kaczynski.
In his premiership, Tusk has proposed various reforms to the Polish constitution. In 2009, Tusk proposed changes to the power of the presidency, by abolishing the presidential veto”
It’s wholly plausible that as the second and worse leg of the economic crisis unfolds, and as sovereign default threatens several countries in Europe, a less prickly person as president of Poland might have seemed an attractive option to NATO.
Of course, at this point, all this is no more than speculation…
Update 5:
Former Czech president, Vaclav Havel comments on mounting speculation over the bizarre crash:
‘That speculation [that it was sabotage and not an accident] will influence the elections,’ he said, predicting some Poles would see an analogy to the 1943 plane-crash death of Wladyslaw Sikorski, Poland’s premier-in-exile. Some believe that Sikorski’s plane was deliberately brought down.
Update 4:
Eyewitness accounts says no explosion:
“A witness named himself Roman said he was washing his car in the village near the airport, when he saw a plane crashed down in the woods. “It was foggy here at that time, I couldn’t see it very clearly. I didn’t hear any explosion, but saw a lot of smoke. The plane flew forward a distance after one of the wings had been knocked off by the trees. Then the other wing also broke down, and the plane crashed in the woods 300 to 400 meters away from the airport, ” Roman recalled. A Xinhua reporter at the site saw pieces of the plane wreckage scattering in the sealed-off woods, where four rescuers were carrying out a body from the wreckage.”
One police officer pointed at a topless white birch tree about 300 meter away and told Xinhua that it was the first tree hit by the plane. Behind it, a number of treetops were cut off straight in the accident.”
Another eyewitness account says there was an explosion (Lila: this contradicts the other account, but that could be because the witness was closer to the crash).
The explosion was apparently so powerful that pieces were scattered near the outskirts of the town at a distance of a mile.
The plane is said to have crashed about half a mile on the runway. Some sections of the plane burned for more than an hour.
Update 3:
Some background on energy rivalry between Russia and Poland, which as focused on natural gas reserves/pipe line deals that had recently been cemented.
“Without consulting the Poles, Mr. Schroder (former German chancellor) had supported a major Russian-German gas pipeline, called Nord Stream, now being built under the Baltic Sea. For the first time, Russia could send gas directly to Western Europe, reducing its dependence on Poland, Belarus and the Baltic States as transit countries for sending Russian gas to its lucrative European markets.When the deal was struck between Mr. Schroder and then-President Vladmir Putin in September 2005, some Polish politicians said it was the beginning of a new Russian-German alliance.” (Lila: This would bring back to many Poles the history of German-Russian collusion at Gdansk to divide Poland)
“American technology to produce shale gas is unleashing a scramble for drilling rights in Poland, where experts believe vast reserves of unconventional gas exist that could help to weaken Russia’s grip on Europe’s energy supplies.
(Lila: Russia supplied 33% of European oil in 2009 and cut supplies to Ukraine during a fight over prices)
ConocoPhillips is poised to launch Poland’s first shale gas drilling programme next month near Gdansk on the Baltic coast. Two other American oil groups — Exxon-Mobil and Marathon — and Talisman Energy, of Canada, are set to follow. The technology has transformed America’s energy industry and driven gas prices to their lowest level in years.”
Update 2:
“In one of those rare moments of unity, the National Bank of Poland and the Polish government agreed on the need to weaken the Polish zloty, which over recent weeks has rebounded close to its pre-crisis strength. The currency’s strength is now seen a possible threat to economic recovery. After several verbal interventions over the past few days, the central bank intervened with real money Friday, for the first time in more than a decade.”
Update 1 (the following is paraphrased from a Polish newspaper that I translated with Google translator):
Smolensk’s Severny airport was, until October 15, the 103rd airport Military Transport Aviation Regiment. And, half an hour before the presidential plane landed, a military plane, Ilyushin Il-76, from Moscow, which was carrying a branch of the Federal Protection Service officers (the equivalent of BOR-u), tried to land. The pilot, originally from Smolensk was thoroughly familiar with local conditions and tried to land twice, before returning to Moscow. A Pole living in a hotel near the site says that the left wing hit a tree and the plane fell to the ground and disintegrated, immediately catching fire. Emergency services on the spot appeared after several minutes.
[Lila: Now this part sounds a bit odd to me, although it could just be confusion at the scene of an accident].
The Russians stated that it made no sense to send ambulances to the site, since everyone was dead. The crash occurred in the forest, and the Russian services couldn’t enter the disaster area because of the mud at the site.
[Lila: How could they be so sure everyone was dead, especially, when many more bodies were recovered than were on the flight list (132 bodies versus 89 on the list)?]
ORIGINAL BLOG POST
Accident, Sabotage, or False Flag?
MSNBC reports that Polish President (from 2005-2010) Lech Kaczynski (1949-2010) and top Polish military and civilian leaders, historians, and activists were killed when the presidential plane crashed on landing in thick fog in Smolensk in western Russia on Saturday, killing 130, according to this report.
(Other reports have placed the death toll at 96, 97 88 (the number on the passenger list according to the Poles), 132, and 135).
Communication with the plane was lost at 10:50 local time (0656 GMT).
Pravda.ru says the plane came down at 11 AM local time about 1.5 km from the airport and 225 km from Moscow.
The Governor of Smolensk told official media there were no survivors of the crash and that the plane had clipped the top of the trees, crashed, and then broken into pieces.
Preliminary data collected show that the plane hit the treetops while approaching the airport in bad visibility, says an official with the Russian general prosecutor’s office, according to ITAR-Tass news agency, (reported by CBS).
A spokesman for the Smolensk regional government said publicly that air traffic controllers there had advised the pilot not to land in the thick fog at the military airport and to divert to Moscow or to Minsk (the capital of Belarus) instead.
BBC reported that Russian PM Putin visited the scene of the crash and said he would personally supervise the investigation. He also said the investigation would be a joint Polish-Russian investigation. The Russian emergency ministers said both of the plane’s information recorders (black boxes) had been found and would be examined.
The Polish group was on its way to the 70th anniversary of the massacre at Katyn forest near Smolensk, when thousands of Polish officers (including some who were also Jewish) were killed by the Soviet secret police, the NKVD, in 1940.
My Comment 2:
The significance of Katyn was that it was blamed on the Nazis by the Soviets, and, that despite this betrayal of its own ally, Poland, the US continued to treat the Soviets preferentially and cover-up for it.
Furthermore, at the end of WW II, the western powers again betrayed Poland – over whom the war was supposed to have been fought – by allowing it remain under the Soviet sphere of influence.
So, Katyn is not simply about Poland and Russia, as nation states, it’s also, equally, about Poland’s betrayal by the US and the Allies.
And it’s about the Polish Catholic suspicion of the atheistic Bolsheviks who primarily carried out the massacres ….
Religion, ethnicity, and nationalism all converge in this profound national trauma.
It’s important to remember that President Roosevelt officially rejected the conclusion of his own research team, and stated he was convinced that the Nazis were culpable. That is, he sided with Stalin against the Poles. And he actually ordered that the report that he himself had commissioned be suppressed. It was only more recently that the true history of the massacre of the flower of Poland by the Soviet NKVD has become common knowledge. This secret history is vital to understanding the symbolism involved in this crash.
This is not just about Poland and Russia. It is about the anti-Communist and anti-Nazi feelings of Catholics in Poland and their betrayal by the West.
Smolensk is only 11/2 hours away from Warsaw and the symbolism of the crash has struck many people, including former President Kwasniewski, who called Katyn “cursed.”
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk called it the most tragic event of Poland’s post-World War II history, according to BBC.
My Comment 1:
1. It’s very strange that so many of the top brass would be on a single flight, especially on a plane as known for being unreliable and dangerous as the Soviet built Tupolev-154, which has suffered 16 crashes since 1994 (AP).
According to the Aviation Safety Network, there have been 66 crashes involving Tu-154 in the last 40 years, 6 in the last 5 years alone, and Aeroflot has withdrawn its Tu-154 fleet from service, although the TU-154 used to be the workhorse of the Soviets and the eastern bloc in the 1970s and 1980s. The Polish government had been thinking of replacing the planes for flights carrying government officials, but didn’t have the money for it.
Wouldn’t high level personnel have normally been booked on separate flights to avoid difficulties in the military/government in case of an accident? This particular plane was also 26 years old, had been overhauled recently at a Russian aviation facility, and had only few hours on it.
However, the Russian facility Aviakor has said that the plane was in good condition for the flight.
Another aviation expert also told Al-Jazeera that the TU-154 can operate in extreme weather conditions and can land on an unpaved airstrip. He believes the crash was a “fluke”.
2. How is it that the information that the president’s wife had an uncle who was killed at Katyn was so widely and uniformly known that it appeared in a majority of global reports about the crash?
(Katyn is a national symbol of WW II and the anti-Communist struggle and stirs deep nationalistic feelings in Poland).
Another oddity in the media reports was the varying numbers given for the dead, when according to early reports, the Russians were able to collect all the bodies, and had verified that all on board had died. In that case, why such different numbers?
Also, how is it that the original flight list was for only 89 people (one didn’t show up)? How did some 30 plus extra passengers apparently fly…or is this a reference to something else?
3. What a bizarre coincidence that several people whose death would be calculated to arouse nationalist remembrance of the past (Katyn, communist crimes, Solidarity), should all die on a trip to Katyn, along with significant members of the political and military establishment? The people who died were all people significant to Poland’s anti-communist history. Kaczynski and his twin brother, Soviet era child actors, both played important roles in Polish politics.
“The twins (Kaczynski and his brother) pushed unashamedly for conservative values and a righting of historical wrongs with 20th century foes Russia and Germany in ways that ruffled feathers and often seemed out of step with the times,” says the WSJ.
The BBC noted that Kaczynski was a right-wing Catholic, who opposed rapid free-market reforms and favored retaining social welfare programs:
“He had advocated a right-wing Catholic agenda, opposed rapid free-market reforms and favoured retaining social welfare programmes.”
The LA Times noted his campaign against liberal sexual mores:
“At home, Kaczynzki, who was mayor of Warsaw before becoming president, sought to expose former communists and cleanse what he and his brother regarded as pervasive liberalism. He took a hard line against homosexuality and often assailed the media over salacious magazines and TV shows. His critics regarded him as a politically dangerous mix of Polish nationalism and religious conservatism.”
“The president was a conservative and a lifelong skeptic of Russia with many detractors at home and abroad.”
Consider also this piece of symbolism, among many other coincidences:
“Rossiya-24 showed footage from the crash site, with pieces of the plane scattered widely amid leafless trees and small fires burning in woods shrouded with fog. A tail fin with the red and white national colors of Poland stuck up from the debris.”(BBC)
4. In case this proves not to be an accident, Poles might be tempted look to the FSB (and Putin) as the possible culprit, since the plane was recently overhauled in Russia. Yet, Russia is unlikely to have downed a Polish plane with top military and civilian commanders on its own territory. That would be a political and military blunder almost unthinkable.
5. Exploring another angle, it’s been known for a while now that the CIA has a presence in Eastern Europe, as also suggested in a piece I wrote in 2005 on CIA black sites there.
Poland is a staunch ally of the US in other areas as well, thus provoking some dislike in Russia:
“The European Union member nation of 38 million people sent troops to the U.S.-led war in Iraq and recently boosted its contingent in Afghanistan to some 2,600 soldiers.
U.S. Patriot missiles are expected to be deployed in Poland this year. That was a Polish condition for a 2008 deal — backed by both Kaczynski and Tusk — to host long-range missile defense interceptors. The deal, which was struck by the Bush administration, angered Russia and was later reconfigured under President Barack Obama’s administration. Under the Obama plan, Poland would host a different type of missile defense interceptors as part of a more mobile system and at a later date, probably not until 2018.” (CNN)
Russians also distrusted his advocacy of NATO membership for the former Soviet states of Ukraine and Georgia and his support of Georgian President Mikhael Saakashvili during the 2008 Russo-Georgian war (CS Monitor).
6. However, in recent times, relations with Russia had thawed:
“Polish-Russian relations had been improving of late after being poisoned for decades over the Katyn massacre of some 22,000 Polish officers.”(Stanford Advocate, April 10, 2010).
Last year in September, Russian PM Putin met Kaczynski in Gdansk (Danzig) on the anniversary of the Hitler’s invasion of Poland and had made partial amends for the USSR’s role in breaking up Poland under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (the Non-Aggression Treaty between Germany and the Soviet Union in 1939).
and this:
“Russia never has formally apologized for the murders but Putin’s decision to attend a memorial ceremony earlier this week in the forest was seen as a gesture of goodwill toward reconciliation. Kaczynski wasn’t invited to that event because Putin, as prime minister, had invited his Polish counterpart, Tusk.” (CBS) http://wcco.com/national/polish.Kaczynski.dead.2.1623978.html)
6. Exploring this from another angle, could this tragedy have anything to do with the another strange incident in Eastern Europe a few weeks ago?
Two Gulf Stream V type jets equipped with sophisticated intelligence equipment violated Hungarian laws by flying low into Hungary without landing and then flew 1300 miles over Turkey, Hungary and Romania and disappeared, all around the same time a Syrian-Hungarian man implicated in money-laundering was mysteriously killed in Budapest, in what some have suggested was a Mossad hit. That incidence should be read in light of the recent expulsion of the Israeli ambassador from the UK, and the threat of diplomatic sanctions against Israel in Australia, following the revelation that the Mossad had forged multiple passports from different countries in carrying out the killing of a Hamas operative in Dubai, earlier this year.
But Kaczynski was on very good terms with the Jewish community in Poland, once almost wiped out by the Holocaust. In 2008, he became the first head of state to attend service at a synagogue in Poland, and before that, as mayor of Warsaw, he donated land for a projected museum on Jewish history. Israel and the Jewish community expressed deep shock at the deaths and called Kaczynski a great leader.
That would seem to make him an unlikely target for an Israeli false-flag operation.
Update: AP has a list of the top officials and political significant people who died in the crash. Here are some of them:
Lech Kaczynski (President), Maria Kaczynska (his wife), Andrzej Kremer (deputy foreign minister and chief of staff), General Franciszek Gagor (army chief of staff since 2006, Polish rep at NATO, 2004-06), General Andrzej Blasik (head of airforce, trained in Montgomery, Alabama in 2005), (Vice-Admiral Andrzej Karweta, Navy Chief since 2009, served as Supreme Allied Command Atlantic, Norfolk, Virginia, 2002-05), Gen. Tadeusz Buk (land forces commander, 2009, commander of Polish troop in Iraq since 2007), Slawomir Skrzypek (president of the National Bank since 2007, close friend of the president), Alexander Szczyglo, head of National Security Office, former defense minister, Jerzy Szmajdzinski (opposition candidate for president, deputy parliamentary speaker, defense minister during Iraq war), Ryszard Kaczorowski (last president in exile, who passed on presidency to first democratic president Lech Walesa), Janusz Kurtyka (head of the state-run National Remembrance Institute, commemorating communist crimes), Anna Walentynowicz (Solidarity activist whose firing sparked the movement which led to Polish freedom), Piotr Nurowski (head of Poland’s Olympic Committee), Krystyna Bochenek (deputy parliamentary speaker)