REPORT: RUSSIA STONEWALLING PLANE CRASH INVESTIGATION

Forget conspiracy theories. I've long maintained that it doesn't apply when looking at the facts - and the odds. When a Polish plane carrying that country's president and 90+ senior officials, crashed on April 10th, the odds of it being an accident were likely longer than the odds of foul play. The reason President Lech Kaczynski was flying to Russia was to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Katyn massacres, in which over 20,000 senior polish officials were killed at the hands of Stalin's NKVD, which was a pre-cursor to the KGB, an agency Vladimir Putin was - and is - very loyal to.

The date, the location, the deaths of polish leaders, Putin's tendency to deal harshly with political opponents, and his dislike for Kaczynski are tragically ironic, yes but what are the odds that such a disaster was an accidental coincidence? Are they longer than the odds it was intentional? When factoring in all of those things, I'd bet they are.

As I have long said, under that premise, Russia's willingness to cooperate with the investigation will either extinguish suspicion or raise more flags. Now we have a report from the Irish Times that Poland is getting impatient with Russia's stonewalling:

POLAND HAS accused Russia of failing to hand over crucial evidence relating to the plane crash that killed Polish president Lech Kaczynski and 95 other people in April.

“The Polish side will be waiting for information and explanations about the reasons hampering the Russian side in forwarding the appropriate documents,” Polish prime minister Donald Tusk said yesterday. “Now, when the probe is entering its final phase, our co-operation is worse than at the beginning,” he added.

Mr Kaczynski’s aircraft crashed as it tried to land at fog-bound Smolensk airport in western Russia. The president and his group – which included his wife and many of Poland’s senior political, military and financial figures – were travelling to a commemoration ceremony at Katyn, where Soviet forces massacred more than 20,000 Polish officers in 1940.

Jumping to conclusions that foul play was involved is not advised. However, Russia could have gone a long way in dissuading people from doing so by being - shall I say it - transparent.

Read it all.

Click HERE for my April 10th post.