REPORT: POLISH PLANE DUMPED FUEL BEFORE CRASH

There is tacit sentiment out there that no one should jump to conclusions when it comes to what caused the Polish airliner carrying Polish president Lech Kaczynski and nearly one hundred top officials, to crash in Smolensk, Russia. I agree with that. That also should go for the conclusion that it was pilot error, weather, or anything else.

In reading a report from the Times Online, two new facts seem to jump out. The first is a report that the plane carrying Kacynski was dumping fuel prior to attempting to land. This almost necessarily indicates a mechanical problem:

Russia Today and other television stations reported that even before the first attempt to land, the pilot had been dumping fuel — indicating some form of mechanical problem — so by the fourth attempt there was no alternative but to put the aircraft down.

If true, this could likely mean that weather - heavy fog - was not the sole cause of the crash.

Another part of the report seems to provide a possible reason for why the pilot would ignore Air Traffic Control (ATC) after being repeatedly told to divert to Moscow or Minsk:

Kaczynski, whose body was also said to have been found, was a former anti-communist campaigner with a penchant for taunting the Kremlin. He had every reason to believe he was not welcome in Russia. Polish observers said he may have interpreted an order to divert to Moscow as an attempt to sabotage his big day in Katyn, where he was due to attend a mass and give a speech.

Russian media reports said he had once become angry with a pilot who refused to land in Tbilisi, the Georgian capital, on the grounds that it was unsafe. The same thing may have happened at Smolensk, aviation experts claimed. They suggested he may have pressed the pilot to make at least two attempts to land.

There is every reason to believe that relations between Putin and Kacynski were tense and strained before the crash:

Kaczynski was not invited to Putin’s event and there was no promise of a warm welcome at the Smolensk airfield yesterday. He was determined to attend the commemoration, though — not, as he put it, “to inflame relations with Russia”, but to support 400 relatives of the victims who were expected to be there. “I hope I get a visa,” he had joked.

Kacynski also backed Georgia in 2008 when Russia invaded:

Kaczynski had angered the Kremlin by siding with Georgia in its brief war with Russia in 2008. Tensions between the two countries grew when Poland agreed to host an American missile defence system. Relations have remained frosty despite Obama’s decision to opt for a simpler version of the system.

Think of the odds. In 1940, over 20,000 Polish officials were gunned down by Stalin's Secret Police (early KGB). Then, in 2010 - 70 years later - the Polish president and several top officials go down in a plane crash en route to commemorating the atrocity. As if that weren't enough to raise skepticism, this isn't the first time a plane carrying people headed to Russia for the purpose of the Katyn massacres went down:

Some Poles saw a connection between Kaczynski’s death and that of Wladyslaw Sikorski, a leader killed in a mysterious plane crash in Gibraltar in 1943 just as he had started delving into events at Katyn.

As I posted more extensively here, Andrew Osborn wrote in the Independent that there are 20 journalists who have mysteriously lost their lives under Putin's reign. One of them - Artyom Borovik - died in a plane crash:

Senior executive at investigative magazine 'Completely Secret' that exposed the misdeeds of the rich and powerful. Died on 3 March 2000 in a plane crash that the authorities believe may not have been accidental.

For the record, I am 100% on board with not jumping to conclusions. The same should go for those who are already willing to disregard foul play.

Link to Times Online piece.

POLISH PLANE CRASH: HEAVY FOG, PUZZLING PILOT BEHAVIOR

According to Accu Weather Reports out of State College, PA., the plane carrying Polish president Lech Kaczynski and nearly one hundred top Polish officials likely did encounter very troubling weather as it attempted to land in Smolensk, Russia to commemorate the anniversary of the Katyn Massacre in which more than 20,000 Polish officials were murdered at the hands of Stalin's secret police. Tragic irony indeed.

Via GTR News:

AccuWeather.com reports weather likely played a significant role in the plane crash that killed Poland’s president Lech Kaczynski on Saturday morning. Accuweather.com meteorologists studied the weather closely at the time of the crash in Smolensk, Russia, and indications show that very dense fog was present before the plane went down.

It's established that the weather was quite bad, though wind was not a factor - just fog. Puzzling, however, are reports that the pilot made four landing attempts at the Smolensk airport - the final attempt ending with the crash - despite both the airport being closed before the attempted landings as well as requests made to the pilot by the tower to land elsewhere, either Minsk or Moscow.

According to the news agency Interfax, the Smolensk Airport was closed due to the thick fog and poor visibility before the crash. The pilot was instructed to land at either Minsk to the west or Moscow to the east. The plane crashed after the pilot’s fourth attempt to land at the closed airport.

This all begs a very logical question: Why would the pilot of a plane carrying so many high ranking Polish officials, including that country's president be so obstinate about landing at a closed airport and by extension, so reckless with such important passengers?

We're told that the black boxes have been retrieved. It would seem to me that with the extremely tragic irony surrounding this horrific event, Vladimir Putin should be 100% transparent about this investigation. Color me skeptical.

h/t to Astute Bloggers

REASONS TO BE SKEPTICAL OF POLISH PLANE CRASH

The Putin government has quite the disturbing history when it comes to dealing with people it doesn't like. Whether it be strong western style leaders who are elected by countries once members of the Soviet bloc, journalists with whom it disagrees, or whistle blowers who used to work inside the Russian government, there is already good reason to question the official story when it comes to the death of the Polish president in a plane crash.

It doesn't take much effort to notice how close together these dots are. For starters, a news release from FOCUS Information Agency states that none other than Vladimir himself will be personally monitoring the investigation of the crash that killed Polish president Lech Kacynski as his plane approached the Smolensk airport.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has set up a government commission that will investigate the crash in the Russian city of Smolensk, in which most likely is killed the Polish president Lech Kaczynski., Prime Minister Vladimir Putin will personally monitor the investigation…

Why on earth would Putin want to personally oversee the investigation unless he wanted absolute control over it? Let's start off with the reason for Kaczynski's visit to Russia. He was on his way to commemorate what is known as the Katyn Massacre,

THE KATYN MASSACRES, in which 22,000 Polish officers, policemen, and civil servants were murdered by the NKVD (Soviet Secret Police), are probably the most notoriously senseless of Stalin's crimes.

Keep in mind that Putin was a proud leader within the Soviet Union's KGB. This from a Washington Post article in 2000:

Putin defends the Soviet-era intelligence service to this day. In recent comments to a writers' group in Moscow, he even seemed to excuse its role in dictator Joseph Stalin's brutal purges, saying it would be "insincere" for him to assail the agency where he worked for so many years. Fiercely patriotic, Putin once said he could not read a book by a Soviet defector because "I don't read books by people who have betrayed the Motherland."

Regardless of whether Putin's fingerprints end up being on this plane crash, a visit to Russia by a pro-western president of Poland intended to commemorate the mass murder of tens of thousands of Polish officers at the hands of Stalin's Secret Police would likely be perceived by Putin as a blatant slap in the face to everything he fervently reveres. As for Katyn, the longer the Polish officers were held, the more their very existence began to anger Stalin's NKVD, led by Laverti Beria until they finally and successfully lobbied Stalin for approval to execute the ones remaining.

Beria finally made an unambiguous recommendation to Stalin on March 5, 1940: "They are all thorough going enemies of Soviet power. saturated with hatred for the Soviet system . . . the only reason they want for liberation is to be able to take up the fight (sic) against Soviet power. . ." The inmates of three camps, 14,700 POWs, and 11,000 Poles held in prisons "should be dealt with by special measures and the highest measure of punishment, shooting, should be applied to them." The victims were not to be informed of the charges or the sentence. The Politburo voted the same day in favor of murder. Stalin signed first, then Voroshilov, Molotov, and Mikoyan: Kaganovlch and Kalinin agreed by telephone.

Anti-Communist has the breakdown of the people that were to be executed:

Eleven generals, an admiral, 77 colonels, 197 lieutenant colonels, 541 majorem 1,441 captains, 6,061 lieutenants and other ranks, 18 chaplains, and the Polish army's chief rabbi were all to be shot in April...

Vasili Blokhin was the name of Stalin's Chief Executioner at Lubianka. To say he was sick is being kind. He actually partook in these executions personally and while wearing an apron:

Some executions were carried out more humanely than usual by Blokhin and his men. In Kalinin (Tver), where the Ostashkov prisoners were killed one by one, each Pole was taken into the prison club room and his identity carefully checked, before being handcuffed and led into a neighboring soundproofed chamber and shot in the back of the neck. The bodies were then dragged through a back door, thrown into covered trucks and taken to the countryside at Mednoe, to the grounds used for the NKVD men's dachas, a site chosen by Blokhin. A total of fifty executioners was used, Blokhin in his leather apron, helmet, and gauntlets taking a leading part. Each evening a body count was telegraphed to Merkulov in Moscow.

Interestingly, Lubianka was the name of Putin's KGB headquarters. Ironically, maybe the most telling quote - again, if it's determined that foul play at the government level was in any way responsible for this plane crash - comes from the Black Book of Communism:

"Katyn, Russia, April 1943. The Germans discovered here the bodies of 4,500 Polish officers buried in mass graves. A Red Cross commission concluded that they had been killed by Soviet troops in the spring of 1940, when around 25,000 people disappeared. Katyn came to be a symbol of mass murder and official lies. Until 1989 the Communist government in Poland and Communists throughout the world attributed the massacre to the Germans."

Lies? As the Soviet Union was falling in 1989, some unpleasant truths about its past were obviously surfacing. As a loyal leader within the KGB, Putin couldn't have been happy about it. In fact, his actions as president and now Prime Minister indicate he's got quite a bit of nostalgia for those times.

It's not like we don't have a history of extremely curious deaths in Putin's Russia. Two in particular are among the most notorious. Journalist Anna Politkovskaya was critical of Putin and foretold her own death. She was eventually murdered on October 7th, 2006 - Putin's birthday - in an elevator. Additionally, she fell violently ill in 2004 after drinking tea; she was believed to have been poisoned after reporting on the Beslan school massacre:

Politkovskaya was poisoned on her way to cover Beslan crisis. After drinking tea on a flight to the region, she became seriously ill and was hospitalized—but the toxin was never identified because the medical staff was instructed to destroy her blood tests.

Another death making the news was that of Alexander Litvinenko, a Russian defector who was murdered on British soil by what amounted to a nuclear explosion in his body after his tea was poisoned with polonium-210. Litvinenko was not only poisoned less than one month after Politkovskaya's death but he had previously warned her that her life was in danger from the Russian government and that she should flee the country. Unlike Politkovskaya, Litvinenko did flee - to Great Britain - but it didn't help him escape death. Although Politkovskaya is the most well known journalist to suffer this fate in Russia, the Independent chronicles the lives of 20 journalists who met their death under Putin's reign.

Lastly, let us not forget Viktor Yushchenko, a western-style leader who was victorious in a very close election for presidency of the Ukraine. He led what is known as the "Orange Revolution". The opposition did everything it could to see his defeat, including massive voter fraud that Ukraine's Supreme Court ruled against, opening the door for new rounds of elections that ultimately gave Yushchenko the victory. Like Politkovskaya and Litvinenko, Yushchenko was also poisoned prior to the elections everyone knew would be close. Although he survived the poisoning, Yushchenko's face had become severely disfigured.

Regardless of what the real cause of the crash that killed the Polish president, there is an extremely disturbing track record in Putin's Russia of taking aggressive measures to squash the views, careers, and some times lives of those who oppose it. The death of President Lech Kaczynski has far too much history surrounding it to allow any investigation overseen by Vladimir Putin to be the final word.

h/t to Reagan Republican Resistance