by the Left Coast Rebel

Sad news earlier today out of Poland. NYT:

WARSAW — A plane carrying the Polish president and dozens of the country’s top political and military leaders to the site of the Soviet massacre of Polish officers in World War II crashed in western Russia on Saturday, killing everyone on board.

President Lech Kaczynski’s plane tried to land in a thick fog, missing the runway and snagging treetops about half a mile from the airport in Smolensk, scattering chunks of flaming fuselage across a bare forest.

The crash came as a stunning blow to Poland, wiping out a large portion of the country’s leadership in one fiery explosion. And in a bizarre twist, it happened at the moment that Russia and Poland were beginning to come to terms with the killing of more than 20,000 members of Poland’s elite officer corps in the same place 70 years ago.

RT Video:



The NYT reports that a good portion of top government officials from Poland were killed:

Russian emergency officials said 97 people were killed. They included Poland’s deputy foreign minister and a dozen members of Parliament, the chiefs of the army and the navy, and the president of the national bank. They included Anna Walentynowicz, 80, the former dock worker whose firing in 1980 set off the Solidarity strike that ultimately overthrew Polish Communism, as well as relatives of victims of the massacre that they were on their way to commemorate.

Knowing this, the BlogProf brings up a possible question. Was the KGB involved?:

The sad news this morning of the Polish President and some of the highest-level leaders in the Polish government over Russia smells rancid to me. Consider that:

1. Polish president Lech Kaczynski was a friend of the US (at least the US as it was before Obama came in and apologized to our enemies while snubbing our allies)
2. 2 words: missile defense. Poland under Kaczynski stuck its neck out for us and was willing to give us whatever we wanted as far as establishing a missile shield against what the Russians wanted
3. Poland was under Russian hegemonic domination for decades, and Kaczynskiwaqs no friend of Russia
4. Besides Kaczynsk, there was an unusually high number of Polish leaders on the plane. Thus if the KGB were going to bring it down it was their opportunity to kill a whole flock of birds with a single stone
5. Poland is one the US’s strongest allies having sent troops to Iraq and Afghanistan, something Russia didn’t like one bit.

And guess who has been put in charge. A ‘former’ KGB leader:

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has been put in charge of a commission investigating the crash, the Kremlin said.

Read the rest at BlogProf.Via Memeorandum, here.