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Russia creates too many questions about Polish plane crash

The Russian government's actions raise too many questions about the April 10 airplane crash that killed many of the most anti-Russian leaders of Poland. My recent conversations with informed Polish sources reveal so many irregularities with how the Russian government handled the crash that nobody should presume that the disaster was accidental until all the facts are in.

I knew four of the Polish officials who died in the crash and have a special interest in raising unpleasant questions and pushing for full answers. Here are the issues that surfaced in my recent discussions one month after the disaster that killed Polish President Lech Kaczynski and other senior Polish figures:

• President Kaczynski and his entourage were traveling to Smolensk, Russia, near the Katyn forest where the Soviet NKVD (Chekists) murdered thousands of Polish officers during World War II. Kaczynski was a strong critic of Moscow and its failure to repudiate its Soviet past. His rival, Prime Minister Donald Tusk, has taken a much softer approach toward Moscow. Tusk was not on the plane.
• Tusk held an official observance of the anniversary of the Katyn massacre with Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. Tusk and Putin agreed in advance that Kaczynski would not be part of the official commemoration, and that Kaczynski would arrive separately on a "private" visit.
• In the hour or so after the crash, the Russian government officially blamed the disaster on "pilot error," before an investigation had begun. Russian officials said the Polish pilot did not speak Russian, when the pilot spoke excellent Russian.
• Putin has assumed personal control of the crash investigation.
• The Russian government has maintained total, opaque control of the crash investigation, in violation of the Chicago Convention that governs international air crashes and in violation of a bilateral 1993 agreement that joint commissions would conduct investigations of aircraft disasters affecting both countries.
• All 97 bodies of the crash victims, including the late Polish president, were removed from the crash site before Polish authorities could arrive, and brought to Poland.
• No independent autopsies of the crash victims was permitted, and Polish officials did not have the ability to be present during the autopsies.
• All personal effects of the crash victims were removed from the scene and taken to Moscow before any Polish official could arrive.
• Russian security officers interrogated Polish family members who traveled to Moscow to recover the bodies - sometimes for hours - and were denied access to the bodies until the interrogations were complete. The daughter of parliament member Zbigniew Wasserman, who oversaw the security services, went to Russia for her father's body but was detained six hours and interrogated. She was repeatedly denied the right to have a Polish official present for her interrogation.
• Russian officials required Polish family members of the victims to sign that they were satisfied that the personal effects were all in order or had been destroyed in the crash; those who did not want to sign were told that they would not have access to their loved ones' remains until they did sign.
• There has been no independent verification that all the bodies are accounted for. The bodies were returned to Poland in sealed coffins for burial. Families of the victims were not permitted to open the coffins. Under Polish law, official permission from the state prosecutor's office is required to exhume a body, and that office has denied family requests, apparently for fear of offending the Russian government.
• The Russian government has not turned over two of the plane's black boxes to Polish authorities, despite repeated formal Polish requests. Two of the three boxes aboard the Russian-made Tupolev 154 presidential plane were of Russian manufacture, and one was Polish. The Russian government briefly gave the Polish-made black box to the Polish government, then took it back. Russia has refused to hand over the two Russian-made black boxes.
• Russia's intelligence services have used the disaster as a spy operation against Poland and the NATO alliance. Russian authorities recovered laptop computers, flash drives, cell phones and other electronic gear belonging to the Polish president, senior military leaders, security chief and other top officials who died on the flight. Those items contained sensitive names, telephone numbers, correspondents, documents, and top secret military and diplomatic codes. The Russians delayed for days and sometimes weeks before returning the items. Some of the items, such as flash drives belonging to officials with responsibility for security and intelligence matters, are missing.
• Russian officials waited six days before returning President Kaczynski's Nokia cell phone to the Polish government.
• After Russian security officers removed what they wanted from the site, they left the site unguarded. Polish journalists discovered that the site was unattended. 
• A Polish aviation official who serves as a day-to-day interlocutor with the Russians on the matter told a Polish parliamentary commission, "We know everything that happened but the Russians forbid us to tell you." The official said that it could take as long as a year before Russia releases the information.
• Most Polish officials seem to believe that the Russian government played some role in the crash. Kaczynski was the most anti-Russian leader in Europe, and his entourage on the plane included similarly minded senior military and security officials. Kaczynski's twin brother, Jaroslaw, was supposed to have been on the plane as well. On the heels of years of Russian assassinations of Putin's internal opponents, the assassination by radioactive polonium of a top KGB defector in London, the attempted assassination of the anti-Russian leader of Ukraine, the Moscow-backed overthrow of the government of Kyrgyzstan and other actions, Polish officials can only presume that Putin may have had a hand in the April 10 crash. The disaster took place on Russian soil, with Putin's secret services in total control of the probe that he personally directs.
• Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, who opposed the late president and is in charge of day-to-day affairs of state, appears fearful of Russia and does not want to say or do anything to upset Putin.  
• Tusk says that those who suspect foul play are motivated by "anti-Russian" prejudice, but sources close to him say he has never definitively called the crash an "accident."
• "Prime Minister Tusk, at every moment from the crash, says, 'We will do this or that because the Russian government wants it and we don't want to offend the Russians.' Tusk acts like he is in fear," a source close to Tusk tells me.

Why has Prime Minister Tusk acted like in such a servile manner toward Moscow in the wake of the April 10 crash? If the crash was an accident, what is Tusk afraid of?

Statement or coincidence? Russia fires nuclear missile over Norway as Obama accepts Nobel Peace Prize

Was it just an unfortunate coincidence or a calculated political statement? Russia test-fired a next-generation nuclear missile that was visible over Norway on the eve of President Barack Obama's visit to Oslo to accept the Nobel Peace Prize.

The Bulava-30 submarine-launched ballistic missile is the most modern strategic nuclear missile in the world. It has yet to be perfected, and the system, as well as its platform, the new Borei-class ballistic missile submarine, has proceeded in fits and starts.

But there is no mistaking Russia's continued, Cold War-style belligerence on a range of fronts. And now, with a bizarre white spiral and blue tail illuminating the black Arctic sky as the multiple-warhead missile arced toward space, our leaders have to ask if Moscow is trying to send us a signal that most of the world would rather ignore.

How dictators censor us

Dictatorial regimes and movements continue to censor the American media through implicit or explicit threats of retaliation. Anne Applebaum notes the problem in her Washington Post column that:

• Yale University Press censored a book about the Danish cartoons of Muhammad, the founder of Islam, and didn't include important cartoons that the author had included in the manuscript.
• GQ buried a story (first broken in the US by David Satter) in its September 2009 issue that pointed to the former KGB as being behind a series of bombings of Russian apartment buildings that Vladimir Putin used as a pretext to invade Chechnya; the story was purged or never posted on GQ's website and censored out of its Russian-language edition.
• Google has merrily censored its Chinese-language search engine to come up with few if any significant results on the Tiananmen Square massacre, Taiwan or democracy.

"These three incidents are not identical," says Applebaum. "Yale Press refused to print the cartoons because the university fears retaliatory violence on its campus. Conde Nast [publisher of GQ] refused to promote an article on the Russian secret service because it fears a loss of Russian advertisers. Google refuses to let its Chinese users search for 'Tiananmen' and other taboo subjects because Google wants to compete against Chinese search engines for a share of the huge Chinese market. All three companies exhibit greatly varying degrees of remorse, too, from Conde Nast (none) to the Yale Press (a lot) to Google (ambivalent: Google founder Sergey Brin initially argued that the company would at least bring more information to China, if not complete information).

"Nevertheless, the three stories lead to one conclusion: In different ways, the Russian government, the Chinese government and unnamed Islamic terrorists are now capable of placing de facto controls on American companies -- something that would have been unthinkable a decade ago. In a world that seems more dangerous and less profitable than it did in the pas t, either greed or fear proved stronger than these companies' commitment to free speech."

Incidents like these are nothing new. One almost forgets that CNN ran deliberately biased coverage of Saddam Hussein's regime as the price its executives paid for the dictator's permission to operate a "news" bureau in Baghdad (a la Peter Arnett). Harvard University is notorious for its apparent faustian bargain with Chinese benefactors to water down its academic skepticism of the Beijing regime - and to invite People's Liberation Army intelligence officers to Cambridge as part of an "exchange" program. And so much more.

A Soviet political warfare manual comments on 'socialist education'

With all the controversy now about propagandizing schoolchildren, I dusted off an old Soviet political warfare manual titled Communists and the Youth: A Study of Revolutionary Education. Published in the USSR in 1984, the 255-page book sat on my shelf, unread, since I got it while infiltrating a Soviet front organization during United Nations International Youth Year celebrations in 1985. Today I cracked the cover the first time - and how relevant it is to today's debate! Here's an excerpt from the introduction, with some sections highlighted for emphasis:

"'The hot student summer' of 1968 affected nearly 50 countries of the capitalist world. Bourgeois publishers jumped at the opportunity to cash in on the events, and hurriedly printed everything connected with this event, even collections of graffiti and glossaries of the 'insurgents' slang. The bourgeois mass media gave wide coverage to the student battles. And soon the Western publishing conveyor began churning out more profound 'studies' prophesying the appearance of a new 'thinker class' and the dawn of a new era called 'the revolution of the young.' What made this more alluring was the fact that the waves of the student tempest continued to swell from time to time, especially on American campuses.

"It would be wrong to belittle the force and significance of this student unrest, its extent, the political awakening and attempts of social self-assertion by the young people of the 'sixties. But this student action, which had quite a considerable impact when it did erupt, was, on the whole, spontaneous and chaotic. Led principally by anarchist, Trotskyite, and ultra-left elements, the student protest had a pseudo-revolutionary colouring.

"But youth will not automatically come to the side of the revolutionary forces. For them to do so there has to be a persistent, painstaking, daily work by the progressive forces, and especially by the communist and workers' parties. And objective and subjective factors play a special role. . . .

"Alongside the objective conditions for the growing breadth and depth of social action by the youth, the subjective factor is equally significant: the correct ideological and political orientation of the young, the ability of the communist parties and youth leagues to impart the protest by the youth a conscious and organized nature, and their ability to educate them in a genuine revolutionary spirit.

"In an antagonistic society the ruling classes determine the content, objectives, forms and methods of the system of education officially recognized in that society. However, this does not exclude that other classes are involved in educational activities, activities directly opposed to the objectives of the official education. Here, the question is to change the character of education. In the Manifesto of the Communist Party [Communist Manifesto], Marx and Engels wrote: 'The Communists have not invented the intervention of society and education; they do but seek to alter the character of that intervention, and to rescue education from the influence of the ruling class.'

"The founders of Marxism-Leninism pointed to the close interconnection between the process of education and the revolutionary transformation of society. They considered that the educational process was of a political character, and said that the revolutionary class of society - the working class led by its vanguard, the Communist Party - had to play a special role in education.

"At this point one should explain the correlation of the ideas 'revolutionary education' and 'communist education.' Thus, in a bourgeois society, it is a question mainly of revolutionary education, primarily of giving the progressive section of the youth a Marxist world outlook, and class self-consciousness, and of educating these young people in the course of revolutionary practice and revolutionary action. . . .

"Communist education became of general state and political significance only after the victory of the Great October Socialist Revolution and when the building of a socialist society was initiated. There was a fundamental change in the entire character of social education, which became a component of the building of socialism and communism. . . .

"In several instances, especially during the transitional period of the building of socialism, it is correct to use the term 'socialist education' as the initial stage of communist education. . . .

"The struggle to win the youth is one of the most important aspects of the ideological struggle in the modern world. The outcome of the class struggle of today and tomorrow largely depends on whom the youth will follow."

Source: Communists and the Youth: A Study of Revolutionary Education (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1984), pp. 1-11.

Criminalizing criticism of war criminals

The Russian regime is endorsing the criminalization of speech that criticizes Josef Stalin's military strategy and tactics during World War II. It's part of an official campaign to glorify the totalitarian Soviet past in order to legitimize the chekist mafiocracy's grip on economic and political power.

The repression is aimed not only at Russian citizens, but at foreign dignitaries, including presidents of other countries who criticize Stalinism and the Soviet invasions and occupations of countries across Central and Eastern Europe.

The proposed legislation, called "Against the Rehabilitation of Nazism," is modeled after anti-holocaust-denier laws in democratic European countries, Russian regime officials say.

John Wendle, Time magazine's Moscow correspondent, writes, "Liberals in Russia fear the law may punish and silence new - and possibly more accurate - interpretations of the country's history and solidify the government's control of the past. But the real aim of the law may be to provide the Kremlin with another rhetorical tool with which to attack governments of former Soviet Republics and Eastern Bloc countries that have increasingly moved towards the West."

Russia's history of World War II remains steeped in Stalinist propaganda, with the very name - Great Patriotic War - a holdover of what Stalin called the war after Hitler betrayed him and invaded the USSR in June, 1941. Stalin and Hitler started World War II together, with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 23, 1939, but this does not appear in the official Russian history.

Since 2009 marks the 70th anniversary of the Hitler-Stalin pact to invade and occupy Central and Eastern Europe, it would be a good time to remember the real history of the war - and encourage the Russian government to do the same.

Russian propaganda campaign starts to pay off as US relents on missile defense

Russian leader Vladimir Putin's pressure campaign against a US-built missile defense system for Europe is bearing fruit.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates' announcement today that the US might delay activation of the system showed the Kremlin that its old-style intransigence still works in pressuring the West. Gates' statement, according to the New York Times, was "clearly seeking to mollify Moscow."

This is a terrible move. The Bush Administration seems to have learned nothing from dealing with the Russians. Precedent shows that when Moscow succeeds in delaying a US decision, it will follow with a campaign to push harder to isolate the US from its European allies and ultimately cause Washington to cancel its program.

President Bush has set himself up to become another Jimmy Carter, who got the US into a similar fix in the late 1970s by delaying his decision to deploy the enhanced radiation warhead (ERW, often inaccurately called the "neutron bomb") to deter against a Soviet armored invasion of Western Europe. Carter's delays allowed the Soviets to mount a political warfare counteroffensive within NATO that pressured the president to cave.

The American political position in Eastern Europe is already weakened with the expected change in the government of Poland, which is less pro-American and less anti-Russian than the incumbent. This will give the Kremlin another wedge against the United States.

The US isn't helping things with its lame defense of the anti-missile system. While warning about the danger that a nuclear missile-armed Iran presents, the White House now says that the missile defense system, to be based on Poland and the Czech Republic, can be delayed until Iran does something that looks threatening.

At the same time, everyone knows the Bush Administration is being either disengenuous or naive by continuing to insist that the Russians pose no missile threat to Europe. Indeed, Bush has maneuvered himself into another corner; in order to "prove" that we don't think Russia threatens Europe, the administration now wants to invite the Kremlin to be part of our missile defense system.

Meanwhile, Moscow's threat to reprogram its ICBM force to target European cities still stands, and we pretend not to notice. Ditto for Russia's ongoing strategic nuclear missile modernization program that is proceeding apace, as we look the other way. 

Propaganda state

It's all smiles, moderation and good news in sunny Russia, now that the Putin regime is forcing radio stations to make sure that at least 50 percent of the news about the country is positive.

Russian News Service employees tell the New York Times that under the new guidelines, "opposition leaders could not be mentioned on the air and the United States was to be portrayed as an enemy." Only "moderate" political views may be aired.

"Now, the implementation of the '50 percent positive' rule at the Russian News Service leaves an increasingly small number of news outlets that are not managed by the Kremlin, directly or through the state national gas company, Gazprom, a major owner of media assets," the New York Times reports.

The regime is also cracking down on the Internet.

Rather than apply official censorship as the Soviets did, the Putin regime is simply taking direct or indirect control or ownership of media organizations, firing the editors, and installing yes-men who offer bland fare.

This is an opportunity for the United States. Russia's free media days - when people were so saturated with independent and interesting content that few had a desire to turn to US-backed surrogate radios - are over. US-backed Radio Liberty and other stations are vital now. It's time to return them to their origins as surrogates for a free media inside Russia - on the radio waves and online.

Should US government hire Putin's propagandists?

Should the United States government continue to do business with a public relations firm that takes millions of dollars to flack for the Kremlin?

Ketchum, Inc., a global PR company, took $15 million from the Putin regime to orchestrate the July, 2006 "Group of Eight" meeting in St. Petersburg, Russia, Kommersant reported earlier this year.

CBS and the Christian Science Monitor report that the Ketchum operation was part of what they call "Soviet-style propaganda." They also report that Ketchum has been a US government contractor - for civilian agencies and for the US Army.

People are now starting to wonder why the USA would ever want to buy the services of paid propagandists for a KGB colonel and his gangster regime.

'Silence of America'

"Now, with Russian President Vladimir Putin bullying his neighbors, manipulating the Russian media and throwing increasingly audacious anti-American tantrums, one would think US policymakers would have the sense at least to maintain relatively modest VOA operations in and around the Russian Federation," the Washington Post says in today's editorial.

"Yet President Bush's recently released 2008 budget proposal does just the opposite, cutting VOA programming for a range of post-Soviet states to finance programming expansion in other areas of the world."

Among the changes that the Post laments: cutting "the only direct contact Uzbeks have with the United States and the only unvarnished news in the region," and cutting broadcasts to Kazakhstan and Ukraine.

"The price of such programs is so low that federal financial constraints are hardly an excuse to kill them," the editors say.

What could the reason be, then? Might it have something to do with the fact that the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) member responsible for the former Soviet Union, D. Jeffrey Hirschberg, is a director of the pro-Kremlin US-Russia Business Council?