Polish President and Army Chief of Staff dead

[Helen Reyes]

To cause an aircraft flown by a top military pilot to crash, the loss of control probably needs to be fundamental.

As most likely happened with the 1994 Chinook helicopter crash at the Mull of Kintyre in which much of the British Northern Ireland intelligence cabal died.

What happened to the rumour that the mobile phones went dead on the plane right before the crash? Has that been rejected, followed up or substantiated?

I agree with Jan on the foreign perception of the Kaczynskis as unexploded ordnance, and all this spectacular mourning seems odd at the very least, and points to something else going on.

Did Lech Kaczynski have some big surprise planned that only he, MI6 and NSA knew about? Did it involve EU membership, Lisbon, the loss of the Rzeczpospolita's liberum veto? CIA torture sites? Hard to say.

I came to the same conclusion Webster Tarpley seems to have on Schroeder and Putin's deal to pump natural gas across the Baltic sea bed: Poland and the Baltic states opposed it because it meant loss of transit fees and their loss of the ability to blackmail western Europe by cutting off the Russian fuel. This was a big point of contention for a while and might still be, with Merkel taking over Schroeder's position and Schroeder getting a cushy job at Gazprom in exchange for the deal. I also heard the Baltic states were furious about the new nuclear arms reduction treaty between the US and Russia, but have no further information on that, and none on Poland's position. The missile shield is another nexus around which assassinations might orbit. Afghanistan, too, with Karzai making a public spectacle of appearing to cut the marionette strings by threatening to go over to the mythical Taliban, which means the civilian peasantry who are supposed to be his constituency.

As a flow-of-consciousness matter, it all adds up to something nuclear in Asia (nuclear reductions, Russian gas, missile shield, Karzai). Was Kaczynski about to sing like a canary about some secret NATO plan for a new war? Speculation.