Monday, August 30, 2004

Why has Shabalkin been quiet?

After all kinds of sources from East to West dumped out a whole bunch of versions about the plane crashes in Russia, Russian authorities started concocting their own story out of this hodgepodge, as if they were picking and adding certain ingredients when making their special dish.

Russian secret services are playing the role of a chef, and the end result will be whatever they will find convenient. Each ingredient of that dish has its own term and its own dose.

First they started to get worried about a female passenger whose relatives did not look for her. Then they recalled about another passenger (there were two planes, you know), and nobody was wondering what happened to her either. Their Caucasus last names were supposed to imply their Chechen ethnic background. The authorities started looking for the dead bodies of these two women and they barely discovered them at the very last moment when everybody else was already identified.

Dead bodies of other passengers were sent to be buried, but these ones were sent to examination in order to discover traces of hexogen, which were immediately discovered among the fragments of the planes that were not even picked up. All in all, you can hardly find any faults in the investigation, but that investigation is worth being called a high-quality detective story. Next it will be discovered that the women were linked to terrorists, and the culminating point will be a big story about a training camp for female suicide bombers.

Let’s take into account that the official version can never be discrediting the Russian leadership at all. Then there must be something more serious that has to be concealed and there must be some hints that the planes crashed because of the attack by already mentioned 'female terrorists', - this is the story that the Kremlin will benefit from at the moment.

The version sounds pretty believable, but there is one snag to it: how did they manage to blow the planes up all at the same time? If we assume that time bombs were used, which were set for the same time and which were handed to the suicide bombers before the departure, then it is not clear what’s the sense of doing that since the kamikazes had the explosives on them. It’s just extra risk to smuggle a clockwork mechanism on a plane, while all that a kamikaze has to do is just connect the wires.

Different times of departures and times of explosions, when one of the planes was already ready to land, and absence of communication between the terrorists are ruling out any possibility of arranging to synchronize the two blasts.

The only version that comes to mind in this case is the version that both airplanes were shot down by air defense missiles. It is hard to imagine any other version of how the two planes were hit at the same time at such a high altitude and at such a distance from each other. But the Russian side will never even mention this version, and what’s more, it will be refusing to have anything to do with it, like it happened during the 'training exercise' in Ryazan (when FSB/KGB got caught planting explosives under an apartment building) or with 'harmless' combat gas during the Moscow theater siege in 1992.

You can’t rule out the version that suicide bombers may be behind this act or that some explosives were planted into the airplanes. Even if they were Chechens who are not acting on the orders of the Chechen military command, still, compared to what Russian army is doing in Chechnya, it is quite natural that there may be hundreds if not thousands of people who will to deal a blow to Russia any way they can. Then it will be considered revenge, but not terrorism.

Besides, if there were even one military person on each of these planes, Russian secret agents or soldiers who fought in Chechnya, then this is where the term could be applied, which even Russia's critics in the West liked and by which they characterize Russia's actions in Chechnya: disproportionate use of force, but no terrorism at all.

However, in this particular case it all looks like we just witnessed a new 'Nord-Ost' (siege of Moscow theater in 2002). Most likely the planes were hijacked and when they were up in the air, some demands could have been made to the Russian government. Putin issued the order to shoot the planes down, and air defense forces were used. This is where the denial of anything staring with C was coming from a day after the disaster, and this is the reason for the attempt to blame it all on Russian negligence.

Apparently they figured that it was like in that joke where the defendant tells the judge about how “the victim slipped, fell on the knife, and the same thing happened fifteen times over and over”. And they thought that Russians might not like Putin’s overly 'friendly pre-election' attitude towards Chechens. And this is why they decided to get the 'kamikazes' of proper ethnic background involved.

Russian spokesman for the war in the North Caucasus Shabalkin has been quiet for a few days, due to some strange set of circumstances. He is probably on some special assignment. So let’s wait for his coming report about (discovery of a training camp of militants with a camouflaged dummy of a TU-154 plane, where female suicide bombers were being trained on flight simulators from Microsoft).

AS: Im also have TU-154 Plane For Dummy, Russian version.

# ANTENNA SHARON | 3:27:00 pm |