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Honoring the Dead With Hours of Lies
On Aug. 24, two planes crashed in the Tula and Rostov regions, killing all 90 people on board. The Federal Security Service, or FSB, only figured out that terrorists were to blame for the crashes last Friday. A Chechen woman was among the passengers on each plane, and no one was waiting for them in Volgograd or Sochi, where the planes were headed. The FSB should have gotten hold of the passenger lists immediately. Ground control received a hijack alert from the Sochi-bound plane. Eyewitnesses in the village of Buchalki spoke of a midair explosion. The tails of the planes fell before the fuselage, which only occurs after an explosion. U.S. experts were the first to attribute the crashes to terrorism. Meanwhile, Russian authorities were telling relatives of the dead that if terrorism were to blame, they wouldn't collect the insurance.On Wednesday, state-owned Rossia television led its 8:00 p.m. newscast not with a story on the crashes, but with an emergency meeting between President Vladimir Putin and top government officials. Putin said nothing about the attacks. Prosecutor General Vladimir Ustinov assured the president that his office had not ruled anything out, including terrorism. As I watched Putin's dismayed face, I was reminded of June 22, 1941, when the Germans invaded the Soviet Union. Generalissimo Stalin gave the order to destroy the enemy but not to cross the border without permission. Then he retreated to his dacha for several days and fell silent. Stalin couldn't comprehend that the picture of the world that he had created, in which Hitler would never attack, had crumbled. Putin seemed similarly unable to accept the facts at first. As a result, the entire chain of command froze, having no idea what to say. Posted by: tipper 2004-09-01 |
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