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Polish commentator slams Applebaum Washington Post op-ed as 'nonsense'

PR dla Zagranicy
Agnieszka Łaszczuk 21.09.2016 15:22
A conservative Polish commentator has slammed an opinion piece for the Washington Post by US journalist Anne Applebaum as "a load of nonsense".
The site of the Polish presidential plane crash in 2010. Photo: Wikimedia CommonsThe site of the Polish presidential plane crash in 2010. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

In her piece, entitled "In Poland, a preview of what Trump could do to America", Applebaum argues that if elected, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump could find it expedient to adopt a "conspiracy theory", much as she claimed has been done by Jarosław Kaczyński, the leader of Poland’s ruling Law and Justice PiS party.

In order to support her claim, Applebaum focuses on the official investigations into the Polish presidential plane crash in Smolensk, western Russia, in 2010.

Marek Pyza, in a response to Applebaum’s piece published on the wPolityce.pl website, accuses her of "blatant lies" and "feeding the American public with a load of nonsense, which even Putin’s propagandists have not managed to come up with."

Applebaum writes, when depicting the course of the crash: "The chief of the air force sat in the cockpit during the final minutes of the flight and pushed the pilots to land: ‘Be bold, you’ll make it’, he told them."

Pyza insisted there is no record of such words being spoken in the cockpit.

"Those words are a complete lie," he added in an interview for Radio Poland.

Applebaum argues: "The president was late; he had planned a live broadcast from Katyn."

Pyza responds: "The president [Lech Kaczyński] was neither the head of a television station, nor even a publisher. Obviously, broadcasts had been planned by the heads of several Polish TV stations.”

The US journalist continues: "When Russian air traffic controllers wanted to divert the plane because of heavy fog, he did not agree."

The Polish commentator writes: “Not true! Neither did the controllers want to turn back the plane, nor do we know the president's stance" on this matter.

In terms of the course of the investigation, Applebaum said: "Within hours of the crash, Polish forensic experts were on the ground. They immediately obtained the black boxes and transcribed them meticulously."

Pyza responds: "Not true! None of them [the Polish experts] were there. They arrived in Moscow only the next day, where they found out that they cannot take part in the victims’ autopsies, because these had already been performed by the Russians."

Pyza continues: "The Russians opened the black boxes themselves and started analysing them without waiting for the Poles."

Poland's governing Law and Justice (PiS) party has set up a new commission to probe the Smolensk crash. (ał/pk)

Source: wpolityce.pl, Washington Post

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