Polish Government Report on Poland's Military Intelligence Creates Storms
Warsaw, Poland 18 February, 2007 The long awaited report on Poland's Military Intelligence Services was first greeted as saying nothing new and a disappointment. It was essentially an over-hyped flop. But it has suddenly bounced back at the Polish President as people accused in the report of various transgressions are angrily reacting.
Last year the Kaczynski Government put the Military Intelligence Service (WSI) into liquidation as a step in their program of de-communizing Poland. And they promised a report that would show what WSI had been doing.
The report, authored by controversial Deputy Minister of Defense Antoni Macierewicz, released last week, charges a web of ex-communists and corrupt businessmen in the WSI controlled Polish public life and that WSI had put agents into political parties, the media and state-owned companies up for privatization.
But analysts disagree. They have said the report fails to confirm the WSI had hijacked Polish public life.
Leaders of opposition party SLD describe the report as completely un-objective.
One critic likened it to the annals of the neighborhood busybody rendering judgement on everyone she does not like. It is long on judgement and short on details.
And the judgements it has rendered are said to be inaccurate
So inaccurate that some people judged in the report of cooperating with the WSI are going to court. One is going to sue President Kaczynski.
One of the reports main conclusions is that former Presidents Lech Walesa and Aleksander Kwasniewski were negligent during their time in office and failed to root out any collaborators of the former communist regime. http://www.polskieradio.pl/zagranica/gb/dokument.aspx?iid=48384
Kwasniewski responded by saying only that he had not read the report.
But Walesa is not taking the judgement lightly.
"What a fool of a president we've got," was his highlighted response, which comment, incidently, may land him in court. See Poland's Lech Walesa versus the Polish Twins turns south
And he continued.
"There are many things one can criticise from the early 1990's. We didn't have a free homeland yet then - there was no legislation - there was no constitution, no structures." Solidarity leaders in the first democratically elected government did the "best they could" to avert chaos.
"Those Kaczynski's are smart today, but they could have acted then - nobody was stopping them."
Aside from the current verbal battles and accusations, there is more on the horizon.
The report reveals a lot of information about how the Polish intelligence services work. That information is very useful to Russia. That will be looked at closely and there is likely to be some calls for prosecution for revealing state secrets.
The story about this matter has legs. The storms that are about today are probably just the beginning of a major PR fiasco for the Polish Government.
See also:
Poland: According To Polish Prime Minister Democracy Is Not Functioning.
Poland: Two Versions Of Same Report OK To Polish President
Polish President Blows The Cover Of Poland's Spies - Report
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