Did Russia murder the Polish government?

In April 2010, senior members of the Polish government, including the Polish president and first lady, got on a plane to head to Smolensk, Russia, to commemorate the 70th Anniversary of the Katyn Massacre, in which Josef Stalin ordered the murder of 20,000 Polish army officers and other intelligentsia and had them buried in the Katyn Forest, outside Smolensk, in an attempt to decapitate Poland in preparation for installing a post-war communist regime.

This was one massacre for which the Nazis, who discovered the mass graves in the Katyn Forest, were not responsible, though they, too tried to decapitate Poland by killing its intellectuals.  The Nazis conducted a very public investigation, witnessed and vouched for by the Red Cross, that fixed guilt for the massacre on the Soviet Union.  Stalin denied in, blaming Germany.  Roosevelt and Churchill stayed silent, not wanting to alienate their ally.  Arguably no country suffered more in World War II than Poland.

The 70th Anniversary was to witness a very public admission by the Russians (they had only admitted responsibility in 1995) for the massacre.  A very, very big step for them, though, one might say, out of character for Vladimir Putin.

But the Polish plane never arrived.  Instead, it crashed under mysterious circumstances outside Smolensk.

Sound suspicious to you? It did to me at the time.  And Russia's behavior in "investigating" the crash has only added to those suspicions.  The Washington Examiner's Diana West:

What really happened in the forests at Smolensk, Russia, when a Polish aircraft carrying Poland's national leadership crashed in April 2010, killing all 96 people on board, including Poland's president and first lady?
The answers Russia presented to the world in its official 2011 crash report are wholly unsatisfactory. Indeed, the Moscow-controlled crash investigation seems to have been designed to suppress or tamper with evidence to exonerate Russia of all responsibility for an accident -- or guilt for a crime.

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