It might be the decisive piece of evidence proving who and what and how and why the MH17 Malaysian airliner over the conflict zone in Ukraine on 17 July 2014 was shot down, but the pilot’s corpse has been hidden even from the people who have the most right to see it.

The corpse of the pilot of the MH17 Malaysian airliner might contain in it bullets, or bullet-residues, that can prove a Ukrainian military jet intentionally fired into the pilot; or else it might contain only missile-shrapnel, which would be consistent only with the plane’s having been erroneously shot down by a ground-based missile such as the Ukrainian Government says it was; but the Malaysian Government has prohibited anyone to see it — not even his relatives, who are still trying to find out how and who murdered their loved-one and the 297 other people who were aboard that tragic plane on July 17th of 2014.

Until recently, the Malaysian government itself had had no access to the coroner’s report on the corpse: it was done by a Dutch coroner, in Holland.

The corpse has been hidden from everyone, and the Malaysian Government isn’t even being permitted, by the other four nations on the official investigatory commission, to say anything to anyone outside the commission — not even to the pilot’s family. The coroner’s report on the pilot’s body exists, but has been seen by no one outside of the now 5-nation investigatory commission. (The commission was originally just Netherlands, Belgium, Australia, and Ukraine, but Malaysia was recently added. The Dutch government heads the commission. The Dutch government had helped to install the current Ukrainian government, whose Air Force is a suspect in having possibly shot down the MH17 airliner. Netherlands, along with the U.S., and also along with George Soros’s International Renaissance Foundation, had funded Hromadske TV, which propagandized heavily for forcing the democratically elected Ukrainian President, Viktor Yanukovych, to leave his Presidency before the next election would be held, and which then propagandized Ukrainians heavily for the ethnic cleansing operation to get rid of the residents in Ukraine’s Donbass, the only area of Ukraine that had voted 90%+ for Yanukovych. So: the Dutch government had actually helped to install the current Ukrainian government — which might have shot down the MH17, and yet which is a member of the official ‘investigation.’)

This cover-up of what might be the decisive evidence in the MH17 case was revealed when Russian Television sent reporters last month to interview the pilot’s family.

See the brief Russian documentary interviewing the pilot’s wife here:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_7dlG7qPio

The pilot’s wife says, at 5:42 on the video, “We were not allowed to open” the coffin. Q: “Not allowed by who?” A: “Not allowed by the [Malaysian] government.” The existing four-nation team had required the Malaysian government to sign onto their secret 8 August 2014 agreement, in order for Malaysia to be allowed to join. This agreement says that Ukraine will have a veto-power over any report that the commission produces — and this veto-power is the reason why the ‘investigation’ continues dragging on. The now-five nation commission can’t yet produce a report that the Ukrainian government will sign onto.

Then, the interviewer in the documentary says that she had taken her camera-crew to the crash site two months after the plane’s downing, and says that they saw there, still in the field of grass, the pilot’s chair. This video at 6:21 shows it — its bare frame, because the padding had blown off.

Those 30 mm round holes through it are bullet holes; they’re definitely not shrapnel holes, which are larger and very irregular (not at all round). Furthermore, the bullet-holes through the side-panel of the chair’s backrest are fairly head-on instead of at any steep angle; and, so, might have been from stray bullets among the gunner’s fusillade into the left cockpit-side that was focused around the pilot’s belly-area. This chair backrest is thus yet further evidence suggesting that the pilot’s corpse had bullets, or bullet-residues, in it.

For more background on the pilot’s corpse’s evidentiary importance to solving this crucial mass-murder case, see this. For my reconstruction of the evidence, and of where it points to regarding guilt and motive, see this.

RUSSIA’S GAME ON THIS:

On July 29th, Russia vetoed at the United Nations an attempt by the U.S. and its allies to transfer the MH17 investigation to a rigged UN commission that would be set up in order to enable the guilt for the cover-up to be transferred away from Netherlands, Belgium, Australia, and Ukraine, the four nations that set up the existing official corrupt ‘investigation,’ whose ‘findings,’ at this late stage, would be believed only by outright suckers in the West — and that number of people might not be enough now to protect the actual guilty parties in the case. Russia wants the guilty parties to bear the blame not merely for the mass-murder itself, but for the subsequent and ongoing cover-ups. If the official ‘investigation’ finds Russia and/or the people of Donbass to have perpetrated it, then Russia will presumably make public, evidence, which it has thus far withheld just in case America and its allies turn out to be that brazen. So, Russia might even be eager for that to happen. The official ‘investigation’ has already announced that its conclusions will be made public in October. Until then, the commission is doing everything they can to forestall, if not prevent, a scandal-squared, from resulting. (For example: if anything, Richard Nixon’s Watergate cover-up doomed him even more than the Watergate-crime itself did.)

Here are some of the typical ways the Western press have reported on Russia’s veto:

“Russia threatens UN veto on Julie Bishop’s MH17 tribunal”

“Why Russia Vetoed the MH17 Tribunal”

“Russia says no to MH17 justice“

“Alternative solution needed for investigating loss of MH17: Russia’s Security Council veto means other means may be used to find those responsible”

For some unexplained (though accepted-without-question by the Western press) reason, the Western powers aren’t satisfied for the official ‘investigating’ commission (though itself entirely Western until the recent addition of Malaysia to the commission) to be blamed for producing the official ‘findings.’ Western leaders had wanted the UN to be blamed instead. Russia voted no on the Western proposal (which was fronted by Malaysia, on behalf of the West); China abstained (perhaps in the hope that the West won’t go after them, too).

The result is heightened fear within the official ‘investigating’ commission. On 3 August 2015, Russian Television headlined “Dutch Safety Board asks for RT’s assistance in MH17 probe after documentary,” and reported that:

The Dutch agency heading the international probe into Malaysia Airlines MH17 crash in eastern Ukraine has contacted RT over the footage used in our recent documentary on the tragedy. RT’s documentary discovered fragments of the plane still in Donetsk.

The RT Documentary film, titled “MH17: A year without truth,” showed fragments of the crashed Boeing and pieces of luggage still scattered in the area at the time of filming. The RTD crew collected the parts of the plane’s exterior they spotted, bringing them to the administration of the nearby town of Petropavlovsk.

“With great interest we watched your documentary, ‘MH17: A year without truth,’” Dutch Safety Board spokesperson Sara Vernooij wrote to RT. “In this film, RT shows parts of the cockpit roof which were found near Petropavlivka. We would like to gather those pieces and bring them over to the Netherlands so the Dutch Safety Board can use them for the investigation and the reconstruction.”

On 17 July 2015, Rupert Murdoch’s Australian Courier-Mail published behind a paywall, and his The Australian republished open on their website, the complete transcript, plus video excerpts, of 17 minutes of video footage that had been taken by the independence fighters in Donbass at the wreckage site while the fires were still aflame on the fateful day, 17 July 2014; and this remarkable footage, never before made public, and published by a lifelong anti-Russian, shows the rebels’ “Commander,” trying to understand what he was seeing, and saying that there are two planes destroyed in the area, one a Malaysian airliner, and the other a Sukhoi fighter-jet, the latter from which had parachuted out five people. Someone off-camera in the background is saying, “They decided to do it this way, to look like we have brought down the plane.” In other words: these people speculated immediately that the presence of the downed fighter-jet indicated that the Ukrainian authorities were trying to pin onto the rebels the blame for shooting down the airliner. Here is that link, and the relevant passages in the transcript itself:


“Full transcript: Russian-backed rebels ransack the wreckage of MH17 in shocking 17-minute video”

• JULY 17, 2015 12:01AM

• Video [just an excerpt, but the transcript is complete, only excerpts from which are reproduced here:]

Cmdr: Yes, there’s 2 planes taken down. We need the second.

Background: The second one is a civilian too?

Background: The fighter jet brought down this one, and our people brought down the fighter.

Background: They decided to do it this way, to look like we have brought down the plane. …

Cmdr: Let the firefighters extinguish the flames.

(Phone ringing)

Yes Kalyian. I understood you, but we’re already at the crash site. A passenger plane was brought down. They brought down the passenger plane and we brought down the fighter. …

Cmdr: The parachute jumpers are there.

Background: But there are two planes, from my understanding.

Background: And what’s the other one? A Sukhoi?

Cmdr: A Sukhoi.

The Sukhoi brought down the plane and we brought down the Sukhoi. …

I mean … the two pilots landed on parachutes.

(Phone ringing)

Cmdr: Yes, speak. I’m here, I’m in Grabovo. Right at the place. I’m not at the bird site, I’m in the field. I didn’t get there yet.

Cmdr: Five parachutes jumped off this plane. Five people jumped off this plane. …

CONCLUSION:

It’s like the way the West handled the 2008 economic crash: extend-and-pretend. While Western leaders transferred their aristocracy’s investment losses onto future taxpayers and pretended that the enormous governmental debts that resulted from these ‘bailouts’ to the aristocracy won’t destroy the economic future for the public, no one can yet say with certainty that they were lying about that. As ridiculous as extend-and-pretend seems to be, no appropriate historical precedent exists to show with any near certainty that no way will be found for it to ‘succeed.’ Russia has apparently placed its bet that it won’t succeed, in regards to the MH17 case.

Russia’s game seems to be: In the short term, we’ll suffer contempt from the West’s suckers while Western leaders keep on doing this; but, the longer the West’s leaders do that, the worse the outcome will be for those leaders.

So: will that game on Russia’s part work? The precedents don’t look favorable:

After George W. Bush kept lying about “Saddam’s WMD,” and became exposed simply by none being found, did his extend-and-pretend on the truth there hurt his Republican Party? They extended the lie so far that even today most Republicans still think that WMD did exist there in 2002 and 2003, and they even think that WMD were subsequently found there — though none of that was at all true. Even in 2015, 51% of Republicans agree with the statement, “American Forces Found an Active Weapons of Mass Destruction Program In Iraq.” (32% of Democrats do. 46% of Independents do.) (40% of Republicans said it was “Definitely not true” or “Probably not true,” but yet even they continued to label themselves as “Republican,” even after their own Party had deceived them for so long on such a crucial matter, which had produced America’s invasion of Iraq.) Despite such brazen lying, the Republican Party still has as many suckers as before. (And, in the Democratic Party, Barack Obama is still overwhelmingly supported, despite being now exposed, to all open-minded people, to be the best asset the Republican Party has had within recent decades.)

Extend-and-pretend can work for a very long time, indeed. Russia’s game could fail. But it might nonetheless be their best chance to win.

If the West’s game succeeds, then the entire world will fail as a result. If some power-group — here, the West’s aristocrats — can get away with lying, no matter how long they persist in it, they might as well own the entire world: the public are then just their slaves. The public might as well have no minds at all. Anyone who accepts a politician who has lied is either an aristocrat or an idiot. There are only a few thousand aristocrats in the world, but there are, it is clear, plenty of idiots — perhaps the majority of people — so that everyone else, the decent people, suffer constantly the many idiots who believe the few aristocrats. That combination is toxic to democracy.

The MH17 case started before the event itself, as Barack Obama’s desperate attempt to get the EU to agree to hiking the economic sanctions against Russia. It succeeded. Now the world is waiting to see what Obama’s long game is, and whether Putin’s long game (which is the only game he’s got) will beat it. Whatever the outcome, it’ll be interesting.

MH-17 one year later

Unz ReviewThis column was written for the Unz Review: http://www.unz.com/tsaker/flight-mh-17-one-year-later/


Over a year has passed since Malaysian Airlines flight MH-17 has been shot out of the skies by somebody, but we still don’t know the truth and all sorts of hypotheses are circulating on the Internet. In the West, the Emperor Barak Ist decreed on the day after the actual shoot-down that the party responsible for this atrocity was, of course, the Novorussians. That is as predictable as it is irrelevant since not a shred of evidence has been presented by anybody in the West. In contrast, the Russians did provide quite a lot of evidence, but it was all immediately dismissed without further ado. Again, this is also as predictable as it is irrelevant. The undeniable fact is that the western narrative about the Ukraine absolutely mandates that either the Russians or the Novorussians shot down MH-17. Any other version is completely unacceptable and therefore shall never be considered, nevermind accepted, by the western politicians and their corporate media.

But for the rest of the world the question remains opened: who shot down MH-17 and how?

The first thing we know is that the Ukrainian traffic air controllers directed MH-17 to fly directly over the combat zone and to lower its altitude. We also know for a fact that there was at least one Ukrainian aircraft in the immediate vicinity of MH-17 that day. This was confirmed both by Russian radar signals and by several local witnesses who saw at least one, possibly two, SU-25 aircraft in the air that day. Finally, we also know that Ukrainian air defense units were present in the area that day and that their radars were active. What nobody saw that day was the kind of large and highly visible smoke plume which would have accompanied any large missile launch, not did anybody hear anything special. Apparently, no missile launch, and yet the Ukrainian radars were active. How come?

I believe that MH-17 was shot down by a Ukrainian SU-25. Critics of this theory have pointed out that the SU-25 is a “close-air-support aircraft” which was designed to fly very low and to engage attacking amour columns, that it was never designed to fly very fast or very high, and the SU-25 does not have a radar or air-to-air missiles. Finally, the cockpit of the SU-25 is not pressurized which means that the pilot cannot fly over 7’000 meter in altitude. This is all quite true. But it also misses the point.

First, while it is true that the cabin of the SU-25 is not pressurized, all a pilot needs to do is use a mask to supply him with oxygen. The aircraft itself can easily fly well over the 7’000 meter limit. It is true that the speed of the aircraft is inadequate to intercept a large civilian jet flying at its cruising speed. The SU-25 engines were never designed to fly high and while they can be made to bring the aircraft over 7’000 meters, they cannot develop enough speed in this rarefied atmosphere. But what the SU-25 can do is carry a R-60 infrared-guided missile. Not only does such a missile not require an engagement radar, but it’s speed is over 3’000 kilometers per hour, way faster than any civilian airliner. The problem with the missile, however, is that it’s range is short, about 8’000 meters.

The SU-25 does not have a radar capable of detecting a civilian airliners and guiding the SU-25 towards it. But the Buk missile radar battery definitely does. Since the course of the MH-17 was known well in advance, all the Ukrainians had to do was the keep one or two SU-25 loitering at low altitude under the air corridor which MH-17 would take and wait for the Buk missile operators guide the best placed SU-25 towards the airliner at the appropriate moment. All the pilot would have to do when given the signal was to sharply climb towards MH-17 and get inside the missile’s flight envelope (in this case within less than 8 kilometers of MH-17) and then fire off his R-60 missile. At that point, the missile would guide itself towards the biggest heat source of the aircraft – one of the engines.

The R-60 is a rather small missile and it would never be able to destroy a large airliner like the Malaysia Airways Boeing 777. But the R-60 is more than capable to destroy one of the Boeing’s engines. At this point, the airliner would rapidly lose speed and enter into a sharp turn while the pilots would be trying to figure out what happened, extinguish a burning engine and compensate for the increased drag. This is exactly what was observed on radars, by the way. The rapid loss of speed and altitude would make the Boeing easy prey for the SU-25 which has a powerful cannon on board which would then easily catch up and finish off the attack with a volley of 30mm cannon fire. Having finished off it’s target, the SU-25 would then sharply turn and return to its base. This is exactly what the Russian radars saw.

One might wonder why the Ukrainian would use a close air support aircraft like the SU-25 instead of a dedicated interceptor like the SU-27 or a fighter like the MiG-29. Here again, the explanation is very simple: not only does the Ukraine have many more SU-25s than SU-27s or MiG-29s, but these would also be very conspicuous to any witness. In contrast, the one (or, possibly two) SU-25s tasked with the destruction of MH-17 would be very easy to conceal in the eastern Ukraine and on any airfield. It is precisely because the SU-25 would be an unlikely aircraft to be given such a mission that it is the perfect aircraft to execute what is a textbook example of a false flag attack.

As for the Buk, it is such a big and conspicuous missile system that it is impossible to hide. Furthermore, had such a missile been fired broad daylight, the launch would have been clearly seen for many miles around. However, as long as all the Buk battery was doing is guiding the SU-25 towards MH-17 nobody would have noticed it. Nobody except the Russian, NATO and the USA, of course.

As somebody who has personally monitored military and civilian air traffic over Europe, I can attest to the fact that several militaries in Europe are constantly monitoring the entire airspace between the Atlantic and the Urals. These countries include the US and NATO. This is especially true for a battle zone. In fact, US and Russian AWACS aircraft are always present when a conflict occurs anywhere near Europe. They have been monitoring the war in the Persian Gulf, the war in Bosnia and Croatia, the war in Afghanistan and many other conflicts. Besides their AWACS, the Americans and Russians also use their space based satellites to monitor any conflict zone. Of course, neither side is willing to share all the detailed information it has, but the real problem here is political: the US won’t share anything at all because of the need to protect the regime in Kiev while anything the Russians would share will be immediately dismissed as “propaganda” (which is exactly what happened with the little the Russians did share).

I would add here that if had been the Novorussians who had shot down MH-17 the US could easily have proven it just as they have done it with KAL007 in 1983. In fact, in the 20 years which separate us from the shooting down of KAL007 US intelligence capabilities have considerably improved, so I would expect the US could provide much more data than just radio intercepts. And yet the US provided exactly *nothing*. There is only one logical possibility for that otherwise bizarre US refusal to provide any data at all: the US points to the “wrong” party. In other words, the fact that the US is not releasing any data all all is, by itself, an indirect proof that the Ukrainians did it.

As for the Ukrainians themselves they, of course, know *exactly* what happened and there is no need for them to “investigate” anything. So there is really nothing left to investigate. The Ukrainian did it and the West will never admit it.

End of story.

The Saker

[size=18pt]Dutch media sue govt, demand it release full info on MH17 crash[/size]
Published time: 8 Oct, 2015 19:31
Edited time: 8 Oct, 2015 19:38

© Antonio Bronic
© Antonio Bronic / Reuters
16681
Three Dutch media companies have filed a joint lawsuit against the country’s Security and Justice Ministry, demanding that it disclose more documents relating to the MH17 catastrophe investigation after the ministry’s refusal to release the information.
The Netherlands Broadcasting Foundation (NOS); the Dutch subsidiary of the European TV, radio and production company RTL Group; and the Dutch daily Volkskrant have joined forces to appeal the Netherlands Security and Justice Ministry’s refusal to make public “many documents” concerning the Malaysian Airlines MH17 crash in Eastern Ukraine last year, NOS said in a press release.

The three media companies had previously appealed to the ministry separately, asking it to disclose MH17 investigation data based on the Freedom of Information Law (WOB). The aim of the companies was to bring to light the details of the tragedy, as well as to reconstruct the actions of Dutch officials after the catastrophe.

READ MORE: E. Ukrainian self-defense hands over MH17 debris to Dutch investigators, following RT documentary

The three media companies asked for the reports of ministerial and other official committees that were involved in the MH17 investigation to be released. In response to the media outlets’ request, the ministry reportedly released about 575 documents related to the MH17 case, including the correspondence of the members of the national crisis group that was formed immediately after the tragedy.


National day of mourning for the victims killed in Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 plane disaster, in Schiphol © Cris Toala Olivares / Reuters
However, the media companies called the result of their requests “disappointing” in statements published on their websites. They said the ministry refused to release many of the MH17-related documents and rendered lots of other documents unreadable by blurring large pieces in them.

READ MORE: ‘So it WAS Putin?’ Fleet Street again twists MH17 coverage

Peter Klein, deputy senior editor of Dutch RTL News, said he was “frustrated” with the government’s attempts to blur over the truth with the "black marker policy.”

“It seems to me that [such actions] are unworthy of an open, democratic society,” he said in the RTL press release.

The Netherlands National Coordinator for Security and Counterterrorism, Dick Schoof, who released the documents after the request of the media companies, said that the disclosure of the documents that had not been made public could lead to deterioration of relations with "some countries and international organizations,” as well as damage the reputation of “some persons.”

Even the objection procedure launched by the media outlets has changed nothing in the ministry’s decision. NOS, RTL and Volkskrant have now undertaken joint legal action, asking the Utrecht District Court to launch an appeal for all of them within a single lawsuit, according to NOS press release.

READ MORE: MH17 investigators to RT: No proof east Ukraine fragments from ‘Russian’ Buk missile

The three companies have launched the joint appeal procedure as they claim they want to emphasize that transparency is of crucial importance in the MH17 case.

“Given the social impact of the MH17 plane crash as well as many questions raised by the relatives [of the victims of the catastrophe], it is vital that the government’s actions and efforts in the aftermath of this disaster should be transparent,” Philippe Remarque, editor-in-chief of De Volkskrant, said in the company’s press release.

"For journalists, this openness is essential for monitoring the activities of the government," he said.

READ MORE: MH17 probe not truly independent and intl tribunal aimed at hiding its ineffectiveness – Lavrov

Marcel Gelauff, editor-in-chief at NOS, said the wider public interest would be served by the publication of the documents: “It is not just about the families of the victims but also about the actions of the Dutch government and the political situation in Europe.”

“Finding out the causes [of the MH17 crash] and bringing the perpetrators of the attack on the plane to justice is a top priority,” Peter Klein said in the RTL press release.

“However, it is also important that the actions of politicians and government officials in the aftermath of the catastrophe could be accurately reconstructed,” he added.


© Maxim Zmeyev / Reuters
READ MORE: Dutch Safety Board asks for RT’s assistance in MH17 probe after documentary

It is still unknown when the court hearing will take place. The media outlets hope it will be before the end of the year.

Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17, heading from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, crashed in Eastern Ukraine on July 17, 2014, killing all 298 people on board. The Dutch Safety Board (DSB) has been heading an international investigation into the cause of the crash since a large number of passengers on the flight were Dutch citizens.

The DSB is scheduled to present its final report on the causes of crash on October 13.

Lalasticlala Oga, is there any reason why this thread hasn't made the front page?

You will notice a trend: Russia has been the only country that has consistently asked for an open investigation headed by an independent body into the shooting down of MH17. The U.S., Ukraine and others on the other hand have had this entire "investigation" shrouded in secrecy. They have failed to investigate evidence or findings provided by the Russians (or other independent bodies) and neither has the U.S. even provided ANY on it's part!

These are the facts:

- Details of Flight Data Recorder and the Voice Cockpit Recorder are yet to be revealed.

- The tapes of the conversation between Air Traffic Control and MH17 were confiscated by the Ukrainian SBU and remain hidden to this day

- The U.S. hasn't provided ANY evidence whatsoever to support their immediate and frenzied accusation of Russia and the separatists as being responsible for shooting down MH17. What we have had so far are citations of "social media", "common sense" "unverified", "unconfirmed" evidence. Here again is the video of then U.S. State Department Spokesperson, Marie Harf (I believe was fired from the post for such a horrible job ) fumbling and mumbling, unable to butress the accusations the U.S. had leveled against Russia.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQRvINebeok

- One of such social media evidence that Ms Marie Harf referenced to were the alleged videos of BUK missile batteries being scurried back to Russia. These images if you recollect were plastered all over Western news media as evidence that Russia used a BUK battery to shoot down MH17 - not minding that a workable BUK missile battery actually requires three separate units to function as a whole (The radar acquisition unit, the command center and the missile batteries itself) These images however have all been debunked and proven to be missile batteries that actually belong to the Ukranian Army.

- Another social media evidence that Uncle Sam then desparately hinged its case on was the "intercepted" audio recording of separatists supposedly rejoicing over the shooting down of the plane. As shown in earlier posts in this thread, this has also been discredited and outed as a fake as the audio recording wasn't one composite frame and what's more, the date stamp on it shows that it was recorded a day before MH17 was shot down! Talk about bumbling SBU operatives and their CIA counterparts!

Now, tell me, who has something to hide! The final report from the "investigative" team is two days time, I believe. Let's see how they spin the report



[size=18pt] Moscow asks UN aviation agency to intervene into MH17 probe - report[/size]
Published time: 11 Oct, 2015 16:32

© Maxim Zmeyev
© Maxim Zmeyev / Reuters
8782921
Russia has appealed to the head of the UN aviation agency to intervene in the investigation into the MH17 crash in Ukraine to prevent the Dutch experts in charge from ignoring the findings of their Russian counterparts, according to a new media report.

The Deputy Chief of Russia’s Federal Air Transport Agency, Oleg Storchevoy, sent a letter to Olumuyiwa Benard Aliu (Nigerian born??), the head of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), after becoming acquainted with a draft of the final report by the Dutch Safety Board (DSB), which is heading the probe. This was revealed by Malaysian newspaper the New Straits Times on Sunday.

The letter, received by the ICAO on September 16, states that the DSB ignored “comprehensive information” provided by the Russian side and relating to the downing of the Boeing 777 over war-torn Eastern Ukraine on July 17, 2014, the media report said. In the letter, Storchevoy said that, in conducting its investigation, the DSB had violated the principle of “sequence of conclusions,” one of the most fundamental rules when conducting probes into air crashes.

He went on to explain that, instead of conducting its investigation in a logical order, by first examining the damage to the airplane and then, based on this analysis, drawing conclusions as to its cause and source, the DSB had begun with an assumed hypothesis, and worked backward to demonstrate that the evidence met the criteria necessary to prove their preconceived conclusion.

READ MORE: Dutch media sue govt, demand it release full info on MH17 crash

He stated that the DSB steered the investigation to prove that the aircraft was destroyed by a BUK missile launched from a certain location.

“This is before any research into the characteristics of the warhead which brought down the plane was done. The basic data and methods of identifying where the missile was fired from were also not explained by the DSB,” the letter said, as quoted by the New Straits Times.

The US and EU blame Eastern Ukrainian rebels, who were fighting government forces in the area at the time, for downing the plane with a BUK missile system provided by Russia. The claims have been repeatedly denied by both the rebel militias and Moscow, which have urged the West to wait for the official results of the investigation.
[img]http://twitter.com/RT_com/status/649501109464211456/photo/1[/img]

During two meetings with the DSB, Almaz-Antey, the designer and producer of BUK missile systems, declassified the specifications of its rockets - the 9M38 and 9M38M1 surface-to-air missile systems to aid the inquiry, the letter said.

The details provided by Almaz-Antey included technical specifications, flight and ballistics characteristics, launch parameters, algorithms governing the detonator and characteristics of the warhead, the report said.

Storchevoy added that the Russian arms maker also provided detailed data describing the damage that would have been incurred by the Boeing had it been hit by a BUK missile, but the DSB refused to consider any of this information, as well as other Russian findings.

“All these detailed calculations were ignored by the DSB. As a result, the DSB arrived at conclusions that contradict common sense and are not consistent with the design of this weapons system,” he said.

He added that the DSB draft report also had discrepancies with regards to the metallurgical properties of the missile and size of the warhead.

“According to the [DSB] calculations, the weight of the warhead was no more than 33kg, and the main warhead was equipped with between 3,000 and 4,000 ‘pre-formed fragments’ that weighed around 3g each. These do not correspond with the BUK at all.”

READ MORE: MH17 investigators to RT: No proof east Ukraine fragments from ‘Russian’ Buk missile

According to the Russian side, the Dutch experts also failed to properly document and examine the metal fragments found at the crash site in Eastern Ukraine.

“[The fragments] were submitted half a year later, after the investigation began. As a result, a year after the accident, there is no proof to connect the pre-formed fragments with missiles of any type.”

“Taking the abovementioned into consideration, there is no proof that this aircraft was destroyed by the BUK rocket,” he concluded.

The Netherlands was put in charge of the probe because the majority of the 298 people who died in the crash were Dutch citizens. The Dutch have been heading two international investigations into the crash: a criminal inquiry and the probe into the crash’s causes (the latter headed by the DSB).

The DBS earlier announced that it would release the long-awaited final report on October 13 this year.

The Dutch Safety Board has released its final report on what was responsible for the downing of flight MH17. Their findings conclude that a Buk missile particularly one of the 9M38-series missile with a 9N314M warhead - still in use only by the Ukrainian Army; as Russia has decommissioned its remaining ones in 2011 - did it.

The Saker's and Colonel Cassad;s hypotheses, as you can see from earlier posts within this thread, are that MH17 was brought down by a combined salvo of a R-60 surface to surface missile and 30mm cannon fire from a SU-25 or similar aircraft.

Almaz-Antey, the manufacturer of the Buk missile system believes that a Buk 9M38-series missile brought down MH17. This is in concurrence with the findings of the Dutch Safety Board. The only variance between the reports of Almaz-Antey and that of the DSB is the additional information provided by Almaz-Antey which puts the area of launch of this missile in Zaroschenskoye, an area controlled by the Ukrainian junta.

It is worthy to note that Almaz-Antey today also held a press conference a few hours before the DSB held it's, in which Almaz-Antey's findings were presented; including a video of a full scale experiment of a Buk missile downing a commercial plane (in this case a decommissioned Il-86 was used in place of a Boeing 777) was presented.

So in conclusion:

1. A Buk missile was used. It's a Russian made missile just as an AK is Russian made, so do not be fooled by the mainstream media that plasters "Russian Missile Responsible!!" in their headlines designed to sway public opinion into believing that Russia or the separatist were responsible for firing the missile. No blame has been apportioned and the culprit has not been identified. As a matter of fact, the only blame that has been apportioned is to the Ukranian authorities who re-directed a commercial airline over a war zone.

2. The contents of the Data Flight Recorder and the Cockpit Voice Recorder remains unknown. These like the confiscated tape recordings between the Air Traffic Control and MH17 remain classified!

3. The U.S. hasn't provided ANY evidence whatsoever to support their immediate and frenzied accusation of Russia and the separatists as being responsible for shooting down MH17. What we have had so far are citations of "social media", "common sense" "unverified", "unconfirmed" evidence. Here again is the video of then U.S. State Department Spokesperson, Marie Harf (Whom I believe was fired from the post for such a horrible job ) fumbling and mumbling, unable to butress the accusations the U.S. had leveled against Russia.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQRvINebeok


Mr John Kerry's remarks made some days after the shooting down of MH17 in which he categorically stated that the U.S. had satellite images and the heat signature of the BUK missile that was used by the separatist, non-surprisingly hasn't been backed up with any evidence. These elusive satellite images haven't materialized

4. One of the social media evidence that Ms Marie Harf referenced to were the alleged videos of BUK missile batteries being scurried back to Russia. These images if you recollect were plastered all over Western news media as evidence that Russia used a BUK battery to shoot down MH17 - not minding that a workable BUK missile battery actually requires three separate units to function as a whole (The radar acquisition unit, the command center and the missile batteries itself) These images however have all been debunked and proven to be missile batteries that actually belong to the Ukrainian Army.

5. Another social media evidence that Uncle Sam then desperately hinged its case on was the "intercepted" audio recording of separatists supposedly rejoicing over the shooting down of the plane. As shown in earlier posts in this thread, this has also been discredited and outed as a fake as the audio recording wasn't one composite frame and what's more, the date stamp on it shows that it was recorded a day before MH17 was shot down! Talk about bumbling SBU operatives and their CIA counterparts!

[size=18pt]Russian missile killed pilots and cut jet in half but passengers could have been conscious for up to a minute as plane plunged, reveals official report into MH17 downed over Ukraine [/size]
Dutch investigators release final report into disaster that killed 298 people as jet flew over Ukraine in July last year
Officials unveiled a ghostly reconstruction of front section of the jet using fragments recovered from the crash site
Also released video demonstrating how missile exploded inches from the cockpit, breaking off the front of the plane
Report says 'it can't be ruled out some occupants remained conscious' during the 60 to 90 seconds before crash
Investigators say the Boeing 777 was hit by a Russian-made BUK missile fired from rebel-held territory in Ukraine
Russian minister says report was 'an obvious attempt to draw a biased conclusion and carry out political orders'

Passengers on flight MH17 may have been conscious for up to a minute as the jet plunged to Earth after being hit by a missile, an official report found.
Dutch investigators said the Russian-made BUK rocket exploded just inches from the cockpit, killing the pilots and breaking off the front of the plane.
The missile's impact was instantly fatal only to the three crew members in the flight deck of Malaysia Airlines jet, the Dutch Safety Board report said.
Other crew and the passengers would have died due to decompression, reduced oxygen levels, extreme cold, powerful airflow and flying objects.
But painting a horrifying scenario, the report said 'it cannot be ruled out that some occupants remained conscious' during the 60 to 90 seconds before the plane crashed.

Doomed: Dutch air crash investigators released a video demonstrating how a Russian-made BUK missile detonated just inches from the MH17 cockpit, killing the pilots and breaking off the front of the plane


Destroyed: The warhead exploded to the left of the cockpit, causing it to break off as it was showered with fragments of metal and the Boeing 777 broke up in mid-air, the Dutch Safety Board found


Blasted: The official Dutch Safety Board report says a missile exploded less than 3ft outside the cockpit


The 15-month Dutch-led inquiry said the plane was hit by a Russian-made BUK surface-to-air missile fired from rebel-held territory in Ukraine

This appeared to contradict earlier information given to relatives who were told at a briefing in The Hague that their loved ones would have died very soon after the missile exploded.
The 15-month Dutch-led inquiry said the plane was hit by a Russian-made BUK surface-to-air missile fired from rebel-held territory over eastern Ukraine.
A total of 298 people, including 10 Britons, were killed when the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 was downed over territory where pro-Moscow separatists operated on July 17 last year.
The report by the Dutch Safety Board gives a horrifying glimpse into what the victims faced before they all died.
It says the missile fragments struck the plane at speeds of 2,800-5,600mph, 'tearing off the cockpit' and sending a 'pressure wave' throughout the plane a few milliseconds later.

The missile explosion also caused a 'deafening sound wave' and the airplane's sudden deceleration, then speeding up as it fell to Earth, may have 'caused dizziness, nausea and loss of consciousness.'
The board said it is likely people 'were barely able to comprehend the situation in which they found themselves... no indications were found that point to any conscious actions' such as text messages sent on mobile phones.
Some MH-17 victims were found without clothes on the ground. The report said the 'powerful airflow' ripped them from their bodies.
One passenger was found wearing an oxygen mask, but it was 'unclear how the mask got there,' the board said.
After the report's release, Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte has called on Russia to fully co-operate with the criminal investigation into the crash.
Commenting for the first time on the Dutch Safety Board's final report, Mr Rutte said that a key priority 'is now tracking down and prosecuting the perpetrators'.
He said the DSB report 'is a new element and undoubtedly an important building block' in the international criminal investigation that is being led by Dutch prosecutors and detectives.
Dutch prosecutors leading the criminal investigation later said they had identified 'persons of interest', but did not identify them.

Crumpled: The reconstructed wreckage of MH17 is seen at the presentation of the final report into the crash


The Dutch Safety Board said the missile's impact was instantly fatal only to the three crew members in the cockpit of Malaysia Airlines jet


Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3270355/Doomed-flight-MH17-shot-Russian-BUK-missile-fired-rebel-held-territory-eastern-Ukraine-Dutch-investigators-set-rule.html#ixzz3oTcvoH5Y
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook

[size=18pt]MH-17: The Dog Still Not Barking[/size]
October 13, 2015


Exclusive: The dog not barking in the Dutch report on the shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 is the silence regarding U.S. intelligence information that supposedly had pinned down key details just days after the crash but has been kept secret, writes Robert Parry.

By Robert Parry

The Dutch Safety Board report concludes that an older model Buk missile apparently shot down Malaysia Airline Flight 17 on July 17, 2014, but doesn’t say who possessed the missile and who fired it. Yet, what is perhaps most striking about the report is what’s not there – nothing from the U.S. intelligence data on the tragedy.

The dog still not barking is the absence of evidence from U.S. spy satellites and other intelligence sources that Secretary of State John Kerry insisted just three days after the shoot-down pinpointed where the missile was fired, an obviously important point in determining who fired it.

On July 20, 2014, Kerry declared on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that “we picked up the imagery of this launch. We know the trajectory. We know where it came from. We know the timing. And it was exactly at the time that this aircraft disappeared from the radar.”

Russian-made Buk anti-missile battery.
Russian-made Buk anti-missile battery.
But such U.S. government information is not mentioned in the 279-page Dutch report, which focused on the failure to close off the eastern Ukrainian war zone to commercial flights and the cause of the crash rather than who fired on MH-17. A Dutch criminal investigation is still underway with the goal of determining who was responsible but without any sign of an imminent conclusion.

I was told by a U.S. intelligence source earlier this year that CIA analysts had met with Dutch investigators to describe what the classified U.S. evidence showed but apparently with the caveat that it must remain secret.

Last year, another source briefed by U.S. intelligence analysts told me they had concluded that a rogue element of the Ukrainian government – tied to one of the oligarchs – was responsible for the shoot-down, while absolving senior Ukrainian leaders including President Petro Poroshenko and Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk. But I wasn’t able to determine if this U.S. analysis was a consensus or a dissident opinion.

Last October, Der Spiegel reported that German intelligence, the BND, concluded that the Russian government was not the source of the missile battery – that it had been captured from a Ukrainian military base – but the BND blamed the ethnic Russian rebels for firing it. However, a European source told me that the BND’s analysis was not as conclusive as Der Spiegel had described.

The Dutch report, released Tuesday, did little to clarify these conflicting accounts but did agree with an analysis by the Russian manufacturer of the Buk anti-aircraft missile systems that the shrapnel and pieces of the missile recovered from the MH-17 crash site came from the 9M38 series, representing an older, now discontinued Buk version.

The report said: “The damage observed on the wreckage in amount of damage, type of damage, boundary and impact angles of damage, number and density of hits, size of penetrations and bowtie fragments found in the wreckage, is consistent with the damage caused by the 9N314M warhead used in the 9M38 and 9M38M1 BUK surface-to-air missile.”

Last June, Almaz-Antey, the Russian manufacturer which also provided declassified information about the Buk systems to the Dutch, said its analysis of the plane’s wreckage revealed that MH-17 had been attacked by a “9M38M1 of the Buk M1 system.” The company’s Chief Executive Officer Yan Novikov said the missile was last produced in 1999.

Who Has This Missile?

The Russian government has insisted that it no longer uses the 9M38 version. According to the Russian news agency TASS, former deputy chief of the Russian army air defense Alexander Luzan said the suspect warhead was phased out of Russia’s arsenal 15 years ago when Russia began using the 9M317 model.

“The 9M38, 9M38M, 9M38M1 missiles are former modifications of the Buk system missiles, but they all have the same warhead. They are not in service with the Russian Armed Forces, but Ukraine has them,” Luzan said.

“Based on the modification and type of the used missile, as well as its location, this Buk belongs to the Armed Forces of Ukraine. By the way, Ukraine had three military districts — the Carpathian, Odessa and Kiev, and these three districts had more than five Buk anti-aircraft missile brigades of various modifications – Buk, Buk-M, Buk-M1, which means that there were more than 100 missile vehicles there.”

But Luzan’s account would not seem to rule out the possibility that some older Buk versions might have gone into storage in some Russian warehouse. It is common practice for intelligence services, including the CIA, to give older, surplus equipment to insurgents as a way to create more deniability if questions are ever raised about the source of the weapons.

For its part, the Ukrainian government claimed to have sold its stockpile of older Buks to Georgia, but Ukraine appears to still possess the 9M38 Buk system, based on photographs of Ukrainian weapons displays. Prior to the MH-17 crash, ethnic Russian rebels in eastern Ukraine were reported to have captured a Buk system after overrunning a government air base, but Ukrainian authorities said the system was not operational, as recounted in the Dutch report. The rebels also denied possessing a functioning Buk system.

As for the missile’s firing location, the Dutch report said the launch spot could have been anywhere within a 320-square-kilometer area in eastern Ukraine, making it hard to determine whether the firing location was controlled by the rebels or government forces. Given the fluidity of the frontlines in July 2014 – and the fact that heavy fighting was occurring to the north – it might even have been possible for a mobile missile launcher to slip from one side to the other along the southern front.

The Dutch report did seek to discredit one alternative theory raised by Russian officials in the days after the shoot-down – that MH-17 could have been the victim of an air-to-air attack. The Dutch dismissed Russian radar data that suggested a possible Ukrainian fighter plane in the area, relying instead of Ukrainian data which the Dutch found more complete.

But the report ignored other evidence cited by the Russians, including electronic data of the Ukrainian government allegedly turning on the radar that is used by Buk systems for targeting aircraft. Russian Lt. Gen. Andrey Kartopolov called on the Ukrainian government to explain the movements of its Buk systems to sites in eastern Ukraine in mid-July 2014 and why Kiev’s Kupol-M19S18 radars, which coordinate the flight of Buk missiles, showed increased activity leading up to the July 17 shoot-down.

The Dutch-led investigation was perhaps compromised by a central role given to the Ukrainian government which apparently had the power to veto what was included in the report. Yet, what may have spoken most loudly in the Dutch report was the silence about U.S. intelligence information. If – as Kerry claimed – the U.S. government knew almost immediately the site where the fateful missile was launched, why has that evidence been kept secret?

Given the importance of the conflict in eastern Ukraine to U.S. intelligence, it was a high-priority target in July 2014 with significant resources devoted to the area, including satellite surveillance, electronic eavesdropping and human assets. In his rush-to-judgment comments the weekend after the crash, Kerry admitted as much.

But the Obama administration has refused to make any of its intelligence information public. Only belatedly did CIA analysts brief the Dutch investigators, according to a U.S. government source, but that evidence apparently remained classified.

The second source told me that the reason for withholding the U.S. intelligence information was that it contradicted the initial declarations by Kerry and other U.S. officials pointing the finger of blame at the ethnic Russian rebels and indirectly at Russian President Vladimir Putin, who stood accused of giving a ragtag bunch of rebels a powerful weapon capable of shooting down commercial airliners.

Despite Russian denials, the worldwide revulsion over the shoot-down of MH-17, killing all 298 people onboard, gave powerful momentum to anti-Putin propaganda and convinced the European Union to consent to U.S. demands for tougher economic sanctions punishing Russia for its intervention in Ukraine. According to this source’s account, an admission that a rogue Ukrainian group was responsible would take away a powerful P.R. club wielded against Russia.

Among the organizations that have implored President Barack Obama to release the U.S. intelligence data on MH-17 is the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, a group of mostly retired U.S. intelligence analysts.

As early as July 29, 2014, just 12 days after the shoot-down amid escalating Cold War-style rhetoric, VIPS wrote, “As intelligence professionals we are embarrassed by the unprofessional use of partial intelligence information. …As Americans, we find ourselves hoping that, if you indeed have more conclusive evidence, you will find a way to make it public without further delay. In charging Russia with being directly or indirectly responsible, Secretary of State John Kerry has been particularly definitive. Not so the evidence.”


But the release of the Dutch report – without any of that data – indicates that the U.S. government continues to hide what evidence it has. That missing evidence remains the dog not barking, like the key fact that Sherlock Holmes used to unlock the mystery of the “Silver Blaze” when the sleuth noted that the failure of the dog to bark suggested who the guilty party really was.



Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com). You also can order Robert Parry’s trilogy on the Bush Family and its connections to various right-wing operatives for only $34. The trilogy includes America’s Stolen Narrative. For details on this offer, click here.

Paul Craig Roberts' thoughts:


[size=18pt]The MH-17 ‘Report’ — Paul Craig Roberts[/size]
October 13, 2015 | Categories: Articles & Columns | Tags: | Print This Article Print This Article
The MH-17 ‘Report’

Paul Craig Roberts

When I read that the report on the downing of the Malaysian airliner over Ukraine was being
put in the hands of the Dutch, I knew that there would be no investigation and no attention to the facts.

And there wasn’t.

I did not intend to write about the report, because Washington’s propaganda has already succeeded, at least in the Western world, in its purpose of laying the blame on Russia. However, the misrepresentation of the Dutch report by Western media, such as NPR, is so outrageous as to make the media the story and not the report.

For example, I just heard NPR’s Moscow correspondent, Corey Flintoff, say that the missile that hit the airliner was fired by Ukrainian separatists who lack the technical ability to operate the system. Therefore, the missile had to have been fired by a Russian.

There is nothing in the Dutch report whatsoever that leads to this conclusion. Flintoff either is
incompetent or lying or he is expressing his view and not the report’s conclusion.

The only conclusion that the report reaches is one that we already knew: if a Buk missile brought down the airliner, it was a Russian-made missile. The Dutch report does not say who fired it.

Indeed, the report places no blame on Russia, but it does place blame on Ukraine for not closing the airspace over the war area. Attorneys have stated in response to the report that families of those killed and the Malaysian airline itself are likely to file lawsuits against Ukraine for negligence.

Of course, there was nothing of this in Flintoff’s report.

As I wrote at the time of the airliner’s destruction, the Western media already had “the-Russians-did-it” story ready the moment the airliner was reported to be shot down. This story was very useful to Washington in hardening its European vassal states into sanctions against Russia, as there was some dissent. What Washington has never explained and the Western media has never asked is: What motive did separatists and Russia have to shoot down a Malaysian airliner?

None whatsoever. The Russian government would never allow such a thing. Putin would have immediately strung up those responsible.

Washington’s story makes no sense whatsoever. Only an idiot could believe it.

What motive did Washington have? Many. The demonization of Russia made it impossible for
European governments to resist or abandon the economic sanctions that Washington is using to
break economic and political relationships between Europe and Russia.

The Russian manufacturer of the Buk missile has proven that if a Buk missile was used, it was an old version that exists only in the Ukraine military. For some years the Russian military has been equipped with a replacement version that has a different signature in its destructive impact. The damage to the Malaysian airliner is inconsistent with the destructive force of the Buk missile in Russian service. The reports were given to the Dutch, but no effort was made to replicate and verify the validity of the tests conducted by the manufacturer of the missile. Indeed, the Dutch report does not even consider whether the airliner was downed by Ukrainian fighter jets. The report is as useless as the 9/11 Commission’s report.

Don’t expect any acknowledgement of this by the Western media, a collection of people who lie for a living.

The reason that the West has no future is that the West has no media, only propagandists for government and corporate agendas and apologists for their crimes. Every day the bought-and-paid-for-media sustains The Matrix that makes Western peoples politically impotent.

The Western media has no independence. An editor of a major German newspaper has written a book, a best-seller published in Germany, in which he states that not only he himself served the CIA as a reliable purveyor of Washington’s lies, but that every significant journalist in Europe doThe MH-17 ‘Report’ — Paul Craig Roberts
October 13, 2015 | Categories: Articles & Columns | Tags: | Print This Article Print This Article
The MH-17 ‘Report’

Paul Craig Roberts

When I read that the report on the downing of the Malaysian airliner over Ukraine was being
put in the hands of the Dutch, I knew that there would be no investigation and no attention to the facts.

And there wasn’t.

I did not intend to write about the report, because Washington’s propaganda has already succeeded, at least in the Western world, in its purpose of laying the blame on Russia. However, the misrepresentation of the Dutch report by Western media, such as NPR, is so outrageous as to make the media the story and not the report.

For example, I just heard NPR’s Moscow correspondent, Corey Flintoff, say that the missile that hit the airliner was fired by Ukrainian separatists who lack the technical ability to operate the system. Therefore, the missile had to have been fired by a Russian.

There is nothing in the Dutch report whatsoever that leads to this conclusion. Flintoff either is
incompetent or lying or he is expressing his view and not the report’s conclusion.

The only conclusion that the report reaches is one that we already knew: if a Buk missile brought down the airliner, it was a Russian-made missile. The Dutch report does not say who fired it.

Indeed, the report places no blame on Russia, but it does place blame on Ukraine for not closing the airspace over the war area. Attorneys have stated in response to the report that families of those killed and the Malaysian airline itself are likely to file lawsuits against Ukraine for negligence.

Of course, there was nothing of this in Flintoff’s report.

As I wrote at the time of the airliner’s destruction, the Western media already had “the-Russians-did-it” story ready the moment the airliner was reported to be shot down. This story was very useful to Washington in hardening its European vassal states into sanctions against Russia, as there was some dissent. What Washington has never explained and the Western media has never asked is: What motive did separatists and Russia have to shoot down a Malaysian airliner?

None whatsoever. The Russian government would never allow such a thing. Putin would have immediately strung up those responsible.

Washington’s story makes no sense whatsoever. Only an idiot could believe it.

What motive did Washington have? Many. The demonization of Russia made it impossible for
European governments to resist or abandon the economic sanctions that Washington is using to
break economic and political relationships between Europe and Russia.

The Russian manufacturer of the Buk missile has proven that if a Buk missile was used, it was an old version that exists only in the Ukraine military. For some years the Russian military has been equipped with a replacement version that has a different signature in its destructive impact. The damage to the Malaysian airliner is inconsistent with the destructive force of the Buk missile in Russian service. The reports were given to the Dutch, but no effort was made to replicate and verify the validity of the tests conducted by the manufacturer of the missile. Indeed, the Dutch report does not even consider whether the airliner was downed by Ukrainian fighter jets. The report is as useless as the 9/11 Commission’s report.

Don’t expect any acknowledgement of this by the Western media, a collection of people who lie for a living.

The reason that the West has no future is that the West has no media, only propagandists for government and corporate agendas and apologists for their crimes. Every day the bought-and-paid-for-media sustains The Matrix that makes Western peoples politically impotent.

The Western media has no independence. An editor of a major German newspaper has written a book, a best-seller published in Germany, in which he states that not only he himself served the CIA as a reliable purveyor of Washington’s lies, but that every significant journalist in Europe does so also.

Obviously, his book has not been translated and published in America.

NPR, like all of Western media, has lost its integrity. NPR claims to be reader-supported. In fact, it is supported by corporations. Pay attention to the ads: “NPR is supported by xyz corporation working to sell you this or that product or service.”

The George W. Bush regime destroyed NPR by appointing two Republican female ideologues to oversee NPR’s public function. The two Republicans succeeded in making job security, not reporting integrity, the motive of NPR journalists.

As a person who worked with President Reagan to end the Cold War and associated nuclear threat, I am dismayed that the Western media has failed life on earth by resurrecting the prospect of nuclear armageddon.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HrfFL88TMGM

Watch. 25 minutes long but worth every minute

DSB report in detail- all 279 pages of it.

http://cdn.onderzoeksraad.nl/documents/report-mh17-crash-en.pdf


Note however these parts that are highlighted.

How convenient eh?

https://consortiumnews.com/2016/01/15/mh-17s-unnecessary-mystery/

[size=18pt]MH-17’s Unnecessary Mystery[/size]
January 15, 2016

Exclusive: Nearly 18 months after Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 crashed in eastern Ukraine, one of the troubling mysteries is why the U.S. government – after rushing to blame Russia and ethnic Russian rebels – then went silent, effectively obstructing the investigation into 298 deaths, writes Robert Parry.

By Robert Parry

As the whodunit mystery surrounding the shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 nears the 1½-year mark, the Obama administration could open U.S. intelligence files and help bring justice for the 298 people killed in eastern Ukraine on July 17, 2014. Instead, a separate mystery has emerged: why has the U.S. government clammed up since five days after the tragedy?

Immediately after the crash, senior Obama administration officials showed no hesitancy in pointing fingers at the ethnic Russian rebels who were then resisting a military offensive by the U.S.-backed Kiev regime. On July, 20, 2014, Secretary of State John Kerry appeared on TV talk shows claiming there was a strong circumstantial case implicating the rebels and their Russian backers in the shoot-down.


Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.

After mentioning some information gleaned from “social media,” Kerry said on NBC’s “Meet the Press”: “But even more importantly, we picked up the imagery of this launch. We know the trajectory. We know where it came from. We know the timing. And it was exactly at the time that this aircraft disappeared from the radar.”


Two days later, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a “Government Assessment,” also citing “social media” seeming to implicate the rebels. Then, this white paper listed military equipment allegedly supplied by Russia to the rebels. But the list did not include a Buk missile battery or other high-powered anti-aircraft missiles capable of striking MH-17, which had been flying at around 33,000 feet.

The DNI also had U.S. intelligence analysts brief a few select mainstream reporters, but the analysts conveyed much less conviction than their superiors may have wished, indicating that there was still great uncertainty about who was responsible.

The Los Angeles Times article said: “U.S. intelligence agencies have so far been unable to determine the nationalities or identities of the crew that launched the missile. U.S. officials said it was possible the SA-11 [the designation for a Russian-made anti-aircraft Buk missile] was launched by a defector from the Ukrainian military who was trained to use similar missile systems.”

That uncertainty meshed somewhat with what I had been told by a source who had been briefed by U.S. intelligence analysts shortly after the shoot-down about what they had seen in high-resolution satellite photos, which they said showed what looked like Ukrainian military personnel manning the battery which was believed to have fired the missile.

There is also an important distinction to make between the traditional “Intelligence Assessment,” which is the U.S. intelligence community’s gold standard for evaluating an issue, complete with any disagreements among the 16 intelligence agencies, and a “Government Assessment,” like the one produced in the MH-17 case.

As former CIA analyst Ray McGovern wrote: “The key difference between the traditional ‘Intelligence Assessment’ and this relatively new creation, a ‘Government Assessment,’ is that the latter genre is put together by senior White House bureaucrats or other political appointees, not senior intelligence analysts. Another significant difference is that an ‘Intelligence Assessment’ often includes alternative views, either in the text or in footnotes, detailing disagreements among intelligence analysts, thus revealing where the case may be weak or in dispute.”

In other words, a “Government Assessment” is an invitation for political hacks to manufacture what was called a “dodgy dossier” when the British government used similar tactics to sell the phony case for war with Iraq in 2002-03.

Demonizing Putin

Yet, despite the flimsiness of the “blame-Russia-for-MH-17” case in July 2014, the Obama administration’s rush to judgment proved critical in whipping up the European press to demonize President Vladimir Putin, who became the Continent’s bete noire accused of killing 298 innocent people. That set the stage for the European Union to accede to U.S. demands for economic sanctions on Russia.
Russian President Vladimir Putin during a state visit to Austria on June 24, 2014. (Official Russian government photo)



The MH-17 case was deployed like a classic piece of “strategic communication” or “Stratcom,” mixing propaganda with psychological operations to put an adversary at a disadvantage. Apparently satisfied with that result, the Obama administration stopped talking publicly, leaving the impression of Russian guilt to corrode Moscow’s image in the public mind.



But the intelligence source who spoke to me several times after he received additional briefings about advances in the investigation said that as the U.S. analysts gained more insights into the MH-17 shoot-down from technical and other sources, they came to believe the attack was carried out by a rogue element of the Ukrainian military with ties to a hard-line Ukrainian oligarch. [See, for instance, Consortiumnews.com’s “Flight 17 Shoot-Down Scenario Shifts” and “The Danger of an MH-17 Cold Case.”]

But that conclusion – if made public – would have dealt another blow to America’s already shaky credibility, which has never recovered from the false Iraq-WMD claims in 2002-03. A reversal also would embarrass Kerry, other senior U.S. officials and major Western news outlets, which had bought into the Russia-did-it narrative. Plus, the European Union might reconsider its decision to sanction Russia, a key part of U.S. policy in support of the Kiev regime.

Still, as the MH-17 mystery dragged on into 2015, I inquired about the possibility of an update from the DNI’s office. But a spokeswoman told me that no update would be provided because the U.S. government did not want to say anything to prejudice the ongoing investigation. In response, I noted that Kerry and the DNI had already done that by immediately pointing the inquiry in the direction of blaming Russia and the rebels.

But there was another purpose in staying mum. By refusing to say anything to contradict the initial rush to judgment, the Obama administration could let Western mainstream journalists and “citizen investigators” on the Internet keep Russia pinned down with more speculation about its guilt in the MH-17 shoot-down.

So, silence became the better part of candor. After all, pretty much everyone in the West had judged Russia and Putin guilty. So, why shake that up?

The Ukrainian Buks

Yet, what has become clear after the initial splurge of U.S. blame-casting is that U.S. intelligence lacked key evidence to support Kerry’s hasty judgments. Despite intensive overhead surveillance of eastern Ukraine in summer 2014, U.S. and other Western intelligence services could find no evidence that Russia had ever given a Buk system to the rebels or introduced one into the area.


Russian-made Buk anti-aircraft missile battery.

Satellite intelligence – reviewed both before and after the shoot-down – only detected Ukrainian Buk missile systems in the conflict zone. One could infer this finding from the fact that the DNI on July 22, 2014, did not allege that Buks were among the weapons systems that Russia had provided. If Russian-supplied Buks had been spotted – and the batteries of four 16-foot-long missiles hauled around by trucks are hard to miss – their presence surely would have been noted.

But one doesn’t need to infer this lack of evidence. It was spelled out in a little-noticed report by the Netherlands’ Military Intelligence and Security Service (MIVD) that was made public last October when the Dutch Safety Board issued its findings on the causes of the doomed MH-17 flight. (Since the flight had originated in Amsterdam and carried many Dutch passengers, Netherlands took a lead role in the investigation.)

Dutch intelligence, which as part of NATO would have access to sensitive overhead surveillance and other relevant data, reported that the only anti-aircraft weapons in eastern Ukraine – capable of bringing down MH-17 at 33,000 feet – belonged to the Ukrainian government.

MIVD made that assessment in the context of explaining why commercial aircraft continued to fly over the eastern Ukrainian battle zone in summer 2014. MIVD said that based on “state secret” information, it was known that Ukraine possessed some older but “powerful anti-aircraft systems” and “a number of these systems were located in the eastern part of the country.”

But the intelligence agency added that the rebels lacked that capacity: “Prior to the crash, the MIVD knew that, in addition to light aircraft artillery, the Separatists also possessed short-range portable air defence systems (man-portable air-defence systems; MANPADS) and that they possibly possessed short-range vehicle-borne air-defence systems. Both types of systems are considered surface-to-air missiles (SAMs). Due to their limited range they do not constitute a danger to civil aviation at cruising altitude.”

MIVD noted that on June 29, 2014, “the Separatists captured a Ukrainian armed forces military base in Donetsk [where] there were Buk missile systems,” a fact that was reported in the press before the crash and attracted MIVD’s attention.

“During the course of July, several reliable sources indicated that the systems that were at the military base were not operational,” MIVD said. “Therefore, they could not be used by the Separatists.”

In other words, it is fair to say – based on the affirmative comments from MIVD and the omissions from the U.S. DNI’s “Government Assessment” – that the Western powers had no evidence that the ethnic Russian rebels or their Russian allies had operational Buk missiles in eastern Ukraine, but Ukraine did.

It also would have made sense that Ukraine would be moving additional anti-aircraft systems close to the border because of a feared Russian invasion as the Ukrainian military pressed its “anti-terrorism operation” against ethnic Russians fighters. They were resisting the U.S.-backed coup of Feb. 22, 2014, which had ousted elected President Viktor Yanukovych, whose political base was in the east.

According to the Dutch Safety Board report, issued last October, a Ukrainian warplane had been shot down by a suspected air-to-air missile (presumably from a Russian fighter) on July 16, 2014, meaning that Ukrainian defenses were probably on high alert. The Russian military also claimed that Ukraine had activated a radar system that is used to guide Buk missiles.

Gunning for Putin?

I was told by the intelligence source that U.S. analysts looked seriously at the possibility that the intended target was President Putin’s official plane returning from a state visit to South America. His aircraft and MH-17 had similar red-white-and-blue markings, but Putin took a more northerly route and arrived safely in Moscow.

A side-by-side comparison of the Russian presidential jetliner and the Malaysia Airlines plane.

Other possible scenarios were that a poorly trained and undisciplined Ukrainian squad mistook MH-17 for a Russian plane that had penetrated Ukrainian airspace or that the attack was willful provocation designed to be blamed on the Russians.

Whoever the culprits and whatever their motive, one point that should not have remained in doubt was where the missile launch occurred. Remember that just three days after the crash, Secretary Kerry had said U.S. intelligence detected the launch and “We know where it came from.”

But last October, the Dutch Safety Board still hadn’t pinned down anything like a precise location. The report could only place the launch site within a 320-square-kilometer area in eastern Ukraine, covering territory then controlled by both Ukrainian and rebel forces. (The safety board did not seek to identify which side fired the fateful missile).

By contrast, Almaz-Antey, the Russian arms manufacturer of the Buk systems, conducted its own experiments to determine the likely firing location and placed it in a much smaller area near the village of Zaroshchenskoye, about 20 kilometers west of the Dutch Safety Board’s zone and in an area under Ukrainian government control.

So, with the firing location a key point in dispute, why would the U.S. government withhold from a NATO ally (and investigators into a major airline disaster) the launch point for the missile? Presumably, if the Obama administration had solid evidence showing that the launch came from rebel territory, which was Kerry’s insinuation, U.S. officials would have been only too happy to provide the data.

A reasonable conclusion from the failure to share this information with the Dutch investigators is that the data does not support the preferred U.S. government narrative. If there’s a different explanation for the silence, the Obama administration has failed to provide it.

Amid the curious U.S. silence, the most significant public finding by Western intelligence is that the only powerful and operational anti-aircraft-missile systems in eastern Ukraine on July 17, 2014, belonged to the Ukrainian military.

Nevertheless, the mainstream “conventional wisdom” remains that either the ethnic Russian rebels or the Russians themselves shot down MH-17 and have sought to cover up their guilt.

Some of this certainty comes from the simpleminded game of repeating that Buk missiles are “Russian-made,” which is true but irrelevant to the issue of who fired the missiles, since the Ukrainian military possesses Russian-made Buks.

But much of this “group think” can be credited to the speed with which the Obama administration got its narrative out immediately citing dubious “social media” and exploiting the West’s disdain toward Russian President Putin. He was a ready-made villain for the story.

Lying First

A similar case occurred in 1983 when Korean Airlines Flight 007 penetrated deeply into Soviet territory and was pursued by a Soviet fighter that – after issuing warnings that were ignored – shot the plane down believing it was an enemy military aircraft. Though the Soviets quickly realized they had made a terrible mistake, the Reagan administration wanted to use the incident to paint the “evil empire” in the evilest of tones.

So, Reagan’s propagandists edited the ground-control intercepts to make it appear that the Soviets had committed willful murder, a theme that was presented to the United Nations and was gullibly lapped up by the mainstream U.S. news media.

The fuller story only came out in 1995 with a book entitled Warriors of Disinformation by Alvin A. Snyder, who had been director of the U.S. Information Agency’s television and film division. He described how the tapes were edited “to heap as much abuse on the Soviet Union as possible.”

In a boastful but frank description of the successful disinformation campaign, Snyder noted that “the American media swallowed the U.S. government line without reservation. Said the venerable Ted Koppel on the ABC News ‘Nightline’ program: ‘This has been one of those occasions when there is very little difference between what is churned out by the U.S. government propaganda organs and by the commercial broadcasting networks.'”

Snyder concluded, “The moral of the story is that all governments, including our own, lie when it suits their purposes. The key is to lie first.”

In the case of MH-17, however, the falsehoods and deceptions are not simply some spy-vs.-spy propaganda game of gotcha, but rather obstruction of justice in a mass murder investigation. Whatever evidence the Obama administration has, it should have long since been made available to the investigators, but – so far – the official Dutch reports have indicated no such assistance.

While the U.S. government maintains its official silence, the Russian manufacturer has tried to provide details about the functioning of various generations of Buks and challenged the conclusion from the Dutch Safety Board of precisely which model likely brought down MH-17. The Dutch Safety Board cited a 9M38M1 missile using a 9N314M warhead that dispersed “butterfly or bow-tie” fragments that ripped through MH-17’s fuselage.

But Almaz-Antey reported that only older warheads and missiles of the 9M38 type have that signature. “The 9M38M1 missile has no H-shaped striking elements,” Almaz-Antey executive Yan Novikov said. According to the manufacturer, the Russian army had phased 9M38 missiles out years ago, but they remained part of Ukraine’s arsenal.

On Jan. 14, the Russian aviation agency issued its own report critical of the Dutch Safety Board’s understanding of the Buk models, saying that “the strike elements” in the 9N314M warhead did not match the composition of what was recovered from MH-17. Yet, the Dutch-led criminal investigation, which is being partly run by the Ukrainian government, has shown little interest in the Russian information.

‘Citizen Journalists’

The inquiry has been much more welcoming of leads from Bellingcat, a group of “citizen journalists” led by British blogger Eliot Higgins.

Despite having made significant mistakes in an earlier investigation of the Syria-sarin case in 2013 – including misstating the range of suspect missiles – Higgins has been treated as something of a savant on the MH-17 case, basing his analysis on photographs that popped up the Internet purportedly showing a Buk missile system heading eastward from Donetsk shortly before MH-17 was shot down.

Although one of the first lessons anyone learns about the Internet is to be cautious about what you find there, Higgins and Bellingcat relied on the images to conclude that this battery was dispatched from Russia under the command of Russian forces. The bloggers went so far as to send a list of Russian soldiers’ names as suspects to the MH-17 criminal investigators.

There are, of course, problems with this sort of theorizing. First, it assumes that the photos on the Internet are genuine and not cleverly photo-shopped fakes. The Internet can be a devil’s playground for both amateur and professional disinformationists.

But even assuming that the photos are real, there is the question of why – if this cumbersome weapons system was lumbering around eastern Ukraine apparently for weeks – did Western intelligence services not detect it from overhead surveillance either before or after the shoot-down? From Bellingcat’s Internet photos, it appears there was no effort to conceal the Buk system, which curiously was headed eastward toward Russia, not westward from Russia.
Correspondent Michael Unsher of Australia's "60 Minutes" claims to have found the billboard visible in a video of a BUK missile launcher after the shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 on July 17, 2014. (Screen shot from Australia's "60 Minutes"

Correspondent Michael Unsher of Australia’s “60 Minutes” claims to have found the billboard visible in a video of a BUK missile launcher after the shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 on July 17, 2014. (Screen shot from Australia’s “60 Minutes”)

Higgins also directed an Australian TV film crew to the supposed site in Luhansk where the Buk battery, minus one missile, supposedly made its getaway back into Russia. However, the location that the Australian crew filmed clearly was the wrong place. None of the landmarks matched up, but this journalistic fraud did nothing to diminish Bellingcat’s sterling reputation with mainstream Western news outlets which routinely repeat the group’s allegations. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “A Reckless Stand-upper on MH-17.”]

It turns out that it is an excellent business model for “citizen” bloggers to find “evidence” on the Internet to reinforce whatever the U.S. government’s propagandists are claiming. Since the U.S. government’s credibility is shaky at best, young hip Internet readers are more inclined to trust what they hear from bloggers – and when the bloggers echo what Washington claims, the mainstream media and well-funded think tanks will join in the applause.

A screen shot of the roadway where the suspected BUK missile battery passes after the shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 on July 17, 2014. (Image from Australian “60 Minutes” program)

Latest Speculation

Earlier this month, Bellingcat’s speculation identifying Russian soldiers as MH-17 suspects based on their assignment to a Buk battery was splashed across the international press, including Dutch television, London’s Telegraph and the British Guardian. The U.S.-funded Radio Free Europe/ Radio Liberty headlined its story, “Russian Soldiers Said Involved in Downing of MH17 Airliner,” complete with photos of Russian soldiers with their eyes blacked out, courtesy of Bellingcat.

“The Britain-based Bellingcat group said it had identified up to 100 Russian soldiers who may have knowledge of the movements of the Buk missile launcher that destroyed the Boeing 777 on July 17, 2014, killing all 298 on board,” RFE/RL reported, citing a quote that Higgins gave to the Telegraph: “We have the names and photos of the soldiers in the June convoy who traveled with the MH17 Buk, their commanders, their commanders’ commanders, etc.”

Higgins told Dutch TV channel NOS that Belligcat believed that at least 20 soldiers in an air-defense unit based in Kursk “probably” either fired the missile or know who fired it.

The Dutch-led prosecution team, which collaborates with the Ukrainian government and nations that suffered large numbers of deaths from the crash including Australia and Malaysia, welcomed the Bellingcat information and promised to “seriously study it.”

Not that the prosecution team has asked or appears interested, but one could also give the sleuths a list of Americans who almost certainly have knowledge about who fired the missile and from exactly where: CIA Director John Brennan, DNI James Clapper, Secretary of State John Kerry and President Barack Obama.

Any one of those officials could end the strange silence that has enveloped the U.S. government’s knowledge about the MH-17 shoot-down since five days after the tragedy and – by doing so – perhaps they could finally bring some clarity and justice to this mystery.

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).

Sorry for wasting your time all this while.

Mysteries solved:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3463835/The-disappearance-MH370-shooting-MH17-masterminded-Vladimir-Putin-aviation-expert-claims.html

“We picked up the imagery of this launch. We know the trajectory. We know where it came from. We know the timing, and it was exactly at the time that this aircraft disappeared from the radar,” said US State Secretary John Kerry in an interview with David Gregory of NBC's Meet the Press in July 2014


Dutch MPs slam secrecy, question lack of evidence in MH17 investigation
Published time: 3 Mar, 2016 02:34
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© Maxim Zmeyev / Sputnik
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Dutch lawmakers have questioned the course of the investigation into the MH17 crash in Ukraine, highlighting innuendos in the Dutch Safety Board report, and lack of raw data despite US claims of picking up “imagery” as the jet disappeared from radars.
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Dutch MPs have held a parliamentary debate on the investigation into the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 in eastern Ukraine on July 17, 2014 that killed all 298 on board, most of them citizens of the Netherlands.

In particular, the Tuesday discussion focused on the final report into the causes of the incident issued by the Dutch Safety Board last October, and the recent chief prosecutor’s letter which revealed the investigation has no raw radar data and useful footage and satellite images of the missile launch.

During the debate, PM Mark Rutte’s government insisted that there was already enough information for a criminal investigation into the crash, while Dutch opposition lawmakers questioned innuendos and a lack of firm evidence.

Among the questions raised by Dutch MPs was an issue concerning raw radar data and satellite imagery that the United States claimed to have in possession and which it called strong evidence.

“We picked up the imagery of this launch. We know the trajectory. We know where it came from. We know the timing, and it was exactly at the time that this aircraft disappeared from the radar,” said US State Secretary John Kerry in an interview with David Gregory of NBC's Meet the Press in July 2014.

The reason why Dutch investigators apparently haven’t seen that data was questioned during the parliamentary debate: “So our question is, why has not been asked what information they had because Kerry literally says: we saw it “disappear from the radar” screens,” said Pieter Omtzigt of the of the Christian Democratic Appeal.

The Dutch Minister of Security and Justice Ard van der Steur in response argued that the Safety Board on one hand “stated in their report that they themselves did not ask for this data” while on the other the investigators “were given insight into the information distributed to the by the Americans via the Military Intelligence Services.”

Meanwhile Washington officials have failed to clarify to what extent alleged US intelligence was shared with the investigation.

“I believe we have collaborated with the Dutch in their investigation,” State Department spokesperson Mark Toner told RT’s Gayane Chichakyan. “I just don’t know to what level we shared information with them, I’d have to look into that.”

(Y'all remember Mark "Shut Up or Put Up" Toner don't ya??)


The evidence provided by Ukraine has also raised questions during the debate, in particular the lack of raw radar data, which was unavailable because the military radar was allegedly switched off and the primary civil radar was allegedly on maintenance, according to Kiev’s claims.

“We know that a part of the information we received from Ukraine is incorrect,” Omtzigt said, referring to Kiev’s conflicting statements and noting that secrecy over the evidence used in the investigation complicates the issue even further.

Meanwhile Henricus van Bommel of the Socialist Party wondered how can it be possible that “Ukraine did not notify the European Air Traffic Organization ‘EuroControl’ about the fact that the radars were switched off, while this should have been done. How do you react to this?”

Bommel also called it “weird” that in contradiction to Washington’s claims of having the imagery of the missile launch, the Public Prosecution Service now admits that no “useful” data exists as the day the MH17 was shot down was “cloudy.”


The Russian side has provided the Dutch Safety Board with all available primary radar data tracing Flight MH17 right after the tragedy, as early as August 2014, according to the deputy head of the Federal Air Transport Agency, Oleg Storchevoy. Moreover the data is stored to this day, and can be provided once again to the relevant authorities if necessary.

However, it remains unclear if the investigators had indeed received “all cooperation and documents needed” for a conclusive probe, Omtzigt added.

“Through the primary rough radar-data a rocket [launch] is very likely to be detected,” Omtzigt said.

“And what is the case? This is the only, the only plane disaster in Europe in the last ten years, where this data is not available to the researchers.”

“Did these strange events lead to an insight of the ministry that not everyone involved was cooperating?” Omtzigt wondered. “Did these countries [the US, Ukraine and Russia] oblige to the UN resolution 2166… did these three countries oblige regarding this radar data?”

Among the topics up for debate was Kiev’s failure to close its airspace for civilian aircraft, and the fact that the Dutch government concealed for six months that it was briefed by Kiev about insecurity of the airspace above eastern Ukraine ahead of MH17 crash, according to the Dutch MPs.

“The [Dutch] government was privy to the information given to diplomats at the Kiev briefing,” said Raymond de Roon of the Party for Freedom. “At the day of the briefing the government knew – the government agencies knew – the ministry of foreign affairs and the ministry of defense knew that planes were shot down above the Ukraine, above a certain altitude.”

“All of this was known, none of it shared with the airlines. This is what should have happened. Can the prime minister vow that this information from here on in will be shared?” he wondered.

Parliamentarians also believe that the investigation into the MH17 disaster is taking too long as nineteen months have passed since the crash.



Some families of the MH17 victims have been trying to take legal action against Ukraine by suing the country and its president for manslaughter by negligence, as it was Kiev’s obligation to close the airspace at the time. Elmar Giemulla, aviation law professor, who is representing several families of the victims told RT that they have filed a lawsuit, however received no clear response from Ukrainian authorities.

“We had filed our lawsuits more than one year ago and we never received response from the court except from the acknowledgment of receipt. We know definitely that our lawsuit arrived at the court but for the time being we have been left completely in darkness by the court,” he said.

“We don’t know if the Ukrainian defendant had received a copy of our lawsuit. We do not know whether the Ukrainian side has responded to our allegations, claims. And we do not know what the court has in mind or whether the court will be treating this lawsuit …”

Any criminal investigation “revolves around evidence” but ultimately, Ukraine is responsible for the safety of its airspace, international lawyer Thomas Sima told RT, reiterating one of the Dutch Safety Board’s conclusions.

“At all levels it sounds though the evidence has been blocked,” Sima said. “From what I understand the Ukraine has not released key radar information… so if evidence is sealed and you are not allowed to see it and other evidence is being withheld, it is going to be hard to make a case and prove it.”

In the meantime the United States may indeed be “rather loathed” to release its intelligence, because raw data might reveal some of the military secrets, Julian Bray, aviation security and airline operation expert told RT.

“There are 101 different reasons why they won’t hand it over, but they have actually opened the door, because they say they have irrefutable proof,” Bray said. “Now, if they have the proof somehow they’re going to need to release it.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w1aX0gXkaRI

The mendacity of the Empire knows no bounds, no shame or conscience. Empire will tell you a bold faced lie in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Empire will call black white even when the entire world sees black. Empire couldn't care any less. Empire's hubris, arrogance and self importance is unbridled and limitless.

Washington refuses to reveal details of cooperation with Dutch investigators over MH-17

Published: 3 Mar 2016 | 20:45 GMT

The US State Department declined to answer questions about what information Washington may have shared with the Dutch authorities in the MH-17 probe. Dutch parliamentarians have criticized the absence of evidence the US said it had about the incident.


Malaysia Airlines Flight MH-17 was shot down over eastern Ukraine on July 17, 2014, killing all 298 on board, most of them citizens of the Netherlands. The Dutch Safety Board released a report into the incident last October, concluding the plane was shot down by a surface-fired anti-aircraft missile. However, recently revealed government correspondence admitted the investigators had no raw radar data, useful footage or satellite images of the missile launch.

Among the questions raised by Dutch MPs was an issue concerning raw radar data and satellite imagery that the United States claimed to have in its possession and which it called strong evidence.

When asked about this data, State Department spokesman John Kirby referred reporters to the Dutch government, insisting only that the US was “working together” with the investigators.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w1aX0gXkaRI

“What kind of data has the US shared with Dutch investigators on the downing of MH-17?” asked RT’s Gayane Chichakyan.

“I’m actually not going to be able to give you a lot of information on that,” Kirby replied. “There’s still an active review going on and I’d refer you to the Dutch government. I’m not going to be able to give you much more detail on that.”

“You haven’t given us any detail, at all. Not ‘much more,’ – there’s none,” objected AP’s diplomatic correspondent Matt Lee.

“We’ve continued to communicate,” Kirby persisted.

“We’re continuing to communicate right now, but I’m not getting any answers, and no one else is here,” Lee shot back. “So what does that mean?”

“It means that we’re cooperating with them and assisting them in their efforts. I’m not going to get into the details of what that is,” Kirby was adamant.

“But that answer means nothing!” Lee said.

“I’ve answered the question,” Kirby replied, referring all further question on the subject to the Dutch government.

Lest you forget:

“We picked up the imagery of this launch. We know the trajectory. We know where it came from. We know the timing, and it was exactly at the time that this aircraft disappeared from the radar,” said US State Secretary John Kerry in an interview with David Gregory of NBC's Meet the Press in July 2014


[size=18pt]The Ever-Curiouser MH-17 Case[/size]

Exclusive: The shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over Ukraine has served as a potent propaganda club against Russia but the U.S. government is hiding key evidence that could solve the mystery, writes Robert Parry.

By Robert Parry

The curious mystery surrounding the shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine on July 17, 2014, gets more curious and more curious as the U.S. government and Dutch investigators balk at giving straightforward answers to the simplest of questions even when asked by the families of the victims.

Adding to the mystery Dutch investigators have indicated that the Dutch Safety Board did not request radar information from the United States, even though Secretary of State John Kerry indicated just three days after the crash that the U.S. government possessed data that pinpointed the location of the suspected missile launch that allegedly downed the airliner, killing all 298 people onboard.


A Malaysia Airways’ Boeing 777 like the one that crashed in eastern Ukraine on July 17, 2014. (Photo credit: Aero Icarus from Zürich, Switzerland)

Although Kerry claimed that the U.S. government knew the location almost immediately, Dutch investigators now say they hope to identify the spot sometime “in the second half of the year,” meaning that something as basic as the missile-launch site might remain unknown to the public more than two years after the tragedy.

The families of the Dutch victims, including the father of a Dutch-American citizen, have been pressing for an explanation about the slow pace of the investigation and the apparent failure to obtain relevant data from the U.S. and other governments.

I spent time with the family members in early February at the Dutch parliament in The Hague as opposition parliamentarians, led by Christian Democrat Pieter Omtzigt, unsuccessfully sought answers from the government about the absence of radar data and other basic facts.

When answers have been provided to the families and the public, they are often hard to understand, as if to obfuscate what information the investigation possesses or doesn’t possess. For instance, when I asked the U.S. State Department whether the U.S. government had supplied the Dutch with radar data and satellite images, I received the following response, attributable to “a State Department spokesperson”: “While I won’t go into the details of our law enforcement cooperation in the investigation, I would note that Dutch officials said March 8 that all information asked of the United States has been shared.”

I wrote back thanking the spokesperson for the response, but adding: “I must say it seems unnecessarily fuzzy. Why can’t you just say that the U.S. government has provided the radar data cited by Secretary Kerry immediately after the tragedy? Or the U.S. government has provided satellite imagery before and after the shootdown? Why the indirect and imprecise phrasing? …

“I’ve spent time with the Dutch families of the victims, including the father of a U.S.-Dutch citizen, and I can tell you that they are quite disturbed by what they regard as double-talk and stalling. I would like to tell them that my government has provided all relevant data in a cooperative and timely fashion. But all I get is this indirect and imprecise word-smithing.”

The State Department spokesperson wrote back, “I understand your questions, and also the importance of the view of these families so devastated by this tragedy. However, I am going to have to leave our comments as below.”

Propaganda Value

This lack of transparency, of course, has a propaganda value since it leaves in place the widespread public impression that ethnic Russian rebels and Russian President Vladimir Putin were responsible for the 298 deaths, a rush to judgment that Secretary Kerry and other senior U.S. officials (and the Western news media) encouraged in July 2014.


Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Once that impression took hold there has been little interest in Official Washington to clarify the mystery especially as evidence has emerged implicating elements of the Ukrainian military. For instance, Dutch intelligence has reported (and U.S. intelligence has implicitly confirmed) that the only operational Buk anti-aircraft missile systems in eastern Ukraine on July 17, 2014, were under the control of the Ukrainian military.

In a Dutch report released last October, the Netherlands’ Military Intelligence and Security Service (MIVD) reported that the only anti-aircraft weapons in eastern Ukraine capable of bringing down MH-17 at 33,000 feet belonged to the Ukrainian government.

MIVD made that assessment in the context of explaining why commercial aircraft continued to fly over the eastern Ukrainian battle zone in summer 2014. MIVD said that based on “state secret” information, it was known that Ukraine possessed some older but “powerful anti-aircraft systems” and “a number of these systems were located in the eastern part of the country.”

The intelligence agency added that the rebels lacked that capability: “Prior to the crash, the MIVD knew that, in addition to light aircraft artillery, the Separatists also possessed short-range portable air defence systems (man-portable air-defence systems; MANPADS) and that they possibly possessed short-range vehicle-borne air-defence systems. Both types of systems are considered surface-to-air missiles (SAMs). Due to their limited range they do not constitute a danger to civil aviation at cruising altitude.”

One could infer a similar finding by reading a U.S. “Government Assessment” released by the Director of National Intelligence on July 22, 2014, five days after the crash, seeking to cast suspicion on the ethnic Russian rebels and Putin by noting military equipment that Moscow had provided the rebels. But most tellingly the list did not include Buk anti-aircraft missiles. In other words, in the context of trying to blame the rebels and Putin, U.S. intelligence could not put an operational Buk system in the rebels’ hands.

So, perhaps the most logical suspicion would be that the Ukrainian military, then engaged in an offensive in the east and fearing a possible Russian invasion, moved its Buk missile systems up to the front and an undisciplined crew fired a missile at a suspected Russian aircraft, bringing down MH-17 by accident.

That was essentially what I was told by a source who had been briefed by U.S. intelligence analysts in July and August 2014. [See, for instance, Consortiumnews.com’s “Flight 17 Shoot-Down Scenario Shifts” and “The Danger of an MH-17 Cold Case.”]

But Ukraine is a principal participant in the Dutch-led Joint Investigation Team (JIT), which has been probing the MH-17 case, and thus the investigation suffers from a possible conflict of interest since Ukraine would prefer that the world’s public perception of the MH-17 case continue to blame Putin. Under the JIT’s terms, any of the five key participants (The Netherlands, Ukraine, Australia, Belgium and Malaysia) can block release of information.

The interest in keeping Putin on the propaganda defensive is shared by the Obama administration which used the furor over the MH-17 deaths to spur the European Union into imposing economic sanctions on Russia.

In contrast, clearing the Russians and blaming the Ukrainians would destroy a carefully constructed propaganda narrative which has stuck black hats on Putin and the ethnic Russian rebels and white hats on the U.S.-backed government of Ukraine, which seized power after a putsch that overthrew elected pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych on Feb. 22, 2014.

Accusations against Russia have also been fanned by propaganda outlets, such as the British-based Bellingcat site, which has collaborated with Western mainstream media to continue pointing the finger of blame at Moscow and Putin – as the Dutch investigators drag their heels and refuse to divulge any information that would clarify the case.

Letter to the Families

Perhaps the most detailed – although still hazy – status report on the investigation came in a recent letter from JIT chief prosecutor Fred Westerbeke to the Dutch family members. The letter acknowledged that the investigators lacked “primary raw radar images” which could have revealed a missile or a military aircraft in the vicinity of MH-17.


Russian-made Buk anti-aircraft missile battery.

Ukrainian authorities said all their primary radar facilities were shut down for maintenance and only secondary radar, which would show commercial aircraft, was available. Russian officials have said their radar data suggest that a Ukrainian warplane might have fired on MH-17 with an air-to-air missile, a possibility that is difficult to rule out without examining primary radar which has so far not been available. Primary radar data also might have picked up a ground-fired missile, Westerbeke wrote.

“Raw primary radar data could provide information on the rocket trajectory,” Westerbeke’s letter said. “The JIT does not have that information yet. JIT has questioned a member of the Ukrainian air traffic control and a Ukrainian radar specialist. They explained why no primary radar images were saved in Ukraine.” Westerbeke said investigators are also asking Russia about its data.

Westerbeke added that the JIT had “no video or film of the launch or the trajectory of the rocket.” Nor, he said, do the investigators have satellite photos of the rocket launch.

“The clouds on the part of the day of the downing of MH17 prevented usable pictures of the launch site from being available,” he wrote. “There are pictures from just before and just after July 17th and they are an asset in the investigation.” According to intelligence sources, the satellite photos show several Ukrainian military Buk missile systems in the area.


Secretary of State John Kerry denounces Russia’s RT network as a “propaganda bullhorn” during remarks on April 24, 2014.

Why the investigation’s data is so uncertain has become a secondary mystery in the MH-17 whodunit. During an appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on July 20, 2014, three days after the crash, Secretary Kerry declared, “we picked up the imagery of this launch. We know the trajectory. We know where it came from. We know the timing. And it was exactly at the time that this aircraft disappeared from the radar.”

But this U.S. data has never been made public. In the letter, Westerbeke wrote, “The American authorities have data, that come from their own secret services, which could provide information on the trajectory of the rocket. This information was shared in secret with the [Dutch] MIVD.” Westerbeke added that the information may be made available as proof in a criminal case as an “amtsbericht” or “official statement.”

Yet, despite the U.S. data, Westerbeke said the location of the launch site remains uncertain. Last October, the Dutch Safety Board placed the likely firing location within a 320-square-kilometer area that covered territory both under government and rebel control. (The safety board did not seek to identify which side fired the fateful missile.)

By contrast, Almaz-Antey, the Russian arms manufacturer of the Buk systems, conducted its own experiments to determine the likely firing location and placed it in a much smaller area near the village of Zaroshchenskoye, about 20 kilometers west of the Dutch Safety Board’s zone and in an area under Ukrainian government control.

Westerbeke wrote, “Raw primary radar data and the American secret information are only two sources of information for the determination of the launch site. There is more. JIT collects evidence on the basis of telephone taps, locations of telephones, pictures, witness statements and technical calculations of the trajectory of the rocket. The calculations are made by the national air and space laboratory on the basis of the location of MH17, the damage pattern on the wreckage and the special characteristics of the rockets. JIT does extra research on top of the [Dutch Safety Board] research. On the basis of these sources, JIT gets ever more clarity on the exact launch site. In the second half of the year we expect exact results.”


Quinn Schansman, a dual U.S.-Dutch citizen killed aboard Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 on July 17, 2014. (Photo from Facebook)

Meanwhile, the U.S. government continues to stonewall a request from Thomas J. Schansman, the father of Quinn Schansman, the only American citizen to die aboard MH-17, to Secretary Kerry to release the U.S. data that Kerry has publicly cited.

Quinn Schansman, who had dual U.S.-Dutch citizenship, boarded MH-17 along with 297 other people for a flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur on July 17, 2014. The 19-year-old was planning to join his family for a vacation in Indonesia.

In a letter to Kerry dated Jan. 5, 2016, Thomas J. Schansman noted Kerry’s remarks at a press conference on Aug. 12, 2014, when the Secretary of State said about the Buk anti-aircraft missile suspected of downing the plane: “We saw the take-off. We saw the trajectory. We saw the hit. We saw this aeroplane disappear from the radar screens. So there is really no mystery about where it came from and where these weapons have come from.”

Although U.S. consular officials in the Netherlands indicated that Kerry would respond personally to the request, Schansman told me this week that he had not yet received a reply from Kerry.

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com

[size=18pt]Kerry Balks at Supplying MH-17 Data[/size]
March 25, 2016
Exclusive: The father of a young American killed aboard Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 in 2014 says Secretary of State Kerry balks at turning over U.S. data that Kerry cited three days after the tragedy in eastern Ukraine, writes Robert Parry.


By Robert Parry

Secretary of State John Kerry has rebuffed a request from the father of the only American citizen killed aboard Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 for Kerry to disclose the radar and other data that he cited in 2014 in claiming to know the precise location of the missile launch that allegedly downed the airliner over eastern Ukraine killing 298 people.

In a letter to Kerry dated Jan. 5, 2016, Thomas Schansman, the father of American-Dutch citizen Quinn Schansman, asked Kerry to turn over that data to aid the investigation seeking to identify who was responsible for shooting down the plane on July 17, 2014. In a letter dated March 7, 2016, but just delivered to Thomas Schansman on Thursday, Kerry expressed his condolences and repeated his claim to know where the missile launch originated, but did not provide new details.


Quinn Schansman, a dual U.S.-Dutch citizen killed aboard Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 on July 17, 2014. (Photo from Facebook)

Kerry wrote, “The assessment I provided to the media three days following the shoot down remains unchanged, and is corroborated by the findings of the Dutch Safety Board [DSB]. Flight 17 was shot down by a BUK surface-to-air missile fired from separatist-controlled territory in eastern Ukraine.”

But Kerry’s assertion is not entirely correct. Despite Kerry’s claim on July 20, 2014 – three days after the shoot-down – to know the location of the missile launch, the Dutch Safety Board reported last October that it could only place the likely launch site within a 320-square-kilometer area that included territory under both government and rebel control. (The safety board did not seek to identify which side fired the fateful missile.)

Why the U.S. government has dragged its heels about supplying the evidence that Kerry claimed to possess just days after the tragedy has become a secondary mystery to the allegations and counter-allegations about whodunit. That Kerry would not even elaborate on that information in response to the father of the lone American victim is even more striking.

In an email to me with Kerry’s letter attached, Thomas Schansman wrote, “the message is clear: no answer on my request to hand over satellite and/or radar data to DSB or public.”

Plus, Kerry’s credibility has come under a darkening cloud because of recent disclosures undermining his repeated claims on Aug. 30, 2013, that “we know” that Syrian government forces were responsible for the Aug. 21, 2013 sarin gas attack outside Damascus. Despite Kerry’s assertions of certainty in that case, he presented no verifiable evidence and it has since been confirmed that the U.S. intelligence community lacked “slam dunk” proof.

Nearly a year after his “we know” performance regarding the Syria-sarin case, Kerry staged a reprise expressing similar certainty about the MH-17 case – again dumping the blame on the target of an intensive U.S. propaganda campaign, this time Russia, which was backing the rebels in eastern Ukraine. Kerry again failed to supply supporting evidence (beyond some dubious references to “social media”).

Cracks in the Story

Also, some of Kerry’s MH-17 assertions have shown cracks as more information has become available. For instance, despite Kerry’s putting the blame on the ethnic Russian rebels and their supporters in Moscow, Western intelligence now says the only functioning Buk anti-aircraft missiles in the area were under the control of the Ukrainian military.

According to Dutch intelligence – and implicitly corroborated by U.S. intelligence – Ukraine’s Buk batteries were the only anti-aircraft missiles in the area capable of hitting a commercial airliner flying at 33,000 feet. That information was contained in a little-noticed Dutch intelligence report last October citing information from the Netherlands’ Military Intelligence and Security Service (MIVD).

MIVD made its assessment in the context of explaining why commercial aircraft continued to fly over the eastern Ukrainian battle zone in summer 2014. MIVD said that based on “state secret” information, it was known that Ukraine possessed some older but “powerful anti-aircraft systems” and “a number of these systems were located in the eastern part of the country.”

MIVD added that the rebels lacked that capacity, having only short-range anti-aircraft missiles and a few inoperable Buk missiles that had been captured from a Ukrainian military base. “During the course of July, several reliable sources indicated that the systems that were at the military base were not operational,” MIVD said. “Therefore, they could not be used by the Separatists.”

U.S. intelligence, which had eastern Ukraine under intensive overhead surveillance in summer 2014, implicitly corroborated MIVD’s conclusion in a U.S. “Government Assessment” released by the Director of National Intelligence on July 22, 2014. It listed weapons systems that Russia had provided the rebels but made no mention of a Buk missile battery.

In other words, based on satellite imagery and other intelligence reviewed both before and after the shoot-down, U.S. and other Western intelligence services could find no proof that Russia had ever given a Buk system to the rebels or introduced one into the area. If Russia had provided a Buk battery – four 16-foot-long missiles hauled around by trucks – it would have been hard to miss.

There was also logic to support the notion that a Ukrainian team may have been responsible for the MH-17 shoot-down. At the time, the Ukrainian military was mounting an offensive against the rebels, who had resisted a U.S.-backed coup on Feb. 22, 2014, which ousted elected President Viktor Yanukovych, who had strong support among Ukraine’s ethnic Russian minority in the east.

As the Ukrainian offensive claimed territory that the rebels had held, the Ukrainian military moved several Buk anti-aircraft missile batteries toward the front, presumably out of concern that Russia might directly intervene to save the rebels from annihilation.

Plus, on July 16, 2014, a Ukrainian warplane was shot down apparently by an air-to-air missile believed fired by a Russian jet, giving reason for the Ukrainian anti-aircraft batteries to be on edge the next day, looking for Russian aircraft intruding into Ukraine’s airspace.

(Another possible scenario, reportedly examined by U.S. intelligence analysts, was that a rogue Ukrainian team working with a hardline oligarch hoped to shoot down Russian President Vladimir Putin’s plane returning from a South American trip at about the same time and with similar markings as MH-17.)

But the evidence – that the only operational Buk batteries were under control of the Ukrainian military – did not fit the U.S. propaganda needs of blaming Russia and the rebels. Any indication that the post-coup Ukrainian government was responsible would instead put the U.S.-backed Kiev regime in a negative light.

So, it makes sense in a “strategic communications” kind of way for Kerry and other U.S. officials to leave the conventional wisdom – blaming Putin and Russia for the 298 deaths – in place for as long as possible. Kerry told Thomas Schansman that he and the other families of victims should expect a long wait before the perpetrators are brought to justice.

Expressing Condolences

In the letter to Thomas Schansman, Secretary Kerry wrote, “As a father myself, I can only begin to imagine the pain and loss you have endured with your son’s tragic passing. My heart goes out to you and your family.”


Secretary of State John Kerry denounces Russia’s RT network as a “propaganda bullhorn” during remarks on April 24, 2014.

Kerry then added, “This investigative work is not easy, and bringing those responsible to justice will not be a quick process. However, Quinn, your family, and the families of all the others who died that day deserve such justice, and we will continue to do everything possible to achieve it.”

But the “everything” doesn’t apparently include releasing the data that Kerry claimed to have just days after the crash.

On July 20, 2014, Kerry appeared on NBC’s “Meet the Press” and declared, “we picked up the imagery of this launch. We know the trajectory. We know where it came from. We know the timing. And it was exactly at the time that this aircraft disappeared from the radar.”

In the letter asking Kerry to release that data, Thomas Schansman noted Kerry’s similar comments to a news conference on Aug. 12, 2014, when the Secretary of State said about the Buk anti-aircraft missile suspected of downing the plane: “We saw the take-off. We saw the trajectory. We saw the hit. We saw this aeroplane disappear from the radar screens. So there is really no mystery about where it came from and where these weapons have come from.”

Yet where the missile launch occurred has remained a point of mystery to the Dutch-led investigation. Last October, the Dutch Safety Board put the missile launch in a 320-square-kilometer area. Almaz-Antey, the Russian arms manufacturer of the Buk systems, conducted its own experiments to determine the likely firing location and placed it in a much smaller area near the village of Zaroshchenskoye, about 20 kilometers west of the DSB’s zone and in an area under Ukrainian government control.

Earlier this month, Fred Westerbeke, the head of the Dutch-led Joint Investigation Team, told the families of the victims that the inquiry had yet to pin down the missile launch site, saying “In the second half of the year we expect exact results.” In other words, on the second anniversary of the shoot-down, the investigators looking into the MH-17 tragedy still might not know what Kerry claimed to know three days afterwards.

[For more on this topic, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Flight 17 Shoot-Down Scenario Shifts”; “The Danger of an MH-17 Cold Case”; and “The Ever-Curiouser MH-17 Case.”]

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com.

What a difference 20 months can make!

[size=16pt]On the morning of July 18, 2014:[/size]




[img]http://nn.by/photos/z_2014_07/putinskilledmyson.jpg[/img]


[size=16pt]This morning:[/size]

Lol.

Someone is misrepresenting a sensational headline as usual. Common sense is definitely not common

www.theguardian.com/media/2016/apr/25/bbc-sunday-express-mh17-ukraine-jets?CMP=share_btn_tw

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/04/25/bbc-says-russian-media-wrong-to-suggest-documentary-shows-mh17-d/

Missy89:
Lol.
Someone is misrepresenting a sensational headline as usual. Common sense is definitely not common

Americanism is simply a form of psychopathy where greed, egomania and a love of violence are manifested in varying degrees of severity. I’ve known many pro-Americans and many are thus because stu.pid and brainwashed by Hollywood and TV, and are totally ignorant of real Amerikan history and society today. They worship a false, idealised, ‘America’. Most of the rest are nastier types who understand that the USA really embodies greed and hegemony, and a predatory way of life where other people are enemies, competition, suckers or prey.

Valeriansteel, Vedaxcool, Mazeltov belong to the former, Missy89 falls into the latter category. Missy 89 in particular has declared her love for "war and destruction"; a manifestation of years of brainwashing and mind controlling drugs serving in the 3rd world-bombing-innocent-people-killing-murder machine known as the United States Military. I have observed over the past couple of months that her (if "she" indeed is a she!) actions and views aren't that of a rationale person ready to take a step back and realize and acknowledge the destruction and carnage that policies and actions of the Hegemon has wrought on the world for the past 70 years or so. "She" scours several threads derailing them; disparaging and insulting fellow contributors whose views run contrary to her pre-packaged lies and distractions labeling such individuals "trolls", "Kremlin bots", "ignorant", "cranks", "tiny brains", "lacking common sense", etc but yet like the "war wh0re" "she" is, "she" keeps storming threads to engage these very same cranks and tiny brains in "intellectual" discourse. Beats me! I guess though when the narrative of what Amerika stands for starts to fall apart, you can't help but scurry in a desperate - but yet increasingly futile - attempt to pick up and put together any shred of legitimacy or credibility left. For newcomers (and gullible ones too) that aren't wary of "her" ways, they are easily swayed by "her" act of showcasing an appreciable knowledge of historical events and to some extent, military strategies and policies which in turn fools them into thinking this demonstrates a person with a balanced and rationale outlook on world matters. "Her" modus operandi has however been exposed in this thread here; https://www.nairaland.com/2945001/did-russia-just-threaten-turkey/3

Missy89 will lie about, twist, justify and rationalize precarious situations orchestrated by or atrocities perpetrated by Amerika or its vassal states:
-Mendacious State Department officials are "only doing their job and lie all the time",
-"The US never wanted Assad out of power,"
-"Someone is misrepresenting a sensational headline as usual" even though that headline is a stark departure from that of 20 months prior when blame was clearly apportioned.
-Etc

Missy89 is the type that would aspire to reach the upper echelons of power so that "she" can declare, like another war wh0re in the person of Madeleine Albright did, "It was worth it", in response to the death of 500,000 Iraqi kids as a result of U.S. sanctions.
Missy89 is nothing more than a meddlesome interloper; nothing more than an emissary of the Empire's lies and propaganda.

27/28 years on earth unfortunately doesn't guarantee maturity or the "common sense" that this individual always like to wax about. Ignore him or her

Does your rant change the fact that you are misrepresenting daily-mail's headline?

[s]

NairaMinted:


Americanism is simply a form of psychopathy where greed, egomania and a love of violence are manifested in varying degrees of severity. I’ve known many pro-Americans and many are thus because stu.pid and brainwashed by Hollywood and TV, and are totally ignorant of real Amerikan history and society today. They worship a false, idealised, ‘America’. Most of the rest are nastier types who understand that the USA really embodies greed and hegemony, and a predatory way of life where other people are enemies, competition, suckers or prey.

Valeriansteel, Vedaxcool, Mazeltov belong to the former, Missy89 falls into the latter category. Missy 89 in particular has declared her love for "war and destruction"; a manifestation of years of brainwashing and mind controlling drugs serving in the 3rd world-bombing-innocent-people-killing-murder machine known as the United States Military. I have observed over the past couple of months that her (if "she" indeed is a she!) actions and views aren't that of a rationale person ready to take a step back and realize and acknowledge the destruction and carnage that policies and actions of the Hegemon has wrought on the world for the past 70 years or so. "She" scours several threads derailing them; disparaging and insulting fellow contributors whose views run contrary to her pre-packaged lies and distractions labeling such individuals "trolls", "Kremlin bots", "ignorant", "cranks", "tiny brains", "lacking common sense", etc but yet like the "war LovePeddler" "she" is, "she" keeps storming threads to engage these very same cranks and tiny brains in "intellectual" discourse. Beats me! I guess though when the narrative of what Amerika stands for starts to fall apart, you can't help but scurry in a desperate - but yet increasingly futile - attempt to pick up and put together any shred of legitimacy or credibility left. For newcomers (and gullible ones too) that aren't wary of "her" ways, they are easily swayed by "her" act of showcasing an appreciable knowledge of historical events and to some extent, military strategies and policies which in turn fools them into thinking this demonstrates a person with a balanced and rationale outlook on world matters. "Her" modus operandi has however been exposed in this thread here; https://www.nairaland.com/2945001/did-russia-just-threaten-turkey/3

Missy89 will lie about, twist, justify and rationalize precarious situations orchestrated by or atrocities perpetrated by Amerika or its vassal states:
-Mendacious State Department officials are "only doing their job and lie all the time",
-"The US never wanted Assad out of power,"
-"Someone is misrepresenting a sensational headline as usual" even though that headline is a stark departure from that of 20 months prior when blame was clearly apportioned.
-Etc

Missy89 is the type that would aspire to reach the upper echelons of power so that "she" can declare, like another war wh0re in the person of Madeleine Albright did, "It was worth it", in response to the death of 500,000 Iraqi kids as a result of U.S. sanctions.
Missy89 is nothing more than a meddlesome interloper; nothing more than an emissary of the Empire's lies and propaganda.

27/28 years on earth unfortunately doesn't guarantee maturity or the "common sense" that this individual always like to wax about. Ignore him or her

[/s]
Look who is talking
You will do well to leave me out of your swine logic, which praises a criminal who murders the innocents in syria drives them away to live in squalor. All this death to you are western propaganda and geo political interest. My post carries many criticism of the us, they are far from being saints. I judge issues on a case by case matter not like a robot who is programmed to disparage and propagate Kremlin lies with no objectivity whatsoever.

[size=18pt]'Explosive' Papers Seized From Private Detective Investigating MH17 Crash[/size]

02:20 08.06.2016(updated 02:21 08.06.2016)
German and Swiss authorities have confiscated documents from private detective Josef Resch, who has been conducting his own investigation of the 2014 crash of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, Dutch officials and media said Tuesday.

Investigators believe that some of the documents seized after last week's raid on the detective's home in Bad Schwartau, northern Germany, may shed light on the circumstances of the tragedy. Some of the papers are said to be "explosive" and could help determine the culprits.

According to De Telegraaf daily, the German detective began his own probe two months after the catastrophe, and has received some $19 million for his investigations. His generous clients remain unknown.

"We are hoping to get some information about this. That's why the raids at his home were carried out," the spokesman for the prosecution service, Wim De Bruin, told AFP.
The contents of Resch's safe-deposit box in a bank in Zurich, Switzerland, were also inspected.

"We don't actually know what was in the box. The Swiss judge must now decide if its contents can be handed over to Dutch officials," the spokesman said.
He added that it is possible that the detective may have been in contact with the culprits.


The Boeing 777 aircraft, operated by Malaysia Airlines as Flight 17, was en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur when it was struck by a BUK anti-aircraft missile while flying at 33,000 feet over war-torn eastern Ukraine on June 17, 2014. All 298 passengers and crew — the majority of them Dutch — died in the crash.

A criminal investigation is ongoing in the Netherlands to identify who fired the missile and where from, although many believe that those responsible will never be brought to justice.
The first official findings by criminal investigators are expected after the summer, as they await further information from Russia.

It would be interesting to see How the criminal prosecution would turn out, because, first; they don't even have a clearly defined evidence base upon which the investigation can rely on, simply because the "joker DSB inquiry" simply did not provide any. You are looking for a thief outside when you are hiding him inside your closet. I just dey laf..... And that bereavee Father who was asking Kerry for evidence to prove where the lunch came from, should have known before now that Kerry had already provided it:

"The Social Media"... Pathetic!

As for those unrepentant willing stooges of mendacity that lies in wait anticipating Russian Generals or Donbass Seperatists leaders to be hanged for a crime that even a blind man knew was a false flag desperately seeking cover-up, i say, tarry and be patient. Justice we surely come and you shall surely be proved tight, because, its ONLY A FOOL THAT WILL BELIEVE IN THE CHARADE CURRENTLY UNGOING.

Very pathetic.

Today on the anniversary of the shoot down of MH17.

I believe it's obvious to all by now why this particular investigation is taking forever to conclude. You may come out with guns blazing blaming a country as the guilty party to suit your propaganda but its an entirely different ball game to cook up evidence to suit your false narrative.

Never forget: “We picked up the imagery of this launch. We know the trajectory. We know where it came from. We know the timing, and it was exactly at the time that this aircraft disappeared from the radar,” said US State Secretary John Kerry in an interview with David Gregory of NBC's Meet the Press in July 2014

[size=18pt]MH-17: Two Years of Anti-Russian Propaganda[/size]
July 17, 2016

Exclusive: Two years ago, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was shot out of the sky over eastern Ukraine killing 298 people and opening an inviting path for a propaganda campaign toward a new Cold War with Russia, writes Robert Parry.

By Robert Parry

Perhaps it’s only fitting that as we reach the second anniversary of the horrific shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flights 17, The New York Times would mark the occasion by once more using the tragedy as a propaganda club to advance the neocon goal of a new, costly and very dangerous Cold War with Russia.

On Saturday, the Times again demonstrated its disdain for normal journalistic practices as

[url=http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/16/world/europe/malaysia-airlines-flight-17-russia.html?rref=collection%2Ftimestopic%2FMalaysia%20Airlines%20Flight%2017&action=click&contentCollection=timestopics&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacem]it picked up[/url] an amateur assertion that the Russians had faked satellite imagery showing Ukrainian anti-aircraft missile systems in eastern Ukraine before the civilian airliner was blown out of the sky on July 17, 2014.


A photograph of a Russian BUK missile system that U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt published on Twitter in support of a claim about Russia placing BUK missiles in eastern Ukraine, except that the image appears to be an AP photo taken at an air show near Moscow two years earlier.
Since that moment, the Times and other mainstream Western publications have been determined to pin the blame for the deaths of 298 people on Russian President Vladimir Putin so the world could plunge ahead into the latest neocon scheme of destabilizing nuclear-armed Russia with the eventual aim of “regime change” in Moscow.

As revolting as it has been to watch the deaths of innocents exploited in the name of big-power geopolitics, what has been most troubling from a journalistic perspective is that the Times has cast aside any pretense of professional objectivity, much as it did during the deception of the American public over Iraq’s fictitious weapons of mass destruction in 2002-2003.

In this latest burst of anti-Russian propaganda, the Times gives great weight to some bloggers who applied a computer program supposedly to show that two Russian government satellite images were manipulated. The point is to cast doubt on whether the Ukrainian military had missiles in place in eastern Ukraine that could have shot down MH-17.

What the Times leaves out is the fact that Western intelligence has already confirmed that Ukraine’s military did have powerful anti-aircraft missiles in eastern Ukraine on July 17, 2014. Last October, a Dutch intelligence report stated that fact based on NATO intelligence gathering, i.e., the West’s own satellite and other data collection.

Indeed, the Netherlands’ Military Intelligence and Security Service (MIVD) concluded that the only anti-aircraft weapons in eastern Ukraine capable of bringing down MH-17 at 33,000 feet belonged to the Ukrainian government, not the ethnic Russian rebels.

MIVD made that assessment in the context of explaining why commercial aircraft continued to fly over the eastern Ukrainian battle zone in summer 2014. (The MH-17 flight had originated in Amsterdam and carried many Dutch citizens, explaining why the Netherlands took the lead in the investigation.)

MIVD said that based on “state secret” information, it was known that Ukraine possessed some older but “powerful anti-aircraft systems” and “a number of these systems were located in the eastern part of the country.” MIVD added that the rebels lacked that capacity:

“Prior to the crash, the MIVD knew that, in addition to light aircraft artillery, the Separatists also possessed short-range portable air defence systems (man-portable air-defence systems; MANPADS) and that they possibly possessed short-range vehicle-borne air-defence systems. Both types of systems are considered surface-to-air missiles (SAMs). Due to their limited range they do not constitute a danger to civil aviation at cruising altitude.”

Lacking Motive

In other words, the Russians would have no clear motive to doctor satellite photos since accurate ones would have shown the presence of Ukrainian Buk missile batteries in the area. You might have thought that the Times would have considered this fact relevant in evaluating claims from some amateur analysts about whether photos were manipulated or not.


Two slides released by the Russian Federation purporting to show a Buk missile launcher absent from a Ukrainian military base (left), and a pair of Buk missile launchers in a field on the day of the shootdown (right). [From armscontrolwonk.com]

Instead, reporter Andrew E. Kramer, who has been a regular contributor to the Times’ anti-Russian propaganda campaign, treats the findings by some nuclear arms control researchers at the Middlebury Institute for International Studies as definitive though there’s no reason to believe that these folks have any special expertise in applying this software whose creator says requires careful analysis.
Roger Cozien, designer of the filtering software Tungstene, has warned against rushing to judge “anomalies” in photographs as intentional falsifications when they may result from the normal process of saving an image or making innocent adjustments.

In an interview in Time magazine, Cozien said, “These filters aim at detecting anomalies. They give you any and all specific and particular information which can be found in the photograph file. And these particularities, called ‘singularities’, are sometimes only accidental: this is because the image was not well re-saved or that the camera had specific features, for example.

“The software in itself is neutral: it does not know what is an alteration or a manipulation. So, when it notices an error, the operator needs to consider whether it is an image manipulation, or just an accident.”

As Cozien described the process, it becomes clear that the trick of detecting an intentional manipulation rather than some normal or innocuous anomaly — that might occur in transferring an image from one format to another or making contrast adjustments or adding a word box — is more art than science.

And, there is no reason to believe that the Middlebury Institute’s arms control researchers have some special expertise in photographic forensics beyond having purchased the Tungstene suite of software upon which they based their report at the “armscontrolwonk.com” Web site.

Double Standards

The report’s authors also take the Russians to task for the lack of precision of the two images. “The image files are very poor quality,” they write. “We are very disappointed that the Russian Federation, in such an important matter, would release such low quality images as evidence. … Russian officials must know that releasing images in such a format makes it more difficult to verify the integrity of the images…”


Russian President Vladimir Putin answering questions from Russian citizens at his annual Q&A event on April 14, 2016. (Russian government photo)

Nevertheless, these researchers make sweeping judgments about the presence of a cloud in one photo and the allegedly sharper image of two Ukrainian Buk missile launchers in the other. Yet, why the Russians would add a cloud makes little sense. (July 17, 2014, was a partly cloudy day in eastern Ukraine, so perhaps the cloud is in the image just because the area was under a partial cloud cover.)

The researchers archly note that “UN Security Council Resolution 2166 calls on states to ‘provide any requested assistance to civil and criminal investigations.’ … We believe Russia should provide the original, underlying images in an unaltered form to the Joint Investigative Team [which is conducting the criminal investigation into the MH-17 crash] to allow independent experts to verify their claims.”

Sure, of course, but the arms control bloggers don’t call on the U.S. government to release its satellite and other intelligence data relating to the MH-17 shoot-down.

The real filter that needs to be applied when dealing with either The New York Times or some of the “citizen journalists” who pop up to reinforce the U.S. government’s propaganda themes is their unrelenting anti-Russian bias. Can anyone recall the last time The New York Times or any mainstream U.S. news outlet has presented a favorable or even neutral story about Russia?

The U.S. ‘Dog Not Barking’

Along those lines, neither the researchers’ report nor the Times’ article offers any criticism of the U.S. government, which has claimed to have satellite intelligence showing where the anti-aircraft missile was fired but has refused to release that important information to the public or apparently even to official MH-17 investigators.


Secretary of State John Kerry at a press conference on Aug. 6, 2015. (State Department photo)

On July 20, 2014, just three days after the disaster, Secretary of State John Kerry appeared on all five Sunday talk shows including NBC’s “Meet the Press” where he cited some “social media” to implicate the ethnic Russian rebels in eastern Ukraine and added: “But even more importantly, we picked up the imagery of this launch. We know the trajectory. We know where it came from. We know the timing. And it was exactly at the time that this aircraft disappeared from the radar.”

Two days later, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a “Government Assessment,” also citing “social media” seeming to implicate the rebels. Then, this white paper listed military equipment allegedly supplied by Russia to the rebels. But the list did not include a Buk missile battery or other high-powered anti-aircraft missiles capable of striking MH-17, which had been flying at around 33,000 feet.

The DNI also had U.S. intelligence analysts brief a few select mainstream reporters, but the analysts conveyed much less conviction than their superiors may have wished, indicating that there was still great uncertainty about who was responsible.

The Los Angeles Times article said: “U.S. intelligence agencies have so far been unable to determine the nationalities or identities of the crew that launched the missile. U.S. officials said it was possible the SA-11 [the designation for a Russian-made anti-aircraft Buk missile] was launched by a defector from the Ukrainian military who was trained to use similar missile systems.”

That uncertainty meshed somewhat with what I had been told by a source who had been briefed by U.S. intelligence analysts shortly after the shoot-down about what they had seen in U.S. high-resolution satellite photos, which they said showed what looked like Ukrainian military personnel manning the battery which was believed to have fired the missile.

There is also an important distinction to make between the traditional “Intelligence Assessment,” which is the U.S. intelligence community’s gold standard for evaluating an issue, complete with any disagreements among the 16 intelligence agencies, and a “Government Assessment,” like the one produced in the MH-17 case.

As former CIA analyst Ray McGovern wrote: “The key difference between the traditional ‘Intelligence Assessment’ and this relatively new creation, a ‘Government Assessment,’ is that the latter genre is put together by senior White House bureaucrats or other political appointees, not senior intelligence analysts. Another significant difference is that an ‘Intelligence Assessment’ often includes alternative views, either in the text or in footnotes, detailing disagreements among intelligence analysts, thus revealing where the case may be weak or in dispute.”

In other words, a “Government Assessment” is an invitation for political hacks to manufacture what was called a “dodgy dossier” when the British government used similar tactics to sell the phony case for war with Iraq in 2002-2003.

However, more relevant to the recent Times article is the fact that the U.S. government has withheld from the public – and even from official investigators – important information for determining the guilty parties and holding them accountable. For instance, neither the Dutch Safety Board, which headed up the initial investigation, nor the Joint Investigation Team (JIT) has been able to pinpoint the site of the missile firing.

Though Kerry insisted that the U.S. government knew that fact three days after the incident, the Dutch Safety Board said last October that it had narrowed the likely firing location only to an area of 320-square kilometers covering territory used by both the rebels and the government. The JIT has promised the families of Dutch victims that it would determine that detail later this year (now more than two years after the shoot-down).

If one wants to apply Sherlock Holmes logic to this “dog not barking” problem, you would probably conclude that the U.S. government clammed up after Kerry’s statements and the DNI’s sketchy white paper because – as more evidence was uncovered and analyzed – it was not pointing in the direction that U.S. propagandists wanted.

Lacking Balance

Yet, it is Russia, not the United States, that is taken to task for not providing its data in the most pristine fashion, even as the U.S. government provides nothing at all. And whenever the MH-17 issue is raised in the major Western news media, this strange official U.S. silence is ignored or excused while other inconvenient facts are also left out, such as a report by Der Spiegel that the German intelligence service, BND, had found that MH-17 photos supplied by the Ukrainian government “have been manipulated.”


Photograph published by the New York Times purportedly taken in Russia of Russian soldiers who later appeared in eastern Ukraine. However, the photographer has since stated that the photo was actually taken in Ukraine, and the U.S. State Department acknowledged the error.

Even more egregious is the blackout that the Times and other news organizations have applied to the Dutch intelligence report regarding the presence of Ukrainian military anti-aircraft batteries in eastern Ukraine capable of bringing down a commercial airliner at 33,000 feet and the rebels lack of such a powerful weapon.

Plus, there have been official disclosures that raise serious doubts about the integrity of the JIT, which has investigators from the Netherlands, Australia, Ukraine, Belgium and Malaysia, but has fallen increasingly under the control of Ukraine’s SBU, a security and intelligence agency that is responsible for protecting Ukrainian government secrets and that has been implicated in torture and other war crimes against the ethnic Russian rebels.

Earlier this year, an interim JIT report revealed how cozy the relationship had grown between the SBU and especially the Dutch and Australian investigators who have had long stints in Kiev, getting fed “evidence” by the SBU, and depending on the Ukrainian host’s hospitality.

Though this JIT report was released publicly, its contents were ignored by the Times and other publications even amid formal complaints from the United Nations about the SBU blocking human rights investigations into alleged Ukrainian government torture centers.

The SBU’s dominance over the JIT would seem to bear on the integrity of the MH-17 investigation, but this fact also doesn’t fit the propaganda goal of pinning the deaths of 298 people on Russia. Indeed, it would put whatever the JIT does eventually conclude under the suspicion of bias and possible SBU manipulation.

An Obligatory Hat Tip

And, it seems no Times article on MH-17 would be complete without a tip of the cap to the “citizen journalism” site, Bellingcat, which has made a cottage industry out of reinforcing the West’s propaganda themes whether against the Syrian or Russian governments. Bellingcat has remained the beloved Internet site of the mainstream Western media despite a history of getting stories wrong.


Based on information from Eliot Higgins, correspondent Michael Usher of Australia’s “60 Minutes” claims to have found the billboard visible in a video of a BUK missile launcher after the shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 on July 17, 2014. But the landmarks didn’t match. (Screen shot from Australia’s “60 Minutes”)

In Saturday’s article, Times reporter Kramer cited Bellingcat as a way to bolster the findings of the folks at “armscontrolwonk.com” without mentioning that Bellingcat’s earlier analysis of the “cloud” photo had been criticized by forensics experts for misusing computer software to reach anti-Russian conclusions, or as Der Spiegel reported:

“The research group Bellingcat has accused Russia of manipulating satellite images from the MH17 disaster. But German image forensics expert Jens Kriese has criticized the analysis. He says it is impossible to say with any certainty whether Moscow is lying.”

It also turns out that both Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins and “armscontrolwonk.com” have links to the pro-NATO think tank, Atlantic Council, which has been at the forefront of promoting NATO’s new Cold War with Russia.


A screen shot of the roadway where the suspected BUK missile battery supposedly passed after the shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 on July 17, 2014. (Image from Australian “60 Minutes” program)

Higgins is now listed as a “nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Future Europe Initiative” and armscontrolwonk.com describes one of its writers, Aaron Stein, as a nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East.

Stein’s work on the Syrian conflict would intersect with Higgins’s attempts to reinforce Western propaganda blaming the Syrian government for the devastating sarin gas attack outside Damascus on Aug. 21, 2013, which proved to be one of Bellingcat’s reporting errors.

On the second anniversary of the MH-17 atrocity, it is sadly not surprising that the Times would continue to grab onto any dubious claim – and present it without meaningful context – as long as the material helps agitate the newspaper’s readers into wanting war with Russia.

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).

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NairaMinted:


Americanism is simply a form of psychopathy where greed, egomania and a love of violence are manifested in varying degrees of severity. I’ve known many pro-Americans and many are thus because stu.pid and brainwashed by Hollywood and TV, and are totally ignorant of real Amerikan history and society today. They worship a false, idealised, ‘America’. Most of the rest are nastier types who understand that the USA really embodies greed and hegemony, and a predatory way of life where other people are enemies, competition, suckers or prey.

Valeriansteel, Vedaxcool, Mazeltov belong to the former, Missy89 falls into the latter category. Missy 89 in particular has declared her love for "war and destruction"; a manifestation of years of brainwashing and mind controlling drugs serving in the 3rd world-bombing-innocent-people-killing-murder machine known as the United States Military. I have observed over the past couple of months that her (if "she" indeed is a she!) actions and views aren't that of a rationale person ready to take a step back and realize and acknowledge the destruction and carnage that policies and actions of the Hegemon has wrought on the world for the past 70 years or so. "She" scours several threads derailing them; disparaging and insulting fellow contributors whose views run contrary to her pre-packaged lies and distractions labeling such individuals "trolls", "Kremlin bots", "ignorant", "cranks", "tiny brains", "lacking common sense", etc but yet like the "war LovePeddler" "she" is, "she" keeps storming threads to engage these very same cranks and tiny brains in "intellectual" discourse. Beats me! I guess though when the narrative of what Amerika stands for starts to fall apart, you can't help but scurry in a desperate - but yet increasingly futile - attempt to pick up and put together any shred of legitimacy or credibility left. For newcomers (and gullible ones too) that aren't wary of "her" ways, they are easily swayed by "her" act of showcasing an appreciable knowledge of historical events and to some extent, military strategies and policies which in turn fools them into thinking this demonstrates a person with a balanced and rationale outlook on world matters. "Her" modus operandi has however been exposed in this thread here; https://www.nairaland.com/2945001/did-russia-just-threaten-turkey/3

Missy89 will lie about, twist, justify and rationalize precarious situations orchestrated by or atrocities perpetrated by Amerika or its vassal states:
-Mendacious State Department officials are "only doing their job and lie all the time",
-"The US never wanted Assad out of power,"
-"Someone is misrepresenting a sensational headline as usual" even though that headline is a stark departure from that of 20 months prior when blame was clearly apportioned.
-Etc

Missy89 is the type that would aspire to reach the upper echelons of power so that "she" can declare, like another war wh0re in the person of Madeleine Albright did, "It was worth it", in response to the death of 500,000 Iraqi kids as a result of U.S. sanctions.
Missy89 is nothing more than a meddlesome interloper; nothing more than an emissary of the Empire's lies and propaganda.

27/28 years on earth unfortunately doesn't guarantee maturity or the "common sense" that this individual always like to wax about. Ignore him or her

Goddamnit Minted! This is too much

[size=18pt]‘Fraud’ Alleged in NYT’s MH-17 Report[/size]
July 19, 2016

Exclusive: An amateur report alleging Russian doctoring of satellite photos on the Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 case – a finding embraced by The New York Times – is denounced by a forensic expert as an “outright fraud,” reports Robert Parry.

By Robert Parry

Forensic experts are challenging an amateur report – touted in The New York Times – that claimed Russia faked satellite imagery of Ukrainian anti-aircraft missile batteries in eastern Ukraine on July 17, 2014, the day that Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was shot out of the sky killing 298 people.

In a Twitter exchange, Dr. Neal Krawetz, founder of the FotoForensics digital image analytical tool, wrote: “‘Bad analysis’ is an understatement. This ‘report’ is outright fraud.”


A Malaysia Airways’ Boeing 777 like the one that crashed in eastern Ukraine on July 17, 2014. (Photo credit: Aero Icarus from Zürich, Switzerland)

Another computer imaging expert, Masami Kuramoto, wrote, “This is either amateur hour or supposed to deceive audiences without tech background,” to which Krawetz responded: “Why ‘or’? Amateur hour AND deceptive.”

On Saturday, The New York Times, which usually disdains Internet reports even from qualified experts, chose to highlight the report by arms control researchers at armscontrolwonk.com who appear to have little expertise in the field of forensic photographic analysis.

The Times article suggested that the Russians were falsely claiming that the Ukrainian military had Buk missile systems in eastern Ukraine on the day that MH-17 was shot down. But the presence of Ukrainian anti-aircraft missile batteries in the area has been confirmed by Western intelligence, including a report issued last October on the findings of the Dutch intelligence agency which had access to NATO’s satellite and other data collection.

Indeed, the Netherlands’ Military Intelligence and Security Service (MIVD) concluded that the only anti-aircraft weapons in eastern Ukraine capable of bringing down MH-17 at 33,000 feet belonged to the Ukrainian government, not the ethnic Russian rebels. MIVD made that assessment in the context of explaining why commercial aircraft continued to fly over the eastern Ukrainian battle zone in summer 2014. (The MH-17 flight had originated in Amsterdam and carried many Dutch citizens, explaining why the Netherlands took the lead in the investigation.)

MIVD said that based on “state secret” information, it was known that Ukraine possessed some older but “powerful anti-aircraft systems” and “a number of these systems were located in the eastern part of the country.” MIVD added that the rebels lacked that capacity:

“Prior to the crash, the MIVD knew that, in addition to light aircraft artillery, the Separatists also possessed short-range portable air defence systems (man-portable air-defence systems; MANPADS) and that they possibly possessed short-range vehicle-borne air-defence systems. Both types of systems are considered surface-to-air missiles (SAMs). Due to their limited range they do not constitute a danger to civil aviation at cruising altitude.”

I know that I have cited this section of the Dutch report before but I repeat it because The New York Times, The Washington Post and other leading U.S. news organizations have ignored these findings, presumably because they don’t advance the desired propaganda theme blaming the Russians for the tragedy.

In other words, the Times, the Post and the rest of the mainstream U.S. media want the Russians to be guilty, so they exclude from their articles evidence that suggests that some element of the Ukrainian military might have fired the fateful missile. Such “group think” is, of course, the same journalistic malfeasance that led to the false reporting about Iraq’s WMD. Doubts, even expressed by experts, were systematically filtered out then and the same now.

Dishonest Journalism

Further, it is dishonest journalism to ignore a credible government report that bears directly on an important issue, especially while running dubious Internet analyses and accepting propaganda claims from self-interested U.S. officials seeking to make the case against Russia.


Quinn Schansman, a dual U.S.-Dutch citizen killed aboard Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 on July 17, 2014. (Photo from Facebook)

For instance, the Dutch report contradicted The Washington Post’s early reporting on MH-17. On July 20, 2014, just three days after the crash, the Post published an article with the title “Russia Supplied Missile Launchers to Separatists, U.S. Official Says.”

In the article, the Post’s Michael Birnbaum and Karen DeYoung reported from Kiev that an anonymous U.S. official said the U.S. government had “confirmed that Russia supplied sophisticated missile launchers to separatists in eastern Ukraine and that attempts were made to move them back across the Russian border.”

This official told the Post that Russia didn’t just supply one Buk battery, but three. Though this account has never been retracted, there were problems with it from the start, including the fact that a U.S. “government assessment” – released by the Director of National Intelligence on July 22, 2014, (two days later) – listed a variety of weapons allegedly provided by the Russians to the ethnic Russian rebels but not a Buk anti-aircraft missile system.

In other words, two days after the Post cited a U.S. official claiming that the Russians had given the rebels three Buk batteries, the DNI’s “government assessment” made no reference to a delivery of one, let alone three Buk systems. And that absence of evidence came in the context of the DNI larding the “government assessment” with every possible innuendo to implicate the Russians, including “social media” entries. But there was no mention of a Buk delivery.

The significance of this missing link is hard to overstate. At the time eastern Ukraine was the focus of extraordinary U.S. intelligence collection because of the potential for the crisis to spin out of control and start World War III. Plus, a Buk missile battery is large and difficult to conceal. The missiles themselves are 16-feet-long and are usually pulled around by truck.

U.S. spy satellites, which supposedly can let you read a license plate in Moscow, would have picked up these images. And, if for some inexplicable reason a Buk battery was missed before July 17, 2014, it would surely have been spotted during an after-action review of the satellite imagery. But the U.S. government has released nothing of the kind.

In the days after the MH-17 crash, I was told by a source that U.S. intelligence had spotted Buk systems in the area but they appeared to be under Ukrainian government control. The source who had been briefed by U.S. intelligence analysts said the likely missile battery that launched the fateful missile was manned by troops dressed in what looked like Ukrainian uniforms.

At that point, the source said CIA analysts were still not ruling out the possibility that the troops might have been eastern Ukrainian rebels in similar uniforms but the initial assessment was that the troops were Ukrainian soldiers. There also was the suggestion that the soldiers were undisciplined and possibly drunk, since the imagery showed what looked like beer bottles scattered around the site, the source said. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “What Did US Spy Satellites See in Ukraine?”]

Subsequently, the source said, these analysts reviewed other intelligence data, including recorded phone intercepts, and concluded that the shoot-down was carried out by a rogue element of the Ukrainian government, working with a rabidly anti-Russian oligarch, but that senior Ukrainian leaders, such as President Petro Poroshenko and Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, were not implicated. However, I have not been able to determine if this assessment was a dissident opinion or a consensus within U.S. intelligence circles.

Another intelligence source told me that CIA analysts did brief Dutch authorities during the preparation of the Dutch Safety Board’s report but that the U.S. information remained classified and unavailable for public release. In the Dutch reports, there is no reference to U.S.-supplied information although they do reflect sensitive details about Russian-made weapons systems, secrets declassified by Moscow for the investigation.

An NYT Pattern?

So, what to make of the Times hyping an amateur analysis of two Russian satellite photos and reporting that they showed manipulation. Though the claim seems to be designed to raise doubts about the presence of Ukrainian Buk missile batteries in eastern Ukraine, the presence of those missiles is really not in doubt.


A photograph of a Russian BUK missile system that U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt published on Twitter in support of a claim about Russia placing BUK missiles in eastern Ukraine, except that the image appears to be an AP photo taken at an air show near Moscow two years earlier.

And it makes sense the Ukrainians would move their anti-aircraft missiles toward the front because of fears that the powerful Ukrainian offensive then underway against ethnic Russian rebels might provoke Russia to launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Shifting anti-aircraft missile batteries toward the border would be a normal military preparation in such a situation.

That’s particularly true because a Ukrainian fighter plane was shot down along the border on July 16, 2014, presumably from an air-to-air missile fired by a Russian plane. Tensions were high at the time and the possibility that an out-of-control Ukrainian crew misidentified MH-17 as a Russian military jet or Putin’s plane cannot be dismissed.

But all this context is missing from the Times article by reporter Andrew E. Kramer, who has been a regular contributor to the Times’ anti-Russian propaganda. He treats the findings by some nuclear arms control researchers at the Middlebury Institute for International Studies as definitive though there’s no reason to believe that these folks have any special expertise in applying this software whose creator says requires careful analysis.

The new report was based on the filtering software Tungstene designed by Roger Cozien, who has warned against rushing to judge “anomalies” in photographs as intentional falsifications when they may result from the normal process of saving an image or making innocent adjustments.

In an interview in Time magazine, Cozien said, “These filters aim at detecting anomalies. They give you any and all specific and particular information which can be found in the photograph file. And these particularities, called ‘singularities’, are sometimes only accidental: this is because the image was not well re-saved or that the camera had specific features, for example.

“The software in itself is neutral: it does not know what is an alteration or a manipulation. So, when it notices an error, the operator needs to consider whether it is an image manipulation, or just an accident.”

In other words, anomalies can be introduced by innocent actions related to saving or modifying an image, such as transferring it to a different format, adjusting the contrast or adding a word box. But it is difficult for a layman to assess the intricacies involved.

To buttress the new report, Kramer cited the work of Bellingcat, a group of “citizen journalists” who have made a solid business out of reaffirming whatever Western propaganda is claiming, whether about Syria, Ukraine or Russia.

Bellingcat’s founder Eliot Higgins also had raised doubts about the Russian photos – using Dr. Krawetz’s FotoForensics software – but those findings were subsequently debunked by Dr. Krawetz himself and other experts. While Kramer cited Higgins’s earlier analysis, the Times reporter left out the fact that those findings were disputed by professional experts.

Dr. Krawetz also found the new photographic analysis both amateurish and deceptive. When I contacted him by email, he declined an interview and noted that Bellingcat fans were already on the offensive, trying to shut down dissent to the new report.

In an email to me, he wrote: “I have already seen the Bellingcat trolls verbally attack me, their ‘reporters’ use intimidation tactics, and their CEO insults me. (Hmmm … First he uses my software, then his team seeks me out as an expert, then he insults me when my opinion differs from his.)”

If it’s true that the first casualty of war is truth, the old saying also seems to apply to a new Cold War.

[For more on Bellingcat and its erroneous work, see Consortiumnews.com’s “MH-17 Case: ‘Old’ Journalism vs. ‘New.’”]

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).

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