THE SECOND MYSTERY AROUND MALAYSIA AIRLINES FLIGHT MH370
John Chuckman
A second mystery around the disappearance of Flight MH370
has largely gone unnoticed: why hasn’t the United States been in the forefront
of providing information about it? The implications of this question are massive.
America has a fleet of the most sophisticated spy satellites,
called “keyhole” satellites, covering the earth’s surface daily with imaging
systems comparable to those of the Hubble Space Telescope, but instead of data
from any of these, we read of data from China and France. One can understand
that the CIA does not want others to understand fully the capabilities of its
satellites, but surely the lives of more than two hundred people are cause for
some information, however indirectly supplied.
Then again, the American military has some of most
sophisticated radars on earth, and there is, without a doubt, an installation of
the highest capability at the secret base on Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.
How could there not be? But we have read of no data from them, only from others
less capable of telling us what happened.
Could it be that the United States shot down Flight MH370,
either accidentally or deliberately, and now wants to keep it secret? The
possibility of recovery of the full wreckage, even if its location were found,
from 4 miles under the sea amongst underwater mountains is extremely remote at
best, so the United States can remain confident that physical evidence will
never emerge.
There would be nothing unprecedented in such an act: on at
least 3 occasions, regrettably, America’s military has shot down civilian
airliners, only admitting eventually to the one they could not hide. They are
also indirectly responsible for a fourth.
Iran Air Flight 655 was stupidly shot down in 1988 by the
USS Vincennes in Iranian waters during the Iraq-Iran War, not only killing 290
people including 66 children, but there was a long period afterwards in which the
U.S. admitted no wrong-doing, offered no apology, and no compensation to its
victims (only 8 years later was a quiet settlement made).
It was a quite vicious set of circumstances and the injustice
of it led unquestionably to the motive for bombing Pan Am Flight 103, killing
259 people and 11 on the ground, later the same year by people still unknown.
TWA Flight 800 over the East Coast of the United States was
certainly the victim of a shipboard American anti-aircraft missile accidentally
released. The evidence included radar tracks and eye witnesses. But the U.S., instead
of admitting its horrible error and compensating victims, conducted a long and
almost farcical investigation headed up by the same FBI that gave us the farcical
investigation into the Kennedy assassination.
Last, the fourth hijacked plane on 9/11, United Flight 93, of
“Let’s roll” pop legend, which crashed over Pennsylvania was almost certainly shot
down by an air-to-air missile from a fighter plane. A plane was seen by
witnesses, the distribution of the wreckage tends to support a shoot-down, and
just the sheer impossibility of America’s hundreds of billions of dollars in air
defences staying asleep at the switch for a fourth event the same day argue powerfully
for an attack.
I have no idea what event (a rogue pilot, a hijacker?) led
to Flight MH370 turning off its communications, changing course, and flying low,
but I do know that the event could not have gone unnoticed by America’s
military-intelligence eyes and ears, especially when its new course showed any
possibility of Diego Garcia as a destination, a place which is top secret and
from which America forcibly removed the locals when it leased it from Britain.
Footnote: Since writing this piece, I recalled two other
airliners destroyed owing directly or indirectly to American actions.
The first was Cubana Airlines Flight 455 which was destroyed
in 1976 by two bombs over the Caribbean, killing all its 78 people. This was
the work of a CIA operative named Luis Posada Carriles, part of a huge American
terror operation carried on for years against Cuba.
