PENETRATING THE DARKNESS COVERING TWO MALAYSIAN AIRLINE
DISASTERS
In each case, there
appears to be only one explanation consistent with known facts
John Chuckman
I wrote previously of a second great mystery surrounding the
disappearance over the Indian Ocean of Malaysian Airlines Flight 370, and that
second great mystery is the United States’ utter silence surrounding its
disappearance, despite its being the very nation able to offer the best
information from the world’s most sophisticated radars and spy satellites.
There can be no question that the United States gathered data on that
catastrophe because its military and intelligence surveillance is unblinking.
The fact that we did not hear a word from America, and still do not, can only
mean its government wants the event, like the airplane itself, to sink, in this
case into public forgetfulness.
Now we have a second Malaysian Airliner destroyed (its
national origin is presumably sheer coincidence), Flight MH17, this time at a
location from which the wreckage was recoverable. The American press
immediately jumped to the conclusion that a Russian high-altitude anti-aircraft
missile called BUK was responsible, which surely reflected nothing more than
suggestive whispers from American intelligence since no evidence was offered.
The altitude of the plane before it was destroyed excluded other ground-based
missiles.
But Russia had no possible motive for attacking the airliner,
and, indeed, the unfortunate event has only served as fodder for a Western
press eager to declare Russia a new threat to the world. The Russian-speakers
of eastern Ukraine who broke away from that country’s new American-installed
government simply do not have this missile in their arsenal, but Ukraine’s
government definitely does. These basic facts demonstrate the inappropriateness
of the American press’s early suggestions, but we know that in the
disinformation business the first one out with even a remotely plausible story
repeated loudly enough leaves a lasting impression, as witness the sad fact
that polls show a sizeable proportion of Americans yet believe Saddam Hussein
hid terrible weapons.
Despite the wreck’s physical accessibility, there were
substantial delays getting investigators to it as Ukraine’s new government
pressed attacks against its own eastern, Russian-speaking population. We cannot
know, but the long delay may well have permitted sanitizing of the crash site.
When able to access the site, experts found the flight recorders intact, but,
to this writing, nothing from those recorders has been made public. I don’t
recall another case of a major crash when at least some information from an
intact flight recorder was not made public quickly. After all, the principle
behind such data is to discover problems for civilian aviation, enabling others
to avoid them. The data, under international civil aviation agreements, is not
anyone’s private property, it is to be shared with all in a timely fashion.
But we have heard nothing except a promise that the
investigation’s findings will eventually be made public. With such a suspicious
delay, the possibility of tampering or destruction of data cannot be ruled out.
And here, too, we have silence from the United States which would have the best
supplementary data in the form of radar tracks and satellite images on a
European event not far from Russia’s border, an area of intense interest to
America. Why don’t they produce them? Moreover, despite repeated requests from
Russia and others, Ukraine’s new government has released no data of its own,
things we know it must have, such as tower-to-pilot recordings. Clearly,
information is being deliberately suppressed, and when we hear in our press and
from American-influenced governments about Russia’s underhandedness, it is only
a loud diversion from that disturbing fundamental fact.
Do you see the television networks and newspapers in the
United States calling for the immediate release of information? No, instead you
see the suggestion, sometimes far more than a suggestion, that Russia is
responsible for destroying the airliner, and this accusation is made with no
evidence and without shame.
You might say we have a conspiracy of silence around an
event of international importance. But why should that be so? Why is a country
whose politicians regularly make speeches praising themselves about openness,
democratic values, and fairness, found withholding critical information in two
catastrophes of international importance?
In the first case over the Indian Ocean, it is almost
certainly because the United States itself shot down the airliner, either
mistakenly or deliberately as it may have been regarded as a potential threat
to the secret base at Diego Garcia. Neither of these possibilities would be new
experiences for America’s military which, over the years, has been involved in
destroying at least half a dozen civilian airliners (see my essay with its
footnotes, “The Second Mystery Around Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370” found at Chuckman’s Words on Wordpress).
In the case of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17, destroyed
over Ukraine, I believe the United States is hiding the fact that the Ukrainian
armed forces shot it down. Why would the United States do this? We know, there
being a great deal of good information in the public record, that the United
States has made a huge investment in Ukraine over the past few years trying to
destabilize an elected government, one friendly to Russia, and it succeeded
when that government fled from a coup. Imagine America’s embarrassment at the
world’s seeing its new proxy government, its supposed champion of eastern
democracy, first misdirecting a civilian airliner, Flight MH17 having
inexplicably been sent off course over a war zone, and then shooting it down
with a fighter. Russian data, released to the public, shows a Ukrainian fighter
was near the airliner, and an early photo of the wreckage leaked to the world
clearly shows a large fuselage panel from the pilot’s cabin riddled with holes
as by heavy caliber ammunition from a fighter’s canon.
That embarrassment would come on top of a series of
embarrassments America’s meddling in Ukraine’s affairs has produced: over the
general revolt of Russian-speaking Ukrainians against a new government openly
unfriendly to their interests; over revelations that Nazi-like groups – and
Ukraine has a number of them, notably the Right Sector - committed the sniping
murders of hundreds of civilians from rooftops in Kiev in support of the original
coup; over Ukraine’s pathetic military failures on the ground with its soldiers
displaying poor morale and worse leadership; over the world’s seeing Ukraine
bombing and rocketing its own citizens; over the failure of various cheap ruses
such as using repainted surplus Hungarian T-72 tanks, fit only for scrap, to
pass as invading Russian armor (while this ruse failed, it did for a while take
in a lot of Western journalists, surely a reflection on the depth of their
investigations); and, perhaps, most grating of all for the engineers of the
whole murderous and destructive scheme, some deft statesmanship by Vladimir
Putin snatched from their grasp important expected fruits of the
enterprise.
In a number of instances the Ukrainian armed forces have demonstrated
embarrassing incompetence, and reading between the lines of screaming
propaganda and demands for this or that, appear actually to be losing the
highly unequal fight. They do not fight with motivation for their new
American-installed government, with its neo-Nazi auxiliaries, and against
fellow citizens. I believe the shooting down of the airliner was one of many
blunders, and the recordings from the black boxes, if revealed without
doctoring, would unambiguously prove this to be the case. As would Ukraine’s
flight controller recordings, still held secret.
The United States, despite embarrassments and setbacks, has
worked to make other gains out of its dirty work in Ukraine. It has been able
to use almost comical assertions of a new Russian threat to strengthen its hold
on NATO, an organization which has been obsolete for years and which serves
only to thinly disguise American hegemony in Europe. Even now it pushes members
for increased military spending to a minimum of two percent of GDP as the admission
price for playing with the big boys in NATO. For America, the great appeal of
increased expenditures would be a further subsidizing of its costly presence in
Europe. NATO is held together by America’s financial, economic, and diplomatic
power, still great despite that country’s having entered its relative decline
in world influence. It can still grant rich favors and contracts or it can work
away quietly against the interests of a dissenting state. A Europe with the
many economic problems we see today is naturally fearful of summoning America’s
wrath.
Altogether, it’s a vast and shameful enterprise the United
States has launched, and while most of its unpleasant consequences have yet to
be seen, it has certainly brought war and grief to a previously peaceful
region. But the stark truth is that, in recent years, bringing war and grief
seems to be a core mission of American foreign affairs.
