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MH17-INVESTIGATION |
Robert Parry headlined on July 9th, “MH-17 Case Slips into Propaganda Fog,” and he wrote: “Many investigative journalists, including myself, have been rebuffed
in repeated efforts to get verifiable proof about the case or even
informational briefings.” His phrase “have been rebuffed” was linked to a
July 3rd article by nsnbc’s Christof Lehmann, “MH17 — The Methodology of an International Cover-Up,” which included the following:
The Firewall against Transparency
Numerous journalists, the author included, have made considerable
efforts to elicit independently verifiable evidence from all of the
involved parties. This includes mails and phone calls to relevant
ministries in Ukraine, the USA, UK, Russia, Australia, Malaysia, and the
Dutch Safety Board in The Netherlands.
All requests to provide independently verifiable data have remained
unanswered. That includes requests for a certified copy of radar data
released by the Russian Ministry of Defense, certified copies of
communications between Ukrainian Air Traffic Controllers and the flight
crew on board the downed Boeing 777-200, and not least a certified copy
of the Comma Separated Variable (CSV) file from the downed Boeing
777-200’s flight data recorder.
To mention but a few examples that demonstrate the significance of
the need for full transparency. The DSB [Dutch Safety Board, which is
running the entire investigation] published a “transcript” of ATC –
Flight Crew communications. Investigative journalists have, in other
words, no possibility to see whether the audio has been tampered with or
for that matter, if the voices even are consistent with those of the
flight crew.
Lehmann then dropped a bombshell, just in passing, a communication
from a representative of the investigation-team, which communication had
been made individually to Lehmann:
Sara Vernooij from the Dutch Safety Board implicitly provided the key
to the puzzling question why non[e] of the involved parties is
forthcoming with regards to independently testable and verifiable data
end evidence by stating to the author:
The investigation information is protected by Dutch
law (Dutch Kingdom Act). This act determines that only the information
issued in the Final Reports is public; sources and files containing
investigation information are not publicly accessible. … The Kingdom Act
concerning the Dutch Safety Board excludes investigation information
from [being covered under] the WOB [Open Government Act]. There is [consequently]
no possibility to get any access to investigation information by the
Dutch Safety Board if you are not a member of the investigation team.
… That is – no independently testable and verifiable information will be made available to the public.
This wasn’t the first time that the Dutch Safety Board has made clear
that it will prohibit the public from having access to the evidence.
The Dutch Safety Board had received its authority over the MH17
investigation by the Dutch Government. The Dutch Government had participated in the planning for the Maidan demonstrations and the overthrow of the prior Ukrainian Government. On 24 August 2014, I had headlined, “MH-17 ‘Investigation’: Secret August 8th Agreement Seeps Out,” and reported that,
Regarding what caused the downing of the Malaysian
airliner MH-17 in Ukraine onJuly 17th, the Ukrainian news agency UNIAN,
reported in a brief Russian-language news story on August 12th, that four days earlier (August 8th) a representative of that nation’s [Ukraine’s] Prosecutor General office, Yuri Boychenko, had said that (as auto-translated by google), “the results [of the investigation] will
be announced upon completion of the investigation and with the consent
of all the parties who signed the corresponding agreement.” This UNIAN
report said that, “As part of the four-party agreement signed on August 8
between Ukraine, the Netherlands, Belgium and Australia [all of which nations are allies of the United States and are cooperating with its new Cold War against Russia],
information on the investigation into the disaster Malaysian
‘Boeing-777’ will not be disclosed.” In other words: the official
‘investigation’ is being carried out by four nations that, as U.S.
allies, are hostile toward Russia. One of those four nations, Ukraine,
is … a prime suspect in possibly having shot this airliner down.
Any intelligent person understands that giving a suspect in a crime a
veto-power over the ‘findings’ of the official investigation into the
crime means that the ‘investigation’ is dishonest; it is corrupt. And
yet journaliststs continue to play along with this game as if it weren’t
corrupt. Instead of publicizing its corruptness, they pretend that the
official ‘investigation’ isn’t corrupt. More is needed than merely to
talk about “transparency,” or “propaganda fog.” The appropriate charge
here is: “corrupt.” The official ‘investigation’ is corrupt. It is
dishonest.
How, then, should investigative journalists deal with this matter?
First of all, they need to publicize that the official
‘investigation’ is corrupt (not only as was just indicated, but in other
respects also). Any ‘investigation’ into a crime, where a suspect in
the crime possesses veto-power over the ‘findings,’ is corrupt, and
cannot be trusted by a journalist who has integrity and basic
intelligence. But furthermore, all four national ‘investigators’ were in
league with this Ukrainian Government even prior to the downing.
Secondly, it is crucial that journalists identify and point out what constitutes the highest-quality, least-likely-to-have-been-
fabricated-or-tampered-with,
item of evidence regarding this crime, and that they then build their
theory of the case upon that item of evidence, by interpreting every
other item of evidence only in ways that are consistent with what is
proven to be so on the basis of that one highest-quality item of
evidence.
Such a highest-quality item of evidence does, in fact, exist here,
and it’s already publicly available; and it is the side-panel of the
cockpit right next to where the plane’s pilot was sitting. That
side-panel has an enormous gash shot through it, right where the pilot’s
belly would have been. This gash is a few feet in diameter, and its
ragged edge shows that it was caused not by a huge object like a
canonball but instead by a fusillade of much smaller projectiles that
had been fired at the pilot and which ripped through the panel to his
body, and killed him. This is shocking evidence. It demonstrates that
whatever ripped into the pilot’s body was fired sufficiently close-in so
as to target him, and not merely target the plane itself, which, of
course, is much larger than a pilot’s belly. Here
is that side-panel shown positioned onto the plane prior to the
downing, so that you can recognize where it had been located on the
airliner. And here is a view of this side-panel shown very close up, in high detail. And here
it is shown so that you can see the full side-panel and the enormous
gash into it from those projectiles that had been fired at the pilot’s
belly.
Now, in order to see an analysis of what is proven by this side-panel, click here.
That walks a reader through this and the other reliable evidence, so
that you can make your determinations for yourself, rather than relying
upon Robert Parry’s statements, or Christof Lehmann’s statements, or my
statements — or anyone’s. The case there is presented by me, but it
constantly links directly to the actual evidence, and it interprets all
of the other evidence in a way that is consistent with this side-panel
as you see it in those photographs, all of which were taken within just
hours of the shoot-down. This will enable you to make up your own mind
about everything, entirely on your own, on a best-evidence basis, and
with minimal reliance upon other people’s statements, because your
analysis will be entirely upon a best-evidence-based analysis,
which is the way that a jury in a court of law in a democratic country
is supposed to reach its verdict about a crime.
However, if you are reading this article for the first time, then you
might first want to see the case presented in a different way, which
points out the reason why the ‘history’ of this event, the cause of that
crime, cannot be what the official versions of it say that it is: it
cannot be a ground-fired missile that brought down this airliner 33,000
feet above. That ‘explanation’ isn’t only false; it is actually absurd.
However, that explanation includes stills from a Russian documentary
about the standard ground-based-missile (“Buk”) ‘explanation’ of the
shoot-down; and some people in the West have been so indoctrinated to
disbelieve everything that comes out of Russia, so that they won’t even
want to see that case, which is a preliminary case,
demonstrating the U.S.-Ukrainian or Western theory of this event to be
absurd on its face. If you want to see that preliminary case (of the
absurdity of the U.S.-Ukrainian ‘explanation’), it’s here.
That link, for anyone who isn’t simply closed-minded to Russian
sources, is the best single summary presentation of the evidence on the
MH17 matter, as I have been able to reconstruct the event.
More recently, I have updated my account in order to deal with the
second-most-reliable item of evidence on the case, which is the pilot’s
corpse, the autopsy on which is still being hidden, but the cover-up of
which is consistent with what one would expect on the basis of my
analysis. That update, concerning what would likely be the conclusive
proof in the case if it were ever to become public, is here.
And what about the black box and the other items of evidence that are
so much the foci of the public’s attention in the West? Well, not only
will that evidence never be made public, and so it’s not a rational
basis for the public to rely upon in whatever dubious form that might
some day become publicly released, but, it’s in the hands of an
investigating-team that’s committed to produce a report, if any, that
will be acceptable to the Ukrainian Government, which is one of the
suspects.
By contrast, the cockpit side-panel was superbly photographed and
uploaded to the Internet within only hours of the shoot-down. And no
country, and no agent for any country, had had an opportunity to
manipulate it before it was made public.
That’s extraordinary. It’s golden. Trusting anything else as
constituting the primary item of evidence doesn’t make legal/forensic
sense. And, as the last-given link here opens by explaining, wikipedia’s
article about the downing of this airliner is deeply untrustworthy,
because it altogether ignores the one best item of evidence.
So, the complicity of even the best journalists about this hoax has
been that they play along with the pretense that the official
authorities on the matter are honest. They make this assumption, even
where the authorities persist in hiding evidence from them. Instead,
every reader should make up his or her own mind about the downing of
this airliner, if a person is interested in the matter at all. Distrust
has to be the default assumption for any reader, on this. But what that
means in practical terms is: Start only with the
least-likely-to-have-been-
manipulated item of evidence, and then
reason from there, by means of interpreting every other item of evidence
on the basis of its consistency with that one, the
most-reliable-of-all, item of evidence. And any ‘evidence’ that is
inconsistent with it must be presumed to be likely manipulated; it’s
legal/forensically inadmissible.
The MH17 shoot-down occurred within the context of U.S. President
Barack Obama’s frustration at the EU’s reluctance to increase economic
sanctions against Russia, and the downing of this plane was used as the
excuse for increasing those sanctions, and it worked — his (and
Ukraine’s) ‘explanation’ of the event was accepted right away (though
the official ‘investigation’ still has not been completed, if it ever
will be). So, this was one of the cardinal historic occurrences in 2014.
Anyone seriously interested in the history of our times will need to
determine for him or her self how that airliner was shot down.
Understanding this event accurately will then open doors to an accurate
understanding of our times, and of the world we live in. Not only the
victims’ families need to know the truth about this. We all do,
actually.
Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They're Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010
Source: GlobalResearch
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