RT: It’s been a year since the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 in eastern Ukraine, which claimed the lives of all 298 people onboard. Eastern Ukraine was a war zone at the time – yet the Ukrainian authorities haven’t closed the airspace, allowing civil flights over the area. What was behind their inaction?
Paul Craig Roberts: I think they intended for the airliner to be shot down. The latest evidence is that it was shot down by air, by a Ukrainian jet fighter using a missile. This is the best evidence we have at this time. What is suspicious about this is that the instant that the airliner was reported to have been shot down, the entirety of the Western media was already programmed to blame Russia. Before there was any evidence, before there was any explanation, we had all of the Western media blaming Russia – even the BBC, which used to be a respectable news organization. So this suggests the whole thing was preplanned.
And if you look at the development of this we see that Ukraine has not released any information about its contacts with the airliner. And we see that Washington, which had a spy satellite directly over the area at the time, refuses to release its information. So the only information we have comes from the Russians, and the Russians say that if this had happened on a ground-to-air missile, this Buk system, that their radar in Rostov would have picked it up and yet it shows no such happening.
So I think the reason that we can’t get to the bottom of this is that it’s been used against Russia by Washington in order to break off Russia’s relationships with Europe. It’s the foundation of the sanctions and it’s part of Washington trying to break up the political and economic relationships between Russia and Europe. In my opinion, all the evidence we have, as of this time, supports no other conclusion.
RT: A year on after the tragedy, there is still no conclusive proof as to what brought down the plane. However the US continues to point the finger at anti-government forces. Why is that?
PCR: The US is based on the Wolfowitz Doctrine, and this doctrine says that with the collapse of the Soviet Union there are no longer any constraints on Washington’s ability to act unilaterally anywhere in the world. And yet Putin has brought Russia back as a formidable country, a country with economic and military power and so Russia can now be an obstacle to – for example – Obama’s planned invasion of Syria, or Washington’s planned attack on Iran over alleged nuclear weapon that doesn’t exist. And it was Russia’s ability to prevent war from Washington to Syria, to Iran that caused Washington to say “Hey look, we’ve got to do something about the Russians” and moreover “Look, for heaven’s sake, Europe is now dependent on Russian energy, the Russian gas. We are going to lose our vassal states and if we lose our vassal states in Europe we lose NATO and we lose the ability to bring conflict to Russia and we can’t have Russia rising as a power, so what can we do? Oh, we’ll overthrow Ukraine! And if we overthrow Ukraine we can use this in many ways to cause problems for Russia; it can cause problems with Russian national security, with Russia’s relations to Europe, and so on.”
So that’s really what it’s all about and shooting down an airliner for Washington this doesn’t mean anything; they kill more people than that while we are talking in Yemen, Pakistan, Iraq, in wherever. For 14 years the US has been killing people all over the Middle East and Africa and why are they so worried about a couple of hundred on an airliner, they kill that many every hour.
So the whole thing is directed to demonize Russia in order to force Europe to comply with Washington’s will, which is: “We have to stop the rise of Russia, we can’t have another independent power, we are the uni-power, we have hegemony over the world, we must not permit other countries to be able to block us in any way.” That’s what it’s all about.
RT: Just a couple of days ago, CNN broadcast the leaked results of the report, putting the blame on separatists. However the Dutch investigators say there are not ready to make any conclusions. How much do such accusations influence public opinion?
PCR: Very much, because there is no longer a Western media. In the US, in the last years of the Clinton administration, what had been an independent and dispersed media was concentrated in six mega-companies. So the US media now consists of six big companies whose broadcast licenses are dependent on Washington and whose revenues are dependent on corporate advertising, primarily the military-security complex. So the media in the US no longer exists, it’s a propaganda ministry. And in Europe we have the former editor of [Frankfurter Allgemeine] Zeitung, the big German newspaper, who said there is no journalist anywhere in Europe of any significance who is not on the CIA payroll. This book is published in Germany, it’s a bestseller, it’s called ‘Bought Journalists’. You see, they follow whatever line the CIA gives them. That’s how you can see what Russia is up against – a massive propaganda machine and facts don’t matter.
Why is it that the US hasn’t released its satellite photos? The satellite was right over the incident of the Malaysian airliner when it happened. They won’t release it. Why doesn’t Kiev release its communications with the airliner? They won’t release them. It’s because they don’t support the argument that Russia was responsible, or Russian-supported separatists are responsible. This is the situation. The Russian people, media, government have to understand that this is not a question of fact, it’s a question of demonization, and the problem with Russia from the stand point of the US, is that it has come back, it’s again a powerful country, it can constrain what Washington does just as could the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union could tell the US “No,” that’s what Russia did in Syria, in Iraq: it said “No.” Washington will not accept “No,” that’s what it’s all about. It’s not about facts or evidence. Russia, China and Iran are in Washington’s way. Washington’s committed to world hegemony, this is what the issue is, there is no other issue.
Wow, PCR hits another out of the park. Why isn’t MSM talking about this instead of Trannies?
More info than presented above that points to UKR Gov’t responsible for MH-17, with the U.S. pursuing a coup in UKR for many years.
As a young guy, the U.S. was a beacon of light for the rest of the world – Now, it is nothing but a bully and killing machine.
The “high” heeled boots on the ground is Victoria Nuland. Also responsible for the Maidan black ops snipers who shot demonstrators in the back, while they were facing the UKN security force. And don’t forget the black ops in Odessa, that drove the demonstrators by gunfire into the city hall and then set fire to it, while gunning down anyone who tried to escape.
Indeed, the USA used to well loved and respected by much of the world. The “ruling class” has taken this love and turned it to hatred and the respect has turned to disgust. The country is now on the fast tract to becoming a pariah among nations. To be feared and not trusted. A rogue police state.
Russia Insider has a BUNCH of great MH17 coverage. Just click on the search button at the top right, enter ‘MH17’ and you’ll see all their articles.
http://russia-insider.com/en
Here is their latest piece.
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MH17 Is the New Tonkin Gulf
Would the US misrepresent truth to justify more war?
One year ago, the world experienced what could become the Tonkin Gulf incident of World War III, the shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine. As with the dubious naval clash off the coast of North Vietnam in 1964, which helped launch the Vietnam War, U.S. officials quickly seized on the MH-17 crash for its emotional and propaganda appeal – and used it to ratchet up tensions against Russia.
Shocked at the thought of 298 innocent people plunging to their deaths from 33,000 feet last July 17, the world recoiled in horror, a fury that was then focused on Russian President Vladimir Putin. With Putin’s face emblazoned on magazine covers, the European Union got in line behind the U.S.-backed coup regime in Ukraine and endorsed economic sanctions to punish Russia.
In the year that has followed, the U.S. government has continued to escalate tensions with Russia, supporting the Ukrainian regime in its brutal “anti-terrorism operation” that has slaughtered thousands of ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine. The authorities in Kiev have even dispatched neo-Nazi and ultranationalist militias, supported by jihadists called “brothers” of the Islamic State, to act as the tip of the spear.
Raising world tensions even further, the Russians have made clear that they will not allow the ethnic Russian resistance to be annihilated, setting the stage for a potential escalation of hostilities and even a possible nuclear showdown between the United States and Russia.
But the propaganda linchpin to the West’s extreme anger toward Russia remains the MH-17 shoot-down, which the United States and the West continue to pin on the Russian rebels – and by extension – Russia and Putin. The latest examples are media reports about the Dutch crash investigation suggesting that an anti-aircraft missile, allegedly involved in destroying MH-17, was fired from rebel-controlled territory.
Yet, the U.S. mainstream media remains stunningly disinterested in the “dog-not-barking” question of why the U.S. intelligence community has been so quiet about its MH-17 analysis since it released a sketchy report relying mostly on “social media” on July 22, 2014, just five days after the shoot-down. A source briefed by U.S. intelligence analysts told me that the reason for the intelligence community’s silence is that more definitive analysis pointed to a rogue Ukrainian operation implicating one of the pro-regime oligarchs.
The source said that if this U.S. analysis were to see the light of day, the Ukrainian “narrative” that has supplied the international pressure on Russia would collapse. In other words, the Obama administration is giving a higher priority to keeping Putin on the defensive than to bringing the MH-17 killers to justice.
Like the Tonkin Gulf case, the evidence on the MH-17 case was shaky and contradictory from the start. But, in both cases, U.S. officials confidently pointed fingers at the “enemy.” President Lyndon Johnson blamed North Vietnam in 1964 and Secretary of State John Kerry implicated ethnic Russian rebels and their backers in Moscow in 2014. In both cases, analysts in the U.S. intelligence community were less certain and even reached contrary conclusions once more evidence was available.
In both cases, those divergent assessments appear to have been suppressed so as not to interfere with what was regarded as a national security priority – confronting “North Vietnamese aggression” in 1964 and “Russian aggression” in 2014. To put out the contrary information would have undermined the government’s policy and damaged “credibility.” So the facts – or at least the conflicting judgments – were hidden.
The Price of Silence
In the case of the Tonkin Gulf, it took years for the truth to finally emerge and – in the meantime – tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers and millions of Vietnamese had lost their lives. Yet, much of the reality was known soon after the Tonkin Gulf incident on Aug. 4, 1964.
Daniel Ellsberg, who in 1964 was a young Defense Department official, recounts – in his 2002 book Secrets – how the Tonkin Gulf falsehoods took shape, first with the panicked cables from a U.S. Navy captain relaying confused sonar readings and then with that false storyline presented to the American people.
As Ellsberg describes, President Johnson and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara announced retaliatory airstrikes on Aug. 4, 1964, telling “the American public that the North Vietnamese, for the second time in two days, had attacked U.S. warships on ‘routine patrol in international waters’; that this was clearly a ‘deliberate’ pattern of ‘naked aggression’; that the evidence for the second attack, like the first, was ‘unequivocal’; that the attack had been ‘unprovoked’; and that the United States, by responding in order to deter any repetition, intended no wider war.”
Ellsberg wrote: “By midnight on the fourth, or within a day or two, I knew that each one of those assurances was false.” Yet, the White House made no effort to clarify the false or misleading statements. The falsehoods were left standing for several years while Johnson sharply escalated the war by dispatching a half million soldiers to Vietnam.
In the MH-17 case, we saw something similar. Within three days of the July 17, 2014 crash, Secretary Kerry rushed onto all five Sunday talk shows with his rush to judgment, citing evidence provided by the Ukrainian government through social media. On NBC’s “Meet the Press,” David Gregory asked, “Are you bottom-lining here that Russia provided the weapon?”
Kerry: “There’s a story today confirming that, but we have not within the Administration made a determination. But it’s pretty clear when – there’s a build-up of extraordinary circumstantial evidence. I’m a former prosecutor. I’ve tried cases on circumstantial evidence; it’s powerful here.”
Two days later, on July 22, the Director of National Intelligence authorized the release of a brief report essentially repeating Kerry’s allegations. The DNI’s report also cited “social media” as implicating the ethnic Russian rebels, but the report stopped short of claiming that the Russians gave the rebels the sophisticated Buk (or SA-11) surface-to-air missile that the report indicated was used to bring down the plane.
Instead, the report cited “an increasing amount of heavy weaponry crossing the border from Russia to separatist fighters in Ukraine”; it claimed that Russia “continues to provide training – including on air defense systems to separatist fighters at a facility in southwest Russia”; and its noted the rebels “have demonstrated proficiency with surface-to-air missile systems, downing more than a dozen aircraft in the months prior to the MH17 tragedy, including two large transport aircraft.”
Yet, despite the insinuation of Russian guilt, what the public report didn’t say – which is often more significant than what is said in these white papers – was that the rebels had previously only used short-range shoulder-fired missiles to bring down low-flying military planes, whereas MH-17 was flying at around 33,000 feet, far beyond the range of those weapons.
The assessment also didn’t say that U.S. intelligence, which had been concentrating its attention on eastern Ukraine during those months, detected the delivery of a Buk missile battery from Russia, despite the fact that a battery consists of four 16-foot-long missiles that are hauled around by trucks or other large vehicles.
Rising Doubts
I was told that the absence of evidence of such a delivery injected the first doubts among U.S. analysts who also couldn’t say for certain that the missile battery that was suspected of firing the fateful missile was manned by rebels. An early glimpse of that doubt was revealed in the DNI briefing for several mainstream news organizations when the July 22 assessment was released.
The Los Angeles Times reported, “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 was launched by a defector from the Ukrainian military who was trained to use similar missile systems.”
The Russians also challenged the rush to judgment against them, although the U.S. mainstream media largely ignored – or ridiculed – their presentation. But the Russians at least provided what appeared to be substantive data, including alleged radar readings showing the presence of a Ukrainian jetfighter “gaining height” as it closed to within three to five kilometers of MH-17.
Russian Lt. Gen. Andrey Kartopolov also called on the Ukrainian government to explain the movements of its Buk systems to sites in eastern Ukraine 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 Ukrainian government countered by asserting that it had “evidence that the missile which struck the plane was fired by terrorists, who received arms and specialists from the Russian Federation,” according to Andrey Lysenko, spokesman for Ukraine’s Security Council, using Kiev’s preferred term for the rebels.
On July 29, amid this escalating rhetoric, the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, a group of mostly retired U.S. intelligence officials, called on President Barack Obama to release what evidence the U.S. government had, including satellite imagery.
“As intelligence professionals we are embarrassed by the unprofessional use of partial intelligence information,” the group wrote. “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 Obama administration failed to make public any intelligence information that would back up its earlier suppositions.
Then, in early August, I was told that some U.S. intelligence analysts had begun shifting away from the original scenario blaming the rebels and Russia to one focused more on the possibility that extremist elements of the Ukrainian government were responsible, funded by one of Ukraine’s rabidly anti-Russian oligarchs.
Last October, Der Spiegel reported that the German intelligence service, the BND, also had concluded that Russia was not the source of the missile battery – that it had been captured from a Ukrainian military base – but the BND still blamed the rebels for firing it. The BND also concluded that photos supplied by the Ukrainian government about the MH-17 tragedy “have been manipulated,” Der Spiegel reported.
And, the BND disputed Russian government claims that a Ukrainian fighter jet had been flying close to MH-17, the magazine said, reporting on the BND’s briefing to a parliamentary committee on Oct. 8, 2014. But none of the BND’s evidence was made public — and I was subsequently told by a European official that the evidence was not as conclusive as the magazine article depicted.
Dog Still Doesn’t Bark
When the Dutch Safety Board investigating the crash issued an interim report in mid-October, it answered few questions, beyond confirming that MH-17 apparently was destroyed by “high-velocity objects that penetrated the aircraft from outside.” The 34-page Dutch report was silent on the “dog-not-barking” issue of whether the U.S. government had satellite surveillance that revealed exactly where the supposed ground-to-air missile was launched and who fired it.
In January, when I re-contacted the source who had been briefed by the U.S. analysts, the source said their thinking had not changed, except that they believed the missile may have been less sophisticated than a Buk, possibly an SA-6, and that the attack may have also involved a Ukrainian jetfighter firing on MH-17.
Since then there have been occasional news accounts about witnesses reporting that they did see a Ukrainian fighter plane in the sky and others saying they saw a missile possibly fired from territory then supposedly controlled by the rebels (although the borders of the conflict zone at that time were very fluid and the Ukrainian military was known to have mobile anti-aircraft missile batteries only a few miles away).
But the larger dog-not-barking question is why the U.S. intelligence community has clammed up for nearly one year, even after I reported that I was being told that U.S. analysts had veered off in a different direction – from the initial blame-the-Russians approach – toward one focusing on a rogue Ukrainian attack.
For its part, the DNI’s office has cited the need for secrecy even as it continues to refer to its July 22 report. But didn’t DNI James Clapper waive any secrecy privilege when he rushed out a report five days after the MH-17 shoot-down? Why was secrecy asserted only after the U.S. intelligence community had time to thoroughly review its photographic and electronic intelligence?
Over the past 11 months, the DNI’s office has offered no updates on the initial assessment, with a DNI spokeswoman even making the absurd claim that U.S. intelligence has made no refinements of its understanding about the tragedy since July 22, 2014.
If what I’ve been told is true, the reason for this silence would likely be that a reversal of the initial rush to judgment would be both embarrassing for the Obama administration and detrimental to an “information warfare” strategy designed to keep the Russians on the defensive.
But if that’s the case, President Barack Obama may be acting even more recklessly than President Johnson did in 1964. As horrific as the Vietnam War was, a nuclear showdown with Russia could be even worse.