Eric Zuesse
The cause of the shooting-down of the Malaysian passenger plane MH-17 on July 17th (while that plane was flying over the conflict-zone during Ukraine’s civil war) is becoming clearer and clearer, despite the rigorous continuing attempts by Western ‘news’ media to cover it up and to hide from the public the evidence that clearly shows what brought down this airliner.
In the months since I headlined on August 24th the news, “MH-17 ‘Investigation’: Secret August 8th Agreement Seeps Out: Perpetrator of the Downing in Ukraine, of the Malaysian Airliner, Will Stay Hidden,” explaining why the leaders of Western nations want these black-box and other basic data to remain hidden, additional evidence has nonetheless become public, and all of it confirms and adds yet further details to the explanation that was first put forth by the retired German Lufthansa pilot Peter Haisenko, whose independent investigation had concluded that Ukrainian Government fighter-jets intentionally shot down this civilian plane.
Precisely how they did it is gradually becoming clearer, despite this continuation of Western secrecy regarding the contents of the black boxes, and of the U.S. satellite images, and of the Ukrainian air-traffic-control radar recordings, and of other evidence-sources that are held by the West and not made available to their ‘news’ media nor to anyone outside a tight official circle of those Western nations’ intelligence agencies.
Russia has thus been releasing its own investigations regarding MH-17; and, in the process, Russia is not only providing further details as to how the downing actually happened (it wasn’t by mistake, as the West contends it was), but they are also exposing the absurd impossibility of the Ukrainian Government’s ‘explanation’ of this event, which is the ‘explanation’ that is still being parroted unquestioningly and unflinchingly by officials in Washington, Europe, and NATO, and also by Western ‘news’ media. (As my news-report explained, that secret August 8th agreement was signed by the four governments that were handed the black boxes to study – Ukraine, Belgium, Australia, and Netherlands – and it granted to the Ukrainian Government a veto over anything that the team’s official report would say, which is probably the reason why the subsequent officially released report on those black boxes said essentially nothing. It was a brazen insult to the 298 victims’ families.)
Though Russia doesn’t possess those black boxes, they do possess, and they publicly reveal, evidence that’s conclusive on its own; and it is 100% consistent with Haisenko’s reconstruction of the event. Russian Television issued a 25-minute documentary recently on the event, and it starts with people whom they interviewed in that region, who were describing their having seen at least one and perhaps two planes rising toward the airliner, and then the airliner coming down from the sky. Other witnesses told them that they saw an SU-25 fighter plane take off in that general area just minutes before the airliner came down.
FIRST, THE MISSING BBC REPORT:
The BBC had previously posted to their website on 23 July 2014, just six days after the event itself, a news report in Russian via their Russian service, about the downing, but they quickly removed it without explanation. Fortunately, however, some Russian-speakers had managed to download it before it was yanked; and at least two of those downloads is still up at youtube, the first one having been posted there on July 28th of 2014, with English subscripts, and with the headline, “UKRAINE Eyewitness Confirm Military Jet Flew Besides MH17 Airliner: BBC Censors Video 25Jul2014”. (Actually, there were several witnesses interviewed there, not just one “Eyewitness.”) Furthermore, Global Research posted on September 10th a transcript of it, headlining, “Deleted BBC Report. ‘Ukrainian Fighter Jet Shot Down MHI7’, Donetsk Eyewitnesses.”
The interviews by the BBC were done by their reporter Olga Ivshina. She had filmed local residents in the crash-debris area. In one passage of her 23 July 2014 report, there were two residents simultaneously who described what they had seen. One of them said, “And there was another aircraft.” The other continued immediately, in order to describe the other plane, “a military one, beside it [‘it’ being the airliner]. Everybody saw it. It was proceeding underneath below the civilian one.”
Here is the second, and clearer, version of that clip. The key portion on it is at 0:38-042 in the video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C812MrH6TK4
That was the 9 September 2014 repost, with the same subscript-translation into English, only the visual is sharper.
And here is an apology, dated 25 July 2014, by the BBC, for their having removed their original video of this interview – and yet they still didn’t repost it; they still continue to blockade it; even today the only versions available are the independently posted ones, but here is their apology:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/russian/blogs/2014/07/140725_blog_editors_bbc_story_republished.shtml
Here, then, is that BBC apology google-translated into English:
So: clearly, BBC has done all that they could to remove evidence they had mistakenly broadcast which had fit the retired Lufthansa pilot Peter Haisenko’s reconstruction of the event and which contradicted the U.S.-Ukrainian reconstruction of it, the reconstructin that Western ’news’ media project, and on the basis of which Obama won from the EU a stiff increase in the economic sanctions against Russia.
So, this valuable eyewitness-testimony to the event is available despite Western ‘news’ media (or propaganda-media), and the reason for the news-suppression is clear from anyone who views that BBC report, which presents several eyewitnesses, all others of whom were interviewed separately as individuals, not as a group, and yet all of whose testimonies report having observed the very same basic narrative, of at least one military jet rising toward the airliner just before it came down.
In other words: it is clear that BBC had yanked this piece because it didn’t confirm the West’s story-line, which says that Ukrainian pro-Russian separatists fired a “Buk” ground-based missile at the airliner, thinking that the civilian plane was a Ukrainian Government war-plane about to bomb them and their families. But, first of all, the Ukrainian Government was virtually admitting there that they were bombing these villagers, which means that they were perpetrating an ethnic cleansing operation there, which indeed that Government was doing; but, secondly, the Ukrainian Government’s statement also acknowledged that if the event had happened in that way, it would have been unintentional, a tragic accident on the part of the rebels there.
So, then, why did “the international community” respond with massive economic sanctions against Russia on account of this downing? The whole Western propaganda position was designed for a public of sheer fools, if not of outright psychopathic ones, who cared not a bit about the plights of the victims of an ethnic-cleansing campaign. The West’s basic storyline doesn’t make sense without recognizing that we are financing ethnic cleansing to clear the land in southeastern Ukraine, and that any support that Russia would be providing to those separatists would be defensive in nature, not offensive. Yet Russia gets the blame when this passenger jet goes down? In any case, that storyline is false, from start to finish.
Here is how outright ludicrous it actually is, and sound reason in itself that anyone in the military had to have known, from the very get-go, that the “Buk” ‘explanation’ was a line of pure malarkey:
THE RUSSIAN DOCUMENTARY:
The Russian documentary was titled, “MH-17: The Untold Story,” and it presents videos of several “Buk” missiles being fired. Here’s one:
That passage shows the missile, a 9K37 Buk SA-11 Gadfly, which is a bit longer than ten yards (30 feet) — this large (and certainly not inconspicuous) missile — being launched from its standard launch-base.
The documentary then notes:
And then this:
And then this:
And then this:
So, when even the BBC’s reporter wasn’t able to find anyone in that entire region who recounts having seen anything of the sort, just how likely would the Ukrainian Government’s line on that matter actually be? Obviously, any person with any military knowledge whatsoever had to have recognized virtually immediately that the Ukrainian Government’s story-line on the MH-17 downing was a pile of sheer malarkey, but did anyone in the Western ‘news’ media report that it was – that the Western line there was not just a lie, but an absurd one, one that requires an ignorant public in order for it to be able to be taken seriously at all by the public? One that requires an ignorant public, to remain ignorant? This is supposed to be the Western ‘news’ media, with a free press, and a democracy, a truthfully informed citizenry, who can vote based upon truths, not on mere lies?
Here is the way that the Russian TV documentary opens:
Several of the locals there told Russian TV’s reporter that they had seen a military jet rise toward the airliner; and not a one of these individuals were any of the same ones who had testified the exact same thing to the BBC’s reporter, whose news-piece had been squelched by her managers.
HERE IS HOW MH17 WAS SHOT DOWN:
Now, to the substance of the explanation of how this plane was actually brought down:
Earlier, I summarized the evidence for Peter Haisenko’s reconstruction of the event, but I questioned his having accepted the eyewitness testimony to the effect that the planes that shot down the airliner were SU-25s. In Haisenko’s Russian TV interview, he sticks by his belief that it was probably SU-25s instead of SU-27s or Mig 29s, both of which are also in the Ukrainian Air Force, and all three of which use 30-millimeter machine-guns or “cannons.” But since the fact is that all three of those attack-plane models use machine-guns (“cannons”) with 30-caliber bullets (which is the size that clearly was used, especially on the cockpit), the effect would be identically-sized round 30-caliber entry-holes, no matter what. My last major report on that evidence was “Systematically Reconstructing the Shoot-Down of the Malaysian Airliner: The Guilt Is Clear and Damning.” That basically fills in (and the links in that report document with pictures and videos) the actual way that this plane was downed and why it was downed. Obama (via the regime that he had installed in a February 2014 coup in Kiev) succeeded there in getting the international sanctions against Russia that he had been wanting. Obama, not Putin, was behind this.
International actions are based upon such fabrications, and ‘evidence’ taken out of its full context, as this from the far-right Forbes commentator Paul Roderick Gregory, but there are no such fakes, nor out-of-context items of evidence, in the case that has been presented here. That’s the difference between news-reporting and propaganda; but, in the United States today, propaganda passes as if it were ‘news,’ and authentic news that doesn’t fit the regime’s cooked-up narrative is suppressed entirely.
Western governments, and their ‘news’ media, are treating their citizens, their own publics, not really as citizens, but as suckers. They are treating them as subjects, instead of as citizens. This is not authentic democracy. It is neo-feudal; it is, in fact, a sophisticated form of fascism.
The entire “Buk” ‘explanation’ of the downing of the Malaysian airliner is for suckers only; and everyone in official circles, and in the press, who peddles it, is just as fake as the ridiculous story-line that he or she is peddling. To fall for it, after being provided all of the authentic evidence, which has been linked to here, is to be a willing slave to psychopaths.
So, now we know why Western governments have hidden, instead of making available to the public, the black-box data and the other evidence that they still refuse to provide to the public. They are aiming to scam the public, not to inform it. Lying is their game. And they call it ‘patriotism.’ But, of course, they would! Traitors would do that. Traitors to any country would do it. And, so, they do.
Unfortunately, the people they fool become their tools, and everyone else are purely their victims — helpless to oust the tyrants who make things bad for everyone but themselves and their colleagues.
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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.