Sunday, January 11, 2015

Marcus Bensmann and David Crawford — Flight MH17: Searching for the Truth of a War Crime


Plausible account. Detailed investigative reporting.

Here is the conclusion.
The Russian military under Vladimir Putin is responsible for the downing of MH17. The Russian military destabilized east Ukraine; it provided the separatists with troops and the equipment needed to kill the passengers aboard MH17. The attack could halve been intentional or occurred in a moment of panic. 
The Ukrainian government takes partial responsibility. It used the passengers of civilian aircrafts as human shields in air attacks on Russian tanks. Its fighter jets hid among planes packed with vacationers, placing hundreds of innocent lives at risk. 
The German government and the EU governments must also assume partial responsibility. They were afraid to call the war in eastern Ukraine a war and did not prohibit airlines from flying over the war zone. The EU should have recognized that Russian tanks and air defense units were active in Ukraine and ordered a no-fly-zone. 
Politicians focused on negotiations with Russia rather than the security situation.
Finally, the airlines are also responsible because they didn’t see the danger, and they endangered the lives of their passengers by flying over eastern Ukraine.
 
They all share responsibility.
The evidence reported is germane and the rationale is highly plausible, although the report is clearly biased against the Russian and Putin, who certainly did not order the attack personally in this scenario.

Why do I say that the report is biased against the Russians and Putin. It assumes that Putin had "destabilized" eastern Ukraine ordered to the Russian military to attack, implicitly unprovoked and aggressively. That, I think, is an oversimplification of what had developed into a civil war owing to actions on the part of the Right Sektor, especially, but also the extremism of the Ukrainian government that assumed power after the Maidan. While the West portrays this as a grassroots-led color revolution, others view it as a Western-engineered coup coup d'état drove out the democratically elected president and illegitimately replaced him with a compliant regime to create another vassal state.

It is much more likely that the actions of the Ukrainian authorities, along with an uncontrolled and Russophobic Right Sector volunteer force, destabilized eastern Ukraine  and threatened the Russian-speaking populace before Russia became involved. Russia had already warned that it would defend the interests of ethnic populations adjacent to it borders and had demonstrated this previously in Georgia. However, the aid was clandestine and there was no march of the Russian military on Ukraine, or use of Russian military aircraft to counter air superiority of the Ukrainian air force.

While the article places chief responsibility on Putin and Russia, it looks to me like the responsibility is at least as heavy on both the Ukrainian authorities and Western countries as Russia. As the reports admits, civilian airliners were knowingly, and therefore intentionally, being used as shields.

Truthdig
Flight MH17: Searching for the Truth of a War Crime
Marcus Bensmann and David Crawford, CORRECT!V

4 comments:

PeterP said...

Hilarious. First some geniuses deny Russia is even in Ukraine and now it is the West's fault because they didn't say clearly enough that Russia is in Ukraine. Everybody is guilty. Dalai Lama didn't point to Russian invasion. Also guilty.

Dan Lynch said...

Biased? Well, yeah.

the US State Department said Russian tank units crossed the border to the Ukraine

The US state department is a reliable source?

A spokesman for the Ukrainian Security Council said the Ukraine did not deploy combat aircraft on July 17th.

Nazis are a reliable source?

There is a second hot lead discovered by an international investigative team, Bellingcat.com

I visited the Bellingcat site. He is an English blogger who is anti-Assad and anti-Russia. He has no primary sources, he just sits at home and gets stuff off the internet.

When asked whether Russian soldiers or separatists fired the missile, the man laughs. For him the rocket launch could only be executed by Russian soldiers.

So the star witness offers no specific information about the people he allegedly saw.

the powerful separatist commander Aleksander Khodakovskiy.

Except this Khodakovskiy is a suspicious character. The Saker had nothing good to say about him even before the MH17 incident, implying that Khodakovskiy was at best incompetent and perhaps a traitor and/or a crook. Khodkovskiy seems to have disappeared from the radar screen since then.

They all agree, the separatists did not have the know-how to fire a BUK missile

But we the Nazis did have BUKs and were trained to use them.

Bottom line: the US knows who did it. Why don't they release their data? Why doesn't Kiev release the flight controller recordings? What about the photos of the plane pieces that clearly show raking bullet holes?

Salsabob said...

Yea, those tricksey Ukrainian fighter jets flying along side passenger jets and taking out tanks from 33,000 feet in the air.
One thing fer sure, we need to fire every one of our US cockpit jockeys and bring them thar Ukrainian hotshot flyers to Syria right now!

Anyone buying this horse pucky is already predispose to buying a lot of horse pucky. Putin smiles.

As Peter said, hilarious.

Dan Lynch said...

Remember this old post where I raised questions about the "Bellingcat" source?

Well, Bellingcat is in the news again.

What we are dealing with is a politically motivated report by a source that has already been discredited numerous times.
....
Bellingcat and Higgins’ names should be known to everyone, but not because their analysis is worthwhile. Rather, they need to become household names so that those who understand how western propaganda and soft power actually works, will be on the lookout for more of their disinformation."


And more from Robert Parry:

“I don't consider this Bellingcat group to be serious or credible," Parry said.