What I’ve been told by one source, who has provided accurate information on similar matters in the past, is that U.S. intelligence agencies do have detailed satellite images of the likely missile battery that launched the fateful missile, but the battery appears to have been under the control of Ukrainian government troops dressed in what look like Ukrainian uniforms.
The source said CIA analysts were still not ruling out the possibility that the troops were actually eastern Ukrainian rebels in similar uniforms but the initial assessment was that the troops were Ukrainian soldiers. There also was the suggestion that the soldiers involved were undisciplined and possibly drunk, since the imagery showed what looked like beer bottles scattered around the site, the source said.
Instead of pressing for these kinds of details, the U.S. mainstream press has simply passed on the propaganda coming from the Ukrainian government and the U.S. State Department, including hyping the fact that the Buk system is “Russian-made,” a rather meaningless fact that gets endlessly repeated.
However, to use the “Russian-made” point to suggest that the Russians must have been involved in the shoot-down is misleading at best and clearly designed to influence ill-informed Americans. As the Post and other news outlets surely know, the Ukrainian military also operates Russian-made military systems, including Buk anti-aircraft batteries, so the manufacturing origin has no probative value here.What we know is that as soon as the Malaysia Airlines Boeing went down last Thursday the junta began shrieking that it was the "terrorists" who did it. These assertions were backed up by unnamed USG officials. Since then we have been treated to a steady stream of junta supplied telephone intercepts of gloating militiamen and photographs of missile batteries purportedly being moved across the border into Russia. All this material is passed through to the front pages of the U.S. prestige press without any caveats.
So what we have here is full-blown propaganda campaign, the kind of which we are by now very familiar with. The Ghouta sarin attack of last August comes to mind.
Novorossiyan militia control of the crash site has been one of the main pillars of the Kiev/U.S. propaganda onslaught. From Friday onward the refrain has been that the militia is destroying evidence, desecrating the bodies of passengers, refusing access to OSCE monitors, refusing to release the bodies, etc. Basically, a word picture has been painted depicting the Novorossiyan militia as pirates.
But when you actually move beyond the scare headlines and read these stories in their entirety -- say, for instance, the one by Sabrine Tavernise and Noah Sneider filed yesterday -- a different image emerges. The crash site is in the middle of territory where a war is going on. The Novorossiyans are not refusing to release the bodies; they are waiting for the Dutch to arrive to claim them (which apparently they have just done). There is not a professional crime scene investigation complete with yellow caution tape because there are no police. There is civil war. Instead, you have volunteers doing the work. Where is the evidence, besides the shrill allegations of the junta, that something malign is happening at the crash site? Poroshenko even went as far to blame the Novorossiyans for looting. According to Tavernise and Sneider:
President Petro O. Poroshenko of Ukraine has claimed that rebels stole credit cards from the wreckage. One villager, Elena, who declined to give her last name, strongly disputed that.
“That is a sin, a big sin in our faith,” she said. “This is a cemetery. Who would take from it?”So be wary of the headlines, like the latest about Putin being forced under pressure of new sanctions to allow for an international investigation. Putin has never been opposed to an international investigation. He has been the one saying let's not rush to judgment as the U.S. and Kiev are doing; let's wait to see what a proper investigation reveals.
And the whole time Kiev's assault on Donetsk and Luhanks continues.
In Donetsk, a thick plume of dark smoke could be seen rising into the bright blue afternoon sky. One man, a passenger in a blue car that was stopped at a red light, said two people in his building were killed in the fighting. He said he ran out of his house in nothing but his slippers.
The fighting in Donetsk killed a woman in the Kuibysheva neighborhood, which was hit in the morning, as she walked through a wooded courtyard near a small child’s playground, and two men were found dead nearby. A piece of clothing had been placed over her body, and pools of blood were drying in the sun. A grocery discount card was on the ground near the bloody outline where her body had been.
“They are trying to push the D.N.R. back but they end up hitting us,” said Yevgeny Zhitnikov, a 17-year old resident of the city. “Victory is more important to them than than human life.”
Said his father, who was arranging bags on the ground for the family to leave to a nearby bomb shelter: “Animals.”
A series of booms thumped through the courtyard consistent with the sound of a grad rocket. The rockets hit near dentist office complex and a library.
“Why are people suffering, for what?” said Galina Afrina, a 60-year old retired financial worker who was holding some compote she had made. “We are being told to evacuate.”
By 2:30 p.m., residents were leaving the nighborood. A woman carrying a large gray cat rushed by. A man carrying a kitten walked a bicycle.
The rocket that killed the woman had punched a deep hole into the courtyard. Its shape indicated it had been come from the northwest, the area that the Ukrainian government controls.There will be a price for the U.S. backing this murderous campaign. Putin's relative silence is not a sign of guilt but of strength. Like Parry's bombshell, the truth is starting to emerge about MH17. And when it does, the fallout will be immense, hopefully great enough to topple Kiev and hopefully to permanently tarnish a warmongering Nobel Peace Prize winning POTUS.
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