breaking: civilian airliner goes down near donetsk

[Sasha]

News coming in that a civilian airliner from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur crashed near the Ukrainian Russian border where sepratists are fighting and several Ukrainian fighter jets where shot down, I assume its just a coincidence because if the airplane was downed that would be a huge thing.

[RedAnarchist]

It's a Malaysian airplane from what BBC and other sites are saying, with 295 people on board.

[Sasha]

Some reports that it was shotdown. If true it would be massive in its implications..

[Tim Cornelis]

Sad.
Especially sad because it's a conflict over nothing but oligarchic aspirations. An accident is an accident, but this is so unnecessary and needless.

[Sasha]

At least 20 dutch on board, if the sepratists did it i wouldnt be suprised if the NATO would get involved in some way.

[Tim Cornelis]

I don't think NATO would risk getting involved.

[Sasha]

If they force russia to stay aside, maybe broker a deal where they will recognize the take over if the Crimea if Russia allows the crushing of the donetsk "republic".

[Ethics Gradient, Traitor For All Ages]

Sounds like there were US citizens on board as well, that's one way to escalate the situation. Pretty horrific shit

[Five Year Plan]

The title of this thread can be read with or without the colon.

[cyu]

Was it on autopilot or what? I'd assume most sane airline companies know to avoid active warzones where missiles might be involved? Don't get me going on any conspiracy theories

[Sasha]

Airspace was closed below 7km high but this one was flying on 10km.

[L.A.P.]

commercial flights go over conflict zones often. That wasn't the only commercial flight over the area as well

[Ethics Gradient, Traitor For All Ages]

Since three or four airlines have begun avoiding the area, it sounds like its pretty common.

[Ele'ill]

how exactly do you accidentally shoot down a commercial airliner traveling 500 mph at 23,000 feet

[Hrafn]

Malaysia Airlines really can't catch a break.

[helot]

how exactly do you accidentally shoot down a commercial airliner traveling 500 mph at 23,000 feet

Not counting some chain of events that are ripped straight from a comedy and involves lots of falling over and just plain chance the likely way to accidentally shoot down a commerical airliner is by being shit at identifying military jets.

[Sasha]

Option 1; thinking its an army cargo plane and fighting with the system disabled that identifies civilian airplanes.

Option 2: there are reports that there where Ukrainian jets in the area, maybe the rocket locked on the wrong target.

[Sasha]

http://mashable.com/2014/07/17/malaysia-airlines-ukraine-russia-rebel/?utm_cid=mash-com-Tw-main-link

[cyu]

Speaking of conspiracy theories...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TWA_Flight_800

No verbatim records of the witness interviews were produced; instead, the agents who conducted the interviews wrote summaries that they then submitted. Witnesses were not asked to review or correct the summaries. Witnesses were not allowed to testify at the court hearings.

Within days of the crash the NTSB announced its intent to form its own witness group and to interview witnesses to the crash. However, after the FBI raised concerns about non-governmental parties in the NTSB's investigation having access to this information and possible prosecutorial difficulties resulting from multiple interviews of the same witness. the FBI agreed to allow the NTSB access to summaries of witness accounts in which personally identifying information had been redacted and to conduct a limited number of witness interviews. In April 1998, the FBI provided the NTSB with the identities of the witnesses but due to the time elapsed a decision was made to rely on the original FBI documents rather than reinterview witnesses.

[Sasha]

Already 3 people on my facebook are reporting the death of loved ones, I know its statisticly to be expected but it still feels suddenly very close.:(

[Sasha]

Dutch tv is broadcasting a tapped phone conversation where the military commander of the sepratists is admitting they did it by accident. The source is the Ukrainian secret police though so they would have a agenda.
US media is reporting that the US military has proof that and where from a missile was launched.
The UN security council has a emergency meeting tomorrow.

[Sasha]

154 dutch dead... That would be the biggest dutch civilian deathtol from armed action since the worldwar.

[Sasha]

VP Biden confirmed the plane was shot down .

The other nationalities are 27 Australian, 23 Maleisian, 11 Indonesian, 6 Americans, 4 Germans, 4 Belgian, 3 Filipino, 1 canadian.

[Creative Destruction]

jesus fuck.

[Slavoj Zizek's Balls]

This won't go down quietly now. Could be worrying.

[motion denied]

Any information as to why they (erm... who?) took the plane down?

According to some Russian press (http://en.itar-tass.com/world/741173) the plane was flying too high for the 'rebels' weaponry be effective.

[Patrice O'neal]

I don't see any probability of anything happening over this from a military perspective apart from the UN and EU getting stronger in their support for the Ukranian regime. I think all the people online acting as though Holland or Britian have any military might to say anything to Russia is fantastical and the U.S will probably heighten their rhetoric but they don't have any real want to do anything and they can't really say shit to the Russians.

Not that anyone on here thought that some kind of domino effect would lead to WW3 but the ammount of online pedictions of tiny little nations going to war with a giant military power like Russia over this just seems completely delusional.

[Blake's Baby]

There's reports (on the Guardian website) that this afternoon, some separatist group was posing with its new Buk missile system and claiming 'we took down a Ukrainian government troop-transporter', but that this info was quickly taken down when it became clear it was civilian.

Don't know whether that's all true, obviously.

Here's some excerpts from the Guardian's reporting:

"...
A site attributed to a separatist leader suggests rebels may have shot down MH17, but it has since been taken down and details remain unclear.
It features a comment saying "We just downed an An-26 near Torez. It's down somewhere near Progress mine," which suggests rebel forces may have believed the passenger jet to be a Ukrainian military transport plane.
The page, on the VKontakte social network, is attributed to Igor Girkin, who goes by the nom de guerre Strelkov and is the self-proclaimed military commander of the rebels. The page has been posting for rebels affiliated with Strelkov for weeks, and has some 130,000 followers..."

"...

Igor Sutyagin, a Russian military specialist at the London-based Royal United Services Institute, said that he believed that either Russians or Russian supported groups in eastern Ukraine were responsible. He said they had been shooting at Ukrainian aircraft over the last week.
Sutyagin, who monitors social media in the Ukraine, said a Ukrainian rebel force had been spotted just hours earlier with a Buk at Torez, a village close to the site where the plane came down..."

"...Reports out of Moscow have said that the rebels do not have the Buk missile system that is suspected here, although the same agencies only recently said that they did...."

[Sasha]

I don't see any probability of anything happening over this from a military perspective apart from the UN and EU getting stronger in their support for the Ukranian regime. I think all the people online acting as though Holland or Britian have any military might to say anything to Russia is fantastical and the U.S will probably heighten their rhetoric but they don't have any real want to do anything and they can't really say shit to the Russians.

Not that anyone on here thought that some kind of domino effect would lead to WW3 but the ammount of online pedictions of tiny little nations going to war with a giant military power like Russia over this just seems completely delusional.

Obviously the dutch won't go to war against Russia, it could be that the Russian throw their sepratist friends under the bus though. And the Netherlands is a NATO member as are mamy other countries that lost citizens.

[Patrice O'neal]

Obviously the dutch won't go to war against Russia, it could be that the Russian throw their sepratist friends under the bus though. And the Netherlands is a NATO member as are mamy other countries that lost citizens.

I thought the same thing. Russia will probably stop funding and distance themselves and such with the seperatists and try and remove themselves from blame by calling for "whoever is responsible for this be brought to swift justice".

I would also imagine the U.N and NATO taking advantage of it and declaring whatever new meaningless actions they come up with.

I just feel really sorry for the people who died and their families, about 80 kids are being reported as being on the flight here.

[cyu]

I just feel really sorry for the people who died and their families, about 80 kids are being reported as being on the flight here.

Militaries typically take little note of civilian deaths - they only consider it a problem when it results in bad PR. The goal of a military is to "win" and win at any cost - if any military tells you it doesn't do false flag attacks or black propaganda, either they're lying or the only reason they're against it is because they think it's too risky.

[Patrice O'neal]

Militaries typically take little note of civilian deaths - they only consider it a problem when it results in bad PR. The goal of a military is to "win" and win at any cost - if any military tells you it doesn't do false flag attacks or black propaganda, either they're lying or the only reason they're against it is because they think it's too risky.

What did that have to do with what I put? I never implied that any military was a force for good in the world. If you are just stating that sentiment, well I agree.

[Sasha]

At least 6 people on board where AIDS activists on board to a conference that where close friends and colleages of friends of mine... This hits fucking close. What a waste.

[Patrice O'neal]

At least 6 people on board where AIDS activists on board to a conference that where close friends and colleages of friends of mine... This hits fucking close. What a waste.

Thats horrible, my condolences, sincerely.

[exeexe]

Proberbly some Ukrainian fascist shooting down civilian airplanes. How would Russia and NATO respond to Ukraine now? How many atrocities can they allow Ukraine to commit?

[Sasha]

yeah, i knew it was statistically to be expected that in a country with 18 million people and now 174 confirmed dead dutch people some friends of friends would be among the dead but i was already surprised that so many people really close where missing colleagues and friends, forgot that the international aids conference was going to start in melbourne today... so far no one i knew beyond shaking hands and a few words on a party but a big loss for the anti-HIV/AIDS movement and very fucked up for my friends and the families of those that died.

[Patrice O'neal]

Proberbly some Ukrainian fascist shooting down civilian airplanes. How would Russia and NATO respond to Ukraine now? How many atrocities can they allow Ukraine to commit?

Why would Ukraine shoot down a plane that was flying in that direction? Everything points to it being seperatists, from they saying they shot down a Ukranian plane then deleting it, the tapped conversations, the brggaing about hitting a ukranian cargo plane online then deleting it.

This was Pro Russian rebels and saying otherwise in spite of overwhelming evidence seems pretty distasteful to the people who died, have you said anything about the fact a bunch of innocent people died because they flew through airspace where a bunch of reactionaries were fighting each other? Or is it just pro Russian state nonsense on your agenda?

I mean seriously, have some bloody taste.

[Sasha]

Proberbly some Ukrainian fascist shooting down civilian airplanes. How would Russia and NATO respond to Ukraine now? How many atrocities can they allow Ukraine to commit?


shut the fuck up, this where the stupid fucking separatists playing their pretend war of independence with high grade military kit they knew way too little of.
fucking assholes used the launchers with only the limited radar on the launcher itself instead of the separate radar truck that identifies civilian aircrafts. they didnt know the system was designed to shoot down high flying US spy planes during the coldwar and had range up to 25 km high.
it was fucking stupid mistake and i wont blame them beyond being fucking idiots but if it turns out they didnt conquer this kit from the ukrainian army but got it from russia i will blame fucking Putin.

[piet11111]

Well shit if this turns out to be the seperatists.

They end up finally having advanced weapons to fight back the ukrainian army and they accidentally shoot down a civilian airliner.

[TC]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_airliner_shootdown_incidents

There have been a lot more cases of militaries shooting down civilian jetliners than you might expect. The Soviet Union, United States, Israel and Ukraine have all shot down large civilian jetliners.

[Patrice O'neal]

There have been a lot more cases of militaries shooting down civilian jetliners than you might expect. The Soviet Union, United States, Israel and Ukraine have all shot down large civilian jetliners.

Was the Lockerbie bombing considered a military operation or was it not state sanctioned? I never did much research on that. That of course was not an accident so its different than those other examples anyway, was just curious.

[Sasha]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_airliner_shootdown_incidents

There have been a lot more cases of militaries shooting down civilian jetliners than you might expect. The Soviet Union, United States, Israel and Ukraine have all shot down large civilian jetliners.

but except the US-Iran one those where almost all shot down with simple Stinger rockets by irregular fighters or strayed and "misidentified" by fighterjets during a war. shooting down a high cruising plane with a top grade AS-6 is pretty fucking bizarre (luckily)

[Rss]

What a terrible waste. My condolences for friends and loved ones of those who were lost.

Unfortunately many military surface-to-air missile systems do not make difference between civilian airliner and military cargo transport. Does anyone know if conflict zone is cordoned off now?

[Hrafn]

Swedish media is saying that up to a hundred of the people onboard where going to the AIDS conference in Melbourne. If so, this is even more terrible than I had imagined it could possibly be. Only way it could worse is if it, like, crashed into an orphanage.

[Sasha]

What a terrible waste. My condolences for friends and loved ones of those who were lost.

Unfortunately many military surface-to-air missile systems do not make difference between civilian airliner and military cargo transport. Does anyone know if conflict zone is cordoned off now?

Yeah, all airspace above the Ukrainian east is closed now, sepratists declared a 3 day ceasefire, big problem is that both the donetsk airfield and the bridges are heavily damaged so its very difficult to reach the area, also its not clear wheter the sepratists are centrally controlled enough, let alone provocateurs, will abide the ceasefire...

[Sinister Cultural Marxist]

yeah I've been reading about this since it happened - these amateurish fighters are as much a danger to themselves and to innocent civilians as they are to the Ukrainian military. They obviously did not plan to kill a bunch of civilians, as evidenced by their glee at shooting down a "military supply craft" (deleted as soon as they realized it was a civilian craft).

Of course, no insurgent could just get a hold of such a weapon at their local hardware store, meaning they either captured it, or it was given to them by Russia. The 2nd is more likely, considering the lateness as to which this device was put into service, and the fact that it is unlikely that the Ukrainian military would have deployed such weapons to fight a bunch of irregulars. It seems that Russian leaders thought it smart to just hand highly sophisticated and dangerous anti-aircraft technology to a bunch of untrained amateurs and grizzled, nationalistic veterans without all the proper equipment and training. In their glee, the rebels seem to have been too eager to deploy their toys, and killed a bunch of innocent people in the process.

Aside from making the separatists far more unlikeable than they were before, Russia's total and utter lack of foresight (as well as basic ethical standards) has just done more than the US or Ukrainian governments ever could have at uniting the EU against Putin's project of building a greater Eurasia. It also created the conditions for a totally unnecessary tragedy.

[Patrice O'neal]

Did anyone see the Russian respone at the UN security council?

Their response to questions about how the seperatists got ahold of the BUK 9K37 and where is it now was:

what do you expect from this situation, the ukranians arrest and beat them.

And quite insane and brazenly the jew problem in Ukraine

They actually blamed this on a jew problem in the Ukraine regime. They also did not adress one of the questions.

Fuck having lost people recently seeing the families on the news really is fucking with me.

[piet11111]

The rebels recently captured a ukrainian airforce base where they had the opportunity to capture the BUK system.

[Rurkel]

Wait. They didn't say anything about Jews.

Their answer was the same as Putin's remark: Kiev is the party responsible for this conflict, ergo Kiev is responsible for everything, no matter who downed the plane. I leave it to RevLeft to determine the degree to which this answer is convincing. :rolleyes:

I agree with those who think that the rebels capturing the "Buk" system from an Ukrainian base is likely what actually happened.

[Patrice O'neal]

Wait. They didn't say anything about Jews.

Their answer was the same as Putin's remark: Kiev is the party responsible for this conflict, ergo Kiev is responsible for everything, no matter who downed the plane. I leave it to RevLeft to determine the degree to which this answer is convincing.

I agree with those who think that the rebels capturing the "Buk" system from an Ukrainian base is likely what actually happened.

What channel coverage are you wathcing? On here the guy with the white hair talking for Russia, his interpreter quite clearly said jew problem in Ukraine.

[Rurkel]

I'm reading the "live" press-releases from the Guardian.

[Patrice O'neal]

I'm reading the "live" press-releases from the Guardian.

This was on Sky and BBC. My brother was right next to me and heard it too, so I don't think it was me mishearing.

[Rurkel]

Not reading anything about it anywhere else on the net, though. :confused:

Anyway, the thingy sucks big time.

[Patrice O'neal]

Not reading anything about it anywhere else on the net, though. :confused:

Anyway, the thingy sucks big time.

Yeah ive just been typing jew jew problem ukraine on google trying to find it. God I hope no one starts to type anything starting with a J on my laptop, that autofill making me look like a horrendous person.

I will try and find something on it to post up.

[adipocere]

shut the fuck up, this where the stupid fucking separatists playing their pretend war of independence with high grade military kit they knew way too little of.
fucking assholes used the launchers with only the limited radar on the launcher itself instead of the separate radar truck that identifies civilian aircrafts. they didnt know the system was designed to shoot down high flying US spy planes during the coldwar and had range up to 25 km high.
it was fucking stupid mistake and i wont blame them beyond being fucking idiots but if it turns out they didnt conquer this kit from the ukrainian army but got it from russia i will blame fucking Putin.

According to Russian military intelligence, Kiev had deployed a BUK system in the area and also had the associated central command radar to actually target a high flying plane, not to mention fighter jets. They concede that the separatists also had a BUK system but not the necessary radar to actually use it.
There has been nothing attesting to separatists guilt aside from a dubious audio tape and a typical (pro-Keiv) media onslaught that doesn't even begin to ask whether Kiev could be culpable. If the separatists did this it would certainly be an atrocious mistake - if Kiev is responsible for shooting down the airplane, then it would be an atrocity. Why not wait for an independent investigation before you make up your mind?

[Ethics Gradient, Traitor For All Ages]

Out of curiosity, why would Russia's military intelligence be any more trust-worthy in this situation than say, NATO's?

[adipocere]

Out of curiosity, why would Russia's military intelligence be any more trust-worthy in this situation than say, NATO's?
Because Russia is not only on the defensive in this situation, it also lacks an international racket of stenographer media that howls in unison on its behalf. It is not that one should trust their intelligence simply because it's not NATO, but from a practical standpoint, Russia will want to mind their facts. If Kiev is responsible, it will be an uphill battle to prove that.

[Sasha]

According to Russian military intelligence, Kiev had deployed a BUK system in the area and also had the associated central command radar to actually target a high flying plane, not to mention fighter jets. They concede that the separatists also had a BUK system but not the necessary radar to actually use it.
There has been nothing attesting to separatists guilt aside from a dubious audio tape and a typical (pro-Keiv) media onslaught that doesn't even begin to ask whether Kiev could be culpable. If the separatists did this it would certainly be an atrocious mistake - if Kiev is responsible for shooting down the airplane, then it would be an atrocity. Why not wait for an independent investigation before you make up your mind?

Really?
If this BUK was Ukrainian it must have been over of with very much luck on the frontline. So why would Kiev move a piece of extremely valuable weaponry into enemy (risk) territory when their enemy doesn't have a single aircraft which you couldn't shoot out of the air with a side arm? And why would the ukranian military operators, who are very well trained to recognise a civilian plane, lock on to this plane which was clearly coming in from the west? There is only one reason in which that would make any sense, a deliberate false flag operation. Which is ridiculous, the Ukraine really wants to hang on their east but they wouldn't shoot down almost 300 of their allied citizens. It's the guys who have been shooting down planes for over a week in that area who fucked up massively.

[Ethics Gradient, Traitor For All Ages]

Because Russia is not only on the defensive in this situation, it also lacks an international racket of stenographer media that howls in unison on its behalf. It is not that one should trust their intelligence simply because it's not NATO, but from a practical standpoint, Russia will want to mind their facts. If Kiev is responsible, it will be an uphill battle to prove that.

You're going to have to go more into detail than that. What about being on the defensive gives them any incentive to be more honest? Who exactly would a country as large and powerful as Russia answer to? They have every incentive to lie, just as the US does, because they are wholly unaccountable.

[adipocere]

Really?
If this BUK was Ukrainian it must have been over of with very much luck on the frontline. So why would Kiev move a piece of extremely valuable weaponry into enemy (risk) territory when their enemy doesn't have a single aircraft which you couldn't shoot out of the air with a side arm? And why would the ukranian military operators, who are very well trained to recognise a civilian plane, lock on to this plane which was clearly coming in from the west? There is only one reason in which that would make any sense, a deliberate false flag operation. Which is ridiculous, the Ukraine really wants to hang on their east but they wouldn't shoot down almost 300 of their allied citizens. It's the guys who have been shooting down planes for over a week in that area who fucked up massively.

They hired snipers to shoot their own nazis on maidan and they allowed their nazis to lock 50 people in a trade union building, shoot them, rape and strangle women and set them on fire. Yes, they are capable of atrocities. They are also supported by a certain ally that is absolutely not above these tactics.

In my opinion, the separatists maybe have have a more obvious reason to have done it - they were shooting down military aircraft with manpads. But that is really a superficial observation. Kiev clearly has the equipment and capacity, the hard part to argue is whether or not they are so bloodthirsty. I think they are. Did they shoot the aircraft down? I don't know - but they are by no means above suspicion.


Ethics Gradient; You're going to have to go more into detail than that. What about being on the defensive gives them any incentive to be more honest? Who exactly would a country as large and powerful as Russia answer to? They have every incentive to lie, just as the US does, because they are wholly unaccountable.

Because it would be a huge blow to the legitimacy of Russia supporting the separatist cause, the result of which would be a NATO base on their border.

[Patrice O'neal]

They hired snipers to shoot their own nazis on maidan and they allowed their nazis to lock 50 people in a trade union building, shoot them, rape and strangle women and set them on fire. Yes, they are capable of atrocities. They are also supported by a certain ally that is absolutely not above these tactics.

In my opinion, the separatists maybe have have a more obvious reason to have done it - they were shooting down military aircraft with manpads. But that is really a superficial observation. Kiev clearly has the equipment and capacity, the hard part to argue is whether or not they are so bloodthirsty. I think they are. Did they shoot the aircraft down? I don't know - but they are by no means above suspicion.



Because it would be a huge blow to the legitimacy of Russia supporting the separatist cause, the result of which would be a NATO base on their border.

While the Ukranian leadership are exploiting this, calling it terrorism for example when it was a mistake, a big horrid mistake by reactionaries, but still a mistake, this does not mean it is some sinister underhand plot by the Ukranians to blow up a civillian plane and blame it on the seperatists, I don't think they have the nerves or the need, or the ability to do it without anything leaking.

To be honest there is overwhelming proof it was seperatists, to deny it is a bit Ludicrous at this point.

What is it with the left over the last few years and conspiracies?

[Sasha]

I don't know why I would even debate such lunacy but here we go, the transporter that was shot down earlier was also well out of reach of manpads, also Russian news have reported themselves last week that the sepratists had BUKs. And come on, even Putin doesn't blame Kiev, he says they are responsible for it because they resumed military operations, which translates to "my team did it but you made them do it".

[adipocere]

I don't know why I would even debate such lunacy but here we go, the transporter that was shot down earlier was also well out of reach of manpads, also Russian news have reported themselves last week that the sepratists had BUKs. And come on, even Putin doesn't blame Kiev, he says they are responsible for it because they resumed military operations, which translates to "my team did it but you made them do it".

According to Kiev. According to the rebels it was flying much lower, well in range. Why are you in such a rush to take Kiev at their word?

I'm not trying to get into an argument. I am only suggesting that we wait for an independent and credible investigation before we begin assigning blame. Remember when Assad was the target of full-throated, hysterical western condemnation for using chemical weapons, and how that turned out?

[Slavic]

Remember when Assad was the target of full-throated, hysterical western condemnation for using chemical weapons, and how that turned out?

If I remember correctly the condemnation was appropriate.

[Slavoj Zizek's Balls]

credible investigation

Was I the only person who laughed when Obama said that in his speech? The separatists were making life difficult for investigators trying to reach the plane a few hours ago, although they managed to retrieve two black boxes eventually.

[adipocere]

If I remember correctly the condemnation was appropriate.
Yeah, except that it wasn't (http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-22424188).

[Slavic]

Yeah, except that it wasn't (http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-22424188).


Third line in your article.

"Later, the commission stressed that it had "not reached conclusive findings" as to their use by any parties."

Basically any findings from this commission are irrelevant. Also rebel use of chemical weapons doesn't nullify Assad use of chemical weapons.

[adipocere]

Third line in your article.

"Later, the commission stressed that it had "not reached conclusive findings" as to their use by any parties."

Basically any findings from this commission are irrelevant. Also rebel use of chemical weapons doesn't nullify Assad use of chemical weapons.

The findings are only irrelevant if you are a hypocrite.

That Syrians promptly went back to being unpeople after the chemical weapons stunt failed to achieve US airstrikes must have been totally lost on you.

[consuming negativity]

I don't get why this is such a big deal. Like yeah, the Ukraine stuff, but they couldn't use this politically if it couldn't be hyped up. It's definitely not a good thing and anybody who lost someone has every right to be angry or whatever they wanna be about it. But here is 200 civilians.... compared to hundreds of thousands or even millions that nobody has given a second thought over? And I'm supposed to be blood thirsty over this? Fuck that.

[Tim Cornelis]

If I remember correctly, UN experts calculated the trajectory of the rockets to have come from a hillside where pro-Assad troops are stationed and that the affected neighbourhoods were all either contested or in the hands of rebels. There was some refutation of this circulating on the internet which sounded plausible, but I'm not an expert on rocket trajectories and whatnot so I'm inclined to go with the UN experts on this one.

As for this particular 'incident', we know the pro-Russian rebels had captured a BUK system (which they themselves reported), we know that they have shot down various airplanes in roughly the same area so it fits their MO, we know that pro-Russian rebels reported they had shot down a military airplane in the same area on the same day, and deleted it after it was found out it was a civilian airplane. It is conclusive? No. But that 'some' so aggressively try to deflect blame from the rebels despite all these facts makes my Tankie-radar go off.

[Sasha]

just heard the brother of a close colleague of mine was on board, i met him often both on work and as he was studying on the theater school at the same time as i was. :(

[Rosa Partizan]

this is really bizarre

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/07/18/us-ukraine-crisis-bodies-idUSKBN0FN1JJ20140718?utm_source=twitter

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

love how people think that cos they're 'socialists' they've gotta play the edge 'I don't believe Kiev' or 'I'm going to pretend this isn't tragic' card.

Fucking idiots.

[Rosa Partizan]

love how people think that cos they're 'socialists' they've gotta play the edge 'I don't believe Kiev' or 'I'm going to pretend this isn't tragic' card.

Fucking idiots.

you're right, but this is no exclusively socialist thing (or let's say "socialist"). It's somehow cool and "unconventional" (at least that's what people think) to go like "yeah I've seen it everything, I don't believe anyone, and while 20 people were killed there and there, look what government xy did in country yz and no one reports about it". I mean, okay, let's put up some hierarchy of whose loss we should moan the most.

[Sasha]

Also, the people complaining that 300 unexpected mostly European citizens suddenly shot out over the air above a war they had nothing to do with in a unique accident are getting more attention than the so muched victims in Gaza are the same people who will vehemently argue about the reasons why those people in Gaza are more important than people dying in Syria, Kurdistan or Sri-lanka....
There is sadly always a misery hirarchy in attention and relevance for people, its when people get blatantly hypocreticall in it what's really pathetic.

[Rosa Partizan]

I don't get why this is such a big deal. Like yeah, the Ukraine stuff, but they couldn't use this politically if it couldn't be hyped up. It's definitely not a good thing and anybody who lost someone has every right to be angry or whatever they wanna be about it. But here is 200 civilians.... compared to hundreds of thousands or even millions that nobody has given a second thought over? And I'm supposed to be blood thirsty over this? Fuck that.


Isn't it kind of funny that after all, YOU get to mention that? I mean, you seem to care a lot about Palestinians, right? Seems legit. What about the Palestinians in Syria that are killed, starved and abused and the ones that were prosecuted almost everywhere in the Arab world, be it Iraq, Jordan etc? They aren't as interesting as those in Gaza, right? Not even when you compare their living conditions throughout all these countries would you pay attention to those that don't live in Gaza.

Edit: Sasha beat me to it.

[Hrafn]

Something something Zionism

[Sasha]

Harsh words of the dutch PM towards Putin now, not on the blame of the attack but very much on the obstruction by the militias of the recovery of the bodies and the investigation.

[adipocere]

Tim Cornelis; ...makes my Tankie-radar go off.

Everything makes your Tankie radar go off because it's broken.


love how people think that cos they're 'socialists' they've gotta play the edge 'I don't believe Kiev' or 'I'm going to pretend this isn't tragic' card.

Fucking idiots.

Just because a few of the usual suspects manage to dominate a narrative on an internet forum does not mean they have any special insight into the truth - but I think you are way out of line to call me a "fucking idiot" because I don't wish to join your stampede off reality cliff before any proper investigation has even begun. You're just being a bully.

[Tim Cornelis]

Everything makes your Tankie radar go off because it's broken.

Well not everything, just 'Tankinoid' traits.

[adipocere]

Well not everything, just 'Tankinoid' traits.
And what is a Tankinoid trait exactly? Disagreement with you? Or are you one of the sages who is able to discern meaning from an animated gif of Stalin winking? I don't mean to fight, but I resent the petty little jabs I get for simply trying to participate in a discussion.


I am sort of curious as to why the idea of fighter jet shooting down the passenger plane it has been almost entirely avoided. Unless I am mistaken there is already at least two eyewitnesses who saw the attack and another plane in the vicinity. Kiev has already levied accusations (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/18/world/europe/ukraine-says-russian-plane-shot-down-its-fighter-jet.html?_r=0) that a Russian military jet shot down a Ukrainian fighter jet a few days ago, not to mention Kiev's capability.

[Sasha]

Because both the US as Russia as all other witnesses say it was a rocket, you are so desperate to find the conspiracy that lines up with your dogma's that your willing to ignore even the most obvious evidence.

Funny how the propaganda meant for the Russian people keeps confusing people who also have access to the official statements by the Russian administration towards the outside world

[Tim Cornelis]

And what is a Tankinoid trait exactly? Disagreement with you? Or are you one of the sages who is able to discern meaning from an animated gif of Stalin winking? I don't mean to fight, but I resent the petty little jabs I get for simply trying to participate in a discussion.

Yeah I suppose that wasn't necessary, but sometimes these 'Tankinoid traits' (apologism for anti-Western - and Bonapartist- governments on account of them being anti-Western) just get on my nerves.


I am sort of curious as to why the idea of fighter jet shooting down the passenger plane it has been almost entirely avoided. Unless I am mistaken there is already at least two eyewitnesses who saw the attack and another plane in the vicinity. Kiev has already levied accusations (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/18/world/europe/ukraine-says-russian-plane-shot-down-its-fighter-jet.html?_r=0) that a Russian military jet shot down a Ukrainian fighter jet a few days ago, not to mention Kiev's capability.

The pro-Russian rebels don't have planes so it's highly unlikely Ukraine would shoot down planes suspecting them of belonging to pro-Russian rebels. So the alternative is that the Ukrainian government purposefully shot down a civilian plane to get the West on its side. But this is even more unlikely because the risk involved is far greater than the benefits.

[Blake's Baby]

Well, I don't think anyone is claiming that anyone shot down the jet knowing that it was a passenger jet. But as it was being reported that the separatists had claimed on Thursday afternoon to have shot down a Kiev Government transport plane, it's again more likely that the separatists shot it down.

[Tim Cornelis]

Barack Obama tonight accused Russia of supplying arms to the separatist rebels

His remarks came after the UK's representative at the UN, Ambassador Peter Wilson, blamed 'the senseless violence of armed separatists and with those who have supported, equipped and advised them' for the attack.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2697096/Putin-facing-global-isolation-West-vents-fury-downing-MH17-Russian-backed-rebel-forces-Ukraine.html


LONDON, July 19 (Reuters) - British Prime Minister David Cameron said on Saturday that if it were proven that Ukrainian separatists were behind the downing of a Malaysian jet carrying 298 passengers, Russia would be to blame for having destabilized the country.

"If this is the case then we must be clear what it means: this is a direct result of Russia destabilizing a sovereign state, violating its territorial integrity, backing thuggish militias and training and arming them," he wrote in The Sunday Times newspaper.

This type of hypocrisy is not really surprising. We can just ignore that the EU and the West supported the 'unlawful overthrow' of a (somewhat) democratically elected administration, and blame Russia entirely for the destabilisation.

The Syrian government's use of sarin gas was "a direct result of [the USA] destabilizing a sovereign state, violating its territorial integrity, backing thuggish militias and training and arming them," and therefore we can blame the USA for it.

It's the same with the question of independence and national self-determination. Secession is against Russian interests (e.g. Montenegro), Russia is against it because it undermines Siberian national sovereignty or some shit. Secession is against Western interests (e.g. Abkhazia) and the West is against it because it undermines Georgian national sovereignty or some shit like that.

[consuming negativity]

love how people think that cos they're 'socialists' they've gotta play the edge 'I don't believe Kiev' or 'I'm going to pretend this isn't tragic' card.

Fucking idiots.


Isn't it kind of funny that after all, YOU get to mention that? I mean, you seem to care a lot about Palestinians, right? Seems legit. What about the Palestinians in Syria that are killed, starved and abused and the ones that were prosecuted almost everywhere in the Arab world, be it Iraq, Jordan etc? They aren't as interesting as those in Gaza, right? Not even when you compare their living conditions throughout all these countries would you pay attention to those that don't live in Gaza.

Edit: Sasha beat me to it.

Off-putting, but expected. I suppose I'll give one explanatory post.

A couple hundred people died, and that sucks. Especially for the people who died. And many more people will die in many much more violent and horrendous ways, and touch exponentially more lives, and all of this is very tragic. I fully acknowledge this. In fact, 20,000 children alone will starve to death this year; just from that one cause. And hundreds of millions more persons will be the victims of poor nutrition, lack of adequate healthcare, or just bad circumstances such as the purpose of this thread.

But where is their moral outrage? Where are the warriors coming to their defense? There are none, because they were numbers. Why aren't you crying for them? Because you didn't know them. They meant nothing to you but pixels on a screen. And these people mean nothing to me - the same amount I mean to any of you.

I care about them as much as I care about the 3,000 or so persons who died in 9/11, the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi's killed in Bush's torture-sponsored "accident", or the billions of nameless people who have already died and been forgotten. I will cry as many tears for these people as any of you cried for the various people in my life who you never knew or cared about, or may have even been glad to see go. In comparison to many people alive and dead, being able to live a few decades in this day and age would have been a dream come true. And to top it off, they'll be in the history books forever. They will live on longer than any of us in the minds of various people who will watch all 200, 300 - the exact number doesn't matter - of these people be used as political pawns in a global game.

Or is it somehow unacceptable for me to wash away the romanticizing of bourgeois morality? I won't be bullied by the media-inspired moral crusaders who would have me strung up for admitting the truth or questioning the party line. During times of panic, the so-called revolutionaries will jump right in line with the reactionaries to fuel the war machine with their own carcasses, so why should I have expected anything less than this kind of response from RevLeft? It is indeed much easier to condemn than to think; to lie and go with the flow, rather than be an individual. None of you are any different than the passengers in the aircraft, the people who murdered them, the politicians calling the shots, or me... we are all the same. So then tell me, warriors, how many lives untouched by any of yours should be sacrificed for atonement here?

[hatzel]

If you must insist on pontificating, couldn't you at least try to avoid all this bleeding-heart prose poetry and just use normal words like actual people do? Alternatively you could let a thread about a thing be about that thing, rather than about every bad thing that has ever happened to anybody anywhere.

[consuming negativity]

If you must insist on pontificating, couldn't you at least try to avoid all this bleeding-heart prose poetry and just use normal words like actual people do? Alternatively you could let a thread about a thing be about that thing, rather than about every bad thing that has ever happened to anybody anywhere.

I know many "normal people" (whatever the hell that's supposed to be) who use the word "pontificating".

:rolleyes:

Yes, I should look at this thread outside of its context, like a good communist who buries their head in the sand and recites out of the Bible. Just like Marx did, right? And then he went to Heaven and played mini golf with angels. My point being that the "prose poetry" at the end was ironic.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

Off-putting, but expected. I suppose I'll give one explanatory post.

A couple hundred people died, and that sucks. Especially for the people who died. And many more people will die in many much more violent and horrendous ways, and touch exponentially more lives, and all of this is very tragic. I fully acknowledge this. In fact, 20,000 children alone will starve to death this year; just from that one cause. And hundreds of millions more persons will be the victims of poor nutrition, lack of adequate healthcare, or just bad circumstances such as the purpose of this thread.

But where is their moral outrage? Where are the warriors coming to their defense? There are none, because they were numbers. Why aren't you crying for them? Because you didn't know them. They meant nothing to you but pixels on a screen. And these people mean nothing to me - the same amount I mean to any of you.

You're right. I don't know the anonymous 20,000-30,000 children that die needlessly from preventable disease and malnutrition every year and, as such, I don't really have any emotional investment there. Sure, I recognise it's immoral and when I sit down and really think deeply about such a situation, I feel terrible sadness.

But to blame me (and others) for not being emotionally and morally invested in every unjust act in the world is unfair in itself. It's kind of like a 'moral top trumps' and I have to tell you, it's not how the world works.

I don't stand up in front of my students and say ,"how can you NOT care about this obscure event in history 1,000 years ago to which you have no attachment and which has no relevance to you?" My students, as an example, learn best and engage most when they are drawn to the relevance or conceptual parallels to their own world. That's just how it is.

For this reason I completely reject the idea that the importance of events, or their level of morality/immorality, is dictated by numbers. The shooting down of an airliner in this example is not only a terrible human tragedy but has huge geo-political significance, and is also terrifying for the reason that it makes me feel incredibly unsafe doing something (flying) that should not feel unsafe.

[consuming negativity]

You're right. I don't know the anonymous 20,000-30,000 children that die needlessly from preventable disease and malnutrition every year and, as such, I don't really have any emotional investment there. Sure, I recognise it's immoral and when I sit down and really think deeply about such a situation, I feel terrible sadness.

But to blame me (and others) for not being emotionally and morally invested in every unjust act in the world is unfair in itself. It's kind of like a 'moral top trumps' and I have to tell you, it's not how the world works.

I don't stand up in front of my students and say ,"how can you NOT care about this obscure event in history 1,000 years ago to which you have no attachment and which has no relevance to you?" My students, as an example, learn best and engage most when they are drawn to the relevance or conceptual parallels to their own world. That's just how it is.

For this reason I completely reject the idea that the importance of events, or their level of morality/immorality, is dictated by numbers. The shooting down of an airliner in this example is not only a terrible human tragedy but has huge geo-political significance, and is also terrifying for the reason that it makes me feel incredibly unsafe doing something (flying) that should not feel unsafe.

It isn't that I think we should be more invested in everything, it's that I don't think "it makes me irrationally scared of flying, unintentionally" makes it a crime against humanity. They accidentally blew some shit up because they're morons with guns. Yeah, they're assholes, but what do you think is going to come of all of this? No it wasn't some false flag operation or anything, but it does neatly serve the agenda of America. They're going to ride this all the way into even more people dying if we jump on the bandwagon and give them implied consent to starting more bullshit. What does being scared of flying 33,000 feet in the air above a warzone have to compare to that? It isn't that I even think it's wrong for us to strongly dislike such events, but it isn't the black plague or holocaust. This reminds me of when "Benghazi" was this huge deal. It was all manufactured.

[cyu]

There are kind and decent people in Western Ukraine. There are kind and decent people in Eastern Ukraine. There are kind and decent people in Russia and the United States, in Palestine and in Israel.

Yet in any war, kind people end up fighting and killing each other. How does one accomplish this?

http://hateandanger.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/the-first-casualty-of-war-is-truth.jpg

[Admiral Swagmeister G-Funk]

in all honesty, i reckon this was either a huge mistake by seperatists or it was done on purpose by double agents or something. i doubt that the seperatists are that stupid to do this unconsciously and i can't see ukraine doing it. it stinks of CIA to me. the western narrative is suggesting that only trained military personnel would be able to operate the buk - why, then, would trained military personnel shoot down a commercial flight by mistake? if they were trained, they would know their targets. seperatists have no interest in shooting down a plane full of civilians and, if they did it by mistake (which is a strong possibility), then this contradicts the notion that only trained military people could've conducted the attack - if they were trained, surely they would be able to differentiate between a civilian plane and a military one. however, i don't know how accurate these missile systems are so there's that still. my dad reckons it was some drunk and stoned seperatists. russia seem to be as confused as the rest of us so i'm remaining sceptical of any official accounts for the time being. lets not forget that the same airline had a plane go missing within the last month under suspicious circumstances. it doesn't seem clear-cut to me. sorry it sounds very conspiratory but the truth certainly isn't out. i'm leaning towards the notion that it was a mistake on behalf of seperatists but it seems far too convenient and, if the official accounts are true, then the seperatists are more concerned with sabotage than reiststing europe in ukraine but this isn't true, as we know.

[Admiral Swagmeister G-Funk]

Weekend Edition July 11-13, 2014 The Return of George Orwell and Big Brother’s War On Israel, Ukraine and Truth by JOHN PILGER The other night, I saw George Orwells’s 1984 performed on the London stage. Although crying out for a contemporary interpretation, Orwell’s warning about the future was presented as a period piece: remote, unthreatening, almost reassuring. It was as if Edward Snowden had revealed nothing, Big Brother was not now a digital eavesdropper and Orwell himself had never said, “To be corrupted by totalitarianism, one does not have to live in a totalitarian country.” Acclaimed by critics, the skilful production was a measure of our cultural and political times. When the lights came up, people were already on their way out. They seemed unmoved, or perhaps other distractions beckoned. “What a mindfuck,” said the young woman, lighting up her phone. As advanced societies are de-politicised, the changes are both subtle and spectacular. In everyday discourse, political language is turned on its head, as Orwell prophesised in 1984. “Democracy” is now a rhetorical device. Peace is “perpetual war”. “Global” is imperial. The once hopeful concept of “reform” now means regression, even destruction. “Austerity” is the imposition of extreme capitalism on the poor and the gift of socialism for the rich: an ingenious system under which the majority service the debts of the few. In the arts, hostility to political truth-telling is an article of bourgeois faith. “Picasso’s red period,” says an Observer headline, “and why politics don’t make good art.” Consider this in a newspaper that promoted the bloodbath in Iraq as a liberal crusade. Picasso’s lifelong opposition to fascism is a footnote, just as Orwell’s radicalism has faded from the prize that appropriated his name. A few years ago, Terry Eagleton, then professor of English literature at Manchester University, reckoned that “for the first time in two centuries, there is no eminent British poet, playwright or novelist prepared to question the foundations of the western way of life”. No Shelley speaks for the poor, no Blake for utopian dreams, no Byron damns the corruption of the ruling class, no Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin reveal the moral disaster of capitalism. William Morris, Oscar Wilde, HG Wells, George Bernard Shaw have no equivalents today. Harold Pinter was the last to raise his voice. Among the insistent voices of consumer- feminism, none echoes Virginia Woolf, who described “the arts of dominating other people … of ruling, of killing, of acquiring land and capital”. At the National Theatre, a new play, Great Britain, satirises the phone hacking scandal that has seen journalists tried and convicted, including a former editor of Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World. Described as a “farce with fangs [that] puts the whole incestuous [media] culture in the dock and subjects it to merciless ridicule”, the play’s targets are the “blessedly funny” characters in Britain’s tabloid press. That is well and good, and so familiar. What of the non-tabloid media that regards itself as reputable and credible, yet serves a parallel role as an arm of state and corporate power, as in the promotion of illegal war? The Leveson inquiry into phone hacking glimpsed this unmentionable. Tony Blair was giving evidence, complaining to His Lordship about the tabloids’ harassment of his wife, when he was interrupted by a voice from the public gallery. David Lawley-Wakelin, a film-maker, demanded Blair’s arrest and prosecution for war crimes. There was a long pause: the shock of truth. Lord Leveson leapt to his feet and ordered the truth-teller thrown out and apologised to the war criminal. Lawley-Wakelin was prosecuted; Blair went free. Blair’s enduring accomplices are more respectable than the phone hackers. When the BBC arts presenter, Kirsty Wark, interviewed him on the tenth anniversary of his invasion of Iraq, she gifted him a moment he could only dream of; she allowed him to agonise over his “difficult” decision on Iraq rather than call him to account for his epic crime. This evoked the procession of BBC journalists who in 2003 declared that Blair could feel “vindicated”, and the subsequent, “seminal” BBC series, The Blair Years, for which David Aaronovitch was chosen as the writer, presenter and interviewer. A Murdoch retainer who campaigned for military attacks on Iraq, Libya and Syria, Aaronovitch fawned expertly. Since the invasion of Iraq – the exemplar of an act of unprovoked aggression the Nuremberg prosecutor Robert Jackson called “the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole” — Blair and his mouthpiece and principal accomplice, Alastair Campbell, have been afforded generous space in the Guardian to rehabilitate their reputations. Described as a Labour Party “star”, Campbell has sought the sympathy of readers for his depression and displayed his interests, though not his current assignment as advisor, with Blair, to the Egyptian military tyranny. As Iraq is dismembered as a consequence of the Blair/Bush invasion, a Guardian headline declares: “Toppling Saddam was right, but we pulled out too soon”. This ran across a prominent article on 13 June by a former Blair functionary, John McTernan, who also served Iraq’s CIA installed dictator Iyad Allawi. In calling for a repeat invasion of a country his former master helped destroy , he made no reference to the deaths of at least 700,000 people, the flight of four million refugees and sectarian turmoil in a nation once proud of its communal tolerance. “Blair embodies corruption and war,” wrote the radical Guardian columnist Seumas Milne in a spirited piece on 3 July. This is known in the trade as “balance”. The following day, the paper published a full-page advertisement for an American Stealth bomber. On a menacing image of the bomber were the words: “The F-35. GREAT For Britain”. This other embodiment of “corruption and war” will cost British taxpayers £1.3 billion, its F-model predecessors having slaughtered people across the developing world. In a village in Afghanistan, inhabited by the poorest of the poor, I filmed Orifa, kneeling at the graves of her husband, Gul Ahmed, a carpet weaver, seven other members of her family, including six children, and two children who were killed in the adjacent house. A “precision” 500-pound bomb fell directly on their small mud, stone and straw house, leaving a crater 50 feet wide. Lockheed Martin, the plane’s manufacturer’s, had pride of place in the Guardian’s advertisement. The former US secretary of state and aspiring president of the United States, Hillary Clinton, was recently on the BBC’s Women’s Hour, the quintessence of media respectability. The presenter, Jenni Murray, presented Clinton as a beacon of female achievement. She did not remind her listeners about Clinton’s profanity that Afghanistan was invaded to “liberate” women like Orifa. She asked Clinton nothing about her administration’s terror campaign using drones to kill women, men and children. There was no mention of Clinton’s idle threat, while campaigning to be the first female president, to “eliminate” Iran, and nothing about her support for illegal mass surveillance and the pursuit of whistle-blowers. Murray did ask one finger-to-the-lips question. Had Clinton forgiven Monica Lewinsky for having an affair with husband? “Forgiveness is a choice,” said Clinton, “for me, it was absolutely the right choice.” This recalled the 1990s and the years consumed by the Lewinsky “scandal”. President Bill Clinton was then invading Haiti, and bombing the Balkans, Africa and Iraq. He was also destroying the lives of Iraqi children; Unicef reported the deaths of half a million Iraqi infants under the age of five as a result of an embargo led by the US and Britain. The children were media unpeople, just as Hillary Clinton’s victims in the invasions she supported and promoted – Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia — are media unpeople. Murray made no reference to them. A photograph of her and her distinguished guest, beaming, appears on the BBC website. In politics as in journalism and the arts, it seems that dissent once tolerated in the “mainstream” has regressed to a dissidence: a metaphoric underground. When I began a career in Britain’s Fleet Street in the 1960s, it was acceptable to critique western power as a rapacious force. Read James Cameron’s celebrated reports of the explosion of the Hydrogen bomb at Bikini Atoll, the barbaric war in Korea and the American bombing of North Vietnam. Today’s grand illusion is of an information age when, in truth, we live in a media age in which incessant corporate propaganda is insidious, contagious, effective and liberal. In his 1859 essay On Liberty, to which modern liberals pay homage, John Stuart Mill wrote: “Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement, and the means justified by actually effecting that end.” The “barbarians” were large sections of humanity of whom “implicit obedience” was required. “It’s a nice and convenient myth that liberals are peacemakers and conservatives the warmongers,” wrote the historian Hywel Williams in 2001, “but the imperialism of the liberal way may be more dangerous because of its open-ended nature: its conviction that it represents a superior form of life.” He had in mind a speech by Blair in which the then prime minister promised to “reorder the world around us” according to his “moral values”. Richard Falk, the respected authority on international law and the UN Special Rapporteur on Palestine, once described a “a self-righteous, one-way, legal/moral screen [with] positive images of western values and innocence portrayed as threatened, validating a campaign of unrestricted political violence”. It is “so widely accepted as to be virtually unchallengeable”. Tenure and patronage reward the guardians. On BBC Radio 4, Razia Iqbal interviewed Toni Morrison, the African-American Nobel Laureate. Morrison wondered why people were “so angry” with Barack Obama, who was “cool” and wished to build a “strong economy and health care”. Morrison was proud to have talked on the phone with her hero, who had read one of her books and invited her to his inauguration. Neither she nor her interviewer mentioned Obama’s seven wars, including his terror campaign by drone, in which whole families, their rescuers and mourners have been murdered. What seemed to matter was that a “finely spoken” man of colour had risen to the commanding heights of power. In The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon wrote that the “historic mission” of the colonised was to serve as a “transmission line” to those who ruled and oppressed. In the modern era, the employment of ethnic difference in western power and propaganda systems is now seen as essential. Obama epitomises this, though the cabinet of George W. Bush – his warmongering clique – was the most multiracial in presidential history. As the Iraqi city of Mosul fell to the jihadists of ISIS, Obama said, “The American people made huge investments and sacrifices in order to give Iraqis the opportunity to chart a better destiny.” How “cool” is that lie? How “finely spoken” was Obama’s speech at the West Point military academy on 28 May. Delivering his “state of the world” address at the graduation ceremony of those who “will take American leadership” across the world, Obama said, “The United States will use military force, unilaterally if necessary, when our core interests demand it. International opinion matters, but America will never ask permission …” In repudiating international law and the rights of independent nations, the American president claims a divinity based on the might of his “indispensable nation”. It is a familiar message of imperial impunity, though always bracing to hear. Evoking the rise of fascism in the 1930s, Obama said, “I believe in American exceptionalism with every fibre of my being.” Historian Norman Pollack wrote: “For goose-steppers, substitute the seemingly more innocuous militarisation of the total culture. And for the bombastic leader, we have the reformer manqué, blithely at work, planning and executing assassination, smiling all the while.” In February, the US mounted one of its “colour” coups against the elected government in Ukraine, exploiting genuine protests against corruption in Kiev. Obama’s national security adviser Victoria Nuland personally selected the leader of an “interim government”. She nicknamed him “Yats”. Vice President Joe Biden came to Kiev, as did CIA Director John Brennan. The shock troops of their putsch were Ukrainian fascists. For the first time since 1945, a neo-Nazi, openly anti-Semitic party controls key areas of state power in a European capital. No Western European leader has condemned this revival of fascism in the borderland through which Hitler’s invading Nazis took millions of Russian lives. They were supported by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), responsible for the massacre of Jews and Russians they called “vermin”. The UPA is the historical inspiration of the present-day Svoboda Party and its fellow-travelling Right Sector. Svoboda leader Oleh Tyahnybok has called for a purge of the “Moscow-Jewish mafia” and “other scum”, including gays, feminists and those on the political left. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States has ringed Russia with military bases, nuclear warplanes and missiles as part of its Nato Enlargement Project. Reneging on a promise made to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990 that Nato would not expand “one inch to the east”, Nato has, in effect, militarily occupied eastern Europe. In the former Soviet Caucasus, Nato’s expansion is the biggest military build-up since the Second World War. A Nato Membership Action Plan is Washington’s gift to the coup-regime in Kiev. In August, “Operation Rapid Trident” will put American and British troops on Ukraine’s Russian border and “Sea Breeze” will send US warships within sight of Russian ports. Imagine the response if these acts of provocation, or intimidation, were carried out on America’s borders. In reclaiming Crimea — which Nikita Kruschev illegally detached from Russia in 1954 – the Russians defended themselves as they have done for almost a century. More than 90 per cent of the population of Crimea voted to return the territory to Russia. Crimea is the home of the Black Sea Fleet and its loss would mean life or death for the Russian Navy and a prize for Nato. Confounding the war parties in Washington and Kiev, Vladimir Putin withdrew troops from the Ukrainian border and urged ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine to abandon separatism. In Orwellian fashion, this has been inverted in the west to the “Russian threat”. Hillary Clinton likened Putin to Hitler. Without irony, right-wing German commentators said as much. In the media, the Ukrainian neo-Nazis are sanitised as “nationalists” or “ultra nationalists”. What they fear is that Putin is skilfully seeking a diplomatic solution, and may succeed. On 27 June, responding to Putin’s latest accommodation – his request to the Russian Parliament to rescind legislation that gave him the power to intervene on behalf of Ukraine’s ethnic Russians – Secretary of State John Kerry issued another of his ultimatums. Russia must “act within the next few hours, literally” to end the revolt in eastern Ukraine. Notwithstanding that Kerry is widely recognised as a buffoon, the serious purpose of these “warnings” is to confer pariah status on Russia and suppress news of the Kiev regime’s war on its own people. A third of the population of Ukraine are Russian-speaking and bilingual. They have long sought a democratic federation that reflects Ukraine’s ethnic diversity and is both autonomous and independent of Moscow. Most are neither “separatists” nor “rebels” but citizens who want to live securely in their homeland. Separatism is a reaction to the Kiev junta’s attacks on them, causing as many as 110,000 (UN estimate) to flee across the border into Russia. Typically, they are traumatised women and children. Like Iraq’s embargoed infants, and Afghanistan’s “liberated” women and girls, terrorised by the CIA’s warlords, these ethnic people of Ukraine are media unpeople in the west, their suffering and the atrocities committed against them minimised, or suppressed. No sense of the scale of the regime’s assault is reported in the mainstream western media. This is not unprecedented. Reading again Phillip Knightley’s masterly The First Casualty: the war correspondent as hero, propagandist and mythmaker, I renewed my admiration for the Manchester Guardian’s Morgan Philips Price, the only western reporter to remain in Russia during the 1917 revolution and report the truth of a disastrous invasion by the western allies. Fair-minded and courageous, Philips Price alone disturbed what Knightley calls an anti-Russian “dark silence” in the west. On 2 May, in Odessa, 41 ethnic Russians were burned alive in the trade union headquarters with police standing by. There is horrifying video evidence. The Right Sector leader Dmytro Yarosh hailed the massacre as “another bright day in our national history”. In the American and British media, this was reported as a “murky tragedy” resulting from “clashes” between “nationalists” (neo-Nazis) and “separatists” (people collecting signatures for a referendum on a federal Ukraine). The New York Times buried it, having dismissed as Russian propaganda warnings about the fascist and anti-Semitic policies of Washington’s new clients. The Wall Street Journal damned the victims – “Deadly Ukraine Fire Likely Sparked by Rebels, Government Says”. Obama congratulated the junta for its “restraint”. On 28 June, the Guardian devoted most of a page to declarations by the Kiev regime’s “president”, the oligarch Petro Poroshenko. Again, Orwell’s rule of inversion applied. There was no putsch; no war against Ukraine’s minority; the Russians were to blame for everything. “We want to modernise my country,” said Poroshenko. “We want to introduce freedom, democracy and European values. Somebody doesn’t like that. Somebody doesn’t like us for that.” According to his report, the Guardian’s reporter, Luke Harding, did not challenge these assertions, or mention the Odessa atrocity, the regime’s air and artillery attacks on residential areas, the killing and kidnapping of journalists, the firebombing of an opposition newspaper and his threat to “free Ukraine from dirt and parasites”. The enemy are “rebels”, “militants”, “insurgents”, “terrorists” and stooges of the Kremlin. Summon from history the ghosts of Vietnam, Chile, East Timor, southern Africa, Iraq; note the same tags. Palestine is the lodestone of this unchanging deceit. On 11 July, following the latest Israeli, American equipped slaughter in Gaza – 80 people including six children in one family — an Israeli general writes in the Guardian under the headline, “A necessary show of force”. In the 1970s, I met Leni Riefenstahl and asked her about her films that glorified the Nazis. Using revolutionary camera and lighting techniques, she produced a documentary form that mesmerised Germans; it was her Triumph of the Will that reputedly cast Hitler’s spell. I asked her about propaganda in societies that imagined themselves superior. She replied that the “messages” in her films were dependent not on “orders from above” but on a “submissive void” in the German population. “Did that include the liberal, educated bourgeoisie?” I asked. “Everyone,” she replied, “and of course the intelligentsia.” John Pilger is the author of Freedom Next Time. All his documentary films can be viewed free on his websitehttp://www.johnpilger.com/ http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/07/11/on-israel-ukraine-and-truth/

[Sasha]

ehm, could you post that again with line breaks? i dont think anyone will read it in that form...

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

Whoever shot down a civilian airliner, it was a stupid, pointless loss of human life of the sort you can expect in capitalism, and of course it does not justify any sort of intervention by "benevolent" imperialist powers. The Russian government supplying various separatist detachments is no different than the EU supplying various Maidanist organisations, including the present government. There, was that difficult? I don't think so, it was completely by the numbers. So why this bizarre discussion about Zionism and people trying to be investigators when they don't have access to the relevant data?

[cyu]

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-07-18/ukraines-security-service-has-confiscated-air-traffic-control-recordings-malaysian-j

Earlier, when we commented in the abnormality in the flight path of flight MH-17, the key questions one should ask before casting blame, is why did the pilot divert from his usual flight plan, why did he fly above restricted airspace, and just what, if any instructions, did Kiev air control give the pilot in the minutes before the tragic explosion?"

Ukraine's SBU security service has confiscated recordings of conversations between Ukrainian air traffic control officers and the crew of the doomed airliner.

What happens to the recordings next is completely unknown. What is known is that any hope of getting an undoctored explanation why the plane flew as it did, or what the pilots may have seen or said in the moments before the explosion, is forever gone.

the first black box has been sent to Moscow for analysis. a second black box has been recovered at the crash site.

separatist leader Aleksandr Borodai told the Associated Press: "No black boxes have been found ... We hope that experts will track them down and create a picture of what has happened."

In other words, even more fact-free confusion and speculation which is just what a propaganda-based reporting system needs.

just like in the case of flight MH-370, what actually happened with MH-17 may never be known.

[Admiral Swagmeister G-Funk]

ehm, could you post that again with line breaks? i dont think anyone will read it in that form...

i can't because i'm on a really old computer without javascript. the article is by john pilger and i'll repost the link itself for anyone who is willing to see a counter-argument to the western narrative which seems to prevail everywhere (including here, surprisingly). http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/07/11/on-israel-ukraine-and-truth/

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

It isn't that I think we should be more invested in everything, it's that I don't think "it makes me irrationally scared of flying, unintentionally" makes it a crime against humanity.

Umm I wasn't saying that, but most likely according to the ICC definitions of 'war crimes' and 'crimes against humanity' which can be found here:

http://www.icc-cpi.int/en_menus/icc/about%20the%20court/frequently%20asked%20questions/pages/faq.aspx

this is a crime that satisfies one or both of 'war crimes' and 'crimes against humanity', perhaps more likely the former though i'm not a lawyer so i'm not 100% sure.

The fact that it has added relevance to any civilian that flies further makes it an act of terror and, as I said, this increases its relevance for people who do fly, which is why it is in the news media.


They accidentally blew some shit up because they're morons with guns. Yeah, they're assholes, but what do you think is going to come of all of this?

Language is a very powerful and telling tool, and your use of it is showing a distinct lack of care for the situation. This wasn't an 'accident' where they 'blew some shit up'. They knew they were targeting an airplane flying in civilian airspace, and they properly fucked up and hit a civilian airliner rather than a military transport. That is no accident; they bear 100% responsibility for murdering hundreds of civilians who were not involved in the armed conflict which is at the root of the terrorists' actions.


No it wasn't some false flag operation or anything, but it does neatly serve the agenda of America. They're going to ride this all the way into even more people dying if we jump on the bandwagon and give them implied consent to starting more bullshit.

And here we have the nub of it. If it serves America's interests, even if it had fuck all to do with the imperialist country, then we can downplay the shock and significance of the event.

[Decolonize The Left]

i can't because i'm on a really old computer without javascript. the article is by john pilger and i'll repost the link itself for anyone who is willing to see a counter-argument to the western narrative which seems to prevail everywhere (including here, surprisingly). http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/07/11/on-israel-ukraine-and-truth/

I have posted it below in spoilers:


WEEKEND EDITION JULY 11-13, 2014
The Return of George Orwell and Big Brother’s War
On Israel, Ukraine and Truth
by JOHN PILGER
The other night, I saw George Orwells’s 1984 performed on the London stage. Although crying out for a contemporary interpretation, Orwell’s warning about the future was presented as a period piece: remote, unthreatening, almost reassuring. It was as if Edward Snowden had revealed nothing, Big Brother was not now a digital eavesdropper and Orwell himself had never said, “To be corrupted by totalitarianism, one does not have to live in a totalitarian country.”

Acclaimed by critics, the skilful production was a measure of our cultural and political times. When the lights came up, people were already on their way out. They seemed unmoved, or perhaps other distractions beckoned. “What a mindfuck,” said the young woman, lighting up her phone.

As advanced societies are de-politicised, the changes are both subtle and spectacular. In everyday discourse, political language is turned on its head, as Orwell prophesised in 1984. “Democracy” is now a rhetorical device. Peace is “perpetual war”. “Global” is imperial. The once hopeful concept of “reform” now means regression, even destruction. “Austerity” is the imposition of extreme capitalism on the poor and the gift of socialism for the rich: an ingenious system under which the majority service the debts of the few.

In the arts, hostility to political truth-telling is an article of bourgeois faith. “Picasso’s red period,” says an Observer headline, “and why politics don’t make good art.” Consider this in a newspaper that promoted the bloodbath in Iraq as a liberal crusade. Picasso’s lifelong opposition to fascism is a footnote, just as Orwell’s radicalism has faded from the prize that appropriated his name.

A few years ago, Terry Eagleton, then professor of English literature at Manchester University, reckoned that “for the first time in two centuries, there is no eminent British poet, playwright or novelist prepared to question the foundations of the western way of life”. No Shelley speaks for the poor, no Blake for utopian dreams, no Byron damns the corruption of the ruling class, no Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin reveal the moral disaster of capitalism. William Morris, Oscar Wilde, HG Wells, George Bernard Shaw have no equivalents today. Harold Pinter was the last to raise his voice. Among the insistent voices of consumer- feminism, none echoes Virginia Woolf, who described “the arts of dominating other people … of ruling, of killing, of acquiring land and capital”.

At the National Theatre, a new play, Great Britain, satirises the phone hacking scandal that has seen journalists tried and convicted, including a former editor of Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World. Described as a “farce with fangs [that] puts the whole incestuous [media] culture in the dock and subjects it to merciless ridicule”, the play’s targets are the “blessedly funny” characters in Britain’s tabloid press. That is well and good, and so familiar. What of the non-tabloid media that regards itself as reputable and credible, yet serves a parallel role as an arm of state and corporate power, as in the promotion of illegal war?

The Leveson inquiry into phone hacking glimpsed this unmentionable. Tony Blair was giving evidence, complaining to His Lordship about the tabloids’ harassment of his wife, when he was interrupted by a voice from the public gallery. David Lawley-Wakelin, a film-maker, demanded Blair’s arrest and prosecution for war crimes. There was a long pause: the shock of truth. Lord Leveson leapt to his feet and ordered the truth-teller thrown out and apologised to the war criminal. Lawley-Wakelin was prosecuted; Blair went free.

Blair’s enduring accomplices are more respectable than the phone hackers. When the BBC arts presenter, Kirsty Wark, interviewed him on the tenth anniversary of his invasion of Iraq, she gifted him a moment he could only dream of; she allowed him to agonise over his “difficult” decision on Iraq rather than call him to account for his epic crime. This evoked the procession of BBC journalists who in 2003 declared that Blair could feel “vindicated”, and the subsequent, “seminal” BBC series, The Blair Years, for which David Aaronovitch was chosen as the writer, presenter and interviewer. A Murdoch retainer who campaigned for military attacks on Iraq, Libya and Syria, Aaronovitch fawned expertly.

Since the invasion of Iraq – the exemplar of an act of unprovoked aggression the Nuremberg prosecutor Robert Jackson called “the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole” — Blair and his mouthpiece and principal accomplice, Alastair Campbell, have been afforded generous space in the Guardian to rehabilitate their reputations. Described as a Labour Party “star”, Campbell has sought the sympathy of readers for his depression and displayed his interests, though not his current assignment as advisor, with Blair, to the Egyptian military tyranny.

As Iraq is dismembered as a consequence of the Blair/Bush invasion, a Guardian headline declares: “Toppling Saddam was right, but we pulled out too soon”. This ran across a prominent article on 13 June by a former Blair functionary, John McTernan, who also served Iraq’s CIA installed dictator Iyad Allawi. In calling for a repeat invasion of a country his former master helped destroy , he made no reference to the deaths of at least 700,000 people, the flight of four million refugees and sectarian turmoil in a nation once proud of its communal tolerance.

“Blair embodies corruption and war,” wrote the radical Guardian columnist Seumas Milne in a spirited piece on 3 July. This is known in the trade as “balance”. The following day, the paper published a full-page advertisement for an American Stealth bomber. On a menacing image of the bomber were the words: “The F-35. GREAT For Britain”. This other embodiment of “corruption and war” will cost British taxpayers £1.3 billion, its F-model predecessors having slaughtered people across the developing world.

In a village in Afghanistan, inhabited by the poorest of the poor, I filmed Orifa, kneeling at the graves of her husband, Gul Ahmed, a carpet weaver, seven other members of her family, including six children, and two children who were killed in the adjacent house. A “precision” 500-pound bomb fell directly on their small mud, stone and straw house, leaving a crater 50 feet wide. Lockheed Martin, the plane’s manufacturer’s, had pride of place in the Guardian’s advertisement.

The former US secretary of state and aspiring president of the United States, Hillary Clinton, was recently on the BBC’s Women’s Hour, the quintessence of media respectability. The presenter, Jenni Murray, presented Clinton as a beacon of female achievement. She did not remind her listeners about Clinton’s profanity that Afghanistan was invaded to “liberate” women like Orifa. She asked Clinton nothing about her administration’s terror campaign using drones to kill women, men and children. There was no mention of Clinton’s idle threat, while campaigning to be the first female president, to “eliminate” Iran, and nothing about her support for illegal mass surveillance and the pursuit of whistle-blowers.

Murray did ask one finger-to-the-lips question. Had Clinton forgiven Monica Lewinsky for having an affair with husband? “Forgiveness is a choice,” said Clinton, “for me, it was absolutely the right choice.” This recalled the 1990s and the years consumed by the Lewinsky “scandal”. President Bill Clinton was then invading Haiti, and bombing the Balkans, Africa and Iraq. He was also destroying the lives of Iraqi children; Unicef reported the deaths of half a million Iraqi infants under the age of five as a result of an embargo led by the US and Britain.

The children were media unpeople, just as Hillary Clinton’s victims in the invasions she supported and promoted – Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia — are media unpeople. Murray made no reference to them. A photograph of her and her distinguished guest, beaming, appears on the BBC website.

In politics as in journalism and the arts, it seems that dissent once tolerated in the “mainstream” has regressed to a dissidence: a metaphoric underground. When I began a career in Britain’s Fleet Street in the 1960s, it was acceptable to critique western power as a rapacious force. Read James Cameron’s celebrated reports of the explosion of the Hydrogen bomb at Bikini Atoll, the barbaric war in Korea and the American bombing of North Vietnam. Today’s grand illusion is of an information age when, in truth, we live in a media age in which incessant corporate propaganda is insidious, contagious, effective and liberal.

In his 1859 essay On Liberty, to which modern liberals pay homage, John Stuart Mill wrote: “Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement, and the means justified by actually effecting that end.” The “barbarians” were large sections of humanity of whom “implicit obedience” was required. “It’s a nice and convenient myth that liberals are peacemakers and conservatives the warmongers,” wrote the historian Hywel Williams in 2001, “but the imperialism of the liberal way may be more dangerous because of its open-ended nature: its conviction that it represents a superior form of life.” He had in mind a speech by Blair in which the then prime minister promised to “reorder the world around us” according to his “moral values”.

Richard Falk, the respected authority on international law and the UN Special Rapporteur on Palestine, once described a “a self-righteous, one-way, legal/moral screen [with] positive images of western values and innocence portrayed as threatened, validating a campaign of unrestricted political violence”. It is “so widely accepted as to be virtually unchallengeable”.

Tenure and patronage reward the guardians. On BBC Radio 4, Razia Iqbal interviewed Toni Morrison, the African-American Nobel Laureate. Morrison wondered why people were “so angry” with Barack Obama, who was “cool” and wished to build a “strong economy and health care”. Morrison was proud to have talked on the phone with her hero, who had read one of her books and invited her to his inauguration.

Neither she nor her interviewer mentioned Obama’s seven wars, including his terror campaign by drone, in which whole families, their rescuers and mourners have been murdered. What seemed to matter was that a “finely spoken” man of colour had risen to the commanding heights of power. In The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon wrote that the “historic mission” of the colonised was to serve as a “transmission line” to those who ruled and oppressed. In the modern era, the employment of ethnic difference in western power and propaganda systems is now seen as essential. Obama epitomises this, though the cabinet of George W. Bush – his warmongering clique – was the most multiracial in presidential history.

As the Iraqi city of Mosul fell to the jihadists of ISIS, Obama said, “The American people made huge investments and sacrifices in order to give Iraqis the opportunity to chart a better destiny.” How “cool” is that lie? How “finely spoken” was Obama’s speech at the West Point military academy on 28 May. Delivering his “state of the world” address at the graduation ceremony of those who “will take American leadership” across the world, Obama said, “The United States will use military force, unilaterally if necessary, when our core interests demand it. International opinion matters, but America will never ask permission …”

In repudiating international law and the rights of independent nations, the American president claims a divinity based on the might of his “indispensable nation”. It is a familiar message of imperial impunity, though always bracing to hear. Evoking the rise of fascism in the 1930s, Obama said, “I believe in American exceptionalism with every fibre of my being.” Historian Norman Pollack wrote: “For goose-steppers, substitute the seemingly more innocuous militarisation of the total culture. And for the bombastic leader, we have the reformer manqué, blithely at work, planning and executing assassination, smiling all the while.”

In February, the US mounted one of its “colour” coups against the elected government in Ukraine, exploiting genuine protests against corruption in Kiev. Obama’s national security adviser Victoria Nuland personally selected the leader of an “interim government”. She nicknamed him “Yats”. Vice President Joe Biden came to Kiev, as did CIA Director John Brennan. The shock troops of their putsch were Ukrainian fascists.

For the first time since 1945, a neo-Nazi, openly anti-Semitic party controls key areas of state power in a European capital. No Western European leader has condemned this revival of fascism in the borderland through which Hitler’s invading Nazis took millions of Russian lives. They were supported by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), responsible for the massacre of Jews and Russians they called “vermin”. The UPA is the historical inspiration of the present-day Svoboda Party and its fellow-travelling Right Sector. Svoboda leader Oleh Tyahnybok has called for a purge of the “Moscow-Jewish mafia” and “other scum”, including gays, feminists and those on the political left.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States has ringed Russia with military bases, nuclear warplanes and missiles as part of its Nato Enlargement Project. Reneging on a promise made to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990 that Nato would not expand “one inch to the east”, Nato has, in effect, militarily occupied eastern Europe. In the former Soviet Caucasus, Nato’s expansion is the biggest military build-up since the Second World War.

A Nato Membership Action Plan is Washington’s gift to the coup-regime in Kiev. In August, “Operation Rapid Trident” will put American and British troops on Ukraine’s Russian border and “Sea Breeze” will send US warships within sight of Russian ports. Imagine the response if these acts of provocation, or intimidation, were carried out on America’s borders.

In reclaiming Crimea — which Nikita Kruschev illegally detached from Russia in 1954 – the Russians defended themselves as they have done for almost a century. More than 90 per cent of the population of Crimea voted to return the territory to Russia. Crimea is the home of the Black Sea Fleet and its loss would mean life or death for the Russian Navy and a prize for Nato. Confounding the war parties in Washington and Kiev, Vladimir Putin withdrew troops from the Ukrainian border and urged ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine to abandon separatism.

In Orwellian fashion, this has been inverted in the west to the “Russian threat”. Hillary Clinton likened Putin to Hitler. Without irony, right-wing German commentators said as much. In the media, the Ukrainian neo-Nazis are sanitised as “nationalists” or “ultra nationalists”. What they fear is that Putin is skilfully seeking a diplomatic solution, and may succeed. On 27 June, responding to Putin’s latest accommodation – his request to the Russian Parliament to rescind legislation that gave him the power to intervene on behalf of Ukraine’s ethnic Russians – Secretary of State John Kerry issued another of his ultimatums. Russia must “act within the next few hours, literally” to end the revolt in eastern Ukraine. Notwithstanding that Kerry is widely recognised as a buffoon, the serious purpose of these “warnings” is to confer pariah status on Russia and suppress news of the Kiev regime’s war on its own people.

A third of the population of Ukraine are Russian-speaking and bilingual. They have long sought a democratic federation that reflects Ukraine’s ethnic diversity and is both autonomous and independent of Moscow. Most are neither “separatists” nor “rebels” but citizens who want to live securely in their homeland. Separatism is a reaction to the Kiev junta’s attacks on them, causing as many as 110,000 (UN estimate) to flee across the border into Russia. Typically, they are traumatised women and children.

Like Iraq’s embargoed infants, and Afghanistan’s “liberated” women and girls, terrorised by the CIA’s warlords, these ethnic people of Ukraine are media unpeople in the west, their suffering and the atrocities committed against them minimised, or suppressed. No sense of the scale of the regime’s assault is reported in the mainstream western media. This is not unprecedented. Reading again Phillip Knightley’s masterly The First Casualty: the war correspondent as hero, propagandist and mythmaker, I renewed my admiration for the Manchester Guardian’s Morgan Philips Price, the only western reporter to remain in Russia during the 1917 revolution and report the truth of a disastrous invasion by the western allies. Fair-minded and courageous, Philips Price alone disturbed what Knightley calls an anti-Russian “dark silence” in the west.

On 2 May, in Odessa, 41 ethnic Russians were burned alive in the trade union headquarters with police standing by. There is horrifying video evidence. The Right Sector leader Dmytro Yarosh hailed the massacre as “another bright day in our national history”. In the American and British media, this was reported as a “murky tragedy” resulting from “clashes” between “nationalists” (neo-Nazis) and “separatists” (people collecting signatures for a referendum on a federal Ukraine). The New York Times buried it, having dismissed as Russian propaganda warnings about the fascist and anti-Semitic policies of Washington’s new clients. The Wall Street Journal damned the victims – “Deadly Ukraine Fire Likely Sparked by Rebels, Government Says”. Obama congratulated the junta for its “restraint”.

On 28 June, the Guardian devoted most of a page to declarations by the Kiev regime’s “president”, the oligarch Petro Poroshenko. Again, Orwell’s rule of inversion applied. There was no putsch; no war against Ukraine’s minority; the Russians were to blame for everything. “We want to modernise my country,” said Poroshenko. “We want to introduce freedom, democracy and European values. Somebody doesn’t like that. Somebody doesn’t like us for that.”

According to his report, the Guardian’s reporter, Luke Harding, did not challenge these assertions, or mention the Odessa atrocity, the regime’s air and artillery attacks on residential areas, the killing and kidnapping of journalists, the firebombing of an opposition newspaper and his threat to “free Ukraine from dirt and parasites”. The enemy are “rebels”, “militants”, “insurgents”, “terrorists” and stooges of the Kremlin. Summon from history the ghosts of Vietnam, Chile, East Timor, southern Africa, Iraq; note the same tags. Palestine is the lodestone of this unchanging deceit. On 11 July, following the latest Israeli, American equipped slaughter in Gaza – 80 people including six children in one family — an Israeli general writes in the Guardian under the headline, “A necessary show of force”.

In the 1970s, I met Leni Riefenstahl and asked her about her films that glorified the Nazis. Using revolutionary camera and lighting techniques, she produced a documentary form that mesmerised Germans; it was her Triumph of the Will that reputedly cast Hitler’s spell. I asked her about propaganda in societies that imagined themselves superior. She replied that the “messages” in her films were dependent not on “orders from above” but on a “submissive void” in the German population. “Did that include the liberal, educated bourgeoisie?” I asked. “Everyone,” she replied, “and of course the intelligentsia.”

John Pilger is the author of Freedom Next Time. All his documentary films can be viewed free on his websitehttp://www.johnpilger.com/

[adipocere]

i can't because i'm on a really old computer without javascript. the article is by john pilger and i'll repost the link itself for anyone who is willing to see a counter-argument to the western narrative which seems to prevail everywhere (including here, surprisingly). http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/07/11/on-israel-ukraine-and-truth/


A very good article by Pilger - as usual.

This is worth reading too:

Escalation of Shelling in Eastern Ukraine by Kyiv After the Tragic Crash of Malaysia Airlines Flight (http://rabble.ca/blogs/bloggers/roger-annis/2014/07/escalation-shelling-eastern-ukraine-kyiv-govt-after-tragic-crash-)

Published on Sunday, July 20, 2014 by Rabble.ca (http://rabble.ca/blogs/bloggers/roger-annis/2014/07/escalation-shelling-eastern-ukraine-kyiv-govt-after-tragic-crash-) Escalation of Shelling in Eastern Ukraine by Kyiv After the Tragic Crash of Malaysia Airlines Flight (http://www.commondreams.org/view/2014/07/20-2)


by Roger Annis (http://www.commondreams.org/author/roger-annis)

http://www.commondreams.org/sites/commondreams.org/files/imce-images/ukraine_shelling.jpgShelling of the Russian-owned Lisichansk oil refinery in Ukraine. (Screenshot via UkrStream.tv)I learned of the crash of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 when my plane landed in Montreal the same day, July 17, on my way home from Moscow. The Moscow-Munich leg of my flight departed one hour before the (delayed) departure of Flight MH17 from Amsterdam at 12:30 pm local time. I reckon the respective flight paths crossed each other somewhere just west of Ukraine.
Flight MH17 went down (http://www.salon.com/2014/07/17/heres_what_we_know_about_todays_ukraine_disaster/) over territory controlled by self defense forces of the autonomous regions of southeast Ukraine, near the village of Grabovo (Hrabove), halfway between Donetsk and Luhansk cities, 50 km north and 100 km west of the Russian border. There are 298 reported victims. Here is the fateful flight’s route map (http://flightaware.com/live/flight/MAS17/history/20140717/1000Z/EHAM/WMKK).
A typical western media headline graced the front page of the Vancouver Sun the day after. It read, ‘Malaysian plane shot down by rebels’. Case closed. Guilty as charged.
Paul Koring of the Globe and Mail writes, “What brought down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 is already known. A Soviet-era surface-to-air missile fired from separatist held territory in eastern Ukraine tore the Boeing 777 apart as it cruised more than 10 kilometers above the Donetsk region.”
The Guardian headlines a July 19 story with, ‘MH17: rebels block access to part of site of crash as evidence against them grows’. But the article doesn’t contain a word of the claimed evidence.
Toronto Star columnist Mitch Potter blames what he calls “nihilistic rebels” and “Putin’s monster” in eastern Ukraine, then proceeds to acknowledge that evidence they downed the aircraft is “circumstantial”. He cites a Washington Post writer who says the disaster is all a result of “Putin’s messy disaster he created in Ukraine”.
In an editorial today, Toronto Star editors cite Stephen Harper in fixing blame: “Russia’s military aggression and illegal occupation of Ukraine (sic) . . . is at the root of the ongoing conflict in the region.” Russian President Vladimir Putin, say the editors, should “shackle his dogs of war”.
CBC radio and television reporters have rushed to the scene for yet another stint of fly in, fly out disaster reporting à la the 2010 Haiti earthquake and the 2013 Typhoon Haiyan (Yolanda) that struck the Philippines. They already know the story. Their questions are not, ‘Who shot down the plane and why?’, but, “How did Russia provide the rebels in eastern Ukraine with the know-how to shoot down the plane, and why would it do that?”
British tabloids are universal is blaring on their front pages that ‘Putin’ or his hirelings in Ukraine are mass murderers
Ukraine’s president knows. Within hours of the disaster, he declared, “Today, terrorists killed three hundred people with one shot. Among them innocent children, people of many countries of the world.” When the Kyiv regime speaks of eastern Ukraine, the term “terrorists” is synonymous with “the people who live there”.
Airplane disaster as pretext for war
Never mind that assertions of what happened to Flight MH17 are speculative and an investigation has hardly begun. The post-crash political assessment is all about something entirely different than finding truth—it is being seized as an opening for a political witch-hunt and more violent war against the people of eastern Ukraine. For months, they have been refusing and resisting a brutal, economic austerity turn to Europe and accompanying military violence by the governing regime in Kyiv and its NATO backers. Kyiv’s ground war against them has stalled because its foot soldiers are unconvinced of the cause or ill-prepared for what is required of them.
In the two days since the crash, the regime’s violence has reached new heights of brutality. Artillery and mortars are raining death and destruction upon people and communities throughout the rebellious region. In Luhansk, a city of 425,000, at least 20 people died (http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-28363086) from shelling on the day of the crash. The shells have cut electricity and water supply. Much of communication is also cut.
The press service of the Luhansk People’s Republic said on July 18, “The shells are bombarding practically all the residential districts of the city, including its centre. The number of killed and wounded is not immediately known.” (See videos here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WKZ_S6w7-B0&list=UUdnB82ob_V7EXwwcCtB1vUg&index=9&oref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DW KZ_S6w7-B0%26list%3DUUdnB82ob_V7EXwwcCtB1vUg%26index%3D9&has_verified=1) and here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXGcdQqbntk&index=8&list=UUdnB82ob_V7EXwwcCtB1vUg&oref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DA XGcdQqbntk%26index%3D8%26list%3DUUdnB82ob_V7EXwwcC tB1vUg&has_verified=1) of the aftermaths of inner city shelling on July 18--warning, shocking images.)
The Lisichansk oil refinery in the city, owned by Russia’s Rosneft conglomerate, has been targeted and is burning fiercely (videos here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOHUbvUB1cU) and here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTBPJycf-LU)).
Already on July 16, an observer with the Special Monitoring Mission of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) reported that one third of the buildings in the center of Luhansk were damaged by shelling and the proportions of damage are higher on the city outskirts (ten minute video interview here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Q7F8P15eF0&app=desktop)). A July 18 bulletin (http://www.osce.org/ukraine-smm/121431) of the monitoring mission cites reports from local doctors that in June and July, 250 civilians in the Luhansk region were killed by bombings and shellings and 850 are injured.
Investigation needed
The accusations against self-defense fighters in eastern Ukraine are not only unproven, they are circumstantial. Did rebels in southeastern Ukraine capture at some time a battery of the advanced missile system alleged to have shot down the plane? We do not know. If they did, analysts say, they lacked the very sophisticated training required to operate it.
From where was the missile fired? We don’t know. The lengthy debris field of the crash (six kilometers long, according to one report) and its west-to-east direction may raise doubts about the claims of a missile hit from the east (ie from Russia or its border region).
Flight MH17 was hundreds of kilometers north of its normal course (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/ukraine/10975524/Crashed-MH17-flight-was-300-miles-off-typical-course.html). Why did flight controllers in Ukraine direct the plane there, across a war zone over which many warplanes have been shot down by self-defense forces (at much lower altitudes) in the past several months and which airlines have been avoiding? Way back in April, for example, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration prohibited U.S. airlines from flying where Flight 17 went down. Its directive said, “Due to the potential for conflicting air traffic control instructions from Ukrainian and Russian authorities and for the related potential misidentification of civil aircraft, United States flight operations are prohibited until further notice in the airspace over Crimea, the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov”.
Answers are needed as to who in the chaotic command structure of the Ukraine armed forces possesses the authority to fire missiles and how tightly this is controlled. What role and access to missiles might commanders of fascist and rightist militias have? The militias are playing leading roles in the murderous shellings and attempted ground assaults in the east of the country.
Self-defense forces deny firing a missile at the plane. This article (http://www.vox.com/2014/7/17/5913089/did-this-ukrainian-rebel-commander-take-credit-for-shooting-down-the/in/5677250) in Vox details the internet hoax by which the rebels were said to have made such an admission. Lazy or biased news editors in mainstream media have widely reported the hoax, and U.S. government officials are repeating it as good coin, including U.S. Ambassador Samantha Power before the UN Security Council on July 18.
Self-defense forces are cooperating in bringing an investigative team (http://en.itar-tass.com/world/741225) of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe to the site. Local residents, including coal miners, are taking part in the search for wreckage and bodies.
Both the Ukraine government in Kyiv and the Russian government deny that their forces fired missiles. U.S. Professor Stephen Cohen told Democracy Now in a June 18 interview (http://www.democracynow.org/2014/7/18/stephen_cohen_downed_malaysian_plane_raises), “There’s the possibility that the Russians aided and abetted them [self-defense forces], possibly from Russian territory, but I rule that out because, in the end, when you don’t know who has committed a crime, the first question a professional investigator asks is, "Did anybody have a motive?" and the Russians certainly had no motive here.”
Cohen calls the people who died in the plane, “the first victims of the new Cold War”, referring to the longstanding military threats against Russia by NATO countries that have escalated since last year over Ukraine. He has written frequently about the escalation, including in this June 30 article, ‘The silence of American hawks about Kiev’s atrocities (http://www.thenation.com/article/180466/silence-american-hawks-about-kievs-atrocities)’.
Maybe, just maybe, an official investigation will reveal the truth, or enough of the truth to make decision makers in NATO pause before upping their military intervention. But there are serious reasons to doubt that. The stakes for NATO countries in the war being prosecuted in eastern Ukraine by the government and its allied, fascist militias are just too high to let an inconvenient investigation get in the way.
The degree to which Canadian and international mainstream media are ignoring the rampaging and war of the Kyiv regime and militias in eastern Ukraine is scandalous. It gets little more than brief mention as undefined “fighting”. The Guardian has 14 articles on its Ukraine news page today dealing with the aftermath of the air disaster; not a single one reports on the shellings by the Ukraine army. A member of the self-defense forces tells the BBC at the crash site, “You are only here because foreigners are dead”.
Ominously, while the media broadcasts tears for the victims of the crash, it has none for the victims of shelling and bombing. Indeed, it seems even more war is required because “something” must apparently be done to save defenseless air travelers from the likes of “Putin” and unkempt self defense fighters in eastern Ukraine.
It all sets the stage for an escalation of the military intervention that NATO is already providing to Kyiv. It is so scripted that it tempts the observer to believe that people in Washington and Brussels pushed buttons to unleash it all. But no, that would be speculation, and that’s the last thing needed right now.
Here are some additional excerpts from the July 18 interview with Professor Stephen Cohen on Democracy Now:

By the way, the Ukrainian government shot down a Russian passenger jet, I think in 2001 [Siberia Airlines Flight 1812, Oct 4, 2001, 76 dead]. It was flying from Tel Aviv to Siberia [actually, Siberia to Tel Aviv]. It was an accident. Competence is always a factor when you have these weapons...
Another possibility is that the rebels—we call them separatists, but they weren’t separatists in the beginning, they just wanted home rule in Ukraine—had the capability. But there’s a debate, because this plane was flying at commercial levels, normally beyond the reach of what they can carry on their shoulders.
Let me mention, because I think it’s relevant to what you’re covering here, your very, very powerful segments before I came on today about what’s going on in Gaza, the pounding of these cities, the defenselessness of ordinary people. The same thing has been happening in East Ukrainian cities—bombing, shelling, mortaring by the Kiev government—whatever we think of that government. But that government is backed 150 percent by the White House.
The statement issued by the antiwar conference held in Yalta, Crimea (http://rabble.ca/blogs/bloggers/roger-annis/2014/07/no-to-war-eastern-ukraine-declaration-yalta-crimea-anti-war-confe) earlier this month makes a nine-point call for an end to Kyiv’s war in eastern Ukraine. One of the points is “For an international inquiry headed by jurists and human rights advocates into the human rights violations and war crimes that have been committed in the course of this war”. Campaigns and solidarity mobilizations around these points are now more urgent than ever.
© 2014 Roger Annis
https://www.commondreams.org/sites/commondreams.org/files/imagecache/author_photo/roger_annis.jpg (http://www.commondreams.org/author/roger-annis)
Roger Annis is a writer in Vancouver and member of the newly-formed Vancouver EcoSocialist Group (http://ecosocialistsvancouver.org/). He wrote a comprehensive article on the lessons of the oil train disaster in Lac Mégantic that was published in rabble.ca (http://rabble.ca/news/2013/08/lessons-oil-train-disaster-lac-m%C3%A9gantic) on August 30.

[consuming negativity]

Umm I wasn't saying that, but most likely according to the ICC definitions of 'war crimes' and 'crimes against humanity' which can be found here:

http://www.icc-cpi.int/en_menus/icc/about%20the%20court/frequently%20asked%20questions/pages/faq.aspx

this is a crime that satisfies one or both of 'war crimes' and 'crimes against humanity', perhaps more likely the former though i'm not a lawyer so i'm not 100% sure.

The fact that it has added relevance to any civilian that flies further makes it an act of terror and, as I said, this increases its relevance for people who do fly, which is why it is in the news media.



Language is a very powerful and telling tool, and your use of it is showing a distinct lack of care for the situation. This wasn't an 'accident' where they 'blew some shit up'. They knew they were targeting an airplane flying in civilian airspace, and they properly fucked up and hit a civilian airliner rather than a military transport. That is no accident; they bear 100% responsibility for murdering hundreds of civilians who were not involved in the armed conflict which is at the root of the terrorists' actions.



And here we have the nub of it. If it serves America's interests, even if it had fuck all to do with the imperialist country, then we can downplay the shock and significance of the event.

It boils down to this, man:

1. Making a mistake is not a war crime.

2. Language is indeed powerful and telling. In particular, your insistence on using a term like "terrorist" in a serious context.

[Slavic]

It boils down to this, man:

1. Making a mistake is not a war crime.


Really? Your really going to say that?

The weight of some actions bears more than the intent. Regardless if one "accidentally" shoots down a civilian airliner by "mistake", the action itself is barberous in the extreme and shouldn't be brushed off because "Well they didn't really mean to kill hundreds of civilians, it just happened."

[consuming negativity]

Really? Your really going to say that?

The weight of some actions bears more than the intent. Regardless if one "accidentally" shoots down a civilian airliner by "mistake", the action itself is barberous in the extreme and shouldn't be brushed off because "Well they didn't really mean to kill hundreds of civilians, it just happened."

"Accidentally" "mistake"

Yeah, because "they thought it was something else when they shot it" is a much more off-the-wall theory than "they deliberately killed civilians of third party countries because they're barbarous and evil". Everything in your post outside of your not-so-subtle quoting is directed at a straw man, but I'll pose to you the same question I posed to everybody else: what, exactly, do you think should happen to the people who shot it down? Should anybody be imprisoned or killed? Should there be an invasion, a fine, what? What is your answer? Do you even have one? I would guess not, because the only place this unchecked, non-directional anger can lead is to an even worse place than we're at now.

[Slavic]

"Accidentally" "mistake"

Yeah, because "they thought it was something else when they shot it" is a much more off-the-wall theory than "they deliberately killed civilians of third party countries because they're barbarous and evil". Everything in your post outside of your not-so-subtle quoting is directed at a straw man, but I'll pose to you the same question I posed to everybody else: what, exactly, do you think should happen to the people who shot it down? Should anybody be imprisoned or killed? Should there be an invasion, a fine, what? What is your answer? Do you even have one? I would guess not, because the only place this unchecked, non-directional anger can lead is to an even worse place than we're at now.

Well no shit, I am not going to go ahead and outline a course of retribution and justice for such acts, and I know damn well that any such acts would only produce more horror.

The point I was getting at was the nonchalant brushing off the deaths of a few hundred as a "Opps pressed the wrong button, oh well." scenario. As if a mistaken intent nullifies the action.

[consuming negativity]

The point I was getting at was the nonchalant brushing off the deaths of a few hundred as a "Opps pressed the wrong button, oh well." scenario.

This never happened. You're arguing with a straw man. If anything, you yourself are subject to this criticism of "brushing off" their deaths based on your refusal to outline any course of action or other punishment in response to the incident. Insisting that people /should/ be very angry and upset about this without any positive recourse is all but asking for it to be misdirected towards a geopolitical goal.

[renalenin]

Really?
If this BUK was Ukrainian it must have been over of with very much luck on the frontline. So why would Kiev move a piece of extremely valuable weaponry into enemy (risk) territory .

I find your position hard to understand. The Buk-M1 is a very powerful Soviet Era missile. It has a range of 300 km and it is the only missile in this war zone which is capable of reaching the height of the MH-17 flight path. The fascist Kiev armed forces are the only ones thought to have Buk systems in the area and if they were testing a newly deployed system given their lack of training it is easy to believe they could have launched one from a mobile launcher by error.


The range of the Buk-M1 means that it could have been fired (by accident) a long way east along the MH-17 flight path and it would have still tragically made it to the mistaken 'target'. Given the crash zone is 100 km east of Donetsk then a launch zone say 100 km west of Donetsk is credible. The area would be in the battle zone where the fascist Kiev forces are believed to have Buk-M1 batteries in play.


Those who use this tragic accident to whip up hate against the Peoples' Republic of Donetsk are a disgrace.

:hammersickle::hammersickle::hammersickle:

[Sasha]

the ones Kiev has have a range of 45KM, where do yo get the 300 figure from?

[piet11111]

Anyone else find it strange kiev has not released the flight control recordings yet ?
(communication between the plane and ground control not the black box that are missing)

[Rurkel]

I am slow leaning towards "the rebels shot down the airplane, mistaking it for an Ukrainian military one, after Kiev deliberately sent it the harm's way" theory.

[piet11111]

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-07-21/russia-says-has-photos-ukraine-deploying-buk-missiles-east-rader-proof-warplanes-mh1

I do not know what sort of website zerohedge is but the article does raise some points that need to be answered by the west and the ukraine and the US specifically.

[adipocere]

At this point Russia is releasing hard intelligence (http://rt.com/news/174496-malaysia-crash-russia-questions/) with high level officials putting their names to it - satellite images of a fighter jet tailing the airliner at 5km, BUK systems deployed in govt controlled areas along with accompanying radar activity. Washington is going to have do better than tweets and youtube and unnamed experts opining in the media that basically we'd like to think separatists did it and that Russia was involved (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/19/world/europe/malaysia-airlines-plane-ukraine.html) and besides, http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/76341000/jpg/_76341634_sun18.jpg it's just common sense.

edit: Of course that is what an investigation is for - certainly the US will have come up with something factual, if only by US definition, by then.

[Ethics Gradient, Traitor For All Ages]

Cheryl got married?! :ohmy:

[khad]

The "evidence" provided by the Ukrainian government is not to be trusted.

This is the statement issued by the Ukrainian SBU about the Buk theory. It's on their official website.

http://www.sbu.gov.ua/sbu/control/uk/publish/article?art_id=129099&cat_id=39574


"SBU take measures within the investigation and gets a clear evidence of involvement in the terrorist attack of Russian citizens", - said Naida. He assured that the evidence already submitted to all international partners services. SBU is working directly with the Dutch police officers and law enforcement agencies of other countries whose citizens were victims of the terrorist attack on July 17.

Representative SBU showed reporters photos of the installation "BUK-M" on one of the streets Torez and photos following the installation of the column in the Donetsk region.

The images shown the press are on the left of the page. Pay close attention to the last one.

http://i.imgur.com/0OMQB5E.jpg

Grainy to be sure, but a higher quality version has been provided by a friendly neighborhood Banderite Twitter.

https://twitter.com/VoiceOfDonetsk/status/490151628948111361

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Bs7nASXIQAAtVhm.jpg:large

This unit, identified in the photos provided by the Ukrainian SBU to the media, is marked with the serial number 312.

The same unit appears in various videos and images from early March in the Donetsk area operated by the Ukrainian Army.

Example 1: Video uploaded March 5, 2014 titled "Soledar Military Equipment Ukraine"
#312 appears clearly at 0:37
Bj-VZB0ZdEA

Note: Soledar is a town in Donets Oblast - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soledar

Example 2: Ukrainian News Report dated March 6 titled, "Going to work in Soledar, we met column of military equipment"
#312 is again clearly photographed

http://www.06242.com.ua/news/489172

http://www.06242.com.ua/s/15/section/newsInText/upload/images/news/intext/531/7531220af2/49fa071373dc9c83a284166bae92c96b.jpg

Example 3: Facebook photo of Igor Firsov, dated March 18 - "Yasynuvata post (Donetsk region) on the photo-book "self-propelled anti-aircraft missile system, designed to combat manevriruûs^imi aerodynamic targets at low and medium altitudes (from 30 m to 14-18 km)"

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=827344410615244

https://fbcdn-sphotos-f-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-xap1/t1.0-9/p180x540/1972405_827344107281941_889113957_n.jpg



Possibilities:

1) The Buk theory could be something that the SBU just pulled out of their ass; we actually have no way of telling what exact missile it was - technically speaking any missile with sufficient vertical range could have done the job. This includes super-long range S-200 and S-300 systems fired from deep inside Russian or Ukrainian territory. Counterpoint: If it were indeed an S-300 that did it, wouldn't Ukraine have been directly accusing Russia? Counter-counterpoint: Perhaps something like this is easier to pin on a bunch of ill-disciplined rebels instead of Putin?

2) The Buk theory is correct, but the claim of Russian involvement is incorrect. If indeed we are to believe the SBU's identification of unit 312, it would logically follow that, since #312 was in the Ukrainian army inventory, that it was captured from the Ukrainian Army. Counterpoint: Ukraine has denied losing any Buk units to the rebels, undermining this assertion. Counter-counterpoint: The Ukrainian goverment could just be lying for stupid morale reasons.

3) The Rebel 312 is a fake 312 and that this is a frame job. Rebels know the serial numbers of Ukrainian army equipment and re-stenciled Russian-delivered vehicles to confuse the enemy. Counterpoint: #312 is clearly and neatly stenciled, whereas serial numbers on Rebel vehicles are crude handpaints. The rebels also number their gear starting from 0. Counter-counterpoint: If the rebels can fix WW2 monument tanks into operational form, they can paint straight lines.

http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2014/07/21/article-2700178-1FD8DD8D00000578-680_1024x615_large.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/CgQ0OAY.png

[khad]

4) The Ukrainian government downed the plane and are trying to pin it on the rebels with falsified evidence. Counterpoint: Why would the SBU rumble themselves in such an obvious way? Counter-counterpoint: When their planes bombed the everliving shit out of Lugansk, they attempted to claim that a small man-portable missile did the damage. Sophisticated propaganda was never their forte.

HEAVY TRIGGER WARNING

T8IG_xm6Gbo

http://www.cnn.com/2014/06/03/world/europe/ukraine-luhansk-building-attack/


The authorities in Kiev denied its planes had been involved. Initially, the anti-terrorist operation said the explosion originated from inside the building, then that an anti-aircraft missile operated by the separatists had misfired, reacting to heat from an air-conditioning system on the outside of the building.

[Sasha]

Fair questions, one small point, while pictures of the wreckage 2 days ago showed clear damage of an outside explosion (which points strongly to a BUK/SA missle and means we can discard the, populair in Russian media scenario of an Ukrainian fighter yet, air to air missles impact and not explode in the vincinity of the target)investigators are reporting that this evidence has been crudely removed last 2 nights, often by cutting the damaged parts out of the fusselage wreckage. This does point very strongly to the sepratists as they still control the area.

[khad]

Fair questions, one small point, while pictures of the wreckage 2 days ago showed clear damage of an outside explosion (which points strongly to a BUK/SA missle and means we can discard the, populair in Russian media scenario of an Ukrainian fighter yet, air to air missles impact and not explode in the vincinity of the target)investigators are reporting that this evidence has been crudely removed last 2 nights, often by cutting the damaged parts out of the fusselage wreckage. This does point very strongly to the sepratists as they still control the area.
It's a good point. At this point in time, the air-to-air missile theory does not make a whole lot of sense, since the charges of most air-to-air missiles are not strong enough to cause a plane as large as a passenger jet to completely disintegrate. There are fragmentation missiles designed for anti-bomber use, but they are not typically carried by light craft such as an Su-25.

That said, there's just not enough evidence to prove that it was a specific type of SAM, namely a Buk. Anything that has a vertical range of more than 10000m and has a sufficiently large charge is suspect. The only source for the specific Buk claim is the Ukrainian SBU and some dodgy photos it provided showing the supposed unit 312 on rebel territory. The Buk is a medium range SAM with an intercept radius of about 40km, probably placing it in rebel territory. However, both Ukraine and Russia operate longer-range SAM systems such as the S-200 and S-300, capable of intercepting planes out to 200km or more. The S-200 was reportedly retired less than a year ago in Ukraine, but during this war, they have been recommissioning tons of old soviet-era equipment, like all sorts of old crap like Soviet reconnaissance drones from the 70s. This opens up the possibility that the plane could have been shot down from Ukrainian or Russian territory.

At this point, the only real credible evidence that can cut through various contradictory and half-baked claims is spysat imagery showing where the launch occurred and what kind of launcher launched it. I find it hard to believe that for an area of the world so intensely monitored (by both sides) no one has produced smoking gun evidence of the missiles in question being fired.

[piet11111]

From kiev's pov would it not make more sense to shoot the plane down with a BUK and have a plane nearby for visual confirmation of a kill ?
Otherwise the plane if it was not a 1 shot kill could have limped out of range of the BUK and leave kiev unable to do anything about it unless they just so happen to have a plane with some anti air missiles in the area.


But obviously this is just guess work on my part to explain why that Ukrainian fighter was there if the "kiev shot down MH17" possibility is to be fully thought out.

[khad]

From kiev's pov would it not make more sense to shoot the plane down with a BUK and have a plane nearby for visual confirmation of a kill ?
Otherwise the plane if it was not a 1 shot kill could have limped out of range of the BUK and leave kiev unable to do anything about it unless they just so happen to have a plane with some anti air missiles in the area.

But obviously this is just guess work on my part to explain why that Ukrainian fighter was there if the "kiev shot down MH17" possibility is to be fully thought out.
I re-watched the official Russian explanation, and it leaves more questions on multiple fronts.

1) The claim that multiple Ukrainian AA units were stationed very close to rebel territory. There are apparently satellite photos to back up this claim, but again, no hard evidence any of the Buks photographed were fired.

2) The identity of the plane that could have shot down the passenger jet was never confirmed. The spokesman said that it was "probably" an Su-25, which can temporarily get up to about 10000m even though its service ceiling is 7000m.

There's a lot made about this apparent discrepancy between the service ceiling and the altitude of MH17, but this shouldn't be surprising to anyone who knows a little about aviation.

F-15 climbing to 102,300 feet
S7YAN9--3MA

F-15 according to the USAF website
http://www.af.mil/AboutUs/FactSheets/Display/tabid/224/Article/104501/f-15-eagle.aspx
Ceiling: 65,000 feet (19,812 meters)

The distinction between service ceiling and absolute ceiling: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceiling_%28aircraft%29

There's also the possibility that the plane was misidentified, since the spokesman said it was "probably" an Su-25.

The spokesman also never claimed that the plane fired missiles, though he remarked that it was likely armed with R-60s, which, incidentally, have a proximity fuse. It is equally likely, however, that the Ukrainian jet popped in to get a closer look for the sake of visual confirmation (if for example, military ground radars were unsure what MH17 was).

[Sasha]

Sepratists just downed two Ukrainian fighter jets not far from the crash site of the Boeing.

[adipocere]

Robert Perry has something interesting to say on the matter:

What Did US Spy Satellites See in Ukraine? (http://consortiumnews.com/2014/07/20/what-did-us-spy-satellites-see-in-ukraine/)

July 20, 2014

Exclusive: The U.S. media’s Ukraine bias has been obvious, siding with the Kiev regime and bashing ethnic Russian rebels and Russia’s President Putin. But now – with the scramble to blame Putin for the Malaysia Airlines shoot-down – the shoddy journalism has grown truly dangerous, says Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
In the heat of the U.S. media’s latest war hysteria – rushing to pin blame for the crash of a Malaysia Airlines passenger jet on Russia’s President Vladimir Putin – there is the same absence of professional skepticism that has marked similar stampedes on Iraq, Syria and elsewhere – with key questions not being asked or answered.
The dog-not-barking question on the catastrophe over Ukraine is: what did the U.S. surveillance satellite imagery show? It’s hard to believe that – with the attention that U.S. intelligence has concentrated on eastern Ukraine for the past half year that the alleged trucking of several large Buk anti-aircraft missile systems from Russia to Ukraine and then back to Russia didn’t show up somewhere.
http://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/buk-missiles-300x225.jpg (http://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/buk-missiles.jpg)Russian-made Buk anti-missile battery.

Yes, there are limitations to what U.S. spy satellites can see. But the Buk missiles are about 16 feet long and they are usually mounted on trucks or tanks. Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 also went down during the afternoon, not at night, meaning the missile battery was not concealed by darkness.
So why hasn’t this question of U.S. spy-in-the-sky photos – and what they reveal – been pressed by the major U.S. news media? How can the Washington Post run front-page stories, such as the one on Sunday with the definitive title “U.S. official: Russia gave systems (http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/ukranian-officials-accuse-rebel-militias-of-moving-bodies-tampering-with-evidence/2014/07/19/bef07204-0f1c-11e4-b8e5-d0de80767fc2_story.html),” without demanding from these U.S. officials details about what the U.S. satellite images disclose?
Instead, the Post’s Michael Birnbaum and Karen DeYoung wrote from Kiev: “The United States has confirmed that Russia supplied sophisticated missile launchers to separatists in eastern Ukraine and that attempts were made to move them back across the Russian border after the Thursday shoot-down of a Malaysian jetliner, a U.S. official said Saturday.
“‘We do believe they were trying to move back into Russia at least three Buk [missile launch] systems,’ the official said. U.S. intelligence was ‘starting to get indications … a little more than a week ago’ that the Russian launchers had been moved into Ukraine, said the official” whose identity was withheld by the Post so the official would discuss intelligence matters.
But catch the curious vagueness of the official’s wording: “we do believe”; “starting to get indications.” Are we supposed to believe – and perhaps more relevant, do the Washington Post writers actually believe – that the U.S. government with the world’s premier intelligence services can’t track three lumbering trucks each carrying large mid-range missiles?
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.
Relying on the Ukraine Regime
Much of the rest of the known case against Russia comes from claims made by the Ukrainian regime, which emerged from the unconstitutional coup d’etat against elected President Viktor Yanukovych on Feb. 22. His overthrow followed months of mass protests, but the actual coup was spearheaded by neo-Nazi militias that overran government buildings and forced Yanukovych’s officials to flee.
In recognition of the key role played by the neo-Nazis, who are ideological descendants of Ukrainian militias that collaborated with the Nazi SS in World War II, the new regime gave these far-right nationalists control of several ministries, including the office of national security which is under the command of longtime neo-Nazi activist Andriy Parubiy.[See Consortiumnews.com’s “Ukraine, Through the US Looking Glass (http://consortiumnews.com/2014/04/16/ukraine-through-the-us-looking-glass/).”]
It was this same Parubiy whom the Post writers turned to seeking more information condemning the eastern Ukrainian rebels and the Russians regarding the Malaysia Airlines catastrophe. Parubiy accused the rebels in the vicinity of the crash site of destroying evidence and conducting a cover-up, another theme that resonated through the MSM.
Without bothering to inform readers of Parubiy’s unsavory neo-Nazi background, the Post quoted him as a reliable witness declaring: “It will be hard to conduct a full investigation with some of the objects being taken away, but we will do our best.”
In contrast to Parubiy’s assurances, the Kiev regime actually has a terrible record of telling the truth or pursuing serious investigations of human rights crimes. Still left open are questions about the identity of snipers who on Feb. 20 fired on both police and protesters at the Maidan, touching off the violent escalation that led to Yanukovych’s ouster. Also, the Kiev regime has failed to ascertain the facts about the death-by-fire of scores of ethnic Russians in the Trade Union Building in Odessa on May 2. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Burning Ukraine’s Protesters Alive (http://consortiumnews.com/2014/05/10/burning-ukraines-protesters-alive/).”]
The Kiev regime also duped the New York Times (and apparently the U.S. State Department) when it disseminated photos that supposedly showed Russian military personnel inside Russia and then later inside Ukraine. After the State Department endorsed the “evidence,” the Times led its newspaper with this story on April 21, but it turned out that one of the key photos supposedly shot in Russia was actually taken in Ukraine, destroying the premise of the story. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “NYT Retracts Ukraine Photo Scoop (http://consortiumnews.com/2014/04/23/nyt-retracts-russian-photo-scoop/).”]
But here we are yet again with the MSM relying on unverified claims being made by the Kiev regime about something as sensitive as whether Russia provided sophisticated anti-aircraft missiles – capable of shooting down high-flying civilian aircraft – to poorly trained eastern Ukrainian rebels.
This charge is so serious that it could propel the world into a second Cold War and conceivably – if there are more such miscalculations – into a nuclear confrontation. These moments call for the utmost in journalistic professionalism, especially skepticism toward propaganda from biased parties.
Yet, what Americans have seen again is the major U.S. news outlets, led by the Washington Post and the New York Times, publishing the most inflammatory of articles based largely on unreliable Ukrainian officials and on the U.S. State Department which was a principal instigator of the Ukraine crisis.
In the recent past, this sort of sloppy American journalism has led to mass slaughters in Iraq – and has contributed to near U.S. wars on Syria and Iran – but now the stakes are much higher. As much fun as it is to heap contempt on a variety of “designated villains,” such as Saddam Hussein, Bashar al-Assad, Ali Khamenei and now Vladimir Putin, this sort of recklessness is careening the world toward a very dangerous moment, conceivably its last.




Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his new book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here (https://org.salsalabs.com/o/1868/t/12126/shop/shop.jsp?storefront_KEY=1037) or as an e-book (from Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/Americas-Stolen-Narrative-Washington-ebook/dp/B009RXXOIG/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1350755575&sr=8-1&keywords=americas+stolen+narrative) and barnesandnoble.com (http://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/americas-stolen-narrative?keyword=americas+stolen+narrative&store=ebook&iehack=%E2%98%A0)). For a limited time, you also can order Robert Parry’s trilogy on the Bush Family and its connections to various right-wing operatives for only $34. The trilogy includes America’s Stolen Narrative. For details on this offer, click here (http://consortiumnews.com/2014/06/25/continuing-parrys-3-book-offer/).

[cyu]

I would like to see the latest positions on false flag attacks by the American foreign policy establishment. Obviously they'd deny ever using them, but how empathically do they repudiate them? Would they be willing to put their jobs on the line? Their pensions? Their freedom? Their lives?

Regardless of who is at fault regarding the airliner, or even Ukraine, there is nothing new I've seen from the American foreign policy establishment that says they don't still deserve to be sent on a permanent vacation to Disney World.

[Firebrand]

Ok how about this for a conspiracy theory. It was all a massive insurance scam by Malaysian Airlines. Two planes in five months being downed in suspicious circumstances, helluva coincidence. Plus this theory has the benefit of being easiest to slot into a "capitalism is evil" theoretical framework.

EDIT- or maybe a crocodile escaped and everyone is too embarrassed to admit it

[Geiseric]

Ukrainian govt did it. They forged proof about the DPR and did something just like this in 2001. They faked photos of the supposed "stolen" buk system.

[Geiseric]

Sepratists just downed two Ukrainian fighter jets not far from the crash site of the Boeing.

Good for them. Better fascists than civilians.

[La Guaneña]

MH17 had flight route shifted 1 day before flight, it was not supposed to go into the warzone's airspace. Also seems to have taken one more hard turn to the north shortly before being hit.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/malaysian-airlines-mh17-was-ordered-to-fly-over-the-east-ukraine-warzone/5392540

[piet11111]

Still no "evidence" from washington still no recordings from air traffic control.

Journalists and now even relatives manage to get around the crash site without trouble but somehow these investigators just don't seem to get to it unless they get to bring an army.

[Sasha]

Good for them. Better fascists than civilians.

Because every soldier in the Ukrainian army suddenly turned fascist in the last half year? I assume then that these pilots where glorious people republic soldiers back when the other guy was in charge?

[cyu]

Not all German soldiers who fought in World War II were Nazis. Not all American soldiers currently deployed overseas are imperialists.

http://izquotes.com/quotes-pictures/quote-like-all-the-members-of-the-military-profession-i-never-had-a-thought-of-my-own-until-i-left-the-smedley-butler-215695.jpg

http://izquotes.com/quotes-pictures/quote-military-men-are-dumb-stupid-animals-to-be-used-as-pawns-for-foreign-policy-henry-kissinger-346019.jpg

[Ethics Gradient, Traitor For All Ages]

Ok how about this for a conspiracy theory. It was all a massive insurance scam by Malaysian Airlines. Two planes in five months being downed in suspicious circumstances, helluva coincidence. Plus this theory has the benefit of being easiest to slot into a "capitalism is evil" theoretical framework.

EDIT- or maybe a crocodile escaped and everyone is too embarrassed to admit it

AirAsia X has known links to NATO and is also based in Malaysia. We can assume that they stand to gain from Malaysian Air's recent run of "bad luck". A little too coincidental if you ask me.

[Sinister Cultural Marxist]

What about the recordings of rebel commanders bragging about shooting down a "military transport craft" before word got out that it was a civilian airliner? That certainly seems to make the conspiracy theories less plausible. Also the fact that the separatists have been facing problems with the air superiority of the Ukrainians, they lack training, and they have access to such weapons BOTH through capture from the Ukraine and Russian support all make the position that the separatists were responsible a very strong position

[piet11111]

What about the recordings of rebel commanders bragging about shooting down a "military transport craft" before word got out that it was a civilian airliner? That certainly seems to make the conspiracy theories less plausible. Also the fact that the separatists have been facing problems with the air superiority of the Ukrainians, they lack training, and they have access to such weapons BOTH through capture from the Ukraine and Russian support all make the position that the separatists were responsible a very strong position


We have already seen that post where a commander claimed responsibility for shooting down a military transport craft with a captured BUK system.
However the ukrainian army to my knowledge denies having lost any such systems to the rebels. (though i could be wrong here if so please correct me)

While the russians have provided some very interesting claims along with evidence (that could potentially have been fabricated) that needs to be investigated the Ukraine and washington have made other claims with no evidence whatsoever.

While i think that the rebels having mistakenly shot down the airliner is the most likely thing that happened i do find it strange that they are so cooperative while kiev is much less so.

In fact i find their increased military aggression to be incredibly detrimental to any adequate investigation.

[Geiseric]

Because every soldier in the Ukrainian army suddenly turned fascist in the last half year? I assume then that these pilots where glorious people republic soldiers back when the other guy was in charge?

Not every Israeli soldier is a bad person but the palestinians have the right to defend themselves against imperialist, colonialist invaders. Same goes for the donetsk rebels and the ukranian civilian population which is in exodus from the east due to the US backed Kiev government.

[Hrafn]

Your apologism is rather pathetic, Geis.

[Geiseric]

Not all German soldiers who fought in World War II were Nazis. Not all American soldiers currently deployed overseas are imperialists.

http://izquotes.com/quotes-pictures/quote-like-all-the-members-of-the-military-profession-i-never-had-a-thought-of-my-own-until-i-left-the-smedley-butler-215695.jpg

http://izquotes.com/quotes-pictures/quote-military-men-are-dumb-stupid-animals-to-be-used-as-pawns-for-foreign-policy-henry-kissinger-346019.jpg

If they executed civilians they deserved punishment regardless of personal convictions. The kiev govt started this war, hopefully the ukranian soldiers will mutiny and end it.

[Geiseric]

Your apologism is rather pathetic, Geis.

Your trust in western propaganda organs is pathetic. Do you even realize what theyre fighting about? Are you one of those people who call them "pro russia rebels"?

[Hrafn]

Pro-Russian rebels, yes. Fascist pro-Russian rebels, enacting ethnic cleansing, religious supremacy, and good old fashione Fascism. You're not gonna convince me of the opposite, just as you'll never admit yourself to be a Nazi sympathizer.

[Geiseric]

Pro-Russian rebels, yes. Fascist pro-Russian rebels, enacting ethnic cleansing, religious supremacy, and good old fashione Fascism. You're not gonna convince me of the opposite, just as you'll never admit yourself to be a Nazi sympathizer.

Show me proof of ANY of those things rather than a wall of text a la left communists or youre just as bad as CNN. I can show you proof of the presence of real nazis on the kiev side, who are backed by international finance capital, as nazi scum always are. Russia isnt even supportinfg the rebels. They sold out the rebels at first so they could have their prescious crimea amd german energy deals, falling into NATO's pocket.

So unless these anti EU rebels, who want to be part of the russian sphere as the crimean population did in order to avoid predatory imperialism, who are composed of ukranians as well as russians, are somehow backed by a different imperialist power, your claims are groundless. Typical leftist epigones!

[Rurkel]

Hrafn had already posted quite a lot of very unflattering material on the rebel leadership.

Albeit they haven't been enacting any kind of ethnic cleansing so far. :confused:

[Sasha]

international finance capital


wink wink, nudge nudge

[La Guaneña]

About this liberal bs about killing some military personell, I can't put it better than Fidel did when talking about the invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965: "If the marines come here to kill, they also deserve to die."

[Sinister Cultural Marxist]

What about the fact that the Ukrainian rebels are explicitly homophobic, and endorse a Russian nationalist ideology which is deeply implicated in Russian Imperialism and a desire to re-assert Moscow's cultural, political, economic and military hegemony over Eurasia?

Calling out Ukraine's government for having fascist and rightwing nationalist supporters is one thing, but supporting rebels with a host of politically "problematic" leanings is a very different matter. This is even more the case when you consider their allegiance to Russian Imperialist interests, and the fact that their leadership is not so much an organic outgrowth of the native population but is pretty clearly associated with the state intelligence and military services in Moscow. I don't think doubting Western propaganda should make us ignore the fact that Russian state media is propagandistic too

[Hrafn]

Hrafn had already posted quite a lot of very unflattering material on the rebel leadership.

Albeit they haven't been enacting any kind of ethnic cleansing so far. :confused:

I have indeed.

Sadly they have. Information from within rebel territory is pretty rare, and few westerners care for them, but the Roma population had faced a large number of "incidents". This source is a few months old, sadly, but I persoanlly trust the European Roma Rights Centre. Their main activity is to be extremely critical of EU countries' racist policies. http://web.archive.org/web/20140513012536/http://www.errc.org/article/joint-statement-on-violence-against-roma-in-ukraine/4278

With far over a hundred thousand having fled over the border, and tens of thousands having been internally displaced in Ukraine, I would personally think that many minorities have done their best to leave separatist territory.

[piet11111]

What about the fact that the Ukrainian rebels are explicitly homophobic, and endorse a Russian nationalist ideology which is deeply implicated in Russian Imperialism and a desire to re-assert Moscow's cultural, political, economic and military hegemony over Eurasia?

Calling out Ukraine's government for having fascist and rightwing nationalist supporters is one thing, but supporting rebels with a host of politically "problematic" leanings is a very different matter. This is even more the case when you consider their allegiance to Russian Imperialist interests, and the fact that their leadership is not so much an organic outgrowth of the native population but is pretty clearly associated with the state intelligence and military services in Moscow. I don't think doubting Western propaganda should make us ignore the fact that Russian state media is propagandistic too

True but my support for the separatists is more bound up with the fact that they have an army opposed to them that bombs everyone in rebel held territory indiscriminately.
As terrible as the shooting down of MH17 is i can not put behind me the simple fact that (if the separatists shot it down that is) in that case its almost certain that they mistook it for an enemy military plane.

Self defense is their right.

[Rurkel]

the Roma population had faced a large number of "incidents". This source is a few months old, sadly, but I persoanlly trust the European Roma Rights Centre. Their main activity is to be extremely critical of EU countries' racist policies. http://web.archive.org/web/20140513012536/http://www.errc.org/article/joint-statement-on-violence-against-roma-in-ukraine/4278


The report does list incidents of anti-Roma violence, albeit two of the incidents listed (ones that took place in Kiyiv/Kiev oblast) took place firmly in the pro-government territory where no military fighting takes place, as the proximity to Kiev suggests. The report states an increase in anti-Roma racism in the whole Ukraine, rather than specifically in rebel territory.



With far over a hundred thousand having fled over the border, and tens of thousands having been internally displaced in Ukraine, I would personally think that many minorities have done their best to leave separatist territory.
From what I know, most refugees are representatives of Russian/Russian-speaking majority that are just fleeing the war zone, as opposed to fleeing ethnic persecution. Whether they flee to the rest of Ukraine or to Russia depends on the location of their relatives and their own political sympathies. The ethnic composition of the refugees is likely not particularly different from the composition of Donetsk and Lugansk regions.

So no, I don't think that ethnic cleansing deserves to be listed among the rebels' political sins. Thankfully.

[Geiseric]

Russia isnt even aiding the rebels. Ffs the russian state sold them out so they could have crimea. Russian citizens are however "russian imperial czarism" (lol) isnt on anybodys agenda in donetsk. All of the ukranian nazis are in the kiev army.

[Hrafn]

I disagree, R, but I suppose we won't really know until the war ends and war crimes are investigated.

[Hrafn]

True but my support for the separatists is more bound up with the fact that they have an army opposed to them that bombs everyone in rebel held territory indiscriminately.
As terrible as the shooting down of MH17 is i can not put behind me the simple fact that (if the separatists shot it down that is) in that case its almost certain that they mistook it for an enemy military plane.

Self defense is their right.

Do you also support Hamas? ISIS? The Taliban? The Jihadists of northern Mali? Being the underdog in a conflict with an imperialist power does not make you immediately worthy of support.

[Geiseric]

On top of all of this, Kiev is lying about the rebels atrocities. The nazis who are supported by the EU did it and are blaming the DPR, whom are not in a position to do any kind of racist violence. Even more despicable is the violence towards the civilian population perpetrated by the EU worms, targeting children and women with their artillery. Any apoligists for Kiev are supporting the EU.

Kiev lied about the plane, they are now lying about supposed "rebel nazis" on the DPR side. Its because Ukranians now know the kiev government are imperialist stooges who would stoop as low as paying nazis to do their dirty work. The entire DPR militia is volunteers who are fighting against EU hegemony.

Or they're ignorant about psychological warfare and imperialism. The majority of DPR is by no means "ultra nationalist" and spreading those lies is tantamount to keeping the war against Donetsk going.

[Hrafn]

Geis, I'm increasingly worried about your mental well-being. You appearing to be suffering from strong delusions. :crying:

[piet11111]

Do you also support Hamas? ISIS? The Taliban? The Jihadists of northern Mali?

:rolleyes:

Am i supposed to take this seriously ?

[Ethics Gradient, Traitor For All Ages]

Those are all groups that are resisting various imperialist backed armies on behalf of populations that have not necessarily expressed their consent for such a resistance. So I don't think the comparison is too far off actually. The people of Donetsk do have the right to resist aggression from Kiev, the same as Palestinians, Afghans, Iraqis, etc. The question is whether the far right ultra-nationalist groups are actually doing that for them or whether they're up to something else for their own reasons. Based on the groups who make the resistance, the actions they've taken and the things they've said, it certainly looks and sounds like they are up to something else entirely. Resistance will continue regardless, the discussion is just whether or not some people are going to look really stupid by giving support to neo-Nazis (they do).

[Hrafn]

Exactly, EG.

[piet11111]

Well when it comes to the composition of the seperatists i am unfortunately not informed enough to make a conclusive judgement.

I do know that Kiev has set up a national guard due to their regular army being unwilling to kill their fellow countrymen and some of them even deserting to join up with the seperatists.
Many of these national guardists are recruited from the ranks of svoboda and right sector who have no issue with killing the people from the seperatist parts of the country because of their hatred of russians and jews.

What i also notice is that the separatists are unexpectedly cooperative in the investigation but that due to the fighting near the crash site (something kiev is forcing on the seperatists) and the claim of landmines being placed (a claim from kiev) the investigators are unable to get there.
I cant help but feel that the only party here making things impossible for an independent investigation is Kiev.

Now if i take that and see the un-refuted claims made by the Russians along with the unreleased audio recordings of ukrainian airtraffic control and the unreleased data from the black boxes i tend to find this rather suspect.
After all the british experts said they should be able judging by the apparent limited damage to those boxes to read them out in 24 hours.

All these things taken together makes me rather suspicious of kiev and the western powers.

[Ethics Gradient, Traitor For All Ages]

I don't think there will ever come a time not to be suspicious of NATO, their clients or any nation state. The legitimacy of resistance won't hinge on who is responsible for this, but equally the reactionary character of the separatist groups and Russia won't evaporate if it turns out to have been a western conspiracy after all.

[Geiseric]

I don't think there will ever come a time not to be suspicious of NATO, their clients or any nation state. The legitimacy of resistance won't hinge on who is responsible for this, but equally the reactionary character of the separatist groups and Russia won't evaporate if it turns out to have been a western conspiracy after all.

Some small groups who make up some of the seperatists may hold reactionary views, however the motivation for this struggle is a legitimate anti imperialist struggle by a united front of mostly working class groups. There isnt any evidence that states the majority of the seprratists are right wing, nonetheless fascist.

[Slavic]

Some small groups who make up some of the seperatists may hold reactionary views, however the motivation for this struggle is a legitimate anti imperialist struggle by a united front of mostly working class groups. There isnt any evidence that states the majority of the seprratists are right wing, nonetheless fascist.


What do you mean working class groups?

Like working class GROUPS
or
WORKING CLASS groups

I can tell you that every war has been conducted by WORKING CLASS groups.

[Sasha]

Mass graves are reportedly being found in areas conquered on the rebels.

[Geiseric]

Is that surprising? This is a warzone with mostly civilians being targeted by the ukrainian government.

[Hrafn]

Is that surprising? This is a warzone with mostly civilians being targeted by the ukrainian government.

Yes we all know the government are the only ones capable of atrocities, not ragtag far-right insurgents.

[Geiseric]

Theyre so far right that they oppose neoliberalism? Do you support Poroshenkos choice for the governor of donetsk and slovyansk?

[cyu]

When the ruling class manage to divide themselves, it is a chance for the underclass to take advantage of their division, and conquer them.

[Sinister Cultural Marxist]

Theyre so far right that they oppose neoliberalism? Do you support Poroshenkos choice for the governor of donetsk and slovyansk?

Most far-rightists oppose neoliberalism too. Fascism and free trade are in conflict at least as much as they are in mutual self-interest.

You can't confuse opposing X with supporting Y. The "Donetsk People's Republic" opposes Kiev's racism, but are susceptible to their own, distinct reactionary ideologies. This is why people are not convinced by your defense of the "Donetsk People's Republic" where you argue that we should support them because of Kiev's "fascism". It underplays the threat of far-right Russian Imperialism and Chauvinism, which may easier to miss because they are less likely to utilize traditional rightwing imagery than neo-fascists like Right Sector. That does not speak to the true nature of their ideology or material interests as a rightwing, nationalist grouping.

[Geiseric]

Most far-rightists oppose neoliberalism too. Fascism and free trade are in conflict at least as much as they are in mutual self-interest.

You can't confuse opposing X with supporting Y. The "Donetsk People's Republic" opposes Kiev's racism, but are susceptible to their own, distinct reactionary ideologies. This is why people are not convinced by your defense of the "Donetsk People's Republic" where you argue that we should support them because of Kiev's "fascism". It underplays the threat of far-right Russian Imperialism and Chauvinism, which may easier to miss because they are less likely to utilize traditional rightwing imagery than neo-fascists like Right Sector. That does not speak to the true nature of their ideology or material interests as a rightwing, nationalist grouping.

Far right groups are always funded by the bourgeoisie, they may claim to be against capitalism but they are lying. Golden dawn claims to be against the EU as the nazis claimed to be socialist, but its a facade. Russian neo nazi groups uphold the interests of the most reactionary of the oligarchs, however Borotba which is the main anti EU party in Ukraine denys involvement with such groups because they are a socialist party with principles higher than stalinists, and publicly denounce russian neo nazi groups.

[Hrafn]

Geis, I've put forward direct evidence, both in writing and photographic, showing a direct Borotba-Neo Nazi link. And you know that. You just won't admit it.

[Sinister Cultural Marxist]

Far right groups are always funded by the bourgeoisie, they may claim to be against capitalism but they are lying. Golden dawn claims to be against the EU as the nazis claimed to be socialist, but its a facade. Russian neo nazi groups uphold the interests of the most reactionary of the oligarchs, however Borotba which is the main anti EU party in Ukraine denys involvement with such groups because they are a socialist party with principles higher than stalinists, and publicly denounce russian neo nazi groups.

This is all true but I don't think it addresses anything I said. Fascists are supported by Capitalists, and fascism is a form of Capitalism, but it is an illiberal form of Capitalism. Hence fascists tend to be far more protectionistic, etc

[Geiseric]

You posted pictures with them in the same room. You didnt post their members cooperating in action. If right wing conservative groups in russia are sending people to help the people of donetsk witb no strings attatched, as in with no political ramifications on the ukrainian people, who are doing most of the insurgency as it is, is one thing. If the donetsk rebels are carrying through a neo nazi program is another, of which evidence is lacking. There are direct statements from the rebel leadership, Borotba, that they themselves are fighting a legitimage struggle against the EU. Whats your opinion on that is what im wondering?

[Geiseric]

Because both the US as Russia as all other witnesses say it was a rocket, you are so desperate to find the conspiracy that lines up with your dogma's that your willing to ignore even the most obvious evidence.

Funny how the propaganda meant for the Russian people keeps confusing people who also have access to the official statements by the Russian administration towards the outside world

A special point to make is that Russia's stance isnt pro donetsk. All they wanted was crimea, this crisis is as much their fault as NATO's because they washed their hands of donetsk before this escalated, and despite the Moscovy govt's attempts to stop the flow of arms, medicinen and food, nobody is going along with it because many Russians are in large part related directly to many Russian speaking Ukranians who are under fire all accross Ukraine, not only in Donetsk.

[Hrafn]

You posted pictures with them in the same room. You didnt post their members cooperating in action. If right wing conservative groups in russia are sending people to help the people of donetsk witb no strings attatched, as in with no political ramifications on the ukrainian people, who are doing most of the insurgency as it is, is one thing. If the donetsk rebels are carrying through a neo nazi program is another, of which evidence is lacking. There are direct statements from the rebel leadership, Borotba, that they themselves are fighting a legitimage struggle against the EU. Whats your opinion on that is what im wondering?

Did you bother to read the texts of Borotba? No? Then you'd known that the reason they were in the same room, holding a fucking press conference together, is that they'ce formed an alliance.

The struggle is legitimate, but wholly corrupt through the collaboration with Fascism.

[Geiseric]

Did you bother to read the texts of Borotba? No? Then you'd known that the reason they were in the same room, holding a fucking press conference together, is that they'ce formed an alliance.

The struggle is legitimate, but wholly corrupt through the collaboration with Fascism.

Russian nationalists have no place in Borotba, apart from giving humanitarian aid and delivering light weaponry used for personal self defense. Not arming he rebels with the means to take Kiev and institute a fascist "pro russian" (a rediculous term) state as CNN and your sources claim. That is Borotba's political line, one imposed on them despite their best wishes. Your priority should be in attacking the harbinger of this crisis, kiev oligarchs, who started the war against Donbass and the independence of Ukraine. If you want ukraine to be a NATO base keep defaming Borotba and making things harder for them by starting threads like that other abomination you started.

[Ethics Gradient, Traitor For All Ages]

Geiseric the fact that you think this forum has any kind of real world impact on events, particularly a civil war, demonstrates pretty clearly why no one does anything other than mock and antagonize you here. Get off the fucking internet man

[Geiseric]

Geiseric the fact that you think this forum has any kind of real world impact on events, particularly a civil war, demonstrates pretty clearly why no one does anything other than mock and antagonize you here. Get off the fucking internet man

Why should anybody consider taking you more seriously than me? Do you think youre entitled to an insestuous "debate" forum? Then go and make one where you and the EU supporters can hang out at.

[cyu]

http://scgnews.com/flight-mh17-what-youre-not-being-told

This was not a normal flight path. it was 300 miles off course. Normally planes this flight path keep significantly farther south, and the decision to allow MH17 to fly over Donetsk was ultimately the decision of the the authorities in Kiev.

Kiev initially claimed that they were acting under the assumption that this route was safe as long as the flight stayed above 32,000 feet, which is out of range for man-pad surface to air missiles. But that statement was later contradicted by Ukraine officials who said they knew three days before the downing of MH17 that that the separatists had the Buk missile system, which is capable of hitting aircraft at much higher altitudes. So either the Ukrainian government is lying about the separatists having the missiles, or they routed flight MH17 300 miles off course, KNOWING that it could be easily shot down.

after Russia challenged the U.S. government to produce the satellite imagery to back up their accusations, what Washington released to CNN isn't a recent map at all, in fact the map itself has a date written right on it: 2010.

Russia, on the other hand, has released satellite images. These first two images dated July 14 show Buk missile launch systems located about 8 kilometers northwest of the city of Lugansk (an area under the control of the Ukrainian military).

the last image shows them in a new position 5 kilometers north of Donetsk.

Washington has not responded to this information, and interestingly has lowered it's tone since.

Russia also released a radar image showing an SU-27 fighter jet in close proximity to flight MH17. Ukraine had previously denied that there were any military aircraft near MH17, but they then reversed their story and said that the SU-27 was "escorting" the flight.

video (later taken down by the BBC) shows that eye witnesses saw military aircraft approaching flight MH17 right before the crash.

[Geiseric]

This is rediculous. Why would kiev bring those to the front? The rebels dont even have any planes that kiev would need to shoot down. The idea that the rebels stole the launcher, the missiles, and the radar necessary is ludicrous seeing as there is no reason for those to be on the donetsk front. What they should steal is heavy artillery to blast the kiev nazis back to hell.

[Rss]

Two spanish volunteers among pro-russians in Donetsk.

TgZ_xm1kJDY
JV_z3Pz21PI

[piet11111]

Bizarre how this story has disappeared from the news now that the Russian aid/"invasion" convoy is going to be spinned into a casus belli.

[Geiseric]

Bizarre how this story has disappeared from the news now that the Russian aid/"invasion" convoy is going to be spinned into a casus belli.

The Ukrainian government is getting desperate since Donetsk isnt giving up.

[Onecom]

I am not sure if anyone is aware but the independant investigators already stated that the plane was most likely brought down by aircraft fire.
The same plane that was picked up by Russian radar following the airliner and was seen by eyewitnesses.

Why do you think the US has not released the satellite images yet?

[cyu]

Again from http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=2775220&postcount=121

I would like to see the latest positions on false flag attacks by the American foreign policy establishment. Obviously they'd deny ever using them, but how empathically do they repudiate them? Would they be willing to put their jobs on the line? Their pensions? Their freedom? Their lives?

[cyu]

http://21stcenturywire.com/2014/07/25/mh17-verdict-real-evidence-points-to-us-kiev-cover-up-of-failed-false-flag-attack/

A Malaysian Airlines spokesman has confirmed that Kiev-based Ukrainian Air Traffic Control ordered MH17 off of its original flight path.

Ukraine’s SBU security service has confiscated recordings of conversations between Ukrainian air traffic control officers and the crew of the airliner.

No reason has been given for this loss of transparency, but not a word from Washington regarding this cover-up of crucial evidence.

Soon after the incident, British news outlets began floating the story - without evidence, that MH17 was diverted to “avoid thunderstorms in southern Ukraine”. Nico Voorbach, who is Dutch, is president of the European Cockpit Association, and was the man used to nudge out this talking point.

it was cloudy and overcast, with more visibility above the cloud canopy. at its cruising altitude of approximately 33,000 feet, the airliner would not be visible from the ground. Kiev air traffic controllers order MH17 to drop its altitude, from 35,000 feet to around 33,000 feet.

Kiev has refused to acknowledge or explain why the plane was moved into position in this way.

MH17 would have only been visible for a very short time – just over 1 minute (if Kiev had not ordered MH17 to alter its course and altitude then it would not have been visible at all). an SA-11 or ‘BUK’ missile system, requires 5 minutes set-up active targeting, followed by an additional 22 seconds ‘reaction time’ for target acquisition and firing.

the Ukrainian Army positioned 3-4 anti-aircraft BUK M1 SAM missile batteries close to Donetsk. the day of the incident, these batteries were moved to a position 8km south of Shahktyorsk.

after the downing of MH17, Kiev’s BUK launchers were then moved away from the firing zone.

why did the Ukrainian Army move these anti-aircraft missile batteries to an interior region of East Ukraine where it’s known that the rebel resistance possess no air crafts? both the US and Kiev have not answered that question.

Ukrainian Fighter Jet appears on radar, trailing MH17 at same altitude, est. 4km behind it at 5:21pm

for every second of its final minutes, it’s clear that a Ukrainian combat jet was in its shadow.

‘Carlos’, an ATC contractor in Kiev is a citizen of Spain and was working in the Ukraine. He was taken off duty as a civil air-traffic controller after a Malaysia Airlines passenger aircraft was shot down. The air traffic controller suggested that the Ukrainian military was behind this shoot down. the very same plane was escorted by two Ukrainian fighter jets until 3 minutes before it disappeared from radar.

‘Carlos’ was reporting from the Kiev airport in real time on Twitter, of the downing of MH17 – only to disappear immediately, along with his Twitter account.

[cyu]

http://www.infowars.com/high-level-american-officials-admit-that-the-united-states-uses-false-flag-terror-and-warn-of-future-attacks/

The CIA hired Iranians to pose as Communists and stage bombings in Iran to turn the country against its democratically-elected prime minister.

NATO, with the help of the Pentagon and CIA, carried out terror bombings in Italy and other European countries and blamed the communists, in order to rally people’s support for their fight against communism.

“You had to attack civilians, people, women, children, innocent people, unknown people far removed from any political game. The reason was quite simple. They were supposed to force these people, the Italian public, to turn to the state to ask for greater security”

to foment a police state by killing off and intimidating opposition to post-9/11 legislation such as the Patriot Act: Senators Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy were holding it up because the first draft of the PATRIOT Act would have suspended the writ of habeas corpus. Then all of a sudden, out of nowhere, come these anthrax attacks.

some of the insurgents in Iraq are using recent-model Beretta 92 pistols. the pistols seem to have come off a production line without any serial numbers. Analysts suggest the lack of serial numbers indicates that the weapons were intended for intelligence operations or terrorist cells with substantial government backing. agent provocateurs may be using the untraceable weapons even as U.S. authorities use insurgent attacks against civilians as evidence of the illegitimacy of the resistance.

[Ethics Gradient, Traitor For All Ages]

Are you seriously posting a link to infowars?

[cyu]

You don't believe the US foreign policy establishment is capable of false flag attacks?

[Ethics Gradient, Traitor For All Ages]

Why are you posting infowars articles?

[cyu]

When Edward Snowden leaked NSA documents, some commentators focused on whether Snowden was a traitor or not.

Do you believe the US foreign policy establishment is capable of false flag attacks?

[Ethics Gradient, Traitor For All Ages]

Lets pretend that I dont, can you convince me without resorting to anti-semitic conspiracy theory sites?

[cyu]

Would you resort to attacking Snowden's personal life to discredit what he says about the NSA?

Why don't you believe the US foreign policy establishment is capable of false flag attacks?

[Ethics Gradient, Traitor For All Ages]

So the answer is no, thanks cyu.

For the record I do think they are which is why I used the word pretend.

[cyu]

For the record I do think they are

Even when people agree, they often reach the same conclusion through different paths. What made you come to that conclusion?

[Sasha]

8 September 2014 Last updated at 17:12 GMT
MH17 disaster: Russians 'controlled BUK missile system'


By John Sweeney BBC Panorama
http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/77456000/jpg/_77456673_023288929-1.jpg
Eyewitnesses say they saw what looked like Russian soldiers in control of a BUK hours before MH17 was shot down

Russians were operating a BUK missile launcher seen in the area where the Malaysia Airlines passenger jet MH17 were shot down, eyewitnesses have told Panorama.
Distinctive shrapnel damage to the plane points to a fragmentation weapon - such as a BUK - downing the plane.
The Kremlin had previously suggested that the missile was from a Ukrainian fighter jet.
Pro-Russian rebels have denied any possession of a BUK.
However, photographs and videos cast doubt on the claim by the Kremlin and pro-Russian rebels - that they did not have a BUK missile launcher on their territory.
Three eyewitnesses, all civilians, separately told Panorama that they saw a missile-launcher in rebel-held territory a few hours before the Boeing jet was hit.
One eyewitness saw the missile-launcher roll off a low-loader at Snezhnoye, around ten miles from the crash site, at around 13:30 local time (10:30 GMT).
"We just saw it being offloaded and when the BUK started its engine the exhaust smoke filled the whole town square," he said.
'Pure Russian accents' The eyewitness told the BBC that the crew struck him as Russian soldiers: "Well-disciplined, unlike the rebels, and not wearing the standard Ukrainian camouflage uniform sported by government and rebel troops alike."
"They had pure Russian accents. They say the letter 'g' differently to us," he said.
In eastern Ukraine, most people speak Russian but the BUK crew did not speak Russian with a local accent.
http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/77459000/jpg/_77459091_023258339-1.jpg Investigators said the plane was hit by shrapnel from a fragmentation weapon such as a BUK
His testimony was confirmed by a second eyewitness, who added that an officer in a military jeep escorting the BUK spoke with a Muscovite accent.
If correct, the Kremlin has to explain to the relatives of the 298 passengers and crew who died - including ten Britons - why Russian military personnel were allegedly seen in the area escorting a BUK shortly before MH17 was shot down.
If these eyewitnesses are right, then the BUK crew may have been part of the Kremlin's 'Ghost Army' - reportedly thousands of Russian soldiers who have been secretly infiltrated into Ukraine and have tipped the military balance heavily in the rebels' favour.
Unanswered questions The Kremlin's denial of military support to the rebels is countered by a mass of evidence, including a video of a mechanised battalion column of Russian tanks and military hardware shot from the back of a bus in Ukraine.
Fresh graves of alleged Russian soldiers killed in the fighting in Ukraine also tell a wholly different story to the Kremlin's official line that it has no role in the war.
Last week Panorama caught up with Mr Putin in Yakutsk's Mammoth Museum in Siberia and asked him if he regretted the killings in Ukraine.


He parried the question and was quick to blame the Ukrainian government for not talking to the rebels and its army for "shelling residential areas".
The president has a point. When I was in Donetsk in July, the Ukrainian army, seeking to shell a rebel base in the city, missed and hit the maternity hospital. Fortunately expectant mums and newborn babies had already been moved down to a cellar.
Human Rights Watch has condemned both the government and rebel sides for indiscriminate shelling of civilians.
But Mr Putin left as I tried to tackle him on Russia's actions in the war and MH17, so those questions remain unanswered.
Mikhail Khodorkovsky, once Russia's richest man who spent ten years in prison after he crossed President Putin, said:
"The prospect of democratic change of power in Russia does not exist anymore. There will be more blood in the future."

source: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-29109398

[Geiseric]

"Missed" with SOTA heavy artillery and hit the hospital. Well done BBC. The allegations that Putin is lying ablut official involvement reminds me of allegations that Hussein supported Al Quaeda. If russia wanted to meddle in Ukraine they would just invade it, and swat the ukranian army away like flies. The strategy of supporting the rebels would only work anyways because the rebels are supported by most of the population in Donbass, despite racism and homophobic actions, due to the absurdity of the Ukrainian National army's assaults.

[cyu]

It's interesting how some accounts on this website fairly consistently support American foreign policy.

Just saying.

[Sinister Cultural Marxist]

"Missed" with SOTA heavy artillery and hit the hospital. Well done BBC. The allegations that Putin is lying ablut official involvement reminds me of allegations that Hussein supported Al Quaeda. If russia wanted to meddle in Ukraine they would just invade it, and swat the ukranian army away like flies. The strategy of supporting the rebels would only work anyways because the rebels are supported by most of the population in Donbass, despite racism and homophobic actions, due to the absurdity of the Ukrainian National army's assaults.

From the sound of things, the Russian military did "swat away" the Ukrainian army and a motley assortment of militias outside Mariupol in the past 2 weeks. Whole Ukrainian armored units were simply wiped out in the area, leaving wrecked tanks and hundreds of soldiers broken and hiding in the woods.

I doubt Putin would be willing to invade Ukraine outright under current circumstances, since it would cause even more backlash, and because the closer you get to Kiev, the more people support the current regime there and would not be as sympathetic to the Russian military as those in Donbass. I think Putin's main agenda is in keeping as much of Ukraine as possible under the sway of Russia, yet that might not be served by simply taking Kiev and imposing a costly occupation, when a far cheaper option is simply destabilizing Eastern Ukraine. Of course, Russia could occupy all of Ukraine easily, but it's hard to see how the blowback would be in the best interests of the Russian state.

[cyu]

I wonder what qualifies as treason in the Netherlands.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/facts-withheld-regarding-the-mh17-malaysian-airlines-crash-dutch-government-refuses-to-release-black-box-recordings/5398571

The Netherlands was given custody of the flight data recorder, or black box recordings, from the crash.

As of Aug. 25, the Dutch government has refused to release the recordings.

Questions had already been raised of why the Kiev forces would have placed numerous BUK anti-aircraft batteries in the area when the rebels have no planes, why the Malaysian flight was diverted hundreds of miles by Kiev ground control over the battle zone, and why Kiev air traffic control data and radar data of the flight have still not been made public.

the absence of U.S. officials providing any concrete evidence in over a month from their own spy satellites or radar add fuel to the growing questions and deep suspicions of the Kiev coup regime’s role in the crash.

[Sasha]

yawn, as a dutch person i can tell you this completely normal for a investigation led by the "onderzoeksraad voor de veiligheid" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_Safety_Board), their initial report into the crash will be released tomorrow which will include the flight recorder data as far as relevant to the crash. the definitive report can still take another year. the DSB rapport will also not allocate blame, there is a seperate investigation going on for that by het openbaar ministery (public prosecutor), though probably some reading between the lines will explain a lot about what happened how and by who on that day.

but dont let the facts get in the way of your conspiracy's...

[cyu]

If it turns out that the West participated in a false flag attack, what do you believe should done to those involved with the false flag? Or take any generic example - say we had any society, post-capitalist or not, where people were involved in a false flag attack. What should be done to those involved?

[Sasha]

dont know, ask Putin, he or someone in his entourage ordered the Moscow apartment bombings as a false flag to wage the second Chechen campaign.
but hey, why talk about actual conspiracies and false flag when we can make shit up because "it goes against American Foreign policy"

(what ever that even means btw, i'm pretty sure the Obama administration where really not happy to get dragged in a headbutting match with Putin nor getting involved in the middle east again in his last term)

[cyu]

dont know, ask Putin

You don't have an opinion on what should be done to those who carry out false flag attacks? I assume you have a political opinion on the matter?

Are some people allowed to carry out false flags, while others shouldn't?

[Hrafn]

For a fellow anarcho-syndicalist, you care unusually much about attacking US policy without question, ignoring Russian policy.

[cyu]

You think I work for the KGB maybe? Maybe you don't believe I live in Seattle as my profile claims? Perhaps you think I'm ethnic Russian?

[Ethics Gradient, Traitor For All Ages]

You think I work for the KGB maybe? Maybe you don't believe I live in Seattle as my profile claims? Perhaps you think I'm ethnic Russian?

I think you probably just have bad politics. You post a lot of conspiracy theory, and you're in here tailing Russian foreign policy for some reason which is pretty weird for an anarchist.

[Sasha]

You don't have an opinion on what should be done to those who carry out false flag attacks? I assume you have a political opinion on the matter?

Are some people allowed to carry out false flags, while others shouldn't?


uhm, i dont even identify mostly as an anarchist and the obvious answer still is "all politicians should be hanged, the new ones with the entrails of the old ones, the 'left' ones next to the 'right' ones"
i assumed that was a given talking to an supposed anarcho-syndicalist, what kind of anarchist are you?

[cyu]

all politicians should be hanged


Do you consider yourself a politician? If not, what if a non-politician engages in false flag attacks? What should be done to them?

[Sasha]

dude.....

i though spending too much time on RevLeft rotted our brains in time but I guess reading info-wars is like pouring draino down your ear.

[cyu]

So I assume either you don't have an opinion on false flag attacks, or you are afraid to state your actual opinion here.

[Sasha]

:lol:

False flags are bad m'kay....

Here you go, I think people who commit false flags should be tried by and if found guilty excecuted by the revolutionary people.

Happy? Now please explain what was the point of this little exercise...

[cyu]

What about those who didn't carry out the false flag themselves, but helped to cover it up?


Now please explain what was the point of this little exercise...

To hang people with their own words of course, but as long as you're innocent, you have nothing to worry about :lol:

[Hrafn]

You think I work for the KGB maybe? Maybe you don't believe I live in Seattle as my profile claims? Perhaps you think I'm ethnic Russian?

That uh, would be pretty hilarious. No, I think you're a shoddy anarcho-syndicalist. Why are you so obsessed with false flag attacks? What makes them worse than normal attacks? Either way it's a state hurting people, doesn't matter if they cloak it or not, nor which state commits the act.

[Sasha]

Yeah sure, that what these last few pages showed, my shitty politics :rolleyes:

[cyu]

Why are you so obsessed with false flag attacks?

Sure, murder is murder - in either case, the murderer is expected to lie about it. Adding fraud on top of murder is worse, but fraud is much less severe than murder.

The reason I oppose American foreign policy is - well, am I supposed to support American foreign policy? Maybe if US were unfairly attacked in foreign media, but that's hardly the story around here. All I see is those in power peddling their lies.

[cyu]

that what these last few pages showed


So, what should be done to those who didn't carry out the false flag, but helped cover it up?

[Hrafn]

One can be expected to deeply oppose US imperialism. You, however, appear to completely ignore any suggestion than anyone other than "Amerikkka", if you will, can commit heinous acts.

[Sasha]

What false flag? There is no false flag, some idiots shot down an airliner by mistake and made a complicated mess more complicated.
If this was a false flag it was a pretty shoddy one, because what was supposed to be the result of this conspiracy? Please enlighten us sheeple oh he who has seen the truth...

[cyu]

We're still talking about a generic example.

Let's say in any society (whether post-capitalist or not), some people carried out a false flag attack. And another group of people helped them cover it up. What should be done to those helped in the coverup?

[Sasha]

Yawn again, if you want to accuse me of covering up a false flag attack just fucking say so you fucking coward, may I fucking remember you I actually lost people I knew and cared about in this downing of this airplane. So stop pretending you are all smart and shit (which your not, your bloody obvious and just look like a lunatic idiot) and just say what you want to say or fuck off.

Goodnight fucking tool.

[cyu]

Doesn't sound like you're committing to any opinion on justice here.

If people help in covering up a false flag attack, but did not carry it out themselves, what should be done to those who helped in covering it up?

[Teacher]

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/08/malaysia-airlines-mh-17-dutch-safety-board-preliminary-report


Authorities in the Netherlands are due to publish a preliminary report on the July downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 over eastern Ukraine.

The Dutch Safety Board (DSB) says the report, due on Tuesday, will include details gathered from the cockpit voice recorder, the flight data recorder, satellite and other images, and radar information.

It is not clear whether the evidence will prove who fired the missile thought to have brought down the plane, killing all 298 people on board.

I have seen some reports that suggest it might have possibly been an air-to-air attack that downed the plane. Interested to see what the investigation will turn up. It says the report will not apportion blame, however.

[Slavic]

Yawn again, if you want to accuse me of covering up a false flag attack just fucking say so you fucking coward, may I fucking remember you I actually lost people I knew and cared about in this downing of this airplane. So stop pretending you are all smart and shit (which your not, your bloody obvious and just look like a lunatic idiot) and just say what you want to say or fuck off.

Goodnight fucking tool.

So Sasha covered up the entire plane downing.

I knew it. We need KGB style interrogation in here more often. Can finally find the space lizard's home planet.

[Hrafn]

Doesn't sound like you're committing to any opinion on justice here.

If people help in covering up a false flag attack, but did not carry it out themselves, what should be done to those who helped in covering it up?

Why is that a question we should care about? We have no interested in the bourgeois justice system.

[cyu]

Do you believe one type of justice should apply pre-revolution and a different type of justice should apply post-revolution?

Regardless of your answer, what do you believe should be done to those who help cover up a false flag attack, but didn't carry it out themselves?

[Hrafn]

You're obviously asking us what we think should be done to them within the context of the bourgeois justice. Otherwise this wouldn't be a question.

[cyu]

Seems to me like you're trying to dodge the question, regardless of whether it's in a pre or post-revolutionary context.

[Hrafn]

For the love of god, why would I dodge the question?

Here is the answer: I don't give a rat's ass what happens to them within a bourgeois justice system. It won't be good. The system is too thoroughly fucked to be in any way just, regardless of how the procedure is done or how they are punished.

In case of a revolutionary justice, in a revolutionary context, there is only one response to that type of action. I think you can fucking guess what.

In a post-revolutionary context, there would not exist such a thing as false flag actions.

Now, you, you terrible little pseudo-anarchist, stop promoting bourgeois justice as a thing to care about, and stop supporting Russian imperialism.

[cyu]

You still haven't answered the question - for either a pre or post-revolutionary world.



there would not exist such as false flag actions


Why do you believe this?

[Per Levy]

You still haven't answered the question - for either a pre or post-revolutionary world.



Why do you believe this?

hey cyu, no one gives a fuck about your questions, but i think more people are interested why, a supposed, anarchists posts links to and reads anti-semitic, right wing, conspiracy websites. interested in giveing some infos about that?

[cyu]

no one gives a fuck about your questions

I take it you don't have an opinion on how false flags should be treated?



posts links to and reads anti-semitic, right wing, conspiracy websites


I read Zero Hedge as well - and I would characterize their general political slant as pro-capitalist "libertarian" - just because they have a political bias, that doesn't mean all their financial reporting is based on lies. In fact, I generally tend to see them as cynical stock brokers throwing stones at glass walls from the inside, as opposed to "hippies or punks" throwing stones at windows from the outside.

[Per Levy]

I take it you don't have an opinion on how false flags should be treated?

sorry cyu, im not into your game that you are playing for the last 2 pages of this thread.


I read Zero Hedge as well - and I would characterize their general political slant as pro-capitalist "libertarian" - just because they have a political bias, that doesn't mean all their financial reporting is based on lies. In fact, I generally tend to see them as cynical stock brokers throwing stones at glass walls from the inside, as opposed to "hippies or punks" throwing stones at windows from the outside.

first of all it shows that you read libertarian garbage, second of all way to go to dodge my question. why do you read a right wing, racist, conspiracy theory website?

[cyu]

By the way, if you see two kids fighting each other, and you go ask them why they are fighting, and they both say, "He pushed me first!"

Some adults may give up at this point, since it just became a case of "he said / she said".

What if you asked both kids "What should we do to liars?" and then pressed them for an answer. Do you think the liar and the non-liar would answer the question differently?

[cyu]

why do you read a right wing, racist, conspiracy theory website?

It just came up in a web search. I could've posted http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/09/04/sinister-pretext-for-war-with-russia/ or http://truth-out.org/news/item/26050-did-major-countries-agree-not-to-disclose-key-details-in-downing-of-malaysian-airlines-flight-17 but they contain similar information - plus I hadn't come across those until recently.

[Hrafn]

You still haven't answered the question - for either a pre or post-revolutionary world.



Why do you believe this?

1. I have most definitely answered the question.

2. The concept of a communist world includes a distinct lack of active states, armies, economic crime, and anything of the sort. You're not much of an anarchist, it seems.

Give it the fuck up, you hack.

[cyu]

I have most definitely answered the question.


This is what you said "there is only one response to that type of action. I think you can fucking guess what."

To me, that doesn't mean anything.

[Slavic]

By the way, if you see two kids fighting each other, and you go ask them why they are fighting, and they both say, "He pushed me first!"

Some adults may give up at this point, since it just became a case of "he said / she said".

What if you asked both kids "What should we do to liars?" and then pressed them for an answer. Do you think the liar and the non-liar would answer the question differently?

Can you just actually get out what you are trying to say because your word play makes no sense.

What "AHA I got you" moment are you trying to get?

[cyu]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance

The theory is that people are not so comfortable promoting harsh punishment on something they are secretly guilty of.

[cyu]

Also from http://www.revleft.com/vb/smart-and-aware-t185921/index.html?t=185921

Not directly related, but I been considering how http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance can be used to flush out "spies" within any organization - or even liars.

For example, let's say you suspect someone in the organization of embezzlement. What you can do is to ask each person if embezzlement is wrong, and if they believe it is wrong, to go into specific detail about why they believe it is wrong, and what should be done about those who do harm your organization like this.

Those who are embezzling for personal gain will probably have some self-rationalizations they use to justify their own actions to themselves, to "prove" to themselves that they aren't bad people. For people like this, they are less likely to be able to make a convincing argument that embezzlement is wrong.

The second part, in describing what should be done about embezzling, those who know they are guilty will fear thinking about any potential punishment. They realize that any convincing argument they make about punishment could be turned around and used against them. The result would be a good deal of discomfort for them, especially if you start pushing about how to foil embezzlement, how it can be detected, and how to prevent the escape of the "supposedly guilty".

For ideological agents, ie. non-leftists posing as leftists, you could ask them all to produce propaganda for your cause. If they secretly oppose your ideology, they are less able to produce effective propaganda - it will mostly be half-hearted - since they can't actually think of good reasons to agree with you. However, even if they manage to pull some psychological tricks despite their own beliefs, and do produce excellent propaganda, this can still be used for your cause. If the propaganda is good enough to get more people to join your cause, it doesn't actually matter whether the person who produced it was sincere or not.

[Slavic]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance

The theory is that people are not so comfortable promoting harsh punishment on something they are secretly guilty of.

So fucking say it.

Who do you think is guilty of covering up the Malaysian Airliner "False Flag"?

[cyu]

Who do you think is guilty of covering up the Malaysian Airliner "False Flag"?

The Obama administration obviously, but if you mean who on this forum, it's a conclusion you have to reach over time. Like any science, first you need to observe, and you make your conclusions later. If you make conclusions without enough observation, then your conclusions are less likely to be correct.

[Sasha]

Hey, what about a verbal warning for derailment and spamming, knock it off or you'll be infracted and all your offtopic posts trashed. Last warning.

[Geiseric]

According to Sasha the black box recordings were released by he dutch govt. What was in it?

[Geiseric]

What false flag? There is no false flag, some idiots shot down an airliner by mistake and made a complicated mess more complicated.
If this was a false flag it was a pretty shoddy one, because what was supposed to be the result of this conspiracy? Please enlighten us sheeple oh he who has seen the truth...

Is this a serious question? What does the US have to gain by committing a false flag attack in a country they have a mutual defense treaty in? Guess.

[Sasha]

According to Sasha the black box recordings were released by he dutch govt. What was in it?

Nothing unusual, the only thing "exceptional" was that they where flying a bit lower than thought because there was another civilian plane in their path earlier over the west of Ukraine.
Further only the usual checks until suddenly all comunications seized on the moment of impact.

[Sasha]

Is this a serious question? What does the US have to gain by committing a false flag attack in a country they have a mutual defense treaty in? Guess.

Ehh, what mutual defense treaty? Ukraine isn't in NATO, (if there was a mutual defense treaty we would all be at war with Russia now instead of allowing them to nick the Crimea) the only treaty the US had with Ukraine was the one in which Ukraine volunteered their USSR nukes to Russia in return of which Russia to respect their national borders and the US would not allow them NATO membership.
Since Russia clearly broke that treaty its should come like no suprise the Ukraine now want to join NATO. The fact that even though they have a clearly good case the US has refused them so far showes they care less about Ukraine than Russia. So yeah, again, what was the supposed outcome of this supposed false flag if the US did it, at least for the Ukraine doing it without US knowledge there would be some rationale to be argued (a failed attempt at forcing NATO membership through or at least getting some serious support to keep the east and the Crimea) for the US being involved I can't think of any, and neather has so far any of all these conspiracy truthers.

[Geiseric]

Not mutual defense treaty but this is going on. Since the "orange revolution" in 2004, which was funded but the bourgeoisie. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Membership_Action_Plan

[cyu]

They've released what they claim to be a transcript of what was being said.

It doesn't appear that they've released any voice recordings.

[Sasha]

Yes, but like said, this doesn't go for the Ukraine (or Georgia for that matter) which are subject to a treaty between the US, Russia and these respective countries where they gave up their nukes in exchange for a pledge of the Russians to never infringe on their national borders and the US wouldn't allow them NATO membership.
Now for all your huff and puff about some creeping influence of NATO in these countries you still would have to admit the west kept their side of the deal at least a lot more than the Russians that already nicked several parts of both nations.
Maybe a chicken or an egg discussion can be had but the fact remains that Russia is as much playing their imperialist powerplays in these nations as NATO.

[cyu]

http://www.globalresearch.ca/dutch-safety-board-report-dsb-malaysian-mh17-was-brought-down-by-a-large-number-of-high-energy-objects-contradicts-us-claims-that-it-was-shot-down-by-a-russian-missile/5400526

the DSB –which was no doubt under political pressure– fails to clearly identify the nature of the “high-energy objects” which penetrated the aircraft.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/csm_mh17-einschu__sse_c43fcedbcc.jpg

[cyu]

http://www.thestar.com.my/News/Nation/2014/09/10/Coldblooded-murderers-must-pay-Kin-of-MH17-victims-want-culprits-behind-tragedy-revealed-and-brought/

An emotional Jijar Singh Sandhu, whose son Sanjid was among the 298 people who perished, said he needed to know who the perpetrators were.

“The plane didn’t experience technical problems, but they didn’t explain who blew the plane up. I pray the culprits will be brought to justice. Somebody must be responsible for this cold-blooded murder,” said the 71-year old Jijar.

Don Kassim, a brother of stewardess Dora Shahila, said: “We need justice now. There was nothing wrong with the plane or the pilot or anything else, meaning someone shot the plane down. Whoever did it must pay."

“Countries in conflict should know not to get others involved. Gone means gone; innocent lives can never be replaced."

[Sasha]

Why no doubt, the DSB is a major thorn in the dutch government side and their investigations has led to already before to the fall of the whole dutch government and the stepping down of several ministers.
Tgdu didn't get their hands on any of the objects (they never made it to the crash site because of the war) so they had to rely on footage etc. But any idiot can see that this wasnt a machinegun nor a air to direct impact missle. Which leads to the conclusion it was in all likelihood a surface to air fragmentation rocket.
Of which the question is who fired it, which they sayed they wouldn't investigate but leave to the criminak inquiry.

[cyu]

http://macedoniaonline.eu/content/view/26075/2/

http://beforeitsnews.com/contributor/upload/5973/images/MH%2017%20Evidence%20iiii.jpg

[Sasha]

Yes? Looks like a fragmentation pellet strike to me (and all the serious experts) ...

[Sasha]

Anyway, ocams razor applies, anyone of you making these far out claim better motivate them because until know I havent seen anything beyond knee jerk conspiracy nuttery meets rabid anti-Americanism.
Your turn, prove me wrong with some facts and convincing arguments.

[Sasha]

Anyway, ocams razor applies, anyone of you making these far out claim better motivate them because until know I havent seen anything beyond knee jerk conspiracy nuttery meets rabid anti-Americanism.
Your turn, prove me wrong with some facts and convincing arguments.