Flight MH-17: The (Convenient) Truth or Just Doubling Down on a Pre-Planned Narrative…?

After various delays, international prosecutors are saying that Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 was downed over eastern Ukraine (in 2014) by a Buk missile that had come from Russia. The Dutch-led joint investigation team (JIT) said the missile had been fired from a village under the control of pro-Russia rebels, citing “irrefutable evidence”.

The report, which is not yet final or complete, seems very firmly to point the finger at Russian-backed rebels being directly supported from Moscow. And it does so at a time in which Russian/US relations are at a major low over Syria and Aleppo, coming barely a week after Russia has also been accused of ‘war crimes’ in its Syrian airstrikes.

But this prevailing mainstream view that Russia was to blame for the shooting down of MH-17 began on the very day of the tragedy and has never abated in the two years since.

While Russian complaints that the investigation and all the coverage is biased and politically motivated may be predictable, it is true to say that all information concerning this event seems to proceed from the pre-determined premise that Moscow was responsible for the shoot-down.

In other words, the conclusion always seems to precede the questions and investigations: and the conclusion is clearly politically motivated.

This was evident last year when video footage emerged in Australia that was presented as proof of Russian-backed rebels having shot down the plane (and which I covered in this post). The major news coverage of the video served to reinforce or amplify the guilt of the rebels, as the video – which showed armed Separatists examining the wreckage of the plane, and even the victims’ belongings, in a disrespectful way – did seem to prove their guilt beyond much doubt.

However, there was more that the video seemed to show – and which most coverage failed (or refused) to highlight or explore.

Crucially, that footage seems to show the alleged Russian-backed rebels (on the scene of the MH-17 wreckage) believing at first that they had shot down a Ukraine Airforce fighter, and then being stunned that they had in fact shot down a passenger plane.

It is worth noting that News Corp’s video also indicates that there were two planes shot down and that the rebels seen in the video were on the scene searching for ‘Ukrainian pilots who reportedly parachuted after their aircraft was shot down’ and were not expecting to find the debris of a commercial plane or the bodies of civilian passengers.

The video also features the commander saying: “They say the (Fighter) brought down the civilian plane and ours brought down the fighter.” This actually seems to suggest the rebels might’ve shot down what they viewed as a legitimate target – a Ukrainian Fighter plane – while the actual MH-17 plane might’ve been shot down by the mysterious fighter.

What this video certainly seems to indicate, at any rate, is that the rebels hadn’t deliberately shot down the passenger plane; indeed one of them is heard on-camera asking “Who’s opened a corridor for them to fly over here?”, which re-raises the question of *why* Flight MH-17 was flying over that area in the first place.

This footage in fact seemed to accomplish the rather remarkable task of corroborating elements of *both sides* of the MH-17 narrative, suggesting that (1) the pro-Russia rebels did fire a surface-to-air missile, and (2) that, even so, it might’ve been a Ukrainian plane that shot down MH-17.

If anything, it creates even more confusion and suggests that the truth might be somewhere in the middle.

The MH-17 disaster of course also had the hallmarks of a staged false-flag operation; the magically recovered passports with no burn-damage, the discernible (and immediately pursued) geo-political agenda, even the citing of Social Media reports and You Tube footage as ‘proof’ of who carried out the crime.

This modern strategy of the mainstream media and our government officials to rely heavily on You Tube and Social Media is particularly curious. For one thing, these essentially unreliable ‘sources’ are frequently utilised in place of any actual journalism or legitimate investigative reporting.

For another, we know for a fact that military and intelligence agencies have programmes in place to hijack and utilise social-media platforms for the sake of establishing any scripted/false narrative. The absolute masterclass of this strategy was in Libya in 2011, where military agencies faked hundreds (if not thousands) of so-called Twitter and social-media accounts and passed them off as being the accounts of civilian ‘protesters’, as well as putting out hundreds of clearly fake You Tube videos allegedly showing ‘crimes’ of the then Libyan government forces (all of which is covered more in this free book).

This highly modern misinformation strategy is, again, very useful in the absence of actual journalism. The same strategy was applied in Syria from 2011 onwards, and it was also entirely evident in the case of Malaysian Flight MH-17 and the mad rush to blame Putin and the pro-Russia rebels. The entire case was built almost exclusively on You Tube and Social Media posts.

As William F. Engdahl noted; ‘In a July 21st Washington press briefing, State Department Assistant Secretary Victoria Nuland’s press spokesperson, Marie Harf, was asked why, if Secretary John Kerry and the US Government possessed “irrefutable” evidence of Russian and rebel involvement in MH17, were they refusing to make it public, as had been done in earlier instances such as the 1962 Cuba Missile Crisis? Harf merely referred to July 20th statements by (John) Kerry, saying that “our assessment is that this was an SA-11 fired from Russian-backed, separatist-controlled territory.”

When pressed again for proof she said that “we saw it in social media afterwards, we saw videos, we saw photos of the pro-Russian separatists bragging about shooting down an aircraft…”

As Prof Michel Chossudovsky noted, ‘Immediately after the downing of MH17, an adviser to the Ukrainian Minister of Internal Affairs – a Mr. Anton Gerashchenko – stated categorically that the Boeing 777 MH17 “had been downed by an air-defense missile system Buk” (without, however, mentioning who was behind the missile operation). How did Mr Geraschenko know that so quickly and so categorically? And likewise, why were American, British, and other government officials so sure it was Russia so quickly?

The point is that the degree of concerted propagandising against Putin that soon overtook all Western media was so ridiculous and so obviously contrived that it had to have been pre-planned.

The fact that so-called reputable news organisations were, within just hours of the MH-17 crash, practically accusing Putin of having personally ordered the shooting down of the plane (at a point when it hadn’t even been established that Russia was responsible) just showed how much blatant propagandising and how little actual journalism was taking place; but, as I explored in this post from last year, we were already familiar with how this strategy works from what we had seen in Libya and Syria and in regard to Gaddafi and Assad.

Look at the Daily Mirror headline below, for example.

There are a number of curious or important points about the downing of Flight MH-17 that the mainstream media and our government officials will almost certainly fail to factor in to their coverage, and that official investigations – this Dutch-led inquiry included – will probably omit or avoid entirely. Here are a few;

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• The entire region was naturally being very closely monitored by the US, NATO and Russia by satellite and radar throughout the entire conflict. If a missile had been fired at MH17, one wonders why the satellite data and radar signatures wouldn’t have corroborated the story. The US, NATO and Ukraine have all declined thus far to produce any such evidence. Yet remarkably, the US still claims to *possess* this crucial data – it’s just not being disclosed.

• Former Associated Press reporter Robert Parry asked the legitimate and pressing question: what did the US surveillance satellite imagery show? ‘It’s hard to believe that – with the attention that US 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,’ he writes. ‘So why hasn’t this question of US spy-in-the-sky photos – and what they reveal – been pressed by the major US 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,” without demanding from these US officials details about what the U.S. satellite images disclose?‘

• Further, Robert Parry claimed to have been told by an intelligence source that the United States was in possession of satellite imagery which shows Ukrainian troops were responsible for the shoot-down of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17. “What I’ve been told by one source, who has provided accurate information on similar matters in the past, is that US 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.” If true, this could be one clear reason why no data has been released.

• Russia’s Defense Ministry has long since published its own detailed account of the final moments of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH-17, claiming that Russian radar had spotted a second aircraft in the vicinity shortly before the crash and that satellite imagery showed Ukraine had moved missile systems into the area before the incident. Numerous media commentators dismiss this Russian data as having been faked. That may or may not be the case; but, again, where is the opposing (US/Ukrainian) data to prove the case? We should also note that the aforementioned, video footage put out by News Corp last year seems to support this Russian claim of a second aircraft.

• In fact, Russia has repeatedly demanded that the black-box evidence be made public, along with any satellite data that the US has control or possession of, and that further, independent and impartial, investigations be conducted. The US, however, has not made any of the data available, despite claiming to possess it (and despite even having frequently *cited it* as proof of Russia’s involvement). Russian arms manufacturer Almaz-Antey recently unveiled the results of its own inquiry that showed the missile allegedly shot at MH17 had not been produced in Russia since 1999, but was still in service in the Ukrainian army.

• Why was the plane flying over a known war-zone? Despite claims to the contrary in much of the ‘official’ narrative, Flight MH-17 was following a different flight-path to its standard route over Ukraine. According to data at ‘flightaware.com’ (a website that tracks civil aviation traffic), the flight had been diverted about 200km north from the paths the Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777 had used in previous days. And it led the plane right over the war-torn Donetsk Region. Further, Malaysian Airlines confirms that the pilot was instructed to fly at a lower altitude by the Kiev air-traffic control tower upon its entry into Ukraine airspace.  A Ukrainian SU-25 fighter jet equipped with air-to-air R-60 missiles was also reported to have been detected within 5-10 km of the Malaysian passenger plane, and was moving within an air-corridor usually reserved for commercial aircraft. Again, this too now seems to be corroborated by last year’s Australian video footage from the crash scene.

• According to the controversial report of the Spanish air-controller at Kiev Borisol airport there was, again, an unexplained change of course of the Malaysian MH17 flight which took the aircraft directly over the Eastern Ukraine warzone. The Spanish air-controller indicated that the order to down the plane had come from the Ukrainian Ministry of the Interior and not from the Military. He also said that the MH17 flight was being escorted by Ukrainian fighter jets minutes before it was downed. “The fighters flew close to 777, up to three minutes before disappearing from the radar; just 3 minutes.” The presence of the Ukrainian fighter jets as reported by the Spanish air-traffic controller was also confirmed by eyewitness reports in the Donetsk region. The Air-Traffic Controller has allegedly been subsequently subject to death threats. He and his family were deported from Ukraine on orders of the Kiev regime.

• Have any of the mainstream media outlets ever reported that, from the very start, the Malaysian government had accused the Ukraine government of shooting down the plane?

• Some German experts also pointed a finger at Ukrainian air-force jets having been involved and ruled out the possibility of a surface-to-air missile attack. German technology expert Peter Haisenko published this piece on the subject The pilot published pictures of the MH-17 wreckage, strongly indicating that Flight MH-17 was shot down by two Ukrainian government fighter jets.

• A division of Buk missile systems of the Ukrainian Armed Forces was, according to Pravda, deployed to the Donetsk Oblast on July 15th, two days before the downing of the Malaysian airlines MH17 flight. The Buk missile system has the capabilities of downing an aircraft flying at 35,000 feet.

• As with the case of the 7/7 London Bombings and the phantom train to Kings Cross that the four ‘suicide-bombers’ couldn’t possibly have been on, there is a strong indication that Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17 had actually been cancelled and couldn’t have been shot down. Flight Radar-24 screen-capture on the day following the crash shows Flight MH-17, (9M-MRD) as having been “canceled” on the date of the crash.

• Satellite data provided by Kiev was subsequently exposed as being fake. Similarly, a look at the time-stamps for the nine versions of the video that allegedly shows a conversation between Ukrainian anti-fascists and the Russian military (and uploaded to what is said to be the Ukrainian Security Service (SSU) You Tube account), indicates that all these videos were created before the MH17 shoot-down and were therefore also faked.

• Of course, the classic calling-card of any false-flag operation: the magic passports. All the passenger passports appearing in the video were in perfect condition. They all somehow managed to survive the inferno in pristine condition, did they? Some of the passports were also revealed to be invalid or expired. The point was also made by several sources that the alleged crash-scene baggage and personal belongings that were discovered seemed too clean and too perfect to be true, seeming more like items that had been deposited onto the scene after the fact rather than items that had survived a fiery explosion and a plane crash.

Speculation on-line also quickly developed that the still-missing Malaysian Airlines Flight MH-370 may have been substituted for Flight MH-17 to create a False-Flag event; admittedly, this idea may seem very far-fetched, but it does at least warrant some consideration.

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• The possibility was considered by various independent analysts (and conspiracy theorists) very early on that aircraft parts from Malaysian Airlines Flight MH-370 (M9-MRO) could have been salvaged, altered, re-painted and then used to create the ‘crash scene’ for MH-17 (M9-MRD). More than that, some were quick to hypothesise that the still-missing MH-370 actually *was* the downed MH-17, and that the missing plane from three months earlier in the year had been hijacked and kept out-of-sight for this very purpose. Mainstream commentators naturally mocked or poured scorn on this idea; however, it is still not known what happened to Malaysian Airlines Flight MH-370, which apparently disappeared without a trace.

• It is of course a remarkable coincidence (or misfortune) that two identical planes from the same airline both happened to suffer such disastrous fates within just a few months of each other. The MH-17 plane shot down was of course the same plane model as MH-370. The plane allegedly shot down over Shaktarsk was a Boeing 777-200 (ID number M9-MRD). The missing MH370 was the same model, 777-200, but with a slightly different ID number (M9-MRO). This of course doesn’t prove that they were the same plane; but it does justify enquiry along those lines, particularly when combined with other elements of both the MH-370 and MH-17 stories. There was, for one thing, the very strange report given by a rebel leader at the time of the MH-17 crash in which he claimed the bodies appeared to have been dead for some time and not killed in the crash. Curious initial reports also claim the smell of decaying corpses was evident by witnesses on initial encounter with the crash site, suggesting the bodies had been dead a lot longer than was being claimed.

• Former MI5 agent and whistleblower David Shayler wrote; ‘If the bodies are decayed… then this would be prima facie evidence of a false-flag operation in which dead bodies were loaded on a plane, which was designed to be shot out of the sky. What other explanation could there be for finding already decomposed bodies at the crash site?’

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If the MH-17 disaster was a false-flag operation (and I am not saying for certain that I think it was), it would’ve had its precedent in known preexisting strategies.

Just as the mass deceptions in Libya and Syria in 2011 were perfectly foreshadowed by ‘The 2010 Unconventional Warfare Manual of the US Military’ (the document published by the US military laid out the strategies for infiltrating and destroying any sovereign nation of choice via ‘irregular’ means; in other words, via means other than traditional military invasion or war), the strategy apparently employed in regard to Flight MH-17 is rather presciently foreshadowed by precedents set much earlier in ‘Operation Northwoods’ in the 1960s.

See more about ‘Operation Northwoods’ here.

Originally the plan, approved by all the Joint Chiefs of Staff, consisted of manufacturing mass false-flag ‘terrorism’ aimed at the destruction of Cuba; but could of course be modified to target any specified nation or government in the world. In fact, a study of ‘Operation Northwoods’ can be seen to read pretty much like a blueprint for the modern post-9/11 ‘War On Terror’. Among the various, heinous plots specified in ‘Operation Northwoods’ was a plan to stage a destruction of a commercial aircraft and blame it on Cuba. Among the various elements of the plan;

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 An aircraft at [US military base] would be painted and numbered as an exact duplicate for a civilian registered aircraft.

At a designated time the duplicate would be substituted for the actual civil aircraft and would be loaded with selected passengers, all boarded under carefully prepared aliases.

 The actual registered aircraft would be converted to a drone.

 Take off times of the drone aircraft and the actual aircraft will be scheduled to allow a rendezvous.

From the rendezvous point the passenger-carrying aircraft will descend to minimum altitude (in order to disappear from the radar) and go directly into an auxiliary military base where arrangements will have been made to evacuate the passengers and return the aircraft to its original status.

 The drone aircraft meanwhile will continue to fly the filed flight plan.

 When over the target area, the drone will begin transmitting on the international distress frequency a ‘MAY DAY’ message stating he is under attack (by the chosen enemy). The transmission will be interrupted by destruction of the aircraft which will be triggered by radio signal.

 At precisely the same time that the aircraft is presumably shot down, a submarine or small surface craft would disburse F-101 parts, parachute, etc. [i.e. plane parts]. Search ships and aircraft could be dispatched and parts of aircraft found.

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See here for 15 pages of declassified Joint Chiefs of Staff documents on Operation Northwoods (as posted on the National Security Archive of George Washington University).

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Whatever the truth behind the shooting down of Flight MH-17, it is unlikely to be disclosed in any official report or investigation: not while any such report or investigation is unavoidably tied up in a politically or geo-politically motivated propaganda war. 

There is no question that Western governments and NATO immediately seized upon the MH-17 crash as a tool in the manoeuvring against Putin and Russia; given everything highlighted in this article (and more besides), there is therefore also reasonable grounds to suspect the same governments and agencies had a pre-existing vested interest in that tragedy occurring.

The pro-Russia rebels certainly had no motivation for shooting down a Malaysian passenger plane and killing 298 innocent victims from all over the world and had nothing to gain from it; neither did Russia itself. And, as the News Corp video footage seems to demonstrate, the rebels – even if they did shoot down MH-17 – they probably hadn’t intended to (and hadn’t known there was a passenger plane in the area).

The question again has to be asked as to why MH-17 had been diverted off its normal course; along with the various other questions and anomalies in the widely maintained ‘official’ story.

These questions, and others like it, are of paramount importance: because the MH-17 narrative, without question, is part of a long-playing strategy – along with several other elements aimed at demonisation of Russia in popular perception – to make an unnecessary war between Russia and the West seem both justified and necessary. It is neither, of course.

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This post is derived from a longer article on this site from a year ago. The original is here. 

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