SCG News, “Flight MH-17 – What You’re Not Being Told” (StormCloudsGathering, 27 July 2014)
As the StormCloudsGathering News website says, on 17 July 2014 two significant events occurred: Israel began a ground invasion of Gaza, supposedly as revenge for the kidnappings and murders of three Jewish settler teenagers which were blamed on Hamas, the Palestinian resistance organisation; and Malaysian Airlines Flight MH-17 was shot down over eastern Ukraine. The Israeli invasion initially received very little coverage in the Western mainstream media – and when finally the media began to cover it, the Israelis were and still are portrayed as restrained and only defending themselves while they carry out their frenzied genocide against the Palestinians who are demonised as terrorists. On the other hand the downing of Flight MH-17 was immediately and loudly blamed on pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine (and the government in Moscow supposedly aiding them) by the US government without any evidence to support its allegations. Quickly afterwards, the lies, disinformation and other propaganda noise began with the US and Ukrainian governments building up false and faked evidence in the form of videos and other materials, one after the other, blackening the separatists as thugs and looters, and the Russian government as their controller; and the Western news media uncritically swallowing the garbage and regurgitating it for its audience. The Ukrainian government continues to pound eastern Ukraine, including the area where the passenger jet was downed and crashed, and the US is using the opportunity to pass a raft of economic and other sanctions against Russia, push a bill through its Senate that purports to combat Russian aggression in eastern Europe (and which also includes sections discussing the exploration and exploitation of natural gas resources in Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine by private interests, and spreading pro-US propaganda aimed at Russian-speaking audiences into those countries) and pressure European Union countries to cut all political and economic ties with Russia.
SCG News does a very good job with a 15-minute video covering the recent history of Ukraine since the legitimate president Viktor Yanukovych was forced to flee the country in February 2014 and the subsequent takeover of the government by the oligarch elite and fascists aided and funded by the US government. The narrator reaches back to that fateful day when snipers fired on both the Berkut police and demonstrators on the Maidan in Kyiv and reveals that the snipers, portrayed by the mainstream media as originating from Berkut, were actually from within the Maidanite factions which included various extreme fascist groups such as the political party Svoboda and Pravy Sektor (Right Sector). As proof, SCG links to an abbreviated version of the leaked telephone conversation between Estonian Foreign Minister Urmas Paet and the then EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton. After the Yanukovych government was overthrown by the Maidanites, a new interim government headed by interim President Oleksandr Turchinov and Prime Minister Arseni Yatseniuk quickly rescinded laws that gave minority groups in Ukraine the right to use their own languages in public. Russian-language speakers in the Autonomous Republic of Crimea and Sevastopol then organised a referendum to determine their status within Ukraine; the majority of voters plumped for accession to Russia and the region applied to join the Russian Federation. Russia quickly accepted Crimea and Sevastopol, to the fury of the Ukrainian government and its US backers (who wanted the naval base at Sevastopol).
The subsequent massacre of pro-federalism activists by fascists in the Odessa trade union building, which the fascists also tried to burn down to disguise their heinous crimes, and other incidents of violence in southern and eastern Ukraine led to the eastern-most regions of Donetsk and Lugansk to try to break away. The Ukrainian government, firstly under Turchinov and then under President Poroshenko, has tried to suppress the independence movement in those regions with heavy-handed violence and war crimes against civilians. In spite of the extreme firepower and brutality with which the Poroshenko regime has fought the rebels, in the weeks leading up to 17 July 2014, at least after the rebels withdrew from the town of Slavyansk in Donetsk region, the Ukrainian forces suffered heavy casualties, demoralisation throughout their ranks, food shortages and mass defections. The rebels had encircled a number of Ukrainian army units and were on the verge of defeating them. The Ukrainian government was running out of money, equipment and supplies to continue prosecuting the war with forces that for the past 20 or so years since 1991 had been drained of funding for training and equipment.
In this context, the decision of Malaysian Airlines to fly a plane near the war zone seems madness but Flight MH-17 was originally supposed to have flown over the Sea of Azov which is to the south of Donetsk region. However for reasons still not explained, the flight was re-routed to fly over Donetsk and the flight crew was instructed by air traffic control in Kyiv to fly at 10,000 metres, just above the war zone. So ATC in Kyiv must share part of the blame for the jet’s shoot-down and crash. The film then goes on to ask why the US has not released satellite pictures of the tragedy as it occurred in spite of having a satellite over the area, and in spite of Russia having released its own satellite imagery and challenging the Americans to come clean. Russia’s information indicate that the Ukrainian military had been moving its Buk surface-to-missile systems in an area near Donetsk close to where the missile that hit MH-17 was shot from. A radar image of an SU-25 fighter flying close to the jet was also made public. The American reaction has either been to throw up more disinformation claiming proof of Russian culpability in shooting down the airliner or to ignore the evidence provided by its own satellite.
At this point one might ask why the Americans should want to hound Russia and pin the blame for the airliner shoot-down on Moscow and the rebels. SCG suggests that the trigger event was the founding of a development bank to rival the World Bank and IMF by Russia, China, Brazil, India and South Africa, and Russia’s determination to remove the US dollar as the currency of international trade. However the move to demonise Russia was present even during the staging of the 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Sochi and during other numerous incidents in the past such as the arrest and subsequent death of Sergei Magnitsky in prison in 2009 and the trial of the so-called dissident leader Alexei Navalny for embezzling funds from a Kirov state timber company in 2013.
The video ends in a bit of an odd mess comparing the MH-17 shoot-down with other incidents in which civilian airliners were also shot down by the military, notably the 1988 downing of Iran Air Flight 655 by a US warship in 1988, the 1996 TWA Flight 800 downing in New York and the 2001 Siberian Airlines Flight 1812 downing by the Ukrainian military during military exercises in the Black Sea, followed by an excerpt of a bizarre speech on numerology and magic numbers by the leathery looking IMF chief Christine Lagarde.
SCG’s film insinuates that responsibility for Flight MH-17’s downing lies with the Ukrainians and the Americans; but the video is silent on whether the shoot-down was deliberate or accidental. For more information on the shoot-down and whether the shoot-down was a tragic accident due to military incompetence or a deliberate criminal act, viewers are advised to read an excellent and very detailed article “MH-17 Verdict: Real Evidence Points to US-Kiev Cover-up of Failed False Flag “ posted on 25 July 2014 at the 21st Century Wire blog.
At a time when the world is hurtling recklessly to an unnecessary war that more than likely will involve the unrestrained use of nuclear weapons across nations, thanks to US and Ukrainian intransigence, stupidity, incompetence and levels of crude propaganda and disinformation in global media, the need for the truth about what happened to Malaysian Airlines Flight MH-17 and the 298 people aboard who died to be made public and widely known is more urgent than ever. In particular, the need to know whether the plane’s downing might be linked to the disappearance of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH-370 in March 2014, and whether those incidents might somehow represent pressure on Malaysia itself to shut down the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal which has tried and found guilty former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair and former US President George W Bush for lying and bringing war and chaos to Iraq in 2011, and the State of Israel for genocide against Palestinians in 2013, is also imperative.