(No News) Lies is Good News: Western Media Coverage of MH17 Crash

(No News) Lies is Good News: Western Media Coverage of MH17 Crash 

The US and UK mainstream news media lie about the circumstances concerning the MH17 crash in eastern Ukraine in such a way that it is virtually impossible to gain any plausible information on what had really happened. 

The Western mainstream news outlets, including newspapers, magazines, TV and radio stations, as well as online social networking sites and even user-edited Wikipedia, are all being used to propagate baseless and idiotic rumors about the incident. Not one single “news story” that has been reported or reiterated over the past several days was based on facts or factual evidence. Not even on circumstantial evidence, since everything that has so far been presented as circumstantial evidence is not such in any way. 

An avalanche of most bizarre and nonsensical stories and theories have been presented under the headlines of “circumstantial evidence” but invariably, without a single exception, such stories referred the readers, the listeners, and the Internet users to fake, fabricated, and sham video footages, audio tapes, and social media statements. But the most appalling is that out of all this manure of disinformation and 100-% lies - even before a proper investigation of the MH17 crash has begun - ungrounded and blatant accusations have been hurled on one side (or another), arbitrarily chosen by respective proponents. 

The US government has taken the lead in this cacophony of preconceived accusations thus validating the whole body of lies and disinformation. US politicians - even before the proper investigation has started at the site of the MH17 crash - have reached the top of the mountain of lies upon lies and taken their stand against... (guess who!) of course, Russia.

Unfortunately for Russia, the Russian government does not have that degree of access and control in the Western media realm. Russian position on many pressing issues on the international arena is currently underrepresented and its voice is barely heard in the West. Russian English-language programs on TV or radio, even on the Internet, are barely present and regrettably missing both in the US and in Western Europe.

Coupled with the US and UK governments efforts to distort and suppress whatever news are coming from Russia or its near-abroad neighbors, this lack of proper representation of the Russian voice in those countries makes the Russian government look like what US and British politicians want it to look like, i.e. immoral, vicious, and stupid. Although there are no objective reasons to treat Russia in the same way the Soviet Union was treated by the West,  Russian leaders are still persistently portrayed by US politicians as a reactionaries who have to explain or exculpate themselves. That is a completely wrongful portrayal of a country that wants to make economic and social progress and not war in any way.

Russia’s principled stance is aimed at economic cooperation, social development, and cultural integration with the Western nations. No adventurism or armed threat has ever been used by Moscow to advance its interests in Europe or Americas in the past two decades. The US neocons and liberals with their militaristic approach and “humanitarian” bombing of foreign nations all across the globe has become the sole source of trouble and war on this planet. 
Washington’s debilitating foreign policies of the past couple decades have become the only problem that the nations all over the world have to deal with and Russia has been the only nation that has preserved its own voice and stood up to the US unprovoked aggression the world over.

The situation around the crash of the Malaysian Airlines MH17 has demonstrated once again that the US foreign policy is utterly unprofessional, inexpert, unproductive, and destructive to nations around the world. Current US political leaders have inherited the political agenda of Cold War mentality and continue to disrupt stability and peace all over the world destroying nations, undermining statehood both abroad and in the US, causing trouble at home and abroad, in the absence of a formidable international opposition and in the blind belief of the US and UK politicians in the power of sheer military might of NATO. They truly believe that any adventurism on their part will be justified and covered up if they just keep using NATO as their primary weapon in international relations, forcing nations into obedience, intervening in other nations’ home affairs, organizing and financing coups and civil wars all around the globe.

They use every pretext to do that. The US political leaders are not smart. They are greedy. Their professional acumen has deserted them but they still keep pushing on following their prehistoric agenda of military domination and war. They use the MH17 tragedy to spread lies, misinform and manipulate public opinion to justify their aggression against Russia which is their primary economic and geostrategic rival in Europe. Washington tries to derail Russia in Europe economically but US politicians are so stupid that they can not think of any other method to do this but through falsely accusing Russia of the forceful actions that have been taking place in Ukraine that is currently ravaged by a civil war, which was unleashed by a group of US-backed Ukrainian politicians and oligarchs who had taken power in Kiev through a CIA-backed coup (Maidan). 

The US media is currently  spreading lies about the situation around MH17. They are based on several assumptions concluding that that the plane was hit by a surface-to-air missile fired by Ukrainian separatists in the east. Such conclusion was ostensibly made from what they call circumstantial evidence, including the following: Three SA11 missile batteries recently entered Ukraine from Russia; A missile launch from the rebel-held area was detected by US Intelligence; Russian rebels are hiding black boxes on instructions from Moscow; One of the separatists’ military leaders “twitted proudly at the time that this plane was first shot down that his forces had taken down a Ukrainian military transport plane”. According to investigations carried out by activists in blogosphere alone, such claims are either utterly untrue or based upon actual events that are unrelated to the crash of MH17. 

There is no any circumstantial, let alone scientific, evidence that Russia supplied any weapons to the separatists in Ukraine. The area is closely monitored by US and other NATO observers, both from space and on the ground, that any such movement of large and heavy equipment across Russia-Ukraine border would have been immediately detected and made known to the public as Russia’s role in the conflict  in Ukraine. Russians are not stupid to do anything like that. And they are professional enough to know how to use heavy weapons and aircraft. 

Russians are smart enough not to plunge themselves into an international scandal of such proportions. But someone in the West tries to convince ordinary people in Europe and US otherwise. That is why such anserine news reports appear as the one in New Republic: “Inside [the plane] were not live people, but corpses. The plane was not flown by live pilots; it was on autopilot. (Translated from Russian Website)”. Where on earth have they found that website? Crazy theories and baseless rumors can be found everywhere, both in Russia and US. It would be better if Western news media reported about expert points of view based on real pieces of evidence discovered by US, European, Malaysian, and Russian specialists. 

Unfortunately, US and UK news outlets have dedicated their front pages to bizarre rumors, speculations, and most of all to premature accusations of Ukrainian separatists and Russia. They repeat over and over that circumstantial evidence for what happened to Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 and to the 298 people on board is already powerful but they have failed to produce at least one piece of that evidence so far. It is all baseless rumors and wild accusations, as shameful and disgraceful as the US foreign policy is to date.

The way many Western journalists have been covering the MH17 crash has been an information warfare offensive against Russia designed to form public opinion even before the investigation has begun. Western journalists and politicians are certainly not crash investigators. There is no way to determine within a few hours how a plane was brought down, and yet that is exactly is happening in the Western media. 

Citing evidence like fabricated social media posts is not sufficient to determine who brought the plane down. It is clear even to a child. Nonetheless, people in the US and Europe are being fed lies and accusations all along. There is nothing particularly new about it, though. US news media are known to have run absolutely false stories about Iraqi soldiers who were throwing their babies out hospital windows, about half a million of Kosovo Albanians who were murdered by the Serbs, about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. Now, they are spreading lies about Ukraine and its separatists. 

Here is what Western media should report on MH17 crash, that is investigation carried out by Russian Defense Ministry. Unlike US and UK speculators with their preconceived narrative, Russian intelligence officers have already provided enough evidence to make Ukrainian government and their military leaders look worried, if not guilty. Among those pieces of evidence are satellite images of a group of three or four Buk-M1 air defense missile batteries Ukrainian forces deployed near Donetsk the day the Malaysian Airlines plane crashed. 

Russia is noted to be using what appears to be legitimate photographic evidence (something the West has so far failed to provide in any capacity) that MH17 crashed within the operating zone of the Ukrainian army’s self-propelled, medium-range surface-to-air ‘Buk’ missile systems. 

Russia has also made public its data on the flight paths of the at least one Ukrainian fighter jet in close approach to MH17 before the crash. A Ukraine Air Force SU-25 fighter jet was detected airborne that day and it’s distance from the Malaysian plane was 3 to 5 kilometers. The presence of the Ukrainian military jet is confirmed by video shots made by the Rostov Monitoring Center. 

So, it turns out that the plane might have been taken down by air-to-air missile rather than by surface-to-air one. On the other hand, it might turn out that neither of the missile types is responsible for the crash, if the plane had been rigged with a explosives. All this hullabaloo about missiles and Buk air defense missile batteries could be just a smokescreen intended to cover a terrorist act that involved a bomb on board of MH17. Any way, facts are needed to investigated this crash.

During a recent press conference, Russian Defense Ministry has demanded the US authorities to bring up any evidence as proof of their earlier accusations. According to Russian experts, US satellite was flying over the MH17 crash site. Therefore, there would be no problem providing satellite imagery to make things clear. The question is why it has not been done yet. There has been no proof that the missile (if any) was fired from the separatist-held area. There has been no proof that SA-11 Buk missile systems - or any weapon systems - were transported to or from the separatists in eastern Ukraine. 

As a result of its investigation, the Russian Defense Ministry has set a number of questions to Ukrainian government: 

1. Ukrainian authorities immediately identified the separatists as the perpetrators of the tragedy. What was the basis of such findings?

2. What were the instances and circumstances of using Buk missile systems in the war zone? 

3.  Why Buk air defense systems were deployed in the area, as the separatist militia groups have no fighter planes to use there?

4. What were the reasons for the inactivity of Ukrainian authorities on the formation of an international commission? 

5. Will the armed forces of Ukraine be able to provide inventory documentation to international experts to account for all the missiles, air-to-air and ground-to-air ammo and anti-aircraft missiles?

6. Why did Ukrainian air traffic controllers allow air route deviation of the MH17 flight to the north of the proclaimed "anti-terrorist operation zone"?

7. Why the airspace over the combat zone was not completely closed to civilian aircraft, the area being just partially covered by radar signal for air traffic navigation? 

7. How can Kiev officials comment on the reports allegedly made by the Spanish air traffic controllers working in Ukraine that the Boeing plane that was taken down over the territory of Ukraine was accompanied in air by two Ukrainian military aircraft?

8. Why has Security Service of Ukraine begun to investigate Ukrainian radar data and recordings of conversations between Ukrainian air traffic controllers and MH17 pilots?   

9. What lessons were drawn by Ukrainian authorities from the previous similar disaster that involved Russian Tu-154 aircraft in 2001 over the Black Sea? Back then, Ukraine had also denied any involvement of its Armed Forces in that tragedy until irrefutable evidence was brought up that proved Kiev responsible for the tragedy.

So far, there has been no response by Ukraine to these questions. 

Hopefully, the questions raised by Russian experts should place Ukraine and the US in an awkward position. 

As to the West, sometime, somewhere there will have to be presented at least some facts instead of merely continuing the "emotional appeals" propaganda based on dubious YouTube clips.