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Russia-Baiting and Risks of Nuclear War
The propaganda war on Russia is spinning out of control with a biased investigation blaming Moscow for the MH-17 tragedy and angry exchanges over Syria, raising the risks of nuclear war
Oct 01, 2016
As U.S. and Russian officials trade barbed threats and as diplomacy on Syria is "on the verge" of extinction, it is tempting to view the ongoing propaganda exchange over who shot down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 in July 2014 as a side-show. That would be a huge mistake - easily made by President Obama's wet-behind-the-ears sophomoric advisers who seem to know very little of the history of U.S.-Russia relations and appear smug in their ignorance.
Adult input is sorely needed. There are advantages to having some hands-on experience, and having watched how propaganda wars can easily escalate to military confrontation. In a Sept. 28 interview with Sputnik Radio, I addressed some serious implications of the decision by the U.S. and two of its European vassal states (the Netherlands and Ukraine) to stoke tensions with Russia still higher by blaming it for the downing of MH-17.
In short, there is considerable risk that the Russians may see this particular propaganda offensive (which "justified" the European Union's economic sanctions in 2014), together with NATO's saber rattling in central Europe, as steps toward war. In fact, there is troubling precedent for precisely that.
A very similar set of circumstances existed 33 years ago after the Soviets did shoot down Korean Airlines Flight 007 on Sept. 1, 1983, when it strayed over sensitive military targets inside the Soviet Union and the KAL-007 pilots failed to respond to repeated warnings. After the tragic reality became obvious, the Soviets acknowledged that they had downed the plane but said they did not know it was a passenger plane.
However, 1983 was another time of high tensions between the two superpowers and President Ronald Reagan wanted to paint the Soviets in the darkest of hues. So, his administration set out to sell the storyline that the Soviets had willfully murdered the 269 passengers and crew.
U.S. government propagandists and their media stenographers laid on all the Sturm und Drang they could summon to promote the lie that the Soviets knew KAL-007 was a civilian passenger plane before they shot it down. As Newsweek's headline declared, "Murder in the Sky."
Exploitation of the tragedy yielded a steep rise in tensions, and almost led to a nuclear exchange just two months later. There is an important lesson, now three decades later, as Western governments and the mainstream media manufacture more endless fear and hatred of Russia.
The Dutch/Ukrainian Follies
On Wednesday, new "evidence" blaming Russia for the downing of MH-17 over eastern Ukraine was made public - brought out of the oven, as it were, at a Dutch Maid bakery employing Ukrainian confectioners. A bite into the evidence and it immediately dissolves like refined sugar - and leaves an unpleasant artificial taste in the mouth.
The Dutch-Ukrainian charade played by the "Joint Investigation Team," on which Belgium, Australia and Malaysia also have members, is an insult to the relatives and friends of the 298 human beings killed in the shoot-down. Understandably, those relatives and friends long for truth and accountability, and they deserve it.
Yet, as happened in 1983 with the credulous acceptance of the Reagan administration's version of the KAL-007 case, the mainstream Western media has embraced the JIT's findings as "conclusive" and the evidence as "overwhelming." But it is in reality extraordinarily thin, essentially a case of deciding immediately after the event that the Russians were to be blamed and spending more than two years assembling snippets of intercepted conversations (from 150,000 provided by the Ukrainian intelligence service) that could be stitched together to create an impression of guilt.
In the slick video, which serves as the JIT's investigative "report," the intercepted voices don't say anything about Russian Buk missiles actually being deployed inside Ukraine or shooting down a plane or the need to get the Buk missiles out of Ukraine afterwards. One voice early on says he'd like to have some Buks but - after that - Buks aren't mentioned and everything in the video is supposition. [See Consortiumnews.com's "Troubling Gaps in MH-17 Report."]
There's also no explanation as to why the Russians would have taken a bizarrely circuitous route when a much more direct and discreet course was available. The JIT's embrace of that strange itinerary was made necessary by the fact that the only "social media" images of a Buk system traveling on July 17, 2014, before the MH-17 shoot-down, show the Buks heading east toward Russia, not west from Russia. [See Consortiumnews.com's "The Official and Implausible MH-17 Scenario."]
In other words, to make the storyline fit with the available images, the JIT had to take the alleged Russian-Buk convoy on a ridiculous trip far out of the way so it could be photographed in Donetsk before doubling back toward the alleged firing site near Snizhne, which could have been reached easily from the Russian border without the extensive detour through heavily populated areas.
Ignoring Inconvenient Evidence
The JIT also had to ignore its own evidence that on the night of July 16-17, 2014, Ukrainian military convoys were pressing deep inside what has been called "rebel-controlled territory." The obvious implication is that if a Ukrainian convoy could move to within a few miles of Luhansk, as one of the intercepts described, a Ukrainian Buk convoy could have traveled to the east as well.
And, the JIT's presumed motive for the Russians taking the extraordinary decision of supplying a Buk battery to the rebels - that it was needed to shoot down Ukrainian warplanes attacking rebels on the front lines - doesn't fit with the placement of a Buk system on farmland south of Snizhne, far from the frontlines. Indeed, very little about the JIT's case makes sense.
It also appears that the JIT devoted no effort to examining other plausible scenarios regarding who might have shot down MH-17. The JIT video report makes no reference to the several Ukrainian Buk systems that were operating in eastern Ukraine on the day that MH-17 was shot down.
The Dutch intelligence service MIVD, relying on NATO's intelligence capabilities, reported earlier that the only anti-aircraft-missile systems in the area on July 17, 2014, capable of shooting down MH-17 were under the control of the Ukrainian military.
But the JIT's report offered no explanation of where those Ukrainian Buk systems were located or whether Ukraine had accounted for all the Buk missiles in those batteries. The JIT's blinders can be explained by the fact that it was coordinating (and relying on) Ukraine's SBU intelligence agency, which has among its responsibilities the protection of Ukrainian government secrets.
The shocking reality about the JIT is that one of the major suspects for having shot down MH-17, Ukraine, was pretty much running the inquiry.
Yet, since the JIT's accusations on Wednesday, the West's mainstream media has put on its own blinders so as not to notice the gaps and inconsistencies in the case. But what should be apparent to anyone without blinders is that the JIT set its sights on blaming the Russians for the MH-17 shoot-down in 2014 and nothing was going to get in the way of that conclusion.
That predetermined conclusion began with Secretary of State John Kerry's rush to judgment, just three days after the shoot-down, putting the blame on the Russians. It then took the JIT more than two years to scrape together enough "evidence" to "confirm" Kerry's findings.
The Near-Nuclear Clash
As a longtime CIA analyst covering the Soviet Union, the MH-17 case immediately brought to my mind the exploitation of the KAL-007 tragedy for propaganda purposes in 1983. After KAL-007 went down, the U.S. propaganda machinery, led by the U.S. Information Agency, went into high gear, even doctoring evidence for a U.N. Security Council meeting to "prove" the Soviets knew KAL-007 was a civilian aircraft and still shot it down deliberately.
"Barbaric" was the word used then - and in recent days U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Samantha Power has applied that epithet again to the leaders in the Kremlin.
The same sort of anti-Russian hysteria is in play today as it was in 1983. And we now know based on declassified records that the extreme vilification of Moscow back then led Soviet leaders to believe that President Reagan was preparing for a nuclear war, a conflict that almost got started because of the harsh propaganda, combined with unprecedented military exercises and other provocations.
Last year, a former CIA colleague and senior manager of Soviet analysis, Mel Goodman, wrote about the "war scare" in the Kremlin in the fall of 1983, and asked if history may be repeating itself. Goodman personally helped persuade Reagan to ratchet down the tension, but it's less clear if any adult remains who could tell President Obama to do the same now.
Goodman wrote: "1983 was the most dangerous year in the Soviet-American Cold War confrontation since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. President Reagan declared a political and military campaign against the 'evil empire' ... Soviet leaders believed that the 'correlation of world forces,' Soviet terminology for the international balance, was unfavorable to Moscow and that the U.S. government was in the hands of a dangerous anti-Soviet crowd.
"In response to Reagan's references to the Soviet Union as the 'focus of evil in the world' ... the new Soviet general secretary, Yuri Andropov, a former KGB chief, suggested that Reagan was insane and a liar ... Andropov would take no chances. Soviet leaders believed the Reagan administration was using a mobilization exercise called 'Able Archer' in November 1983 to prepare a nuclear surprise attack. The KGB instituted a sensitive collection effort to determine if the United States was planning such an attack. ...
"In addition to the Able Archer mobilization exercise that alarmed the Kremlin, the Reagan administration authorized unusually aggressive military exercises near the Soviet border that, in some cases, violated Soviet territorial sovereignty. The Pentagon's risky measures included ... naval exercises in wartime approaches to the USSR where U.S. warships had previously not entered. Additional secret operations simulated surprise naval attacks on Soviet targets."
Reining in Reagan
Goodman continued: "One of the great similarities between Russia and the United States was that both sides feared surprise attack. The United States suffered psychologically from the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor; it has still not recovered from 9/11. Yet, the United States has never appreciated that Moscow has similar fears due to Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion in the same year as Pearl Harbor, a far greater nightmare.
"Russia's fear of surprise attack was accentuated in 1983, when the United States deployed the Army's Pershing-II missile and land-based cruise missiles in West Europe as a counter to the Soviet Union's SS-20 missiles. The SS-20 was not a 'strategic' weapon because of a limited range (3,000 miles) well short of the United States. The P-II, however, could not only reach the Soviet Union, but it could destroy Moscow's command and control systems with incredible accuracy. Since the Soviets would have limited warning time - less than five minutes - the P-II was viewed as a first-strike weapon that could destroy the Soviet early warning system.
"In addition to the huge strategic advantage from the deployment of P-II and numerous cruise missiles, the U.S. deployment of the MX missile and the D-5 Trident submarine placed the Soviets in an inferior position with regard to strategic modernization. Overall, the United States held a huge strategic advantage in political, economic, and military policy.
"The Pentagon's psychological warfare program to intimidate the Kremlin, including dangerous probes of Soviet borders by the Navy and Air Force, was unknown to CIA analysts. Thus, the CIA was at a disadvantage in trying to analyze the war scare because the Pentagon refused to share information on military maneuvers and weapons deployments.
"In 1983, the CIA had no idea that the annual Able Archer exercise would be conducted in a provocative fashion with high-level participation. The exercise was a test of U.S. command and communications procedures, including procedures for the release and use of nuclear weapons in case of war."
Goodman continued: "I believed that Soviet fears were genuine and Reagan's national security advisor, Robert McFarlane, was even known to remark, 'We got their attention' but 'maybe we overdid it.' ... [CIA Director William] Casey took our analysis to the White House, and Reagan made sure that the exercises were toned down.
"For the first time, the Able Archer exercise was going to include President Reagan, Vice President Bush, and Secretary of Defense Weinberger, but when the White House understood the extent of Soviet anxiety regarding U.S. intentions, the major principals bowed out. ... Soviet military doctrine had long held that a possible U.S. modus operandi for launching an attack on the USSR would be to convert an exercise into the real thing.
"Three decades later, history seems to be repeating itself. Washington and Moscow are once again exchanging ugly broadsides over the confrontations in Ukraine and Syria. The Russian-American arms control and disarmament dialogue has been pushed to the background, and the possibilities of superpower conflict into the foreground. Pentagon briefers are using the language of the Cold War in their congressional briefings, referring to Putin's Russia as an 'existential threat.'"
The KAL-007 Prequel
As I wrote after the MH-17 shoot-down in 2014:
The death of all 298 people onboard the Malaysia Airline flight, going from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, will surely provide plenty of fuel for the already roaring anti-Russian propaganda machine. Still, the U.S. press might pause to recall how it's been manipulated by the U.S. government in the past, including three decades ago by the Reagan administration twisting the facts of the KAL-007 tragedy.
In that case, a Soviet fighter jet shot down a Korean Air Line plane on Sept. 1, 1983, after it strayed hundreds of miles off course and penetrated some of the Soviet Union's most sensitive airspace over military facilities in Kamchatka and Sakhalin Island.
Over Sakhalin, KAL-007 was finally intercepted by a Soviet Sukhoi-15 fighter. The Soviet pilot tried to signal the plane to land, but the KAL pilots did not respond to the repeated warnings. Amid confusion about the plane's identity -- a U.S. spy plane had been in the vicinity hours earlier -- Soviet ground control ordered the pilot to fire. He did, blasting the plane out of the sky and killing all 269 people on board.
The Soviets soon realized they had made a horrendous mistake. U.S. intelligence also knew from sensitive intercepts that the tragedy had resulted from a blunder, not from a willful act of murder (much as on July 3, 1988, the USS Vincennes fired a missile that brought down an Iranian civilian airliner in the Persian Gulf, killing 290 people, an act which President Ronald Reagan explained as an "understandable accident").
But a Soviet admission of a tragic blunder regarding KAL-007 wasn't good enough for the Reagan administration, which saw the incident as a propaganda windfall. At the time, the felt imperative in Washington was to blacken the Soviet Union in the cause of Cold War propaganda and to escalate tensions with Moscow.
To make the blackest case against Moscow, the Reagan administration suppressed exculpatory evidence from the U.S. electronic intercepts. The U.S. mantra became "the deliberate downing of a civilian passenger plane." Newsweek ran a cover emblazoned with the headline "Murder in the Sky."
"The Reagan administration's spin machine began cranking up," wrote Alvin A. Snyder, then-director of the U.S. Information Agency's television and film division, in his 1995 book, Warriors of Disinformation.
USIA Director Charles Z. Wick "ordered his top agency aides to form a special task force to devise ways of playing the story overseas. The objective, quite simply, was to heap as much abuse on the Soviet Union as possible," Snyder recalled.
Snyder noted that "the American media swallowed the U.S. government line without reservation." Said the venerable Ted Koppel on the ABC News 'Nightline' program: 'This has been one of those occasions when there is very little difference between what is churned out by the U.S. government propaganda organs and by the commercial broadcasting networks.'"
On Sept. 6, 1983, the Reagan administration went so far as to present a doctored transcript of the intercepts to the United Nations Security Council.
"The tape was supposed to run 50 minutes," Snyder said about the recorded Soviet intercepts. "But the tape segment we [at USIA] had ran only eight minutes and 32 seconds. ... 'Do I detect the fine hand of [Richard Nixon's secretary] Rosemary Woods here?' I [Snyder] asked sarcastically.'"
But Snyder had a job to do: producing the video that his superiors wanted. "The perception we wanted to convey was that the Soviet Union had cold-bloodedly carried out a barbaric act," Snyder wrote.
Seeing the Whole Story
Only a decade later, when Snyder saw the complete transcripts -- including the portions that the Reagan administration had hidden -- would he fully realize how many of the central elements of the U.S. presentation were false.
The Soviet fighter pilot apparently did believe he was pursuing a U.S. spy plane, according to the intercepts, and he was having trouble in the dark identifying the plane. At the instructions of Soviet ground controllers, the pilot had circled the KAL airliner and tilted his wings to force the aircraft down. The pilot said he fired warning shots, too. "This comment was also not on the tape we were provided," Snyder wrote.
It was clear to Snyder that in the pursuit of its Cold War aims, the Reagan administration had presented false accusations to the United Nations, as well as to the people of the United States and the world. To Reagan's people, the ends of smearing the Soviets had justified the means of falsifying the historical record.
In his book, Snyder acknowledged his role in the deception and drew an ironic lesson from the incident. The senior USIA official wrote, "The moral of the story is that all governments, including our own, lie when it suits their purposes. The key is to lie first."
In 2016, as we deal with the West's new hysteria regarding Russia - complete with rehashes of prior propaganda themes and military escalations - the pressing question is whether there are any adults left at senior levels of Official Washington who can rein in the madness before things spin entirely out of control.
Santayana famously noted, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." But the real danger now is that history won't stop at repeating itself but will continue beyond, plunging over the nuclear precipice.
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Obama Should Release MH-17 Intel
A year ago, the U.S. government issued a sketchy report on the Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 shoot-down citing "social media" and other flimsy data implicating eastern Ukrainian rebels and Russia, but then - as hard intelligence became available - went silent. Now, U.S. intelligence veterans are demanding release of that intel.
MEMORANDUM FOR: The President
FROM: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)
SUBJECT: Releasing an Intelligence Report on Shoot-Down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17
Jul 24, 2015
A year ago, the U.S. government issued a sketchy report on the Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 shoot-down citing "social media" and other flimsy data implicating eastern Ukrainian rebels and Russia, but then - as hard intelligence became available - went silent. Now, U.S. intelligence veterans are demanding release of that intel.
MEMORANDUM FOR: The President
FROM: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)
SUBJECT: Releasing an Intelligence Report on Shoot-Down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17
It has been a year since the shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over Ukraine, resulting in the death of 298 passengers and crew. The initial response by the U.S. government supported the contention that the likely perpetrators were anti-government forces in southeastern Ukraine (the customary media misnomer for them is "separatists"), and that they were possibly aided directly by Moscow.
On July 29, 2014, we Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) suggested that the United States Government report publicly what intelligence it actually had relating to the shoot-down lest the incident turn into another paroxysm of blaming Russia without cause. We are still waiting for that report.
Executive Summary
Tensions between the United States and Russia over Ukraine are fast reaching a danger point. A major contributing factor in the American public's negative perception of Moscow is last year's downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17.
A public report detailing the investigation of the incident by the Dutch Safety authorities is expected by October but the draft is reportedly already in the hands of the United States government. There is speculation that the report will dovetail with media and leaked government sources that have placed primary blame on the ethnic Russian Ukrainians in southeastern Ukraine opposed to the government put in place after the Western-engineered coup of Feb. 22, 2014, in Kiev.
As the relationship with Moscow is of critical importance, if only because Russia has the military might to destroy the U.S., careful calibration of the relationship is essential. If the United States signs on to a conclusion that implicates Russia without any solid intelligence to support that contention it will further damage an already fractious bilateral relationship, almost certainly unnecessarily. It is our opinion that a proper investigation of the downing would involve exploring every possibility to determine how the evidence holds up.
Currently, the only thing the American public and worldwide audiences know for sure is that the plane was shot down. But the shoot-down might have been accidental, carried out by any one of a number of parties. Or it might have been orchestrated by anti-government forces, with Moscow either conniving in some way in that action or not. It is also possible that the downing was deliberately carried out by the Kiev government or one of Ukraine's powerful oligarchs to implicate the anti-Kiev forces and Russia in this mass murder. And finally, though less likely, it might even be that based on the available intelligence it is impossible to determine who did it.
In light of the high stakes involved both in terms of our extremely important relationship with Russia as well as in establishing a trustworthy narrative that does credit to the White House, the failure of the Administration to issue a coordinated intelligence assessment summarizing what evidence exists to determine who was responsible is therefore puzzling. If the United States government knows who carried out the attack on the plane it should produce the evidence. If it does not know, it should say so.
In what follows, we former intelligence professionals with a cumulative total of some 360 years in various parts of U.S. intelligence provide our perspective on the issue and request for a second time that the intelligence over the downing be made public to counter the fuzzy and flimsy evidence that has over the past year been served up - some of it based on "social media."
The Russian Dimension
It would not be the first time for a tragic incident to be exploited for propaganda reasons with potentially grave consequences. We refer to the behavior of the Reagan administration in the immediate aftermath of the shoot-down of Korean Airlines Flight 007 over Siberia on August 30, 1983.
Hours after the tragic shoot-down on August 30, 1983, the Reagan administration used its very accomplished propaganda machine to manage a narrative emphasizing Soviet culpability for deliberately killing all 269 people aboard KAL-007 in full knowledge that it was a civilian airliner. In reality, the airliner had been shot down after it strayed hundreds of miles off course and penetrated Russia's airspace over sensitive military facilities in Kamchatka and Sakhalin Island. The Soviet pilot tried to signal the plane to land, but the KAL pilots did not respond to the repeated warnings. Amid confusion about the plane's identity - a U.S. spy plane had been in the vicinity hours earlier - Soviet ground control ordered the pilot to fire.
The Soviets soon realized they had made a horrendous mistake. U.S. intelligence also knew from sensitive intercepts that the tragedy had resulted from a blunder, not from a willful act of murder (much as on July 3, 1988, the USS Vincennes shot down an Iranian civilian airliner over the Persian Gulf, killing 290 people, an act which President Ronald Reagan dismissively explained as an "understandable accident").
The story of KAL-007 should come to mind when considering the fate of MH-17. There might be legitimate reasons for opposing the increasingly authoritarian government of President Vladimir Putin, but exploiting a tragedy does not equate to constructive statecraft for dealing with an adversary.
At a minimum, the White House and State Department one year ago displayed unseemly haste in deciding to be first out of the starting gate with a narrative implicating Russia, at least indirectly - a narrative that may not be based on fact. That twelve months have passed and there has been no effort made to either correct or amplify the record is unacceptable.
Someone Is Lying
Both Russia and Ukraine deny any active role in the MH-17 shoot down. So do the anti-coup forces in southeastern Ukraine. Someone knows something and is lying to conceal a role in the incident. From the U.S. perspective what happened needs to be clarified and become a matter of public record. No other nation has the resources that the U.S. had to come up with an evidence-based answer; and intelligence collection and analysis are the tools that must be used. The information released to date does not bear close scrutiny; it does not permit an informed judgment as to who is lying about the shoot-down of Flight 17.
One year ago today, National Intelligence Director James Clapper authorized a background briefing including some sketchy talking points in a very short "Government Assessment" for selected mainstream journalists. It was just five days after the shoot-down and two days after Secretary of State Kerry pointed the finger of blame at anti-coup Ukrainians and Russia. Understandably, corroboration was being sought.
Like Kerry's presentations on the Sunday talk shows of July 20, 2014, however, much of the "Government Assessment" was derived from postings on "social media." The July 22, 2014 briefing addressed, inconclusively, the key issue of who fired the Buk anti-aircraft missile widely believed to have downed the airliner on July 17, 2014.
No update to that five-day-after "Government Assessment" has been provided over the past year. Are we asked to believe that one year later the intelligence community still cannot adduce evidence that goes beyond insinuation regarding the Buk missile?
The July 22, 2014 briefing also suggested that the missile might have been fired by a Ukrainian "defector." Has there been no clarification on that point? It is, frankly, very hard for us to believe that the U.S. intelligence community has been unable to expand its understanding of these key issues over the past year.
To be sure, there has long been a tendency in Washington to "fix the intelligence around the policy," to quote the Downing Street memo relating to the inglorious start of the Iraq War. More recently, we note the claim repeatedly made by Secretary of State John Kerry on August 30, 2013, that "we know" the regime of Bashar al-Assad was responsible for the chemical incidents near Damascus nine days before.
In that case, Kerry also cited a "Government Assessment" to support his charges. We saw the introduction of this unique genre of "assessment," instead of the normally required "Intelligence Assessment," as evidence that honest intelligence analysts were refusing to go along with the preferred narrative. In fact, Kerry's accusations turned out to have been based on false and even fabricated intelligence provided by opponents of the Syrian government.
Choosing to Reveal the Truth
If the White House has concrete, probative intelligence regarding MH-17, we strongly suggest that the time is right to approve it for release before the "blame Russia" narrative becomes completely dominant. The American people are perfectly capable of judging for themselves what took place but they need to have all the information presented without bias and without any attempt to evade unpleasant conclusions. And it should be done even given the risk of compromising "sources and methods," as the broader issue of war or peace with Russia is something that should be of paramount concern to every American.
What is needed is an Interagency Intelligence Assessment - the mechanism used in the past to present significant findings. We are hearing indirectly from some of our former colleagues that the draft Dutch report contradicts some of the real intelligence that has been collected. Resorting to another "Government (not Intelligence) Assessment" to sidestep the accountability issue is not appropriate and is itself an insult to the integrity and professionalism of the intelligence community.
Mr. President, we believe you need to seek out honest intelligence analysts now and hear them out, particularly if they are challenging or even opposing the prevailing groupthink narrative. They might well convince you to take steps to deal more forthrightly with the shoot-down of MH-17 and minimize the risk that relations with Russia might degenerate into a replay of the Cold War with the threat of escalation into thermonuclear conflict. In all candor, we suspect that at least some of your advisers fail to appreciate the enormity of that danger.
The courtesy of a reply is requested.
For the Steering Group, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
William Binney, former Technical Director, World Geopolitical & Military Analysis, NSA; co-founder, SIGINT Automation Research Center (ret.)
Thomas Drake, former Senior Executive, National Security Agency
Daniel Ellsberg, former State Department and Defense Department Official (VIPS Associate)
Philip Giraldi, CIA, Operations Officer (ret.)
Matthew Hoh, former Capt., USMC, Iraq & Foreign Service Officer, Afghanistan (associate VIPS)
Larry Johnson, CIA & State Department (ret.)
John Kiriakou, Former CIA Counterterrorism Officer
Karen Kwiatkowski, former Lt. Col., US Air Force (ret.), at Office of Secretary of Defense watching the manufacture of lies on Iraq, 2001-2003
Edward Loomis, NSA, Cryptologic Computer Scientist (ret.)
David MacMichael, National Intelligence Council (ret.)
Ray McGovern, former US Army infantry/intelligence officer & CIA analyst (ret.)
Elizabeth Murray, Deputy National Intelligence Officer for Middle East (ret.)
Todd E. Pierce, MAJ, US Army Judge Advocate (Ret.)
Coleen Rowley, Division Counsel & Special Agent, FBI (ret.)
Peter Van Buren, US Department of State, Foreign Service Officer (ret.) (associate VIPS)
Kirk Wiebe, former Senior Analyst, SIGINT Automation Research Center, NSA
Ann Wright, Col., US Army (ret.); Foreign Service Officer (resigned)
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Clearing Russia from Blame, German Intelligence Says Rebels Downed Flight MH17
Investigative reporter Robert Parry: "By withholding this evidence for nearly three months, the West has benefited from keeping alive the anti-Russian propaganda—blaming Moscow and President Vladimir Putin for the tragedy."
Oct 20, 2014
Clearing Russia from presumed involvement in the downing of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17, German intelligence officials say they have "unambiguous" evidence that the crash was caused by pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine, Der Spiegel reported Sunday.
The information was presented earlier this month to members of a parliamentary control committee by the president of Germany's foreign intelligence service, the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), Gerhard Schindler.
"The BND has intelligence indicating that pro-Russian separatists captured a BUK air defense missile system at a Ukrainian military base and fired a missile on July 17 that exploded in direct proximity to the Malaysian aircraft, which had been carrying 298 people," Der Spiegel reports.
Citing "unambiguous findings," which includes satellite images and "diverse photo evidence," the BND has concluded that pro-Russian separatists had used a Russian Buk missile defense system from a Ukrainian base to fire a rocket that exploded directly next to the Malaysia Airlines plane, killing all 298 people on board.
"It was pro-Russian separatists," Der Spiegel quotes Schindler as saying.
According to analysts, the admission by the German intelligence committee is in direct contradiction to what Western governments, including the Obama administration, said about the fatal crash: that it was done either directly or with backing by the Russian government.
As investigative reporter Robert Parry notes in Consortium News on Monday, previous to the BND presentation, the Obama administration and other Western governments had thus far failed to present any information upholding their claims.
"By withholding this evidence for nearly three months, the West has benefited from keeping alive the anti-Russian propaganda--blaming Moscow and President Vladimir Putin for the tragedy--but the secrecy has given the perpetrators time to scatter and cover their tracks," Parry writes.
Parry continues:
With Der Spiegel's report, it's now clearer why the delay and the secrecy. If the missile responsible for bringing down MH-17 came from a Ukrainian military base--not from the Russian government--then a very potent anti-Putin propaganda theme would be neutralized. More attention also would focus on whether the missile battery was really under the control of a rebel unit, as the BND suggests--or was in the hands of anti-rebel extremists.
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Malaysia Airlines Whodunnit Still a Mystery
More than seven weeks after Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 crashed in eastern Ukraine killing 298 people, a preliminary report failed to address the mystery of who shot the plane down
Sep 10, 2014
Beyond confirming that Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 apparently was shot down on July 17, the Dutch Safety Board's interim investigative report answered few questions, including some that would seem easy to address, such as the Russian military radar purporting to show a Ukrainian SU-25 jetfighter in the area, a claim that the Kiev government denied.
Either the Russian radar showed the presence of a jetfighter "gaining height" as it closed to within three to five kilometers of the passenger plane - as the Russians claimed in a July 21 press conference - or it didn't. The Kiev authorities insisted that they had no military aircraft in the area at the time.
But the 34-page Dutch report is silent on the jetfighter question, although noting that the investigators had received Air Traffic Control "surveillance data from the Russian Federation."
The report is also silent on the "dog-not-barking" issue of whether the U.S. government had satellite surveillance that revealed exactly where the supposed ground-to-air missile was launched and who may have fired it.
The Obama administration has asserted knowledge about those facts - initially pointing the finger at ethnic Russian rebels using a powerful Buk anti-aircraft missile system supposedly supplied by Russia - but the U.S. government has withheld satellite photos and other intelligence information that could presumably corroborate the charge.
Curiously, too, the Dutch report, released on Tuesday, states that the investigation received "satellite imagery taken in the days after the occurrence." Obviously, the more relevant images in assessing blame would be aerial photography in the days and hours before the crash that killed 298 people on the flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur.
In mid-July, eastern Ukraine was a high priority for U.S. intelligence and a Buk missile battery is a large system that should have been easily picked up by U.S. aerial reconnaissance. The four missiles in a battery are each about 16-feet-long and would have to be hauled around by a truck and then put in position to fire.
Just days after the July 17 shoot-down, a source who was briefed by U.S. intelligence analysts told me that the analysts were examining satellite imagery that showed the crew manning the suspected missile battery wearing what looked like Ukrainian army uniforms.
Then, on July 22, at a briefing given to journalists from major U.S. publications, a U.S. intelligence official suggested that a Ukrainian military "defector" might have launched the Buk missile against the airliner, possibly explaining the issue of the uniforms.
The Los Angeles Times reported that "U.S. intelligence agencies have so far been unable to determine the nationalities or identities of the crew that launched the missile. U.S. officials said it was possible the SA-11 [Buk anti-aircraft missile] was launched by a defector from the Ukrainian military who was trained to use similar missile systems."
The briefers also theorized that the rebels hit Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 by mistake, thinking it was a Ukrainian military aircraft.
Yet, while the U.S. government has released a variety of satellite photos to bolster various allegations lodged against ethnic Russian rebels in eastern Ukraine and the Russian government, the Obama administration has balked at providing satellite imagery relating to the Flight 17 case, instead basing much of its public case on "social media."
Russian Satellite Images
The Dutch report's reference to only post-crash satellite photos is also curious because the Russian military released a number of satellite images purporting to show Ukrainian government Buk missile systems north of the eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk before the attack, including two batteries that purportedly were shifted 50 kilometers south of Donetsk on July 17, the day of the crash, and then removed by July 18.
Russian Lt. Gen. Andrey Kartopolov called on the Ukrainian government to explain the movements of its Buk systems and why Kiev's Kupol-M19S18 radars, which coordinate the flight of Buk missiles, showed increased activity leading up to the July 17 shoot-down.
The Ukrainian government countered these questions by asserting that it had "evidence that the missile which struck the plane was fired by terrorists, who received arms and specialists from the Russian Federation," according to Andrey Lysenko, spokesman for Ukraine's Security Council, using Kiev's preferred term for the rebels.
Lysenko added: "To disown this tragedy, [Russian officials] are drawing a lot of pictures and maps. We will explore any photos and other plans produced by the Russian side." But Ukrainian authorities have failed to address the Russian evidence except through broad denials.
On July 29, amid escalating rhetoric against Russia from U.S. government officials and the Western news media, the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity called on President Barack Obama to release what evidence the U.S. government had on the shoot-down, including satellite imagery.
"As intelligence professionals we are embarrassed by the unprofessional use of partial intelligence information," the group wrote. "As Americans, we find ourselves hoping that, if you indeed have more conclusive evidence, you will find a way to make it public without further delay. In charging Russia with being directly or indirectly responsible, Secretary of State John Kerry has been particularly definitive. Not so the evidence. His statements seem premature and bear earmarks of an attempt to 'poison the jury pool.'"
However, the Obama administration failed to make public any intelligence information that would back up its earlier suppositions.
Then, in early August, I was told that some U.S. intelligence analysts had shifted away from the original scenario blaming the rebels and Russia to one focused more on the possibility that extremist elements of the Ukrainian government were responsible. But then chatter about U.S. intelligence information on the shoot-down faded away.
Given the intense global interest in the tragedy, there were high hopes that the Dutch Safety Board, which is heading up the international investigation, would at least begin clarifying the evidence and sifting through the conflicting claims. However, more than seven weeks after the crash, the preliminary report fails to address any of the evidence regarding who actually fired the missile and from precisely what location.
The Dutch Safety Board promised a final report before the first anniversary of the crash on July 17, 2015. By then, however, the slaughter of those 298 people could well become a cold case with little hope of finding the perpetrators - whoever they might be - and bringing them to justice.
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Obama Should Release Ukraine Evidence
MEMORANDUM FOR: The President
FROM: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)
SUBJECT: Intelligence on Shoot-Down of Malaysian Plane
Executive Summary
U.S.-Russian intensions are building in a precarious way over Ukraine, and we are far from certain that your advisers fully appreciate the danger of escalation. The New York Times and other media outlets are treating sensitive issues in dispute as flat-fact, taking their cue from U.S. government sources.
Jul 29, 2014
MEMORANDUM FOR: The President
FROM: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)
SUBJECT: Intelligence on Shoot-Down of Malaysian Plane
Executive Summary
U.S.-Russian intensions are building in a precarious way over Ukraine, and we are far from certain that your advisers fully appreciate the danger of escalation. The New York Times and other media outlets are treating sensitive issues in dispute as flat-fact, taking their cue from U.S. government sources.
Twelve days after the shoot-down of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17, your administration still has issued no coordinated intelligence assessment summarizing what evidence exists to determine who was responsible - much less to convincingly support repeated claims that the plane was downed by a Russian-supplied missile in the hands of Ukrainian separatists.
Your administration has not provided any satellite imagery showing that the separatists had such weaponry, and there are several other "dogs that have not barked." Washington's credibility, and your own, will continue to erode, should you be unwilling - or unable - to present more tangible evidence behind administration claims. In what follows, we put this in the perspective of former intelligence professionals with a cumulative total of 260 years in various parts of U.S. intelligence:
We, the undersigned former intelligence officers want to share with you our concern about the evidence adduced so far to blame Russia for the July 17 downing of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17. We are retired from government service and none of us is on the payroll of CNN, Fox News, or any other outlet. We intend this memorandum to provide a fresh, different perspective.
As veteran intelligence analysts accustomed to waiting, except in emergency circumstances, for conclusive information before rushing to judgment, we believe that the charges against Russia should be rooted in solid, far more convincing evidence. And that goes in spades with respect to inflammatory incidents like the shoot-down of an airliner. We are also troubled by the amateurish manner in which fuzzy and flimsy evidence has been served up - some it via "social media."
As intelligence professionals we are embarrassed by the unprofessional use of partial intelligence information. As Americans, we find ourselves hoping that, if you indeed have more conclusive evidence, you will find a way to make it public without further delay. In charging Russia with being directly or indirectly responsible, Secretary of State John Kerry has been particularly definitive. Not so the evidence. His statements seem premature and bear earmarks of an attempt to "poison the jury pool."
Painting Russia Black
We see an eerie resemblance to an earlier exercise in U.S. "public diplomacy" from which valuable lessons can be learned by those more interested in the truth than in exploiting tragic incidents for propaganda advantage. We refer to the behavior of the Reagan administration in the immediate aftermath of the shoot-down of Korean Airlines Flight 007 over Siberia on August 30, 1983. We sketch out below a short summary of that tragic affair, since we suspect you have not been adequately briefed on it. The parallels will be obvious to you.
An advantage of our long tenure as intelligence officers is that we remember what we have witnessed first hand; seldom do we forget key events in which we played an analyst or other role. To put it another way, most of us "know exactly where we were" when a Soviet fighter aircraft shot down Korean Airlines passenger flight 007 over Siberia on August 30, 1983, over 30 years ago. At the time, we were intelligence officers on "active duty." You were 21; many of those around you today were still younger.
Thus, it seems possible that you may be learning how the KAL007 affair went down, so to speak, for the first time; that you may now become more aware of the serious implications for U.S.-Russian relations regarding how the downing of Flight 17 goes down; and that you will come to see merit in preventing ties with Moscow from falling into a state of complete disrepair. In our view, the strategic danger here dwarfs all other considerations.
Hours after the tragic shoot-down on Aug. 30, 1983, the Reagan administration used its very accomplished propaganda machine to twist the available intelligence on Soviet culpability for the killing of all 269 people aboard KAL007. The airliner was shot down after it strayed hundreds of miles off course and penetrated Russia's airspace over sensitive military facilities in Kamchatka and Sakhalin Island. The Soviet pilot tried to signal the plane to land, but the KAL pilots did not respond to the repeated warnings. Amid confusion about the plane's identity - a U.S. spy plane had been in the vicinity hours earlier - Soviet ground control ordered the pilot to fire.
The Soviets soon realized they had made a horrendous mistake. U.S. intelligence also knew from sensitive intercepts that the tragedy had resulted from a blunder, not from a willful act of murder (much as on July 3, 1988, the USS Vincennes shot down an Iranian civilian airliner over the Persian Gulf, killing 290 people, an act which President Ronald Reagan dismissively explained as an "understandable accident").
To make the very blackest case against Moscow for shooting down the KAL airliner, the Reagan administration suppressed exculpatory evidence from U.S. electronic intercepts. Washington's mantra became "Moscow's deliberate downing of a civilian passenger plane." Newsweek ran a cover emblazoned with the headline "Murder in the Sky." (Apparently, not much has changed; Time's cover this week features "Cold War II" and "Putin's dangerous game." The cover story by Simon Shuster, "In Russia, Crime Without Punishment," would merit an A-plus in William Randolph Hearst's course "Yellow Journalism 101.")
When KAL007 was shot down, Alvin A. Snyder, director of the U.S. Information Agency's television and film division, was enlisted in a concerted effort to "heap as much abuse on the Soviet Union as possible," as Snyder writes in his 1995 book, "Warriors of Disinformation."
He and his colleagues also earned an A-plus for bringing the "mainstream media" along. For example, ABC's Ted Koppel noted with patriotic pride, "This has been one of those occasions when there is very little difference between what is churned out by the U.S. government propaganda organs and by the commercial broadcasting networks."
"Fixing" the Intelligence Around the Policy
"The perception we wanted to convey was that the Soviet Union had cold-bloodedly carried out a barbaric act," wrote Snyder, adding that the Reagan administration went so far as to present a doctored transcript of the intercepts to the United Nations Security Council on September 6, 1983.
Only a decade later, when Snyder saw the complete transcripts -- including the portions that the Reagan administration had hidden -- would he fully realize how many of the central elements of the U.S. presentation were false.
The intercepts showed that the Soviet fighter pilot believed he was pursuing a U.S. spy aircraft and that he was having trouble in the dark identifying the plane. Per instructions from ground control, the pilot had circled the KAL airliner and tilted his wings to order the aircraft to land. The pilot said he fired warning shots, as well. This information "was not on the tape we were provided," Snyder wrote.
It became abundantly clear to Snyder that, in smearing the Soviets, the Reagan administration had presented false accusations to the United Nations, as well as to the people of the United States and the world. In his book, Snyder acknowledged his own role in the deception, but drew a cynical conclusion. He wrote, "The moral of the story is that all governments, including our own, lie when it suits their purposes. The key is to lie first."
The tortured attempts by your administration and stenographers in the media to blame Russia for the downing of Flight 17, together with John Kerry's unenviable record for credibility, lead us to the reluctant conclusion that the syndrome Snyder describes may also be at work in your own administration; that is, that an ethos of "getting your own lie out first" has replaced "ye shall know the truth." At a minimum, we believe Secretary Kerry displayed unseemly haste in his determination to be first out of the starting gate.
Both Sides Cannot Be Telling the Truth
We have always taken pride in not shooting from the hip, but rather in doing intelligence analysis that is evidence-based. The evidence released to date does not bear close scrutiny; it does not permit a judgment as to which side is lying about the shoot-down of Flight 17. Our entire professional experience would incline us to suspect the Russians - almost instinctively. Our more recent experience, particularly observing Secretary Kerry injudiciousness in latching onto one spurious report after another as "evidence," has gone a long way toward balancing our earlier predispositions.
It seems that whenever Kerry does cite supposed "evidence" that can be checked - like the forged anti-Semitic fliers distributed in eastern Ukraine or the photos of alleged Russian special forces soldiers who allegedly slipped into Ukraine - the "proof" goes "poof" as Kerry once said in a different context. Still, these misrepresentations seem small peccadillos compared with bigger whoppers like the claim Kerry made on Aug. 30, 2013, no fewer than 35 times, that "we know" the government of Bashar al-Assad was responsible for the chemical incidents near Damascus nine days before.
On September 3, 2013 - following your decision to call off the attack on Syria in order to await Congressional authorization - Kerry was still pushing for an attack in testimony before a thoroughly sympathetic Senate Foreign Affairs Committee. On the following day Kerry drew highly unusual personal criticism from President Putin, who said: "He is lying, and he knows he is lying. It is sad."
Equally serious, during the first week of September 2013, as you and President Vladimir Putin were putting the final touches to the deal whereby Syrian chemical weapons would be given up for destruction, John Kerry said something that puzzles us to this day. On September 9, 2013, Kerry was in London, still promoting a U.S. attack on Syria for having crossed the "Red Line" you had set against Syria's using chemical weapons.
At a formal press conference, Kerry abruptly dismissed the possibility that Bashar al-Assad would ever give up his chemical weapons, saying, "He isn't about to do that; it can't be done." Just a few hours later, the Russians and Syrians announced Syria's agreement to do precisely what Kerry had ruled out as impossible. You sent him back to Geneva to sign the agreement, and it was formally concluded on September 14.
Regarding the Malaysia Airlines shoot-down of July 17, we believe Kerry has typically rushed to judgment and that his incredible record for credibility poses a huge disadvantage in the diplomatic and propaganda maneuvering vis-a-vis Russia. We suggest you call a halt to this misbegotten "public diplomacy" offensive. If, however, you decide to press on anyway, we suggest you try to find a less tarnished statesman or woman.
A Choice Between Two
If the intelligence on the shoot-down is as weak as it appears judging from the fuzzy scraps that have been released, we strongly suggest you call off the propaganda war and await the findings of those charged with investigating the shoot-down. If, on the other hand, your administration has more concrete, probative intelligence, we strongly suggest that you consider approving it for release, even if there may be some risk of damage to "sources and methods." Too often this consideration is used to prevent information from entering the public domain where, as in this case, it belongs.
There have been critical junctures in the past in which presidents have recognized the need to waive secrecy in order to show what one might call "a decent respect for the opinions of mankind" or even to justify military action.
As senior CIA veteran Milton Bearden has put it, there are occasions when more damage is done to U.S. national security by "protecting" sources and methods than by revealing them. For instance, Bearden noted that Ronald Reagan exposed a sensitive intelligence source in showing a skeptical world the reason for the U.S. attack on Libya in retaliation for the April 5, 1986 bombing at the La Belle Disco in West Berlin. That bombing killed two U.S. servicemen and a Turkish woman, and injured over 200 people, including 79 U.S. servicemen.
Intercepted messages between Tripoli and agents in Europe made it clear that Libya was behind the attack. Here's an excerpt: "At 1:30 in the morning one of the acts was carried out with success, without leaving a trace behind."
Ten days after the bombing the U.S. retaliated, sending over 60 Air Force fighters to strike the Libyan capital of Tripoli and the city of Benghazi. The operation was widely seen as an attempt to kill Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, who survived, but his adopted 15-month-old daughter was killed in the bombing, along with at least 15 other civilians.
Three decades ago, there was more shame attached to the killing of children. As world abhorrence grew after the U.S. bombing strikes, the Reagan administration produced the intercepted, decoded message sent by the Libyan Peoples Bureau in East Berlin acknowledging the "success" of the attack on the disco, and adding the ironically inaccurate boast "without leaving a trace behind."
The Reagan administration made the decision to give up a highly sensitive intelligence source, its ability to intercept and decipher Libyan communications. But once the rest of the world absorbed this evidence, international grumbling subsided and many considered the retaliation against Tripoli justified.
If You've Got the Goods...
If the U.S. has more convincing evidence than what has so far been adduced concerning responsibility for shooting down Flight 17, we believe it would be best to find a way to make that intelligence public - even at the risk of compromising "sources and methods." Moreover, we suggest you instruct your subordinates not to cheapen U.S. credibility by releasing key information via social media like Twitter and Facebook.
The reputation of the messenger for credibility is also key in this area of "public diplomacy." As is by now clear to you, in our view Secretary Kerry is more liability than asset in this regard. Similarly, with regard to Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, his March 12, 2013 Congressional testimony under oath to what he later admitted were "clearly erroneous" things regarding NSA collection should disqualify him. Clapper should be kept at far remove from the Flight 17 affair.
What is needed, if you've got the goods, is an Interagency Intelligence Assessment - the genre used in the past to lay out the intelligence. We are hearing indirectly from some of our former colleagues that what Secretary Kerry is peddling does not square with the real intelligence. Such was the case late last August, when Kerry created a unique vehicle he called a "Government (not Intelligence) Assessment" blaming, with no verifiable evidence, Bashar al-Assad for the chemical attacks near Damascus, as honest intelligence analysts refused to go along and, instead, held their noses.
We believe you need to seek out honest intelligence analysts now and hear them out. Then, you may be persuaded to take steps to curb the risk that relations with Russia might escalate from "Cold War II" into an armed confrontation. In all candor, we see little reason to believe that Secretary Kerry and your other advisers appreciate the enormity of that danger.
In our most recent (May 4) memorandum to you, Mr. President, we cautioned that if the U.S. wished "to stop a bloody civil war between east and west Ukraine and avert Russian military intervention in eastern Ukraine, you may be able to do so before the violence hurtles completely out of control." On July 17, you joined the top leaders of Germany, France, and Russia in calling for a ceasefire. Most informed observers believe you have it in your power to get Ukrainian leaders to agree. The longer Kiev continues its offensive against separatists in eastern Ukraine, the more such U.S. statements appear hypocritical.
We reiterate our recommendations of May 4, that you remove the seeds of this confrontation by publicly disavowing any wish to incorporate Ukraine into NATO and that you make it clear that you are prepared to meet personally with Russian President Putin without delay to discuss ways to defuse the crisis and recognize the legitimate interests of the various parties. The suggestion of an early summit got extraordinary resonance in controlled and independent Russian media. Not so in "mainstream" media in the U.S. Nor did we hear back from you.
The courtesy of a reply is requested.
Prepared by VIPS Steering Group
William Binney, former Technical Director, World Geopolitical & Military Analysis, NSA; co-founder, SIGINT Automation Research Center (ret.)
Larry Johnson, CIA & State Department (ret.)
Edward Loomis, NSA, Cryptologic Computer Scientist (ret.)
David MacMichael, National Intelligence Council (ret.)
Ray McGovern, former US Army infantry/intelligence officer & CIA analyst (ret.)
Elizabeth Murray, Deputy National Intelligence Officer for Middle East (ret.)
Coleen Rowley, Division Counsel & Special Agent, FBI (ret.)
Peter Van Buren, U.S. Department of State, Foreign Service Officer (ret)
Ann Wright, Col., US Army (ret); Foreign Service Officer (ret.)
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Ukrainian Military Takes Control of MH17 Crash Site as Police Team Retreats
UN says downing of plane may be a "war crime" as growing conflict prevents police team from reaching debris field
Jul 28, 2014
Developing...
The Ukrainian military has launched an effort to take control over the Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 crash site in the eastern part of the country, the New York Times reports. The move comes shortly after the Malaysian government made a deal with pro-Russian separatists to allow an international police team access to the field, hampering continued attempts to secure the site from rebels.
A police team trying to reach the Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 crash site in eastern Ukraine turned back on Monday after hearing explosions and gunfire in the town of Shakhtarsk, about 20 miles from the field, AP reports. The group, including officials from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), as well as Dutch and Australian police and forensic officials, returned to Donetsk.
The team was traveling to the area to secure the wreckage site from pro-Russian rebel forces and clean up remaining debris from the Boeing 777, which was shot down on July 17 by a suspected missile, killing 298 passengers and crew.
United Nations human rights commissioner Navi Pillay said in a report released Monday that the downing of the plane may constitute a war crime. Pillay also said that more than 1,129 people have been killed since the fighting began in April, a death toll from the "extremely alarming" clashes. At least 3,442 have been wounded and more than 100,000 displaced.
Ukrainian troops have reportedly entered Shakhtarsk to push back against separatists, who currently control the town's checkpoints, according to the Defense Ministry. Other towns surrounding the crash site are also experiencing fighting, the ministry said.
Ukraine and the U.S. have both accused rebels of tampering with evidence at the crash site as the investigation continues into who shot down the plane. New evidence released last week indicated that Russia was not directly involved, but may have "created the conditions" for the disaster to occur, according to U.S. officials.
Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov called on the U.S. government to release any evidence it had to back up its position that separatists had received the missile from Russia.
"We do not understand why the Americans, who say that they have strong evidence to support their accusation, why they do not show that evidence," Lavrov said at a news conference.
Andriy Lysenko, a spokesman for Ukraine's National Security and Defense Council, said that an analysis of the flight data recorders showed that the plane was brought down from multiple shrapnel punctures from a rocket blast, which had caused "massive explosive decompression." But it is unclear whether the analysis is accurate, as the data recorders are currently being examined in Britain.
The U.N. report also described an increase in human rights abuses in eastern Ukraine, including abductions, torture, and killing of journalists.
"The reports of increasingly intense fighting in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions are extremely alarming, with both sides employing heavy weaponry in built-up areas, including artillery, tanks, rockets and missiles," Pillay said. "Both sides must take great care to prevent more civilians from being killed or injured. Already increasing numbers of people are being killed with serious damage to civilian infrastructure, which - depending on circumstances - could amount to violations of international humanitarian law. The fighting must stop."
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MH17: Cold War Replay?
Jul 25, 2014
The most bizarre conspiracy theory surrounding the recent downing of a Malaysian airliner over Ukraine comes from a leading pro-Russian separatist, Igor Girkin.
Relying on second-hand information, Girkin asserted that many of the passengers from the crash had already been dead before the plane had even taken off. His underlings had reported to him that the bodies were badly decomposed and drained of blood. This, of course, was news to all the families of the victims who'd seen off their loved ones at the airport in Amsterdam.
The separatists have denied responsibility for shooting down the plane and have pinned the crime instead on the Ukrainian government. Until recently, the rebels restricted access to the crash scene and the bodies, which gave them ample opportunities to tamper with the evidence--such as sawing the cockpit in half and lugging away pieces of the plane. Now that the bodies are in the hands of outside investigators, presumably the rebels have moved on to more plausible exculpatory explanations.
The United States, meanwhile, argues that it has conclusive proof that the rebels not only shot down the plane but also gloated over their success on social media (before deleting the posts). Moreover, Washington argues that Moscow is ultimately responsible for the disaster because it gave the separatists the surface-to-air missile system in the first place.
Russia denies delivery of the Buk missile system and has claimed that a Ukrainian fighter jet was near the civilian airplane shortly before it was hit. The problem with the latter claim is that the fighter jet that Moscow asserts was trailing Malaysian Airlines Flight 17--a Ukrainian SU-25--couldn't actually reach that particular altitude and doesn't have the weaponry onboard capable of taking down a plane 10,000 feet further above.
The Ukrainian government has denied having any missile batteries within firing range of the flight that day. But, strangely, Ukraine didn't completely shut down the airspace over the disputed territory and direct traffic to safer routes. It was permitting overflights above 32,000 feet, and Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 was cruising at an altitude of 33,000.
Moreover, as Russ Wellen points out in the FPIF blog Focal Points, the Ukrainian government knew that the rebels possessed the capacity to bring down planes that high up, and yet Ukrainian air traffic controllers rejected a request from MH17 to fly 2,000 feet higher. Was the government in Kiev guilty of poor judgment, or was some darker motive at play?
Unless a plane completely disappears--a truly unlikely scenario until it happened to another Malaysian airliner back in March--it's usually possible to get to the bottom of air disasters with the help of black box recordings, satellite data, and the scraps of wreckage. But it takes time to sift through the evidence. And during that time, all manner of wild speculation can take place.
Sometimes that speculation is idle and produces only flame wars on the Internet. But sometimes it can lead to a very dangerous escalation in tensions between armed combatants.
I was returning to college in 1983 when news broke that the Soviet Union had shot down Korean passenger jet KAL 007, killing all 269 people on board. For a couple days in early September, the campus worried that this tragic incident would spark something even worse: a nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union. President Ronald Reagan had been rapidly escalating his anti-Soviet rhetoric. Soviet Premier Yuri Andropov, directing Soviet policy from his hospital bed by that point, was firmly convinced that Reagan was planning a first nuclear strike. Indeed, a false alarm later that September--Soviet satellite sensors had mistaken high-altitude clouds for incoming nuclear missiles--nearly triggered a Soviet launch. Only a single quick-thinking lieutenant colonel in Soviet military intelligence saved the world from nuclear annihilation.
There were plenty of rumors back in 1983 about KAL 007. The jet had veered more than 200 miles off course to enter Soviet airspace, so perhaps it was gathering intelligence for the CIA or testing Soviet air defenses. Or maybe the Soviets deliberately downed the airliner knowing that it was a civilian craft. You can still find conspiracy theories on the Internet claiming that the airplane was never shot down in the first place and the Soviets had taken all the passengers into custody (obviously some people have watched too many Lost episodes).
After a number of exhaustive investigations, including an analysis of the black box recordings, the shooting down of KAL 007 turns out to have been the result of error, misinterpretation, and incompetence.
Five years later, it was the United States' turn to engage in criminal negligence when the U.S.S. Vincennes shot down Iran Air Flight 655 in the Persian Gulf, killing all 290 people on board. The Iranian government used language very similar to Reagan's in 1983, calling the attack a "massacre" and an "atrocity." The United States denied that the attack was deliberate. It eventually paid reparations to Iran and expressed regret for the incident, though it did not issue a formal apology. Here, too, it appears that errors of judgment determined the tragic outcome. The evidence that the Iranian plane was civilian should have been clear to the U.S. warship, but the chain of command was apparently so convinced that it was dealing with a military target that it ignored all contrary indicators.
In this case, however, the Airbus disaster didn't escalate the war between Iran and Iraq (in which the United States had intervened on the side of the latter). Within two weeks of the downing of the plane, Iran signed a UN ceasefire. The eight-year struggle was over within the next two months.
The downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 can produce either of these results. It can serve as a wake-up call to the combatants that, because their actions are resulting in inexcusable civilian casualties, they should negotiate an immediate truce. Or it can lead to the most serious escalation in tensions between Moscow and Washington since 1983.
Back in the early 1980s, the United States was convinced that the Soviet Union was fomenting instability in an "arc of crisis" that stretched from the Horn of Africa to South Asia. Moscow, or so Washington asserted, was bent on seizing a warm-water port, securing access to Middle East oil, and picking up allies in its Cold War competition with the United States.
It was yet another example of Washington overestimating Moscow. Certainly the Soviet Union wanted the region along its vast borders to be friendly. But there was no secret plan for Eurasian dominance. The Soviet Union was acting more out of weakness than strength when it invaded Afghanistan in 1979. Its rash intervention was not the beginning of a neo-imperial surge to the south, but the beginning of the end for the overextended Soviet Union.
Vladimir Putin's seizure of Crimea and involvement in eastern Ukraine--taken alongside Russia's encouragement of separatists in Georgia and Moldova and its support for Assad in Syria--might look like a sequel to the arc of crisis. And indeed some on the right are dusting off some of the language from this period. But Putin's ambitions are circumscribed. He is not interested in reconstituting the Soviet Union, much less the former Soviet sphere of influence incorporating Eastern Europe and client states elsewhere in the world.
At most, Putin wants to recreate a greater Russia, which involves some swathes of the "near abroad." But even that plan has its limits. Latvia and Estonia, where there are large numbers of ethnic Russians, are both firmly in the EU and NATO. Kazakhstan, home to the second largest number of Russians outside of Russia, has already proposed new laws criminalizing separatist rhetoric. And given the sheer incompetence of his Donbas allies, Ukraine may well turn into Putin's Afghanistan.
What Putin has done so far in Ukraine is inexcusable. But it's not part of a plan for global or even regional domination.
All of which is to say that the United States should not overreact to the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17. This should be an opportunity for Washington and Moscow to work together on investigating the tragedy, which Putin has agreed to do. This is a chance for the combatants to lay down their arms, which Putin has also urged.
Yes, sometimes Moscow's words and deeds do not match, but Washington suffers from flare-ups of the same disease. Before this war in Ukraine claims more victims and sends U.S.-Russian relations into a deep freeze, both Obama and Putin need to realize that both sides benefit a great deal more from cooperation than confrontation.
A full reset in U.S.-Russian relations is obviously not in the offing. But returning to the status quo ante that existed before the change of government in Ukraine would at least prevent a replay of those perilous scenarios of 1983.
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Ukraine: Anvil of the New Cold War
To understand the present crisis over downed Malaysian flight MH17, we need to look at the roots of the new Cold War.
Jul 23, 2014
The Cold War is perhaps not even remembered by this generation of Americans, beyond dim and distorted traces. Yes, the power alignments in the world have shifted, for example, by the rise of the BRICS and their opposition to Western finance capital. And yes, the rise of China offsets the demise of the old Soviet Union. The Vatican is no longer battling "godless communism." Communism itself is a spent force.
But no new global paradigm has come to dominance and, in that vacuum, the old Cold War premises arise to fill the chatter-boxes of our media and cultural mentality.
Ukraine is the anvil on which the new Cold War thinking is heating up.
It's impossible to understand the roots of the current Ukraine crisis over the downed airliner without understanding the past, but the past is remembered as cliche on all sides. We can agree, however, that the "new" Cold War began when Western strategists sought to expand their sphere of influence all the way eastward across the Ukraine to Russia's border. That push, which seemed like the spoils of Cold War victory to the Western triumphalists, ignored two salient realities. First, eastern Ukraine was inhabited by millions of people who identified with Russia's language, culture and political orientation. Second, since it was believed that the Soviet Union was "defeated", the assumption was that Russia lacked the will and capacity to fight back. Though both assumptions were proven wrong on the battlefield in Georgia in 2008, the machinery of the West never stopped churning and expanding.
Eventually, Russia took back Crimea by force, in an offensive that was entirely predictable but seemed to shock the Western mind. Ukraine was broken along historic ethnic lines. For a brief moment, it appeared that a power-sharing arrangement might be negotiated. There was no reason that Putin would send Russian troops to war over the eastern Ukraine if peaceful coexistence was achievable. Putin accepted the ascension of a new pro-Western elected president in Kiev and called for a cease-fire and political settlement. But as often happens in proxy wars, the proxies drove the dynamics. Ukraine's army marched east, claiming a sovereignty that the Russian-speakers refused to accept. Putin's allies--the so-called "pro-Russian separatists"--refused to surrender and complained loudly that the Russians weren't giving them enough support.
In the Western narrative, these Russian-speakers weren't really Ukrainian at all, or they were Russians in disguise, or pawns of Moscow. That designation humiliated and angered them. In the Western PR offensive, the Russians trained them, advised them and perhaps even directed them to shoot down the airliner. And, of course, those alleged Russian agents were carrying out the orders of the Kremlin. Putin is hardly wrong when he says the catastrophe would not have happened if his calls for a cease-fire were heeded. Instead, a ten-day cease-fire was terminated by Kiev on June 10, surely with US support. No one has asked whether the US government lobbied with Kiev to extend the cease-fire instead of pressing their offensive eastward. The New York Times reported that "Ukraine's President, Petro O. Poroshenko, let the latest cease-fire lapse and ordered his military to resume efforts to crush the insurrection by force." If he had extended the cease-fire instead, the plane would not have been shot down.
It is insane for anyone to believe that Putin would want to shoot down a plane carrying over 200 hundred Europeans at a time when the European Union was debating whether to join the United States in imposing harsh sanctions on Moscow. What makes more sense is that no one in an official capacity anywhere wants to take the blame for an unplanned moral, political and diplomatic catastrophe. If Putin bears responsibility for the chain of escalation, so does Kiev and the West. In the meantime, the West will continue freezing its Cold War position and Ukraine's armed forces will take their war towards the Russian border unless higher authorities restrain them. No one has asked if Western forces are advising or embedded with the Ukrainian military. Either way, the Kiev fighters can advance all they desire, but they cannot pacify the east or predict Russia's next move. If they march into a trap, will the US feel obligated to dig them out?
The inevitable tightening of Western sanctions will push Russia to exploit the economic contradictions between the United States and European nations like Germany, and make Moscow increase its links with the BRICS countries, especially the Chinese powerhouse. As a sign of Russia's trajectory, just before the airliner shootdown, Putin visited Latin America, where he promptly forgave 90 percent of Cuba's $32 billion massive debt to the Russians, ending a two-decade dispute. Then Putin toured six countries and sat down to dinner with four Latin American presidents. The irony barely was noticed. The purpose of the 1960 US policy towards Cuba was to separate the island from the Soviet sphere of interest. Now it is the United States which is increasingly isolated diplomatically in its "backyard" while Cuba is secure in a new Latin America with Russian support. If Cold War thinking prevails, the Obama administration will continue funding illegal "democracy programs" aimed at subverting the Cuban state. That could persuade some in the Cuban leadership to resist normalization with the States, continuing a Cold War standoff of many decades.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the planet, America's heralded new "pivot" to China is stalled in deep contradictions. Lacking any alternative to the Cold War model, the US is dangerously close to fighting two.
The question for progressives is how to construct a compelling alternative to the Cold War model as much of the world slides towards a new Dark Age of class struggle, climate crisis and religious fundamentalism appearing on many continents.
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Airliner Shot Down 'By Mistake' say US Officials
US intelligence officials back theory that Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 was likely shot down by ill-equipped rebels, but evidence shows no direct involvement by Russia
Jul 23, 2014
New comments from high-level U.S. officials and portions of declassified intelligence information released on Tuesday indicates--contrary to earlier comments by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry--that Russia had no direct involvement in last week's Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 disaster in which 298 passengers were killed after being shot down over eastern Ukraine.
Overall, the U.S. assessment as of Tuesday appears to be that the shooting down of the airliner was "a mistake" by Ukrainian rebels in the east of the country who remain in a protracted battle with the Ukraine Army controlled by the newly-established government in Kiev. Though the presented evidence--much of which could not be independently verified by media outlets--attempted to make connections between Russian weapons and training facilities--no "smoking gun" was presented that showed Russian forces or personnel were involved.
According to the Los Angeles Times, the evidence presented suggested that an ill-equipped and ill-trained anti-aircraft unit of rebel fighters was behind the shooting down of the plane who could not distinguish it from a military transport plane which the fighters have been targeting in recent weeks:
The launcher that U.S. officials believe fired the SA-11 heat-seeking missile used a rudimentary radar system that gives an incomplete picture of what is flying above, officials said. Such antiaircraft systems are designed to be linked to other radar that would allow the crew on the ground to distinguish between military and civilian aircraft.
Because separatists did not have secondary radar images available, they probably mistook the airliner for a Ukrainian military plane, the officials said.
The missile that took down the jetliner was probably fired by an "ill-trained crew," said one U.S. official who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly on the issue. "It does appear to be a mistake."
Reporting on the briefing, the Moscow Times adds:
The intelligence officials said the U.S. did not know that the separatists were in possession or control of SA-11 missile systems until after the Malaysia Airlines plane was struck.
Separatist leaders have said they did not bring the Malaysian plane down. Russia has repeatedly denied involvement.
The U.S. intelligence officials dismissed Russian assertions that the plane may have been brought down by a surface to air missile fired by Ukrainian government forces, or by a Ukrainian government warplane.
They said the air-to-air missile theory was backed by little or no evidence, and that while the Ukrainian government has had access to SA-11 missiles, there was no evidence they had deployed them anywhere near the region where the plane crashed.
On Sunday, Secretary Kerry went on numerous news programs and declared there was an "enormous amount of evidence" linking Russia to the disaster, but critics were quick to point out the circumstantial, vague, and selective nature of his comments.
If not directly involved, the new line of criticism against Moscow coming from Washington, DC is that Russia, by backing the rebel fighters in the Ukraine, "created the conditions" for the disaster to occur. Strikingly, this is the exact charge made by Russian President Vladimir Putin against U.S. and NATO countries who have given the Ukrainian military its full support as it continues to bombard the restive regions that have declared independence.
In comments released to the media on Tuesday, Putin said he would use whatever influence over the rebel forces that Russia has in order to facilitate the ongoing investigation into the crash, but also had harsh words for western nations that have tried to blame Moscow for the violence in the region--including the downed plane--while leaving out the deadly role they have played by giving Kiev their full backing for its ongoing military offensive against the so-called "pro-Russian separatists" who the government consistently refers to as "terrorists."
"Ultimately, there is a need to call on the authorities in Kiev to respect basic norms of decency, and at least for a short time implement a ceasefire," Putin said. Scores of people have been killed in fighting in recent days and weeks in and around the cities of Donetsk, Luhansk, and elsewhere.
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UN Security Council Demands Investigation Into Downed Malaysia Airlines Flight
All military activities in the crash area by all parties must stop immediately, unanimous resolution adds.
Jul 22, 2014
The United Nations Security Council on Monday unanimously adopted a resolution demanding an international investigation into the crash of the Malaysia Airlines flight in Ukraine that killed all of its nearly 300 passengers.
The 15-member UN body, whose five permanent members are China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States, also demanded that armed groups controlling the crash site of flight MH17 "refrain from any actions that may compromise the integrity of the crash site, including by refraining from destroying, moving or disturbing wreckage, equipment, debris, personal belongings, or remains, and immediately provide safe, secure, full and unrestricted access to the site..."
All military activities in the crash area must stop immediately, the body's resolution added, to allow for safe access by investigators.
Russia added its support to the resolution, according to media reports, after language was switched from referring to the plane's "shooting down" to "downing."
U.S. officials including Secretary of State John Kerry as well as Ukraine's ambassador to the UN, Yuriy Sergeyev, have blamed Russia for the tragedy, saying the country provided the anti-aircraft weaponry to pro-separatist rebels who used it to take down the plane, though those claims have not been substantiated. Russian officials, for their part, have cast the blame on Ukraine for taking down the plane.
A train carrying the remains of bodies of most of the victims arrived arrived in Kharkiv in northeastern Ukraine on Monday, and the remains will now head to Amsterdam.
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