Did the allies bring down Malaysian Airline MH17?

[sgominator]

Re: Did the allies bring down Malaysian Airline MH17?

I think we confuse the Frogfoot's mission with its capabilities. Its mission is CAS, but the plane is hardly a sluggard when it comes to performance. The specs from Sukhoi are on the web.

Service ceiling (without external ordnance and stores), km	17.3
Maximum flight speed at sea level (without external ordnance and stores), km/h	1,350
Max Mach (without external ordnance and stores)	2.00 (1.9**)

That's 56,000+ feet, 800+ MPH at sea level, and Mach 1.9 straight out.

Wrong plane.
You listed the specs of the SU-30

Specs of the SU-25:

Service ceiling (without external ordnance and stores), km	7
Maximum flight speed at sea level (without external ordnance and stores), km/h	950
Max Mach (without external ordnance and stores)	0.82

[Woodsman]

Re: Did the allies bring down Malaysian Airline MH17?

Wrong plane.
You listed the specs of the SU-30

[touchring]

Re: The Tapes

Being an engineer I do not believe in conspiracy theories

I believe that in order to make economic forecast, it is necessary to consider whether politicians will scrwe up things.

For example, if the US and UK continues to spend money on wars, even the smartest Fed chairperson and bankers won't be able to avert the inevitable.

[vt]

Re: Did the allies bring down Malaysian Airline MH17?

Dutch report: Flight MH17 likely downed by outside impact

Sep 9th 2014 4:17AM175 Comments

⟨⟩

People walk across a damaged bridge near the village of Debaltseve, Donetsk region, eastern Ukraine, Thursday, July 31, 2014. (AP Photo/Dmitry Lovetsky)




BY MIKE CORDERTHE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) - Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was likely struck by multiple "high-energy objects from outside the aircraft," causing it to break up over eastern Ukraine, a preliminary report into the deadly aviation disaster concluded Tuesday.
The report by the Dutch Safety Board stopped short of saying the Boeing 777 was shot down by a missile, but its findings appear to point to that conclusion. It also did not say who might have been responsible.
The Boeing 777 suddenly plunged out of the sky July 17 over pro-Russian rebel-held territory in Ukraine, killing all 298 passengers and crew on board.
"The damage observed in the forward section of the aircraft appears to indicate that the aircraft was penetrated by a large number of high-energy objects from outside the aircraft," the report said. "It is likely that this damage resulted in a loss of structural integrity of the aircraft, leading to an in-flight break up."
The board is leading the international investigation into the cause of the disaster. Its full report is expected within a year of the crash.
"The initial results of the investigation point toward an external cause of the MH17 crash," the board's chairman, Tjibbe Joustra, said in a statement. "More research will be necessary to determine the cause with greater precision. The Safety Board believes that additional evidence will become available for investigation in the period ahead."
Christopher Yates, an aviation safety specialist at Yates Consulting, told the AP the report "is extremely consistent with damage from a missile for the simple reason there are penetration marks.
"It must have been moving at very high velocity to create the damage," he said. "It could only be a missile of the type that would reach the altitude that would have struck the aircraft, potentially a BUK missile.
He said the report gave no indication whether the missile had been fired from the ground or from another aircraft, but it likely came from the ground as there were no military aircraft known to have been flying at the time. The missile could not have been shoulder-fired because it would not have reached the necessary altitude, he added.
Because of the ongoing conflict between pro-Russian rebels and Ukrainian forces, investigators from the board have not visited the fields where the wreckage of Flight 17 plunged to the ground. That likely contributed to the board's cautious assessment of what happened.
"Detailed examination of the structural damage is ongoing," the report said. "Forensic examination will be performed if the wreckage can be removed."
Investigators so far have studied photos of the crash site, radar data and information gleaned from the downed jet's "black boxes" - its cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder. They all indicated that there was no technical fault that may have caused the plane to disintegrate.
The cockpit voice recorder "revealed no signs of any technical faults or an emergency situation," the Safety Board said. "Neither were any warning tones heard in the cockpit that might have pointed to technical problems."
Pro-Russian rebels officially deny having shot down the plane, but unofficially one senior rebel admitted they were behind a missile strike.
Just three hours before the plane was shot down above rebel-held territory in Eastern Ukraine, the Associated Press reported on the passage of a Buk M-1 missile system - a machine the size of a tank bearing four ground-to-air missiles - driving through the rebel-held town of Snizhne, near the crash site.
A highly placed rebel officer told the AP in an interview in the aftermath of the disaster that the plane was shot down by a mixed team of rebels and Russian military personnel who believed they were targeting a Ukrainian military plane.
Intercepted phone conversations between the rebels released by the Ukrainian government support that version of events.
In those tapes, the first rebels to reach the scene can be heard swearing when they see the number of bodies and the insignia of Malaysia Airlines.
___
Gregory Katz in London contributed to this report.

http://www.aol.com/article/2014/09/0...6pLid%3D526644

[touchring]

Re: Did the allies bring down Malaysian Airline MH17?

https://in.news.yahoo.com/reward-wor...050105766.html

Reward worth 30 million dollars offered to provide information about MH17 crash culprits

Any guess on the sponsor of this reward?

the person revealing the information about the crash culprits would be given a new identity.

This may give some clue. Not many people or even countries in the world can have the power to give someone a new identity.

In my opinion, $30 million is too little considering the impact of such a finding.

[lakedaemonian]

Re: Did the allies bring down Malaysian Airline MH17?

Even the Russians are admitting it was done with an SA11/BUK:

http://ria.ru/mh17/20140910/1023539819.html

[Woodsman]

Re: Did the allies bring down Malaysian Airline MH17?

Even the Russians are admitting it was done with an SA11/BUK:

http://ria.ru/mh17/20140910/1023539819.html

Interesting. But not exactly "the Russians." Rather, "a Russian" sharing his personal opinion:

Such an opinion in an interview with RIA Novosti stated former Air Force Commander of the USSR and the Russian Army General Peter Deinekin, commenting on the statement of the Council on the safety of Holland about the discovery of alien fragments in the bodies of pilots.

So really isn't this nothing more that the Bolshie equivalent of a Fox News Brigadier or Admiral sharing his or her opinion? Also, I had forgotten about the Ukey's shootdown of a Russian airliner until the General mentioned it.

Note the similarities in the initial gambit by State, the Russian reaction and the Ukey's admission of guilt in the end:

[/Occurring less than a month after the 11 September 2001 attacks, the crash was initially suspected by Russian officials to be an act of terrorism by Chechen rebels.[5][6][7] Later, the Moscow-based Interstate Aviation Committee ruled that the crash was caused by an accidental Ukrainian S-200 missile strike during military training exercises, staged off Cape Onuk (or Chuluk) in Crimea.[8][9] A preliminary Russian report confirmed initial private assessments of American Military officials that the S-200 missile overshot its target drone—which had been destroyed successfully by an S-300 fired at the same time—and instead of self-destructing, locked in on the passenger plane 150 miles further away and exploded as a ball of Shrapnel shells 50 feet over the plane.[10][11][12]

Russian officials initially dismissed the American claim as "unworthy of attention,"[12] and Russian President Vladimir Putin told the press the next day that "the weapons used in those exercises had such characteristics that make it impossible for them to reach the air corridor through which the plane was moving."[12] Ukrainian military officials initially denied that their missile had brought down the plane; they reported that the S-200 had been launched seawards and had successfully self-destructed. Indeed, Defense Ministry spokesman Konstantin Khivrenko noted that "neither the direction nor the range (of the missiles) correspond to the practical or theoretical point at which the plane exploded."[12][13]

However, Ukrainian officials later admitted that it was indeed their military that shot down the airliner. Ukrainian officials speculated that water interference caused the missile to veer off course.[14][15] Ukraine reportedly banned the testing of Buk, S-300 and similar missile systems for a period of 7 years following this incident.

Maybe that was the point of this seemingly limited hangout of an article; to get the wires to pick up the story of the Ukey's pattern of shooting down airliners.

----

Apropos of nothing (or maybe everything), I started reading Gore Vidal's "The Golden Age" and Robert Stinnett's "Day of Deceit" again. Vidal's fictionalization (and Stinnett's history, which some consider fiction) of the run up to the American entry into WWII is a great compare/contrast exercise to the fictions coming out of the MSN, State and the Russian Foreign Ministry in the run up to our own contemporary war.

TL/DR, nothing changes.

[don]

Re: Did the allies bring down Malaysian Airline MH17?

from the Automatic Earth:

The Russian Union of Engineers has issued a report on what happened to flight MH17. The report has now been translated. It doesn’t leave open the option that MH17 was downed by a ground-to-air missile, something all other sources have so far labeled the most likely explanation for what happened on July 17. The Russian Union of Engineers instead claims the plane was attacked by a fighter jet, and that, since the east Ukraine rebels have no such jets, and multiple sides have confirmed there were no Russian jets in the vicinity, this jet had to have been Ukrainian air force.

At the very least the report should be broadly discussed in western media, and western experts asked to refute what parts of it they find fault with.


The full report can be downloaded here.

Union of Engineers Report

Please open your minds and download the Translated Report on MH17.

Forget about the origin and give the report a read. It may open your eyes.

Looking for another opinion? If so, please consider the Automatic Earth Commentary on MH17.

I side with Raul on Automatic Earth who says "At the very least the report should be broadly discussed in western media, and western experts asked to refute what parts of it they find fault with."

Indeed. Where is the discussion?

My take: There is no government interest in any possibility other than a preordained self-serving US conclusion. Thus, there is not, nor will there be any mainstream media analysis of that nature barring a Watergate or Snowden-type disclosure.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

[FrankL]

Re: Did the allies bring down Malaysian Airline MH17?

ignore/remove this post, browser made a double-post

[FrankL]

Re: Did the allies bring down Malaysian Airline MH17?

so far I still think it's likely that the MH-17 strike was due to an erroneous BUK launch by separatists.

however, there are some interesting quotes in the report:

b) The flight of the missile is accompanied by a loud noise. The flight is easily observed thanks to the trail which is produced as a result of the fuel being consumed by the rocket.

In this case there has been no evidence of a trail of white condensation which would be by-product of the consumption of rocket fuel which would appear and persist for some minutes after the launch and be visible to those standing in a radius of within 10 km from the missile launch-site.

c) The impact of the warhead follows a characteristic pattern which can be observed from the ground during clear weather.
....

e) The airliner was shot down in daylight, in a highly populated area, in the presence not only of military participants following the situation in the skies, but also journalists who were armed with cameras, as well as those people who inhabited the area who were correspondingly equipped with telephones and cameras.

Ok, so they argue against a BUK launch due to the absence of photographic/video evidence of contrails from journalists in the neighbourhood (how many journalists are in the midst of action / near the 4 sites with a BUK system?).

But wait, next we also read this:

7.1.4. The meteorological conditions also support the narrative of the Boeing 777 being attacked by another aircraft. The weather conditions in the region of Donetsk city from 1500 – 1800 on the 17th July 2014 are characterised by rain and thick cloud.

So visibility is very poor due to rain and heavy clouds. That seems like they're defusing their own argument they made above...

The aircraft, according to the information available from the flight recorders, broke up in the air, but this is possible only in the case of a vertical fall from a height of ten thousand meters, which can only happen when the maximum permissible overload is exceeded. One reason for stalling and going into a tailspin is the inability of the crew to control the aircraft as a result an emergency in the cockpit and the subsequent instantaneous depressurization of the cockpit and the passenger cabin. The aircraft broke up at a high altitude, which explains the fact that the wreckage was scattered over the territory of more than 15 square kilometers.

What's the chance of this happening after an attack by the board cannon of an Su-25 or Mig-29?

In addition, Russian air traffic control recorded the ascent of a Ukrainian Air Force aircraft, presumably an Su-25, in the direction of the Malaysian Boeing 777. The distance between the SU-25 aircraft from the Boeing 777 was between 3 and 5 km.

and

Also according to the Russian Defence Ministry, on the 17th of July, Russian Air traffic control tracked an aeroplane, potentially an SU-25, of the Ukrainian Air force, climbing towards the Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777. The distance between the two aircraft did not exceed 3—4 km

claimed distances seem to be flexible within the report... a single proof-read would find this error.

It generally doesn't appear to be written very professionally to me (possibly the product of a single person).

Some further questions I have:
- why does Russia keep pushing the theory of the Su-25 attack instead of a BUK missile strike? wouldn't it make more sense to blame a Ukrainian BUK launch for the MH-17 disaster? Or is that easier to disprove?
- it's interesting how they're suddenly introducing the possibility of the radar footprint of a military jet detected in the area belonging to a Mig-29, making a 10k intercept more 'acceptable'. However, they're not fully pushing for it either (leaving the Su-25 option open too). Again, why the hesitation? Is it easy to dispel the aircraft being a Mig-29?
- Did Ukrainian military admit having a jet in the air at the time of the MH17 strike? why/why not?

of course these are all questions we are unlikely to ever know the answer to

[vt]

Re: Did the allies bring down Malaysian Airline MH17?

Pure propaganda.

The proponents of this view fail to convince because of the refusal of rebels to allow any independent investigation team to cordon off the wreckage and quickly start the investigation. This behavior is unheard of in
major passenger jet crashes. It was over a week before independent experts could start their work. There were reports of widespread looting prior to this.

The delays allowing independent investigation could well have allowed Russian experts to "sanitize" the evidence so no one could tell what type of missile brought the plane down. Any objective observer would question what was being hidden.

Western governments wanted certainly wanted to see the Russians blamed and the Russians and their separatist cohorts definitely wanted to blame the Ukraine government.

Until the Russians can explain the delay in investigation they will be viewed with suspicion.

[vt]

Re: Did the allies bring down Malaysian Airline MH17?

By ALAN CULLISON

July 22, 2015 5:30 a.m. ET


MOSCOW—For the West, the downing one year ago of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 underlined the brutality of Moscow’s hybrid intervention in eastern Ukraine. In Russia, the downing is still living large on television screens, blamed squarely on the Ukrainians—with the possible connivance of Western secret services.
Within hours of the crash on July 17, 2014, Russian state television began to spew a jumble of explanations for the tragedy, all of which fingered Kiev and absolved Russia and pro-Russian rebels in Ukraine of guilt.
Theories included an attack from a Ukrainian fighter jet, a Ukrainian surface-to-air missile, or a botched attempt to kill President Vladimir Putin, whose presidential plane had passed near Ukraine hours earlier. Such stories still abound, with some embellishments.
RELATED ARTICLES




“Everyone believes that Ukraine is responsible, and that has not changed,” said Sergei Markov, a pro-Kremlin political commentator based in Moscow who has lately proposed that the U.S. helped plan the shoot down. That is why, he says, no U.S. citizens were on board. “In the U.S. they know the truth, but they will never tell it.”
In fact, there was one American among the 298 crash victims.
The ability of Russians and Westerners to see such different realities over the Malaysia Airlines catastrophe exposes a fallacy of U.S. policy toward Russia since the end of the Cold War.
After the rise of the Internet and the fall of the Berlin Wall 25 years ago, the West assumed that Russians and Westerners would naturally come to believe the same things. Free access to information would, like the free hand of capitalism, “propel the world toward common beliefs and ways of life,” said Sam Greene, director of the Russian Institute at King’s College London.
“Now we’re finding out that’s not quite true,” Mr. Greene said. “There’s a whole reassessment going on now about what to do about it.”
Russia hasn’t censored its Internet nearly as much as China, so Russians still enjoy mostly unfettered access to information from outside the country, albeit often not in their native language.

How Mr. Putin got Russians to ignore those sources and believe a state-run media that has a tradition of mendacity says a lot about how little Russia has changed since the end of the Cold War—and how some primitive Soviet-era propaganda strategies remain effective.
It also serves as a warning to the West that relations with Russia, now at a post-Cold-War nadir, could stay that way for some time. Boris Nemtsov, a Putin critic and former deputy prime minister who was gunned down outside the Kremlin early this year, said in an interview before his death that anti-American myths and resentment are widespread and would likely linger even if Mr. Putin steps down after his current term expires in 2018, or the term after that, in 2024.
“Putin has eaten the brains of a whole generation of Russians,” he said. “I think it will remain this way at least until he leaves.”
After the CEO of France’s Total oil company—a rare ally of Russia in a time of multiplying economic sanctions and international isolation—was killed when his plane slammed into a snowplow operated by a drunken driver at a Moscow airport, Kremlin commentators suggested the CIA had assassinated him.
In the U.S. and Europe, officials are discussing possible counter-propaganda strategies, but none look easy as Mr. Putin has taken control of all major television and newspapers since his rise to power.
The Kremlin has meanwhile selectively blocked some websites and funds a host of others, making the search for objective Russian news confusing. In the past year Moscow opposition news services have revealed how the government pays beehives of bloggers—so-called trolls—who write under numerous Facebook accounts and identities on newspaper message boards.
Their comments don’t support the Kremlin line as much as attack Western news reporting as biased, suggesting that the truth is unknowable. The mélange of misinformation and conspiracy theory makes any conclusion about world events seem questionable or a matter of opinion.
Television, meanwhile, is a more-focused instrument for persuasion, said Mr. Greene at King’s College. Last year public opinion polls showed that fewer than 5% of Russians thought that Russia or Russian-backed rebels had shot down the Malaysia Airlines flight. The vast majority blamed the Ukraine military.
The rest of the world has largely assigned blame to Russia or Russia-backed rebels.
The putative assassination of Mr. Putin was one of the first theories circulated over Russia’s main state-controlled television station, the First Channel. A commentator explained that Mr. Putin, who was flying home that day from a summit in South America, had flown near the Polish capital of Warsaw about 45 minutes before the doomed Malaysian flight.
The Ukraine military appeared to mix the planes up, shooting down the Malaysia flight by accident, said the commentator, citing a confidential source in Russia’s Federal Transport Agency. Mr. Putin landed safely.
Simultaneously, the same channel put forward another theory, suggesting a poorly trained Ukrainian missile crew shot down the airliner by mistake—as had happened in 2001, when a Russian passenger plane exploded over the Black Sea, killing all 78 on board.
First Channel ran old footage from that catastrophe, showing a Ukrainian leader at the time falsely denying responsibility. [Kiev admitted days later that one of its errant missiles was probably to blame.]
The network also interviewed a supposed military expert as saying pro-Russian rebels today didn’t have a missile that could reach a passenger airliner at cruising altitude.
“Only Ukrainian troops could have destroyed the civilian airliner,” Igor Korotchenko, a Russian defense commentator, pronounced the day of the crash on First Channel.
Today the main debate in Russia is whether a Ukrainian missile shot down the airliner or a Ukrainian fighter jet. The day after the downing, state television aired a Russia Defense Department briefing in which a senior officer suggested that a Ukrainian Su-25 shot down the flight. Ukraine denied it, and pointed out that the Su-25, which was designed to destroy tanks, was built with an unpressurized cockpit and cannot fly high enough to have reached the airliner.
The next day, the managers of Russia’s Wikipedia said there was a flurry of attempts to edit its article about the Su-25, trying to change it to say that the plane could fly at higher altitudes.

WSJ

[lakedaemonian]

Re: Did the allies bring down Malaysian Airline MH17?

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news...ectid=11718931

The three lessons I learned thru this mass media dog's breakfast are:

1) Once again the power of highly experienced and effective disruption/disinformation campaigns(this time Russia) with particular emphasis on the vulnerability of a community that considers itself resilient to influence/messaging.

2) Even iTulip members suffer from hubris and the inability/unwillingness to differentiate the possible from the probable.

3) This thread also exemplifies personal biases we all have that significantly interfere with forming an effective argument. In a nutshell, I think this thread exemplifies the opposite of "wisdom of crowds" that I thought iTulip might represent.

But no one cares anymore(about MH17). So it doesn't really matter and effectively no longer exists.

-----

And in the last 2+ years the velocity of disruption/disinformation/subversion content has continued to accelerate, so much so that it doesn't have to survive 2 years......only 2 social media hours:

http://thebostontribune.com/boston-p...ana-cigarette/

Boston Tribune?

Doesn't exist.

And doesn't pass the "1minute sniff test"(domain just created 2 weeks ago, names not real, places not real, confirmed artificial story, newspaper not real).

But people will share it to achieve the intended effect, and infect others, adding artificial fuel to the social justice warrior fire.

From a Machiavellian perspective, it can be applauded for the ingenuity of the potentisl for it to be a self-funding(click baiting) disruption/disinformation/subversion campaign slice.

This highly corrosive stuff is increasing in regularity and sophistication across the net, undermining and complicating value discovery.

-----

How do these two intersect?

The iTulip community fell for the first one and it needs to learn how not to repeat it, otherwise we have no competitive advantage compared to all the other easily infected and influenced "zombies" who fell for both.

[jk]

Re: Did the allies bring down Malaysian Airline MH17?

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news...ectid=11718931

The three lessons I learned thru this mass media dog's breakfast are:

1) Once again the power of highly experienced and effective disruption/disinformation campaigns(this time Russia) with particular emphasis on the vulnerability of a community that considers itself resilient to influence/messaging.

2) Even iTulip members suffer from hubris and the inability/unwillingness to differentiate the possible from the probable.

3) This thread also exemplifies personal biases we all have that significantly interfere with forming an effective argument. In a nutshell, I think this thread exemplifies the opposite of "wisdom of crowds" that I thought iTulip might represent.

But no one cares anymore(about MH17). So it doesn't really matter and effectively no longer exists.

-----

And in the last 2+ years the velocity of disruption/disinformation/subversion content has continued to accelerate, so much so that it doesn't have to survive 2 years......only 2 social media hours:

http://thebostontribune.com/boston-p...ana-cigarette/

Boston Tribune?

Doesn't exist.

And doesn't pass the "1minute sniff test"(domain just created 2 weeks ago, names not real, places not real, confirmed artificial story, newspaper not real).

But people will share it to achieve the intended effect, and infect others, adding artificial fuel to the social justice warrior fire.

From a Machiavellian perspective, it can be applauded for the ingenuity of the potentisl for it to be a self-funding(click baiting) disruption/disinformation/subversion campaign slice.

This highly corrosive stuff is increasing in regularity and sophistication across the net, undermining and complicating value discovery.

-----

How do these two intersect?

The iTulip community fell for the first one and it needs to learn how not to repeat it, otherwise we have no competitive advantage compared to all the other easily infected and influenced "zombies" who fell for both.

very interesting catch. thanks for posting.

[Woodsman]

Re: Did the allies bring down Malaysian Airline MH17?

...How do these two intersect?

The iTulip community fell for the first one and it needs to learn how not to repeat it, otherwise we have no competitive advantage compared to all the other easily infected and influenced "zombies" who fell for both.

Who fell for what, bubba? What exactly did we do that we need to learn not to repeat? Are you asking us which of the MH17 propaganda and information war campaigns we liked best? Well of course, the one that was closest to our bias.

Mine is distrust of any of the official sources. I respect the people doing the actual messaging, but take as default a presumption of deceptive intent from almost every one of their communiques or official statements regardless if the source is of the political, military, intelligence or diplomatic variety. And that includes those sources suspected to be agents of those official entities.

This is especially the case where Russia, NATO and the US are tangling geo-politically. And most especially of late when Ukraine is in the mix. And absolutely, positively, what are you kidding me, when it comes to anything having to do with MH17.

I should trust intercepted recordings of unspecified provenance and unidentified persons? I should trust testimony from invisible witnesses with no names? Tightly edited video clips and a fancy computer rendering? I see this report as just another skirmish in the information warfare, so while it may give the impression of a legitimate air crash investigation it seems it had one purpose - pin the blame on the Russian Federation.

I agree we should note the power of experienced and effective disinformation campaigns. Only how effective such campaigns might be judged when they are so obviously telegraphed in the first place is another question. In that respect it seems to me a mark of inexperience to cite Russia as the sole culprit on the basis of such thin gruel. I'm looking to learn lessons wherever I can from all sides in this operation and outside of the "zombies" you note, I don't imagine most people in Europe, Russia or America take the conclusion seriously.

I'm not sure what we mean when we say "even iTulip members," as we're all flesh and blood here. So not only must account for human frailty degrading our community's skill at differentiating the possible from the probable, we have to do it in an environment where we are the prize; our very cognition is the "territory" to be won and lost in an information war. And as all 20th Century people know, in the case of Russia, we have been conditioned since childhood to see them as an enemy, alien and malignant force for evil, instead of a nation-state rationally pursuing its interests in maintaining effective control over the Eurasian center.

In the case of MH17, a "Russia did it" faction set up shop within hours of the first news report, dismissing any of the possible reasons - never mind probable - that did not put the blame squarely on Putin and Russia. Anyone who expressed doubt or a desire to hold making judgement until the facts were gathered - the bodies were still strewn among the wreckage as I recall - was immediately slimed as a "Putin apologist." I recall folks evidencing longstanding personal bias that Russia is the source of all the world's evil and that Putin is Hitler (when Trump isn't using the mustache). I also remember folks evidencing professional bias acquired in organizations not generally known for their forthrightness and commitment to clarity and transparency.

I wonder if these interfered with our community's ability to form an effective argument, never mind an effective picture of what was then known? Being the suspicious sort myself, I wonder if that isn't the point even here at home on the farm? The wisdom of crowds is all fine and good, but when it's peppered with the work product of professional liars representing their personal and class interests - which they understand as indistinguishable from the national interest - then I agree that we'd be right to suspect it too.

Within the confines of (Angleton’s) remarkable life were most of America’s secrets. “You know how I got to be in charge of counterintelligence? I agreed not to polygraph or require detailed background checks on Allen Dulles and 60 of his closest friends... They were afraid that their own business dealings with Hitler’s pals would come out. They were too arrogant to believe that the Russians would discover it all... You know, the CIA got tens of thousands of brave people killed... We played with lives as if we owned them. We gave false hope. We - I - so misjudged what happened."

I asked the dying man how it all went so wrong.

With no emotion in his voice, but with his hand trembling, Angleton replied: “Fundamentally, the founding fathers of U.S. intelligence were liars. The better you lied and the more you betrayed, the more likely you would be promoted. These people attracted and promoted each other. Outside of their duplicity, the only thing they had in common was a desire for absolute power. I did things that, in looking back on my life, I regret. But I was part of it and I loved being in it... Allen Dulles, Richard Helms, Carmel Offie, and Frank Wisner were the grand masters. If you were in a room with them you were in a room full of people that you had to believe would deservedly end up in hell.” Angleton slowly sipped his tea and then said, “I guess I will see them there soon.”

Joseph Trento, “The Secret History of the CIA,” (2001) pp. 478-479

Anyway, that's the thing about disinformation that gives the cloak and dagger boys from every service an edge that's hard for the rest of us working in the sunshine to beat. They don't have to prove anything, only just generate enough doubt and suspicion to confuse and befuddle any wisdom anyone might develop, alone or in a crowd, through honest intellectual effort. Here we're not supposed to think, just express the right patriotic feeling. In terms of MH-17, the positions were set within minutes of learning about the disaster and so I have to doubt that this skirmish in the information war changes much at all. Not everybody is falling for it.

Since we must agree the details of the event are intentionally obscured and distorted so as to make knowing practically impossible, maybe a more productive discussion would have us step back a bit to see a larger picture?

In that spirit, I want to ask you Lake if you have an opinion on the strategic wisdom of the west's attempt at regime change in Russia? Is there no bad consequence or downside in the effort to make Russia a pariah state or its president beyond the pale of say a Rafael Trujillo or Mobutu Sese Seko? Is deploying deep penetration weapons and conducting military exercises on the border of the Russian state really in the best interests of European peace and stability?