Brightness falls from the air

Malaysia Airlines Ukraine crash site

Of course it’s quite unclear, so far, just how, and why, and at whose hands, the Malaysia Airlines jet came to be shot down over the Ukraine. Which has not, of course, prevented the “Western”1 media and even the God-Emperor Obama from hastening to pin the blame on Ukrainian Russophile ‘separatists’ — and by association, of course, on Russia. Samantha Power is practically frothing at the mouth, she’s so eager to send the Marines.

Great stress is laid on the likelihood that the plane was brought down by a certain type of rocket, which formed part of the arsenal of the old Soviet Union. Well, of course it was. That’s all there is in those parts. The “separatists” might well have some of these — though the launchers are fairly big truck-mounted affairs and as I understand it, they also require a radar unit, quite apart from the launcher. Odds are that the Ukrainian government has a lot more of these than the “separatists”, if the latter have any at all, a proposition so far undemonstrated.

Why would the “separatists” shoot down a Malaysian airliner? Sheer bloody-mindedness, perhaps. Or maybe they mistook it for a military plane? The latter is possible, I guess, but the notion that they would do it intentionally seems nonsensical.

On the other hand, it doesn’t seem at all improbable to me that somebody would do this if they thought somebody else would end up taking the blame. The technical term, I believe, is ‘provocation’. Since the “Western” propaganda apparatus was right out of the gate in a microsecond, indicting the Seps and the Russkis, some such expectation might not have been unreasonable.

‘Cui bono’ isn’t an infallible principle, but it’s pretty good.

I can’t help noticing, also, that this story has demoted the Gaza incursion from the top headlines. Just sayin’.

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1 Quite an Orientalist trope, innit, when you think about it?

5 thoughts on “Brightness falls from the air

  1. i browsed around various blubberfests for a while when this story 1st broke. BBC right away had on the phone some “expert” from jane’s defense weekly. the 1st words out of his mouth, after cautioning about speculation: the separatists do not have the technology to do this, if it was shot down.

    the ukrainian gov’t is also flying fighter jets in the area. why assume it was a surface-to-air missile?

    and let’s not forget this:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siberia_Airlines_Flight_1812

  2. The separatists have been shooting down loyalist transport aircraft. Presumably they were trying to keep doing that and accidentally shot at a similarly sized airliner.

    The separatists definitely occasionally have access to the missiles in question. They picked up a few from defecting Ukrainian bases at the very least.

    Why someone would fly their airliners over a warzone is the confusing part to me.

  3. No doubt the NAZI Ukies did it at the behest of the CIA. They were getting slaughtered in the week before it happened. Only the most gullible people believe ANYTHING the U.S. says about ANYTHING.

  4. I am a bit late to the thread as usual. I found this piece by Pepe Escobar a good response to the “it’s Putin’s fault” school of blaming for MH17.
    http://rt.com/op-edge/174088-was-it-putin-missile/

    The mass public has its villain, of course, but for those of us who can follow a story for a few weeks and who are blessed (or cursed) with a memory, there is a lot of splainin’ to be done. A final leap to a potential ‘false flag’ will most certainly remain a leap of faith, suitable only to those who can recall the certainty that once attached to the incident in the Gulf of Tonkin and a number of other ‘slam dunk’ conclusions.

    The “tragic error” school that depicts a clutch of red-faced separatists unable to look each other in the eye for a few moments before all spluttering out lame excuses and then trying to erase their tracks may lead the race for blame-worthiest, but, the question remains, in such a case, who directed MH17 into THAT flight path and altitude, given rebel success in knocking Kiev’s transports out of the air in the preceding weeks.

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