Marilyn Justice · @mkj1951
9th Nov 2014 from TwitLonger
Some interesting posts re #MH17
And I only have one word for you - : SU-25M1. The existence of which Interpreter Rag contributor Mark Galeotti sarcastically calls 'Moscow's Magical Mystery Plane' that Galeotti bizarrely insisted would've had to 'hover' near the crash site to see the wreckage. Or that somehow had to have gotten on the Boeing 777's tail to shoot it down and in Galeotti's militarily ignorant world can only shoot R-60 air to air rockets as opposed to far more powerful and modern radar guided R-77s perfectly capable of blasting MH17 from the sky. Here's an amateur photograph of the Ukrainian SU-25M1 taken in Slovakia last August, before the Maidan. Please try to tell us Catherine that the FSB went online and planted this shot of a Ukrainian ground attack jet capable of briefly exceeding 30,000 feet on this website so they could claim that a Ukie SU-25 pilot killed 298 people:
http://www.airfighters.com/pho...
And please tell us, how Aviation Week's Bill Sweetman determined that a Ukie SU-25 could only shoot down a Boeing 777 if it maintained the exact same altitude and airspeed or got on the Boeing's tail like in some obscene version of the movie Top Gun rather than making an easy missile shot from below MH17 using two R-77 radar homing missiles. Or how RFE/RL's reporter covering MH17 ignored the comments under his own story about the existence of the SU-25M1 and its max/excess altitude capabilities being posted online long before MH17.
I'm afraid you'll have to say quite a bit more than that. Ukraine started the war with more than 1000 T-72's, and you can find any number of burnt-out ones on abandoned battlefields now which made it that far with a Ukrainian crew and were destroyed by the rebels - Ukraine's losses of armor were horrific, as documented on sites like militaryphotos and lostarmour. The T-72 was one of the most widely-exported tanks in the world, and there are still examples in lots of countries. A total of 4 newer models were said to have been identified by the Institute for Strategic Studies, in Ukraine, in August. The main difference from a recognition point of view is the addition of reactive armor blocks, and the T-72B1 and BM models were not known to have been operated by Ukrainian forces.
http://www.globalsecurity.org/...
You can go down the list all you like, but until you start showing some accredited photos, whose provenance can be verified as to time and place, you will be going down the list to no avail. The U.S. State Department, with its popular Psaki & Harf comedy hour, has so prostituted the profession of military intelligence with its extensive recourse to Twitter and Facebook "intelligence" that nobody is willing any more to just buy a crisp photo of a T-72BM and assurance from sources with an agenda that it is in eastern Ukraine. "Kiev says" is about as credible as hearing it from Spongebob Squarepants these days, and American trotting-out of satellite photography clearly marked with dates from 4 years ago, coupled with Kiev's attempt to fob off footage from a video game as depiction of the trail of the missile that allegedly took down MH-17 have done little to bolster the believability of either.
You don't need the State Dept., but the State Dept. sure seems to need you and your colleague Michael D. Weiss (who paid for his trip to London we wonder? And on such a cheap budget going off your 2012 Guidestar reports?) to shill for them and spread the 'social media' 'evidence' they won't present themselves as substitutes for real intelligence, like NSA ELINT signatures of a BUK Kupola radar operating near Torez...
The reason you, Eliot Higgins and the Ukraine at War blog obsessively flog Google Earth splice and dice jobs is because your entire operation exists to peddle bullsh--t that the State Dept., CIA/MI6 analysts have refused to put forward.
Your role and that of Brown Moses, Weiss and Interepreter Rag in general is to flog the specifics to 'back up' White House or Kiev claims, rather than them getting their hands dirty by trotting out a Secretary of State to make a specific claim that can quickly be picked apart, ala Colin Powell with the infamous vial of anthrax pre-Iraq War. Interpreter Rag is nothing more than a front for the superhawks, neo-cons and neo-libs of the Anglo-American intelligence community and 'Pavel Khodorkovsky' is likely fencing money that comes from US or foreign government sources into your pocket Catherine.
For example, the White House in speaking to the Associated Press backed off their claim that the BUK launcher came directly from Russia in late July, yet your boy Eliot Higgins persists with this claim -- even after the German BND in their leak to Der Spiegel said the launcher likely was captured from Ukrainian stocks, making liars out of Kiev. Naturally your boy Higgins never bothered rebutting the numerous comments left at his blog Belling the cat, except to say 'I stand by my reporting', and he simply ducked insisting that the photo he relied upon for his 'scoop' was not produced by the same fake artists at SBU whom the BND admitted posed Ukrainian BUKs as the 'separatist' launcher.
Higgins has NEVER explained why he magically came up with a photograph of the alleged rebel BUK taken in Donetsk from Paris Match magazine WEEKS after MH17 was shot down, in early September. Nor can Higgins despite his voluminous posts about Russian BUKs photographed moving around Western Russia show anything other than superficial similarities between weapons systems that have a common design with the Ukie-photographed BUK (duh!). Nor has Higgins, just like the US and Ukrainian governments, ever shown conclusive evidence that the rebels had an operational BUK launcher -- which would have to include not only the rockets on a rail but the radar guidance vehicle without which a BUK would be firing blind. In short, all your organization does is bulls--t with incomplete or laughable 'social media' 'preponderance of evidence' as Marie Harf told Matthew Lee AS A SUBSTITUTE FOR THE NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY AND THE US INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY ACTUALLY COUGHING UP REAL EVIDENCE SUCH AS:
1) Photographs from the US satellite the Russians say was directly overhead when MH17 went down
2) Real, confirmed photographs of the long exhaust trail a BUK launch would leave in the sky over Eastern Ukraine -- likely visible from both rebel and pro-Kiev forces lines (the argument your own contributor Mark Galeotti oddly makes against a Ukie BUK launch, that somehow doesn't apply in reverse logically to a rebel BUK launch when camera phones are everywhere in Donbas)
3) NSA/DIA SIGINT/ELINT showing the signature of a Kupola radar emitting from rebel held, as opposed to Ukrainian controlled territory on July 17 -- that is, REAL EVIDENCE from the US GOVERNMENT rather than splice and dice 'oops we did it' audio of the rebels from Ukraine's SBU which has released fakes and recordings of entirely invented 'rebels' before
"As for MH17, Good Lord, if you don't want to hear it from me, the State Department, or NATO, hear it from Vzglyad, a pro-Kremlin newspaper with your views, and ITAR-TASS, the official news service of your beloved Russian power. They confirmed that the separatists shot down *with their Buk* on July 14 Ukrainian cargo planes" it wasn't a 'Ukrainian cargo plane' it was an Antonov turboprop converted into a spyplane, and a valid target of war. Except for people like you who imagine Ukrainian troops who kill Donbas civilians by the hundreds or thousands with indiscriminate or deliberate artillery fire on cities should be untouchable.
Again, citing sources that may have been mistaken or repeating rebel bravado, or that can't tell the difference between a BUK system (notice we said system -- as stated above, the BUK requires a radar to accompany the basic launcher which would have had less than two minutes to ID a target and shoot or don't shoot in the case of MH17 -- but your and Higgins operation counts on the readers' ignorance of air defense systems) and a Pantsir S-1, which the rebels may very well have had but which was not capable of shooting down a Boeing 777 unless it was DIRECTLY overhead below its cruising altitude:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
Finally - Mark Galeotti's piece 'debunking' the theory that MH17 was shot down by a Ukrainian fighter jet as presented by the Russian Defense Ministry was a joke. It was mere word games while insisting like all the other MSM pro-Kiev hacks that Ukraine's Su-25s are all old Soviet pieces of junk. Neither Interpreter Mag's staff, nor RFE/RL, nor Aviation Week, nor anybody else in Western MSM in the tank for Kiev has ever bothered rebutting the BBC Russian report the BBC spiked in a panic when they realized eyewitnesses told the reporter they saw a fighter jet overhead near the MH17 crash site.
Instead of actually DEALING WITH and REBUTTING factual evidence that may implicate Kiev or at least shows one of its fighters was playing hide and seek using the lives of the MH17 passengers as human shields, you like all the other Western MSM hack pack members simply IGNORE the evidence that doesn't support your case.