I was just watching video the other day of molten metal dripping from the WTC on 9/11.
Once again, I am not trying to stir up conspiracy theories but how did building 7 fall?.
... Also, who do you think started the growing stigma against those who question authority? Authority maybe?
Lets not even go into the fact that the pentagon was hit by a plane, yet the entry hole had no wing shapes to it, only a strait hole.
Like TJO said, to many wtf's. Also, who do you think started the growing stigma against those who question authority? Authority maybe?
Justin Raimondo
The War Party’s Shameless Exploitation Of The MH17 Tragedy
by Justin Raimondo • July 21, 2014
Tweet about this on TwitterShare on FacebookShare on LinkedInPrint this pageEmail this to someone
If there’s one thing neocons and Obamaites can agree on, it’s the penultimate evil of Vladimir Putin. The downing of MH17 has knitted them so close together that’s hard to tell the difference. No sooner had the airliner hit the ground then, one and all, they echoed the “game-changer” meme first enunciated by The New […]
If there’s one thing neocons and Obamaites can agree on, it’s the penultimate evil of Vladimir Putin. The downing of MH17 has knitted them so close together that it’s hard to tell the difference. No sooner had the airliner hit the ground then, one and all, they echoed the “game-changer” meme first enunciated by The New Republic’s Julia Ioffe, the go-to person for media Russophobes. Top Democrats in Congress ranted that what was clearly an accident is an “act of war,” not to mention an “act of terror,” while Sen. John McCain took the opportunity to agree wholeheartedly – while adding that Obama’s “weakness” in the face of Russian “aggression” is really to blame.
Washington is basking in its near-unanimity, and the only competition between left and right is to see who can snarl the most menacingly at the Russian bear. In this frenzied atmosphere, pundits left and right – and even “news” accounts – refer to the fields where the wreckage lies as the “crime scene,” the scene of a “murder.” And they are pointing a finger not only at the rebels but also directly at Putin – with air cover from the Pentagon, as this New York Times account makes all too clear:
“Rear Adm. John Kirby, the top Pentagon spokesman, said it would have been difficult for separatists to fire the SA-11 without Russian help. ‘It strains credulity to think that it could be used by separatists without at least some measure of Russian support and technical assistance,” he said.
“Admiral Kirby raised the possibility that the Russian military had transported the system into Ukraine and even fired it. ‘Whether it was a system that was driven across the border by Russians and then handed off, we don’t know,’ he said.”
What Kirby fails to mention is that Russian expertise is hardly required, since whole Ukrainian army divisions sent in to crush the rebels have chosen to defect rather than fire on their countrymen. There are plenty of rebels with the training to operate an SA-11 or SA-20, but that comment about direct Russian support – “and even fired it” – tells us everything we need to know about this latest chapter in the ongoing US-Russian standoff. They want to pin the blame on Putin, but that is a case that won’t stand up in court.
That’s because the “evidence” of Russian complicity is flimsy. The SBU, the Ukrainian intelligence agency formerly preoccupied with brutalizing opponents of whatever regime was in power, has come up with a series of “intercepts” that are being played nonstop on American cable television: these purportedly show not only rebel responsibility for the downing but also direct Russian assistance. The playing of the SBU tapes is usually preceded by ass-covering boilerplate that they “could not be independently verified” – with the unspoken addendum that “but, heck, why not broadcast them anyway?” One tape presented as a conversation between a rebel commander and his henchman on the ground was apparently made the day before the plane was downed – sloppy work, but good enough for cable news.
But then again everything seems to be half-ass in Ukraine: nothing much in that country has functioned since the fall of the Soviet Union. This was an accident waiting to happen – and in spite of the certitude in which denunciations of the “criminal” rebels are framed, we still don’t know for sure who pulled the trigger. While the Russians have pointed out that the Ukrainian army had anti-aircraft weaponry in the vicinity when the plane went down, it could well be that Washington is correct and the rebels did indeed hit the plane, mistaking it for a Ukrainian fighter. Yet the lesson to be drawn from this isn’t what Washington and the screaming meemies of the Beltway are telling us it is.
Unable or unwilling to directly confront its main antagonists – Russia and Iran – Washington has turned to cold war era tactics (and rhetoric), using proxies to fight wars they don’t dare fight on their own. In Libya, and now Syria, the US used its supposedly tame jihadists to overturn secular Arab leaders who didn’t follow Washington’s orders willingly. The big problem with their efforts to recruit suitable proxies, however, is that quality control is lacking.
This is especially evident in the Ukraine, where Washington has hooked up with a motley gang of ultra-nationalists, open fascists, and Ukrainian oligarchs. Yet the violent coup that ousted President Viktor Yanukovich was just the beginning as far as the War Party is concerned. The Obama administration has been under attack from fellow Democrats as well as McCainite Republicans to deliver some serious arms to Kiev – as well as the Syrian rebels – and the MH17 incident may well provide the political impetus for him to do so, at least in the case of the former.
This would be precisely the opposite of a rational policy, for if the rebels did indeed down that plane, and if they did get the means to do it from the Russians, then this illustrates the utter stupidity of arming proxies with sophisticated weaponry. Plenty of American-made equipment is showing up on the Iraqi battlefield in the hands of ISIS, and although we’re being told it was looted from captured Iraq military facilities, there is good reason to doubt all of it came from that particular source.
In the midst of all this warmongering, the President is coming off as a relative moderate, especially compared to the Republican McCainiacs bent on pouring arms and even US “advisors” into Ukraine (obviously someone has to train the Ukrainians to use them). Meanwhile, Obama – like Franklin Roosevelt in the run up to US entry into World War II – lets others call for stronger action while his relatively rational public pronouncements belie his provocative actions.
The crucial context of this terrible tragedy is the years-long regime change operation conducted by the US in Ukraine, which finally succeeded this year as a democratically elected pro-Russian regime was overthrown – by force – and a government more amenable to Western diktat was installed.
This was accomplished due to both overt and covert support to the Maidan rebels, whose “government” – not recognized by half the country – is now engaged in a brutal military campaign that has wantonly killed civilians in a series of atrocities studiously ignored by the Western media. We started the vicious civil war that is now making Ukraine unlivable: we set off the chain of events that led to the annexation of Crimea – whose people welcomed the chance to opt out of a bankrupt corrupt mess of a “country” – and we alone are responsible for the ensuing internecine conflict that gripped the eastern provinces.
Senior U.S. Intelligence Officers: Obama Should Release Ukraine Evidence
Preface: With the shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over Ukraine turning a local civil war into a U.S. confrontation with Russia, former high-level U.S. intelligence veterans released a statement today urging President Obama to release what evidence he has about the tragedy and silence the exaggeration and rush to judgment. (The whole post is a must-read; but we at Washington’s Blog have added bolding for emphasis.)
Signatory Bill Binney – the former senior technical director at the NSA, and a man who battled the Soviet Union for decades – tells Washington’s Blog:
In my analytic efforts to predict intentions and capabilities down through the years, I always made sure that I had multi-factors verifying what I was asserting. So far, I don’t see that discipline here in this administration or the IC [i.e. the United States intelligence community].
Posted with permission of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
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.”