Downed Airliner: Fake Audio Tape Shows US-Backed Hit to Frame Russia
In a devastating twist to emerge over the weekend it now seems that the Malaysian civilian airliner downed over Ukraine was most probably brought down as a result of sabotage by the US-backed Kiev regime.
The purpose of this audacious act of mass murder – in which 298 lives were lost – was carried out with the intention of framing the Russian government. Washington, the chief sponsor of the Kiev regime, must have known about the plot, if not being fully complicit in it.
The key to this dramatic twist is the identification of incriminating audio tapes over the weekend as fake – tapes that were created initially to implicate Moscow, as part of a massive black operation involving the destruction of the civilian airliner and all those onboard. Nationals from more than 12 countries were onboard the doomed Boeing 777, most of them Dutch, Malaysian, Australian, as well as American, Canadian, British and several other European states.
Within hours of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 crashing into a wheat field in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine last Thursday, Western governments and media have gradually stoked a frenzy of accusations that Moscow had a hand in the disaster. US President Barack Obama announced that unnamed American intelligence sources said that the suspected surface-to-air missile believed to have taken the jet down was fired from territory held by anti-Kiev self-defence militias. Or as Obama put it: «Russian-backed separatists».
The American president did not accuse Moscow outright then but he implied Russian involvement in the incident with the reasoning that Russia (allegedly) provided «technical assistance» in the firing of the sophisticated missile system, known as a Buk SA-11.
The missile system can fire warheads up to an altitude of 70,000 feet – well within range of civilian long-haul jumbo jets – with the armed projectile soaring at three times the speed of sound. The system is Soviet-era make, and is also used by the Ukrainian state forces.
Over the weekend the accusations against Russia from Western governments and media have steadily grown to a crescendo. In his usual round of Sunday television programmes, US Secretary of State John Kerry went as far as claiming that American intelligence was now certain that Russia had supplied the missile system to the militia in eastern Ukraine…
Kerry told CNN: «It’s pretty clear that this is a system that was transferred from Russia in the hands of separatists».
Kerry added: «We know with confidence that the Ukrainians [that is, the Western-backed Kiev regime forces] did not have such a system anywhere near the vicinity at that point in time. So it obviously points a very clear finger at the separatists.» Kerry’s claim is contradicted by Russian intelligence, as we shall see.
The American press were also chiming in with the same story. The Wall Street Journal reported: «US officials believe the anti-aircraft systems were moved back across the border into Russia…»
The Sunday edition of the Washington Post headlined: «Russia supplied missile launchers to separatists, US official says».
So what began as a circumspect implication on Friday from President Obama soon snowballed into a full-blown grave accusation against Russia within 48 hours.
Meanwhile, Washington’s closest European ally, Britain, was also turning up the pressure on Russia over the downed airliner.
In an unusual Sunday Times article, British Prime Minister David Cameron laid the blame on Moscow for unleashing instability in Ukraine and called for tougher sanctions in response. Cameron said: «Tougher EU [European Union] sanctions against Russia will be needed if Moscow does not change its approach to the downing of the Malaysia Airlines plane over Ukraine.»
Subordinate ministers went even further in their accusations. Britain’s new Defence Minister Michael Fallon told media that Russia was «sponsoring terrorism» in Ukraine, on the back of the stricken airliner incident.
However, it is clear from a closer reading of the media reports carried in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and the British press that the alleged case for implicating Russia relies on a mixture of anonymous assertions by unidentified «US intelligence officials, fragments of unverified phone intercepts, and unverified video and photographs. The latter images purport to show a Buk launcher and its missiles being driven across the Ukrainian border into Russia. It is impossible to verify if the alleged location and time is accurate.
The second aspect of the «evidence» – anonymous, unspecified US intelligence – has no credibility whatsoever given the numerous times that such a formula has been invoked previously; and subsequently has been shown to be baseless or, worse, concocted, as in the Iraqi «weapons of mass destruction» that sparked off the US-led Gulf War in 2003, or in the allegations of chemical weapons allegedly used by the Syrian army last August against civilians, which also turned out to be false.
That leaves us with the third element – the alleged communication intercepts. Since the fatal crash of Flight MH17, the Western media have given prominence to audio files that purportedly relate to conversations between members of the anti-Kiev militia, in which individuals appear to acknowledge that militia units mistakenly hit a civilian airliner, thinking that it was a warplane belonging to the Kiev military forces.
The intercepts were supposed to be the central damning evidence of culpability against the pro-Russian militia, and by extension, Russia itself. The files, posted on the internet by the Kiev secret services, were referred to in all the major Western news media outlets as being «a smoking gun».
The Western media frenzy over the weekend based on all of the above «evidence» produced headlines such as: ‘Putin’s rebels blew up plane’ in Britain’s Daily Express; ‘Ukraine claims ‘compelling evidence’ of Russian involvement’ in the British Guardian; and ‘US sees evidence of Russian link to jet’s downing’ in the New York Times.
This political and media stampede to impugn Moscow and Russian President Vladimir Putin in particular is telling in itself of a premeditated black operation.
But then came this devastating twist. Russian audio recording experts revealed over the weekend that the intercepts invoked by Kiev and its Western supporters turn out to be fake.
Reputed digital sound analyst Nikolai Popov and his expert team examined the files made public by the Kiev intelligence services, and they found that the files had been doctored from separate and unrelated conversations.
On first hearing, the alleged conversations tend to implicate the self-defence militia in firing a missile at the passenger plane. But on closer examination, the digital fingerprints show that the files were fabricated, taken from separate recordings and spliced together to give the impression of integral conversations.
«This audio recording is not an integral file and is made up of several fragments,» Popov told Russian news agency Itar-Tass.
Moreover – and this is crucial – the sound analysis of digital data shows that the tapes were engineered the day
before Flight MH17 was seemingly hit by a missile and blown out of the sky.
This latest discovery makes for some incontrovertible and deeply unsettling conclusions: firstly, parties were involved in deliberately forging the files with the purpose of framing others – the self-defence militia and Moscow; secondly, and more disturbingly, the people who faked the files must have known that the airliner was going to be hit with a missile, or some other catastrophic external force, in order to bring it down with all the horrific loss of life entailed.
In all the maelstrom of Western innuendo against Russia over the doomed airliner, the obvious anomaly is that neither the Moscow nor the anti-Kiev rebels would have anything to remotely gain by carrying out such a dastardly act.
Furthermore, the eastern Ukraine self-defence militia have categorically denied possessing such weaponry and the skill to operate these radar-controlled systems.
But here is more potentially damning information on who the culprits are. Russia’s ministry of defence says that it has radar data showing that an anti-aircraft Buk missile launcher was operated by the Kiev forces in the vicinity of the doomed airliner and that these Kiev forces had the plane in their radar target sites. A digital recording could easily verify that claim.
In addition, there are several other troubling questions that the Kiev regime has so far refused to answer: why was Flight MH17 instructed by Kiev Air Traffic Control to fly on this unusual more northerly route on that fateful day, through a dangerous conflict zone? Also, why were the pilots of MH-17 instructed to fly at the lower altitude of 33,000 feet instead of 35,000 feet?
Taken all this into account, the finger of suspicion now points not at Moscow, but rather at the Kiev regime and its military forces.
More damningly, given the close dependence of the Kiev junta on American government sponsorship for its military operations, the ongoing deep involvement of the CIA in bringing this regime to power in the first place with the illegal coup back in February; and given the concerted way that Washington has sought to exploit the airliner disaster for geopolitical gains – all that strongly points to a deeply criminal collusion. A criminal collusion that involves the deliberate shooting down of a civilian flight and the killing of nearly 300 people.
What are You Trying to Hide, Mr Obama?
Finian Cunningham
Western leaders and their media would have us believe that Russian-backed terrorists and bandits not only shot down a civilian airliner killing all 298 onboard – but that they have added to their depravity by defiling the dead, kicking around body parts and robbing corpses.
On top of all that, so the official Western narrative goes, the separatist militias have been callously blocking an international rescue and investigation team, by denying access to the crash site, near the town of Grabovo, in rural fields some 40 kilometres from the Russian border with eastern Ukraine.
US Secretary of State John Kerry told American television networks on Sunday of alleged abhorrent behaviour by the local self-defence militia who took charge of the crash site in the territory under their control. «Drunken separatists have been piling bodies into trucks and removing them from the site. What’s happening is really grotesque, and it is contrary to everything President Putin and Russia said they would do».
The ghoulish theme was picked up the next day by US President Obama who told media that the conduct of the militia was «an insult to those who have lost loved ones and has no place in the international community of nations».
Obama accused the separatists of attempting to cover up the evidence of the crash. «What exactly are they trying to hide?» he asked.
British premier David Cameron and his Australian counterpart Tony Abbott echoed the same line, accusing the Ukrainian separatists of shooting down Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 last Thursday and spending the last few days hampering recovery of bodies and forensic material. Cameron blamed Russia for aiding and abetting the rebels in eastern Ukraine. «The world also wants to see a real change in the stance Russia has taken over the crisis in Ukraine,» said Cameron without any substantiation.
While the Australian premier piled on the pejorative rhetoric, referring to the crash site: «It's more like a garden clean-up than a forensic investigation. This is completely unacceptable».
Abbott added for good measure that the rebels at the crash site was like putting «criminals in charge of a crime scene» – again without any substantiation.
The problem with this lurid narrative, which is being pushed like a tidal wave in the Western media, is that it is actually running reality in reverse.
The «good guys», so to speak, are in fact the various self-defence militia in eastern Ukraine, the communities they are trying to protect, and the Russian government, which has been trying to bring some civilised diplomatic order to the bloody chaos in the region.
That chaos is not just the latest disaster of the downing of the Amsterdam to Malaysia Boeing 777. For the past four months, the eastern region of Ukraine has been living in a nightmare imposed by the Western-installed junta in the central capital, Kiev. All ethnic Russian communities in the east are, in the publicly declared words of the Kiev regime, «sub-humans» to be hunted down in «anti-terror operations».
Since the weekend, the two main cities in the east, Donetsk and Lugansk, have been shelled constantly by Ukrainian regular army forces and neo-Nazi paramilitary groups under the direction of the Western-sponsored coup leaders in Kiev, headed up by self-styled Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk.
Days following the airliner crash – which is believed to have been shot down with a surface-to-air missile, although it could have been hit by a fighter jet – over 20 people have been killed in Donetsk and Lugansk from artillery fire and air strikes carried out by the pro-Kiev forces. Over the past two months more than 250 people have been killed in Lugansk alone, according to monitors from the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). Most the dead are civilians killed by indiscriminate shelling from pro-Kiev military.
Only a couple of days before the airliner came down, a Kiev warplane hit a residential block in the town of Snezhnoye, some 20 kilometres from the crash site. That attack resulted in 11 dead, all them civilians.
Mortars have been fired in residential areas and pedestrian centres. In the deadliest attack in Lugansk over the weekend, eight civilians were killed when mortars hit the city centre on Friday. Their bodies were torn apart, strewn on the street, as graphic video footage testifies.
The self-defence militia set up in the eastern region are opposed to the Western-installed regime in Kiev. They have every right to resist the illegal self-imposed authority, which they see as willing to sign the country up to NATO, the IMF and Western economic pillaging.
The militia have the support of the vast majority of the people, who voted for autonomy from Kiev in referenda organised in early May, giving rise to the self-declared Peoples’ Republics of Donetsk and Lugansk.
Now these people are fighting for their lives, as the Kiev regime steps up the its so-called anti-terror operations. At the start of this week, the Kiev forces were bombarding central areas of Donetsk and Lugansk cities. Residents – those that have not already fled in their tens of thousands for refuge across the border in Russia – have been forced into air raid shelters out of fear from the constant shelling by Kiev troops and warplanes. Some of these shelters have not been used since the Second World War when people used them back then to evade Nazi bombing carried out along with the ancestors of the Kiev regime who collaborated with the Third Reich.
It is obscene that these people are being vilified now by Western governments and their media. The reality is that these people are not only fighting for their lives, they also have spared their time and meagre resources to help secure the crash site of the downed airliner and to retrieve the bodies of the victims – all in the middle of a war zone that has been imposed on them by a ruthless Western-backed Kiev regime.
Despite Obama’s baseless disparagement of the self-defence militia as being «an insult to the international community», on the same day that he made that announcement the Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak was praising the local authorities for having made arrangements to retrieve the bodies and to hand over the vitally important black box recorders from the doomed airliner. The latter data could reveal what caused the passenger plane to explode in mid-air and crash.
Significantly, the Malaysian premier did not make the arrangements through the Kiev regime. He dealt directly with the Donetsk People’s Republic leader Alexander Borodai. The Malaysians disclosed publicly that 282 of the bodies recovered so far were to be transported in refrigerated train carriages to Donetsk and thence to the city of Kharkiv before being flown on to Amsterdam. The flight recorder black boxes were also to be handed over in Donetsk by militia members to an official Malaysian investigative team…
In the latest onslaught by Kiev forces in Donetsk it seems more than a coincidence that they have attacked the central train station in that city – from where the airline crash corpses were to be transported. Some rail tracks were reportedly damaged by shelling, thus putting transport of the human remains in jeopardy.
The Washington Post reported early Monday: «Michael Bociurkiw, an OSCE spokesman, said it remained unclear when the rail cars containing the bodies would move and where they would go. He said renewed fighting in Donetsk on Monday had possibly damaged the tracks, adding a complication.
«We were told by rebels it has caused some damage to the railway system,» said the OSCE spokesman. «That is a crucial development in the sense that with the airport inoperable, and if the train station is inoperable, that will cut off Donetsk even further».
The OSCE team confirmed to media on Saturday – less than 48 hours after the airliner was downed – that they had gained full access to the crash site, facilitated by the local self-defence militia, even though Kiev forces were conducting intimidating flyovers with warplanes.
Meanwhile, Dutch investigators who oversaw the eventual placement of the 282 corpses into a train at the town of Torez, near the crash site, for transport on to Donetsk, spoke admirably of the local rescue teams that the self-defence militia and community had organised.
Reuters reported: «Peter van Vliet, whose team went through the wagons dressed in surgical masks and rubber gloves, said he was impressed by the work the recovery crews had done, given the heat and the scale of the crash site». Vliet told Reuters: «I think they did a hell of a job in a hell of a place».
And so the Dutch investigators should be in admiration. The people of Donetsk are trying to rescue victims in conditions of extreme duress imposed by Kiev’s terrorist operations.
All the while, Russian President Vladimir Putin has been calling for a ceasefire from the Kiev forces so that a full and safe international investigation can take place into what happened Flight MH17. On Monday, Putin called for the disaster not to be politicised by narrow self interests.
So far, Putin’s appeal for safe passage for investigators has been wilfully ignored by the Kiev regime, which has if anything stepped up its violence in the region since the air crash.
And Western leaders are giving full cover to the Kiev regime by perversely laying the blame on Russia and the self-defence militias in Donetsk, accusing both of obstructing recovery and a crash probe.
To paraphrase Obama: «What is the Kiev regime and its Western sponsors trying to hide?»
As for Australia’s premier Abbott, what seems to be getting up his nose is the fact that the Western-backed criminals in Kiev are not in charge of the crime scene.
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Finian Cunningham, originally from Belfast, Ireland, was born in 1963. He is a prominent expert in international affairs. The author and media commentator was expelled from Bahrain in June 2011 for his critical journalism in which he highlighted human rights violations by the Western-backed regime. He is a Master’s graduate in Agricultural Chemistry and worked as a scientific editor for the Royal Society of Chemistry, Cambridge, England, before pursuing a career in journalism. He is also a musician and songwriter. For many years, he worked as an editor and writer in the mainstream news media, including The Mirror, Irish Times and Independent. He is now based in East Africa where he is writing a book on Bahrain and the Arab Spring. He co-hosts a weekly current affairs programme, Sunday at 3pm GMT on Bandung Radio.
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Source 1st article. Source 2nd article Photo 1: AFP/Alexander Khudoteply. Photo 2: standard.co.uk
URL: http://www.a-w-i-p.com/index.php/2014/07/23/downed-airliner-fake-audio-tape
