Worldwide Nightmare Theatre, Empire of Chaos Enhanced and Expanded

[ewmayer]

Russia reveals the MH17 'smoking gun' | Asia Times

The MH17 crash killed 283 passengers from 10 different countries and 15 crew members. A Joint Investigation Team (JIT) from Malaysia, the Netherlands, Australia, Belgium and Ukraine – but not Russia – seemed to reach a controversial verdict: Moscow did it.

Well, not really, according to a detailed presentation by Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov and Lt. Gen. Nikolai Parshin, head of the Main Missile and Artillery Directorate.

The “breakthrough” seems to have come from a JIT briefing last May, which produced fragments of the engine and nozzle of the 9M38 missile, launched by a Buk missile system, which downed MH17. According to Parshin: “Once we had the nozzle and engine numbers, we were able to find out the missile’s number.”

So now we know, via declassified files, that the engine of the missile 9D131 allegedly had the serial number 8869032. And a “passport” for the nozzle cluster 9D13105000 carried the number 8-30-113. The actual missile number was 886847349, they said.

The Defense Ministry established that numbers for the components of the 9M38 missile and the number of units noted in the technical documentation stored at the Dolgoprudny Research and Production Enterprise, outside Moscow, are the same.

So, they were able to establish that the missile was made in Dolgoprudny in 1986 and that it was delivered by rail on December 29, 1986 to military unit 20152 deployed to Ukraine – and never returned to Russia.
...
The ball is now in the JIT court. Moscow has always insisted, in detail, that the investigation has been biased from the start. It never obtained any key evidence from Kiev [such as copies of the same materials mentioned above which were provided to Kiev at time of delivery of the hardware], relied on sources such as Bellingcat, and totally ignored evidence provided by Russia.

This is a political football of immense proportions – at the heart of the Maidan coup and subsequent, relentless demonization of Russia. But in terms of the human tragedy, the thing that really matters is to establish incontrovertible MH17 facts.

In a statement, the Joint Investigation Team seems to admit as much: “The JIT has taken note of the information that has been publicly presented by the authorities of the Russian Federation for the first time today … The JIT will meticulously study the materials presented today as soon as the Russian Federation makes the relevant documents available to the JIT as requested in May 2018 and required by UNSC resolution 2166.”

IOW, the crucial evidence in question could have been shared with Moscow 4 years before, but of course wasn't because ... well, there really is no good reason aside from NATO perma-cold-warriors being NATO perma-cold-warriors and perhaps hoping for a full-blown hot war to liven things up - after all, that's pretty much what the west-sponsored Ukrainian coup was about.

[kladner]

I wonder how this recent evidence will be tortured to make it point back to Russia.

[Nick]

The article misses the point.

The Joint Investigation Team is assembling evidence for the prosecution in a court case.
As always, the defendants will also be able to present their case.
This is not a political matter but a criminal justice matter.

[kladner]

Too many in the West seem to have reached a verdict long ago.

[ewmayer]

Originally Posted by Nick

The article misses the point.

Your note that the article misses the point, misses the point. Namely, that "...the investigation ... never obtained any key evidence from Kiev." This so-called investigation has been an exercise in confirming a preordained conclusion. By way of analogy of the kinds of perverted 'justice' such proceedings routinely achieve, consider the U.S. court which tried Iran in absentia, found it guilty of aiding the 9/11 terrorists (completely ignoring the obvious links to Saudi Arabia and its ongoing support for Sunni extremists as well as the official 9/11 Commission report) and levied a huge monetary fine payable to the victims. Laughable, yes, but legally enforceable in the sense that such rulings may be used to freeze U.S. bank accounts, arrest individuals should they set foot in the U.S. or one of its allies, and so forth.

You read much Kafka?

[Nick]

As I said, this not a political matter but a criminal justice matter.
Once consequence of that (was this really not obvious?) is that the Joint Investigation Team must identify not countries
but individuals who will be charged.

[Fusion_power]

The real question is "why did the ground commander order a missile to be fired on a commercial airliner?"

[ewmayer]

Glenn Greenwald - who currently lives in Brazil but may well be rethinking that domicile choice - writes on that country's likely (pending a runoff) election of a genuine - as opposed to a Trump-style authoritarian oligarch-populist demagogue - right-wing fascist leader, congressman Jair Bolsonaro:

Brazil’s Bolsonaro-Led Far Right Wins a Victory Far More Sweeping and Dangerous Than Anyone Predicted. Its Lessons Are Global | The Intercept

it is virtually impossible to overstate the threat level posed to democracy and human rights in the world’s fifth most-populous country as a result of last night’s election. And unlike in the U.S. or in the UK, which have old, strong, long-established democratic institutions that can limit the excesses and worst abuses of demagogues and authoritarians, Brazil has none of that. Spiraling from multiple crises – suffocating economic inequality, an epidemic of violence worse than many war zones, and a corruption scandal so sweeping that it has infected the core of almost every faction of the ruling class – this is a country with little to no ability to impose limits on what Bolsonaro wants to do.
...
To be sure – as is true of Trump, Brexit, and the rise of right-wing extremism throughout Europe – some substantial minority of Bolsonaro voters are motivated by classic bigotry, racism, anti-LGBT animus, resentment toward the indigenous population, and just a general tribal anger that seeks scapegoats for their plight. But many, probably most, are none of those things.

Many, instead, are motivated by legitimate grievances toward an establishment ruling class that has failed them on all levels, that expresses indifference if not outright contempt for their suffering and loss of hope, that they blame, often with good reason, for enacting policies that have destroyed their futures while refusing to accept any responsibility for it. And once that framework is adopted, any perceived enemy of that ruling class becomes their friend, or at least someone whose vows of destruction become more appealing than vows to preserve the system they justifiably despise (the reality is that Bolsonaro (like Trump), with his Chicago-trained neoliberal economic guru, will serve the economic interests of the establishment with great devotion at the expense of his working-class voters, but the perception of his anti-establishment animus is what matters).

The standard establishment reaction in the face of rising demagogues like Bolsonaro is to denounce those who support them, to call them names, to heap scorn on them, to sanctimoniously lecture them that their choices are primitive, retrograde, ignorant and illegitimate. That only serves further to exacerbate the dynamic.

As I wrote after the enactment of Brexit, and then again after Trump’s victory, unless and until the establishment classes of the world’s democracies begin to cease blaming everyone else and instead engage in serious self-critique, we’re going to have far more Brexits and Trumps – and far worse ones. As I wrote in June, 2016, after Brexit passed:

Instead of acknowledging and addressing the fundamental flaws within themselves, [establishment factions] are devoting their energies to demonizing the victims of their corruption, all in order to delegitimize those grievances and thus relieve themselves of responsibility to meaningfully address them. That reaction only serves to bolster, if not vindicate, the animating perceptions that these elite institutions are hopelessly self-interested, toxic, and destructive and thus cannot be reformed but rather must be destroyed. That, in turn, only ensures there will be many more Brexits, and Trumps, in our collective future.

Unfortunately for the 210 million people who live in Brazil, last night’s election was one of the most vivid and terrifying examples yet of this proposition.

An NC reader made the following perspicacious comment:

Thanks for link which is a must read for anyone interested in foreign affairs. What Greenwald is saying is that Bolsonaro is not Brazil’s Trump but rather the real embodiment of what the Resistance likes to claim Trump is, and in a country with a not too distant history of military dictatorship. Whereas Trump–barely in control of his own administration–is only a cartoonish, reality TV version of a strong man, Bolsonaro is

known mostly for outlandish, deliberately inflammatory quotes in which he paid homage to the most notorious torturers of the 1964-1985 military regime, constantly heralded the 1964 coup as a “defense of democracy,” told a female socialist colleague in Congress that she was too ugly to “deserve” his rape, announced that he’d rather learn that his son died in a car accident than was gay, and said he conceived a daughter after having four sons only due to a “moment of weakness.”

Of course the CIA had more than a hand in that first military dictatorship and for all we know the DC regime changers are at the bottom of this mess as well. But what seems definitely to be true is that financial and media interests are poised to push yet another country into chaos. It’s not Trump but America’s establishment itself that is providing the template for growing political regression.

And more on that "CIA had more than a hand in that first military dictatorship" bit. Talk about - to use a phrase popular among the US MSM since the 2016 election - 'electoral meddling':

Hidden History: The US “War On Corruption” In Brasil | Brasil Wire

...it can already be established on the basis of what is available that despite denial and obfuscation, Sérgio Moro has, in collaboration with various wings of the US Government and its expanded apparatus, aided the removal of an elected President, convicted a former President, and future candidate – all of the same party – and with that significantly contributed to a change in Brazil’s political direction, away from social democratic, mildly redistributive developmentalism, and towards discreet re-colonisation as authoritarian client state or neoliberal viceroyalty. This comes combined with a new US Military presence on Brazilian territory which was simply unthinkable just a few years ago.

[kladner]

Can you say "Duterte?"

[kladner]

Here is an ongoing case of projection: accusing others of the very things the US is doing. It also aims at a restarted Cold War, to try to break the Russian and Chinese economies though military spending. A question is, how long can the US continue feed our death merchants ever greater slices of the pie before its economy craters?

The United States’ economy is a military-industrial complex. Therefore any multilateral arms control treaty that limits weapons and war tensions is by definition incompatible with the functioning of American-style capitalism.

President Donald Trump’s announced intention of withdrawing the US from the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty is but the latest move by Washington in undoing decades of hard-won arms controls agreements.

The US unilaterally scrapped the Anti-Ballistic Missiles (ABM) Treaty back in 2002 under then-President GW Bush. That breach of a decades-old treaty has led to the installation of American missile systems in Europe ever-closer to Russian territory, as the US-led NATO military alliance relentlessly expanded eastwards.

.

[Dr Sardonicus]

Originally Posted by kladner

Here is an ongoing case of projection: accusing others of the very things the US is doing. It also aims at a restarted Cold War, to try to break the Russian and Chinese economies though military spending. A question is, how long can the US continue feed our death merchants ever greater slices of the pie before its economy craters?

Hmm, no source.

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