John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY MARKO MARJANOVIC IN CHECKPOINT ASIA

 

“Donald J. Trump’s Brilliant, Hilarious Rebuke of the War Party”

 

“Trump is a lazy, demented degenerate.”

Indeed.

He’s almost unbelievable. You have to rub your eyes watching him.

An American original grotesque. Like something strange escaped from a zoo. Or Victor Frankenstein’s creature lurching around.

But, despite his ghastly nature, getting out of Syria was a good thing, although he did it very badly, costing many lives.

I actually did not think it would happen. After all, it very much goes against Israel’s wishes.

I think the key considerations for Trump were that he felt he had done enough for Israel’s desires in other matters that he could afford to oppose them here, and, the really important thing for this ultimate narcissist, that he was convinced he needed a “withdrawal” somewhere to get re-elected.

And, I’m inclined to think him right in that. Biden or Warren running against him is just the same old, same old, undeviating support for Pentagon and Empire. He won’t have done much, but his opponent will have done nothing.

Of course, this for that other segment that supported him in 2016, not the base wearing red MAGA caps on shopping trips to Walmart, the folks who love walls and hate anyone kneeling near Old Glory or speaking Spanish.

His opponent will say he did Putin’s work for him, but I don’t think that charge carries any weight with those opposed to America’s insane wars.

He has created an extraordinary political situation.

Readers might like:

https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2019/10/15/john-chuckman-comment-trump-and-northeastern-syria-withdrawal-turkeys-invasion-putins-success-notes-on-saudi-arabias-crown-possibly-endangered-prince-irans-new-pride-in-its-capabiliti/

 

 

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO A (REPEAT) ARTICLE BY DMITRY ORLOV IN RUSSIA INSIDER

 

‘Our Banner of Deceit is Leading the US to Failure

‘”Lies beget other lies, and pretty soon unbiased intelligence-gathering, rational analysis and proper mission planning become impossible.”’

 

https://russia-insider.com/en/christianity/our-banner-deceit-leading-us-failure/ri21135

 

You know, we have another archive article repeated today in Russia Insider, a very good and accurate one about the monopoly tendencies of the American economy.  (“Almost Every Sector of the US Economy Is a Monopoly or an Oligopoly” by Michael Snyder)

I view it as closely related to this excellent piece by Dmitry Orlov on mainline news sources and international affairs, even though its subject is quite another topic.

Both deal with the effects of great, unbalanced power.

Virtually no one in the world likes monopolies.

Their impact on the economy somewhat resembles the impact of dictatorship on the political life of a nation.

And no one embraces dictatorship as a general governing principle.

But in international affairs, somehow, a number of people seem to believe it is perfectly okay to have a form of dictatorship.

If dictatorship is bad for a country’s political life and is bad, in the form of monopoly, for a country’s economic life, how can it possibly be beneficial in world affairs?

It cannot be.

Yet today, as perhaps never before, we have America working industriously towards enforcing its will over almost everyone on the planet. Threats, financial pressures, unwarranted tariffs, arbitrary demands, displays of military force, and sanctions everywhere.

You know, sanctions, a word which sounds almost harmless to the untutored ear, have been described as just war by other means, and that is a deadly accurate description.

Sanctions represent a particularly ugly form of war. They are indiscriminate weapons, much like massive carpet bombing, and they always and everywhere hurt mainly the poor and defenceless.

Indeed, for sanctions really to be effective, that is exactly what they must do, strike the great mass of defenseless people – the poor, the sick, the old, women and children – bringing immense pressure on any government.

I generally don’t like using religious terms to describe things in the world of political power, but the word “evil” seems unavoidable to me in the matter of sanctions.

And what do you know, you only have to briefly watch and listen to the brutal people pushing them vigorously to confirm absolutely the perception of evil – people like John Bolton, Mike Pompeo, Elliot Abrams, Donald Trump, and Benjamin Netanyahu. Simply unconscionable liars and ruthless killers, every one of them.

 

John Chuckman

COMMENT ON THE STILL-SWIRLING SCANDALS AROUND AMERICA’S 2016 NATIONAL ELECTION

 

While I am not a political partisan of any party, I believe there can be little doubt that important American agency heads and senior Democratic figures plotted along several lines either to discredit Trump before the election or to deprive him of office after the election.

He was viewed as a political outsider, a maverick, an unwelcome, intrusive figure whose entrance on the national stage might upset a lot of people’s relationships and plans. And it didn’t help that he was a rude and awkward man, given to expressing himself at times in words you might expect to see scratched inside a stall door at a public toilet.

All indications suggest that Obama – the always-smiling but taciturn and secrecy-embracing Obama, his record on whistleblowers and leakers as well as his eight-year record of bombing countless people demonstrating him as being quite ruthless – led this effort, closely allied with Hillary Clinton, the woman, we know from documents, who cheated repeatedly in the Democratic primary campaign to steal the nomination from Bernie Sanders.

These are ruthless people, although most of the public is not used to thinking of American political figures in that way. It is a hard thing perhaps for ordinary Americans to absorb the idea that their own country, “sweet land of liberty” as it’s termed in the national theology, is run along lines, not of respect for democracy and rule of law, but of what is sniggered at in Third-world lands.

The totality of the Democrats’ efforts – consulting with discreditable people abroad, paying an ex-spy to create a false dossier on a political candidate, spying on a political campaign, making outrageous public charges, and still other acts – does seriously flirt with subverting democracy and Constitutional government, and that actually approaches the definition of treason.

However, I cannot find myself entirely outraged by the dark series of events because, for me, Trump’s own behaviors are so outrageous and extremely dangerous that they tend to overshadow what the others did. I don’t exonerate them, but we are now faced with terrifying new dangers both to peace and to the health and stability of the world’s economy.

And it is not to be said that the Democrats understood and anticipated such developments and are at least to be partly excused for that reason. No, indeed, they very much contributed to bringing it all on.

The Democrats’ activity reflects the heightened sense of privilege and exceptionalism we now see in so many – indeed in most – of the words and deeds coming from Washington. America’s establishment has comfortably assumed a belief in its being God’s contemporary chosen people, or, in the outrageously self-serving words of Madeline Albright, the “indispensable nation.” Well, considering yourself as indispensable and chosen by God has always had some terrible consequences for those wielding great power. We have the eloquent testimony of Shakespeare’s tragedies and histories to just that effect.

Trump was targeted because he was something of an outsider, someone who hi-jacked, in effect, one of the two old-line political parties, depriving other establishment figures, old-line Republicans like the Bushes or Romneys, of a nomination that “should” have belonged to one of them.

That sense of things does come with something of a threat to the prevailing system of the American power establishment, a system where both parties, no matter what their campaign words, always end by closely supporting the American plutocracy, its empire, and all of the agencies of government concerned with maintaining and extending the empire, especially the Pentagon and the CIA. Even a suggestion that an outsider might represent a threat to that established order was enough to drive a number of insiders to distraction.

Normally, those who challenge the establishment in any fashion are simply allowed to say their piece while being largely ignored by the press and other politicians, having few of their words reach most Americans, as well as suffering the tremendous impact of a campaign-finance drought, those funds always overwhelmingly being gifts from the wealthy. Tulsi Gabbard is the best contemporary example of that approach. There have been others, people with various points of view, from Ralph Nader to Ron Paul.

But a unique set of circumstances in 2016, enabled an “outsider” to get inside under the edge of the big-top tent and assume a position at center ring under the spotlights. The main contributing circumstance, I believe, was the nature of the Democrat’s own candidate, Hillary Clinton, a woman who inspires a great deal of fear and hostility, both outside and inside her own party. But the Democrats were stuck with her because her husband, Bill, has been the key link for years in a supply chain of large campaign-fund donors. No one ignores money in American politics. Had someone else run, most of these events likely would not have happened, and Trump would not now be President.

The new dangers to peace to which I referred can also be at least partly attributed to the work of the Democrats and their senior agency heads. Here is the reason. Trump felt seriously threatened at various points, as we know from reports. One of his ways of dealing with the threat was to approach some powerful and influential people for support and money, people whose primary focus was not the American political establishment but Israel.

The money would provide a war chest for the 2020 election campaign as well as against the threat of a costly impeachment. We’ve only learned recently from an analysis of old tax records that Trump is far less wealthy than anyone had imagined, having been burdened with huge debts for years.

Trump got what he wanted, increasing his sense of security, but the price demanded saw him give away things in the Middle East that were not his to give and begin a seriously threatening campaign against Iran, a country which Israel detests but one which had followed the letter of the law scrupulously in its multi-party nuclear agreement as well as being a country which has started no war in its modern history, despite having had a vicious war launched against it in the 1980s. Its record in wars and strife, despite the rhetoric of Trump or Bolton or Pompeo, compares immensely favorably with those of the United States and Israel.

The new dangers to economic stability are largely Trump’s work, his constant noisy haranguing, his many threats, his arbitrary imposition of large new tariffs, and his creation of an entire new branch of public service, one dedicated to illegally sanctioning people all over the world. I say “illegally” because all of the sanctions represent efforts to enforce American law on other people, ignoring the rule of law in other countries and ignoring virtually all international law and diplomatic protocol.

But while Trump is particularly rude and loud about the way he approaches other countries, the essence of what he tries to do is supported quietly by the American establishment, all of them from both parties. Big matters such as the rise of China and new relationships between Germany and Russia have been establishment concerns for decades. They foreshadow the emergence of a brave new world order, one very much not welcomed by America’s establishment.

The American establishment dreads its relative decline in importance to the world’s economy and its geopolitics. So, they appear, all of them, willing to support, at least for now, Trump’s crude efforts to extract concessions from countries like China by methods which really do reflect traditional mafia methods of gaining footholds in other people’s businesses, with “offers they can’t refuse.”

In the 1950s and 1960s Chicago where I grew up, restaurants and other businesses periodically burnt down for no explained reason. It was widely understood that it was the price of having refused to cooperate with “The Outfit,” to pay the required fees for services such as “protection,” that they offered.

So, we have an extremely complex and devious situation in Washington. Senior members of one major party came close to treason in their opposition to a newcomer. However, at the same time, the newcomer has proved himself so destructive in world affairs, in matters of trade and war, that some might almost be tempted to say that the efforts by Democrats and their senior agency heads were warranted.

But no reasonable person can say that. Rule of law is civilization’s greatest founding principle. Take that away, and you have the rule of the strongest, but it so happens that that is something both parties have long worked towards in America’s foreign affairs. There’s nothing of law or principle involved in any of America’s long string of colonial wars and coups and interventions since the end of WWII. They all involved forcing others to do as they were told. They all involved breaking innumerable laws and conventions and treaties. And they involved a great deal of killing and destruction. Now, that same long-accustomed approach has found a home at the very center of American power in Washington.

We were all treated to the most arrogant display of power and abuse and contempt for law with recent events in Venezuela. It’s never been so plainly on display, almost resembling the free summertime performance of a play in a neighborhood city park, even though it represented immoral and illegal practices America has used many times, perhaps with variations, such as more killing, here or there – in Ukraine, in Cuba, in Chile, in Guatemala, in Iran, in Nicaragua, and in other places. Maybe it is just a reflection of the incompetence of those in charge today that we saw the failed efforts so plainly, but that is just the kind of thing immense and unwarranted arrogance produces, a bizarre belief that if you say something should happen, it must happen.

The center of the American empire is in an unprecedented tangle of downright criminal behavior and fears, on all sides, and represents the greatest possible danger both to the world’s peace and its economic stability. I do not see how it all can end well, even if this or that particular crisis is diffused.

It really does remind one of tales of the last days of Rome, but if you find that an excessive comparison, there’s no escaping the fact that what we are seeing is the close-to-absolute corruption that accompanies close-to-absolute power.

 

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY OLGA SAMOFALOVA IN RUSSIA INSIDER

 

“Ukraine Will Be Able to Restore Its Economy Only by Cooperating with Russia”

 

A fundamental truth.

The coup-installed government wrecked many important economic underpinnings simply because they involved Russia.

Anti-Russian bias was stoked into a national obsession.

And all that was associated with Russia, including economic rationality, was ignored or insulted.

The relationship between the two countries is profound and goes back many centuries.

Absolutely absurd and self-destructive to think you can just toss a millenium of history overboard, overnight, but that is just exactly what the United States wanted when it invested five billion dollars into creating the coup in Ukraine.

The United States has never cared the tiniest bit about Ukraine or its welfare, and certain groups in Ukraine have been extremely foolish to believe otherwise.

The United States cares about hurting Russia, let the chips fall the chips fall where they may, including the health and growth of Ukraine. “Collateral damage” is what they call it in all of their many bombing campaigns.

Ukraine means no more to America than do the women and children of Yemen or Syria or Venezuela.

John Chuckman

EXPANSION OF A COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN CBC NEWS

 

“Obama senior adviser Valerie Jarrett offers an intimate look behind the scenes of his presidency

“One of the most influential black women of the 21st century talks about her time in the White House”

 

Gee, does she talk about the CIA’s “Kill Lists” put into Obama’s inbox regularly for his signature?

I cannot be sentimental about this man.

The boyish smile was so deceptive and deceives people still. It deceived me when he first took office. I liked him in the beginning and thought him very promising.

But there is the intrusive fact that he bombed people somewhere for every single day of his eight years in office.

He killed literally hundreds of thousands across a number of countries, made a chaos out of Libya, started the horrors in Syria, ran a coup in Ukraine, and created America’s extrajudicial killing program with drones.

There is nothing sweet or nice to remember. A very dark figure.

________________________

Response to a comment saying Obama lacked Trump’s mental illness:

Yes, he did, except that he is almost certainly something of a psychopath with the all smiling he did and all the killing he signed off on, psychopathy not qualifying so much as a mental illness as simply an “outlier” condition which is repeated in a small portion of the human population over and over, like albinism or autism or freckles.

He even “joked” once, saying to a group of associates, “Say, I’m pretty good at this killing stuff!” Well, it doesn’t get more stomach-churning than that.

Of course, he tolerated and supported such terrible efforts as Joe Biden convincing him that America needed a massive new drone-based CIA extrajudicial-killing industry or Hillary Clinton’s terrible advocacy at the State Department for inducing chaos in Libya and an effort to repeat its success afterward in Syria.

Such is the human material required to head the American empire in our time. The empire requires almost a constant flow of aggression and bloodshed as part of its maintenance work, to say nothing of its expansion plans.

Only those emotionally-equipped to support that effort need apply for the job of President. With some, like Trump, it’s pretty clear early-on what is happening, but with others, like Obama, it does require a bit of time to understand. He is, after all, well known as being an extremely secretive man, a required characteristic for his tough record of going after whistle-blowers and those who leak things to the press.

Surprising how popular he remains, but then most people don’t really explore the details of events, even when it comes to killing hundreds of thousands of people and making refugees of millions. What they do know is comfortably confirmed to them, day after day, in America’s press and broadcasting, an activity which is an important part of their job.

And remember, the famous truth that millions of people, ordinary decent people, in the Soviet Union literally wept when the death of Stalin was announced.

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY TOM LUONGO IN RUSSIA INSIDER

 

“Trump Folds at G-20 on Everything

“To the neocons. “Welcome to the end of Trump’s presidency…He has become Bush the Lesser with arguably better hair.”

 

I agree with the thrust of this piece by Tom Luongo.

I have been saying much the same thing, with some different emphasis.

It almost makes me smile when I see pieces on the Internet still displaying the naive belief that Trump is “out there” fighting the good fight against the forces of evil in Washington, pieces written by people who have adopted Trump’s vision of himself as revelation.

What can you say when people so deceive themselves?

But there is, and always has been, a great deal of self-deception in the world.

It’s what makes cults and fads and great scams and meaningless political movements possible, and are those very things not major landmarks on the American social and political landscape?

Trump is a kind of gigantic bad joke in fact. He is bereft of any real knowledge of history, itself a common trait in America, or of much else outside the field of fleecing people out of their money, which very much represents his life’s work. Vision from this man? To embrace him as a source of vision is a kind of sad public confession.

And he has this inner conviction, much resembling an intense, cultish religious conviction, or perhaps the delusion of a crazed person, that he represents “the great man” able to lift America out of its sleepwalking and lethargy.

As that old Neocon and worker for American empire, Madeleine Albright, conferred a title on the cause for which she so mightily laboured, the “indispensable country,” so Trump sees himself as a kind of indispensable man working for the same cause.

And a good many naive people believe him, just as many people, many in perhaps more influential positions in Washington, accept Madeleine Albright’s view of America.

It is all self-delusion, bred of the immense, corrupting influences of great wealth and power. The wealthy actually almost always regard themselves as somehow exceptional apart from the mere fact of their wealth. It is perhaps an extension of the old Puritan doctrine that material success and prosperity only display God’s special acknowledgement of an individual’s worthiness. And just so, America’s power establishment. That provides the nourishing environment for American Exceptionalism, a very real and palpable faith.

At the level of Trump’s supporters, many a bit lower on the social-economic totem pole, the sense of exceptionalism came out of a postwar period when American workers sometimes reached the level of a genuinely privileged working class. You know, it’s very easy to fool yourself with the idea that such success represents your own special merits. American politicians and elites have traditionally been only too happy to foster the belief.

But the situation resulted not from any special merit of American workers. Nor from any special magic of American society endowing its people with special properties. It represented a temporary set of circumstances resulting from the collapse of much of the world in a great war and America’s unique position, relatively unscathed by the war, of being able to supply a great part of the world’s demands, thus producing jobs and incomes for American workers that were indeed exceptional by world standards.

Thus, the appeal of Trump’s empty slogan about making America great again. What he is really saying is about bringing back the glories of the 1950s, the time of the birth of another slogan, the American Dream. It is obviously an impossible expectation and an impossible task, but what did I say above about there’s always a lot of self-deception in society?

And slogans, when they are timed right, much like advertising jingles, find a new batch of willing believers, at least for a while. Another of America’s great Trump-like promoter types, P. T. Barnum, famously said there was “a new sucker born every minute.”

Anyway, this hopeful illusion plus lots of rhetoric about keeping America free of others who aren’t entitled to share the Dream – migrants, refugees, foreigners in general – is how Trump keeps his pretty much hopeless political base fired up. Of course, he cannot succeed, but the self-deception is enough to get him by in office. Broken election promises are an accepted reality in American politics, and Trump’s are no different for being based in fantasy.

It cannot be 1950 again. No matter how hard he tries, and he cannot make it so. He perhaps believes, having sold so many condo units in the past based in part on illusions that he is capable of carrying it off on an immensely grander scale. But that is no more possible than commanding the winds and waves to halt.

He likes to think he is brave and tough with an iron will and, yes, that he is indispensable. But he is not, and his even holding and keeping office has been under assault by the people who really run America, its power establishment, from the beginning.

Of course, virtually the opposite is true of his personal qualities. In his drive to be seen as a figure worthy of a place on Mount Rushmore, he has surrendered virtually everything of the precious little he once seemed to understand and embrace to America’s power establishment, featuring today, as it does, a major role for the Neocon cult.

He works strenuously for their interests now and does so, not necessarily out of any native conviction, but out of cowardice, a quality he has quietly displayed his whole life despite all the bombast and bluster. He wants to stay in office and is ready to do just about anything to be allowed.

And that’s what makes him an exceptionally dangerous figure. The power establishment already had been on its own new tear for a while, a tear to re-establish its once almost unquestioned authority in the world despite America’s relative economic decline for decades. Obama served them well with wars and threats and coups and defense and intelligence budgets, despite his public image of seeming progressive and peaceful.

The relative decline which preoccupies American elites concerned with their continued influence in the world is reflected for Trump’s base in the virtual disappearance of America’s almost-elite working class and the gradual melting away of real incomes for much of the lower middle class over decades as America’s unique postwar economic position gradually eroded away.

So, they cheer him on to “make America great again,” but he has become preoccupied, apart from the sheer impossibility of his original goal, with just hanging onto office and maybe having a bit of luck here or there so that he can say, “See, I did that!”

And, boy, have we all learned how he loves to be able to say those words when it comes to just about anything, “See, I did that!” It is pathetic and childish and dangerous.

And surely at some point he has realized that his general assumptions about making the world into 1950 again are hopeless, but there is a way still to affect “America’s greatness,” and that is through the program of the power establishment and its Neocon inner cult. He has signed on with full enthusiasm to show them what he can do.

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN PRAVDA

 

“Blame MH17 on Russia: International investigation turns into demonic circus”

 

Good summary of events. What has always most impressed me is the vivid memory of some early images I saw on the Internet of the wreckage on the ground.

In the frame of the pilot’s seat and in some of metal skin of the cabin, there were the clearest possible perfectly round holes, as would have been made by a machine gun or small-caliber canon from a fighter plane. The image was unmistakable.

Then, when after much delay, the pilot’s body was sent home for burial, his family were ordered not to open the coffin. I couldn’t help but wonder about that. Was it so they didn’t see bullet holes?

I just don’t know. There clearly was other damage too. The holes I saw were definitely not from missile warhead shrapnel, although other damage suggests that too.

The bottom line for me is the inordinate length of time deliberately taken. This was not a difficult case at all. Everything should have been out to the public within weeks, but it was not.

Also, the investigators failed to comprehensively collect evidence on the ground – something always demanded in such investigations. Locals still had pieces long after and likely still do. The considerable time the investigators took to get around to collecting material gave the Ukrainians an extended opportunity to fiddle with the site.

Investigators also refused to use certain data supplied by Russian authorities and did not allow Russian collaboration. Why?

And then we get periodic announcements, after long intervals of time, always with imprecise conclusions and no new hard evidence. The pattern resembles nothing we’ve ever seen before in a crash investigation. It just screams cover-up with the vague conclusions at each announcement. The Dutch have undoubtedly been put under intense pressure by America in defense of its interests in the coup-induced Ukrainian government, who I think more than likely shot the plane down in stupid error after stupidly not closing the air space over a war zone as they were required to do.

_________________________

Response to a comment:

The Dutch are pretty fair people, and that is part of why they were selected, for credibility. I’ve always thought highly of them.

But even honest people can be pressured behind the scenes.

Especially by a muscle-bound bully like today’s America, which busied itself back then with projects like overthrowing Ukraine’s elected government and lying about all the mercenaries fighting in Syria posed as jihadists and a whole bunch of other dirty operations.

Do you even know what Hillary’s scandal at Benghazi was about? What they were doing was collecting weapons and cut throats to ship to poor old Syria, assistance for all the creepy al-Nusrah and ISIS types. But some of the thugs killed the ambassador instead.

Clinton and Company also, we know, sent very limited amounts of Qaddafi’s stock of poison gas to help create a “red line” incident in Syria so that good old smiley Obama could begin bombing the crap out of them. It all went wrong in part thanks to Putin, providing still another reason for disliking him.

The US spent $5 billion on the Ukraine coup. We know that amount accidentally from big-mouthed former State Department Neocon, Victoria Nuland, the same charmer who was overheard once shouting “F-ck Europe!”

How would you react if some American thug of the quality of a Nuland or today’s Pompeo or Bolton told you that if you didn’t cooperate, you were going to endanger a $5 billion investment by the United States? And if you did that, there would be serious repercussions for Dutch investments and banking, etc.?

America today, sadly, is country almost without honor.

_____________________

Additional comment:

‘”It is also worth mentioning that the United States has not provided satellite images, the presence of which was announced immediately after the catastrophe,” Zakharova said as quoted on the website of the Russian Foreign Ministry.’

It should be noted that America’s “Keyhole” spy satellites have camera equipment not so very different from the space telescope. And we know these satellites are active especially in any area of conflict. Nothing could be more suspicious than the failure to produce the images.

___________________________

FOOTNOTE: A MUCH LATER STATEMENT FROM THE MALAYSIAN PRIME MINISTER AS QUOTED IN “SOUTHFRONT”

 

“WHERE IS THE EVIDENCE?”: MALAYSIAN PM SLAMS MH17 INVESTIGATION AS NOT IMPARTIAL AND POLITICALLY MOTIVATED

 

Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad said that the investigation into the 2014 crash of the Malaysia Airlines-operated Boeing in Ukraine was not conducted in an impartial manner, but was rather focused on simply pinning the blame on Russia for political reasons.

“For some reasons, Malaysia was not allowed to check the black box to see what happened. We don’t know why we are excluded from the examination but from the very beginning, we see too much politics in it and the idea was not to find out how this happened but seems to be concentrated on trying to pin it to the Russians. This is not a neutral kind of examination,“ the prime minister said, as quoted by the Malaysian National News Agency.

“They are accusing Russia but where is the evidence? We know the missile that brought down the plane is a Russian type missile, but it could also be made in Ukraine. You need strong evidence to show it was fired by the Russians, it could be by the rebels in Ukraine, it could be Ukrainian government because they too have the same missile”.

Both Malaysia and Russia were excluded from partaking in the investigation.

If one translates the recent remarks by the Malaysian prime minister from diplomatic language to direct speech, we see that he stated that Malaysia has little doubts that the MH17 was intentionally shot down by the Ukrainian government. He also points out that the side controlling the JIT and thus the investigation is concealing the criminals, hiding data, and limiting the participation of third parties in the ‘international’ investigation.

 

COMMENT ON CHARGES NOW LAID BY DUTCH INVESTIGATORS OF MH17

 

With the announcement of charges being laid by Dutch investigators, a British newspaper used the headline “MH17 suspects charged with murder over 298 deaths will likely escape justice”

What justice?

This American-appointed investigation has ignored all kind of evidence.

Including the fact that the Russians have shown that the BUK missile serial numbers found at the scene correspond to a unit sold to Ukraine many years ago.

The investigators have pulled this stunt of charging four men knowing full well that the individuals named cannot be extradited. They just wanted names for sensational headlines.

The entire performance is shameful.

Such a relatively simple crash, normally solved in weeks by professionals, has had its investigation stretched to years, with still no clear and indisputable findings.

Many pieces of evidence supplied by Russia were simply cast aside by these investigators. Pieces of physical evidence were left on the ground, some of them still in the possession of locals. The effort to collect physical evidence, normally meticulous and scrupulous after air crashes, was careless, and the effort came only after a substantial delay, allowing Ukraine plenty of time to sanitize things before investigators set to work. Still other pieces of potential evidence were never supplied, such as images or radar tracks from an American spy satellite working over the area at the time.

Shame on the Dutch, a people I’ve always admired, but there they are, under the American thumb, America trying to protect a coup-installed government from humiliation over its incompetence.