John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY OLIVIA BLAIR IN THE INDEPENDENT

 

I think the most fascinating and overlooked aspect of the Hillsborough disaster is the way it is was easy for those in authority to enforce for decades an “official view” of the event, a view which we now know was completely different from the truth.

You might not think at first it possible in so large an event involving many deaths for officials to succeed as they did in lying, but they did succeed and for decades.

It could serve to teach us all a lesson about what goes on at a higher level in our governments day-in and day-out.

The public is fed and it swallows the same kind of garbage explanations about even more serious events, such as the real nature of the war in Syria or the downing of airliner MH-17.

If officials decide on an explanation for something – and the press colludes in supporting it, which it always does – then that becomes history, and the truth does not exist.

We are literally immersed in such practices today by our national governments.

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN THE INDEPENDENT

 

That must be some journal to publish such a feeble idea and some academic to come up with it.

It is simply ridiculous work to be called science or research or even an idea.

The standards in academia have fallen almost everywhere and thus the rise in pseudo-journals for second-raters trying to get published.

Our world can be divided into things which are simply facts and all the rest, including fears and lies and nonsense.

One certifiable fact of today’s world is that governments have invested increasingly in elaborate lies and misrepresentations to their people. This reflects both increased prosperity with so much more at risk than ever before and the world-scale of so many events and activities.

In Britain, the examples of Tony Blair’s stream of lies or the mysterious death of Doctor Kelly surely resonate with many ordinary souls who could never be called “conspiracy theorists.”

In the United States, the list is huge, as you might expect in a country whose establishment focuses on controlling events everywhere and telling others how to live their lives.

Another fact is that the very term, “conspiracy theorist,” was coined by the CIA decades ago to be used to disparage honest people who just want to know the truth about some important events such as the Kennedy assassination.

That term was picked up by the press and is still used to this day. It’s a rather sad reflection of the state of our press and its relationship to the government and the establishment.

Propaganda articles like this one – The Independent regularly does them to keep the term “conspiracy theorist” alive and flourishing – always dredge up the skeptics about moon landing, clearly in the eyes of most people a paranoid fringe group. We hardly need a professor’s formula to determine the validity of what is complete nonsense.

But such articles never deal with the really hard cases. The lies of Tony Blair. The murder of Doctor Kelly , a man who knew too much about WMD. The downing of Flight MH 17 and the unacceptable investigation of it. The American-induced coup in Ukraine. The murderous efforts of Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Israel to topple Assad and turn Syria into the kind of broken mini-states we see in Iraq. The infinite lies that made a million deaths in Iraq possible. Israel’s explanations for the horrors of Gaza. And the list goes on and on.

Great powers playing dirty games lie and hide what they do every day, and calling someone a “conspiracy theorist” who says so is just derogatory, not informative.

It actually resembles, albeit in a lighter vein, calling someone who questions Israel’s brutal treatment of millions an “anti-Semite.” You might not think such a nonsense dirty tactic would work, but it is repeated day after day.

It was Hitler – one of history’s great liars and therefore an authority on the subject – who explained the concept of “the big lie.” Say even something outrageous often enough, and people will believe it, at least enough of them to matter.

Indeed that is a founding, unspoken principle of almost all advertising and of almost all our news sources today. And that is no “conspiracy theory,” just a hard fact.

 

 

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE THE TORONTO STAR

Sorry, but your calling Putin a bully is mighty shabby stuff, Justin Trudeau.

It truly makes you sound like Stephen Harper, likely the most dishonest and disliked politician in Canadian history, a true bully, if you will.

I do not see how there’s really anything you must tell Putin, unless you count repeating some boilerplate phrases borrowed from America’s sprawling junkyard of needless attacks and propaganda.

If there is a legitimate bully on the world’s stage today, it is, without question, America, responsible as it is for the deaths, destruction, and refugees of Syria.

It is America also that is responsible for the mess in Ukraine, putting an illegitimate government in place by coup and then supporting its awful policies of intolerance and war.

And even in the case of Flight MH-17, it is America who has kept things hidden. It never released data from its radars and spy satellite – which was overhead at the time – and that is mighty suspicious. Likely it was afraid of seeing its coup-induced government in Ukraine embarrassed. So we’ve had long delays and much evidence never used and a useless report.

Putin is the most able leader on the international scene today, a totally reasonable man, and a far more honest one than Obama or Harper or Cameron, all of whom lie regularly about matters like Syria. Putin’s country, too, is certainly destined to be a great one in future, given its endowments of natural resources and human ingenuity. It is extremely short-sighted to use American trash-talk about a leader Russians embrace as strongly as they do Putin.

We should welcome working with a reasonable man like Putin for many reasons, but if some chose not to do so, they can at least avoid bellowing undiplomatic nonsense for a few cheap votes, as you did with your campaign statement.

That’s not how your much-respected father would have acted in these circumstances – witness his independent-minded judgment and policies about Castro’s Cuba – and in the case of Russia today, Pierre Trudeau’s way would be far more productive than bellowing.

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN THE GUARDIAN

The Dutch investigation into the downing of Flight MH-17 is most disgraceful air-crash investigation I’ve ever heard of, leaving out, as it does, crucial evidence. The report may be understood as the Warren Commission of aircraft-crash investigations, a nickname very suitable since it was produced by the Dutch to the exclusion of other parties under intense American pressure.

Pieces of the plane actually remain on the ground in Ukraine.

The manufacturer of the Buk system was not consulted and evidence they attempted to submit was not used.

Russian government data were ignored.

Ukrainian Air Force records were never examined.

And shabbiest of all, America’s data in the form of radar tracks and satellite images were never examined because they were never offered and never demanded.

The very fact that America never offered data which we know to a certainty exists – an American spy satellite was directly overhead at the time of the crash – is a terribly incriminating fact left untouched by this “investigation.”

What these folks are telling us, after a supposed year of investigative work, is pretty much what we knew on day one: the plane was brought down by someone firing some form of missile.

Contrary to some careless newspaper headlines, the report is not even conclusive about the type of missile, describing it as resembling Buk.

General readers may not know but the Buk system – a Russian-made ground-to-air system – has been produced for decades, and there are a number of versions of it.

Earlier versions of it are no longer in use in Russia, but they very much are in Ukraine. The Russian manufacturer of Buk itself conducted tests and concluded that an older version of the missile, fired from Ukraine-controlled territory, was responsible for damage they simulated in tests.

Russia has not provided the missile to separatists in Eastern Ukraine.

If American data had been examined and released, I’d be glad to embrace the results whatever they were, but there is only one plausible reason for keeping them secret: they demonstrate something embarrassing to America’s coup-installed government in Ukraine.

The investigation thus has served the purpose of a government white paper or special investigation: eaten up time to reduce the public clamor over an issue and allow people to forget.

It is a shabby, shabby effort, just like so many American-induced dark acts in today’s world, such as its phony war against ISIS in Syria which in truth tends to support ISIS as it does what America wants doing.

______________________________

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.

 

 

POSTED COMMENTS TO A STORY IN THE GUARDIAN

 

 

David Cameron is America’s biggest fool abroad.

This entire adventure, the CIA’s causing a coup in Ukraine and precipitating a civil war, was a gigantic mistake, a mistake fraught with great risk from the beginning and serving no purpose but to gain a psychological advantage over Russia.

Not only that, but it has always involved the support of neo-Nazi and fascist-militia types, present in Ukraine in sizable numbers and heavily armed.

Russia could literally sweep Ukraine off the map in weeks, but it hasn’t done so and has shown not the least intention of doing so.

So leave the situation alone.

Ukraine’s current government is so incompetent it will fall eventually anyway. It has thrown away a good part of its army to achieve nothing. It has shot down a civilian airliner without ever acknowledging the fact. It has thrown Ukraine’s economy into turmoil. It has endangered its own energy supplies.

These are dangerous clowns, and the only people genuinely happy with them are frat-boys and plug-uglies guffawing in Langley, Virginia.

Of course, I realize Cameron is by this act genuflecting to Washington. Possibly even he realizes in private how stupid it is, but he is a card-carrying member of the cult worshipping American pre-eminence.

___________________________________

Response to a reader who took exception to my comment about shooting down Flight MH-17:

The simple fact that the investigators are silent tells you a great deal, silent under American influence.

Believe me, if any evidence showed the Russians responsible, we’d hear about it.

It is not that complex a job to determine what happened. It’s been done many times in many places.

The key fact always left out of the story is that America has the world’s most sophisticated spy satellites, called Keyhole Satellites. They cover the earth daily, and one of them was directly overhead the area at the time.

Where are the pictures? Where are the various data tracks?

Simple answer: hidden.

Also, as you should know, America has some of the world’s most sophisticated radars, and believe me, some of them are always trained on the Russian border.

So where are the radar tracks, which absolutely must exist for this event?

Hidden, clearly.

And what is the only reasonable explanation for withholding all the evidence?

To prevent the West from being horrified by what the incompetent Ukrainian military has done.

After all, the mess in Ukraine is their baby, so to speak.

_____________________________

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.