Systematically Reconstructing the Shoot-Down of the Malaysian Airliner MH17: The Guilt Is Clear and Damning

By Eric Zuesse

Global Research, August 07, 2014

Region: Russia and FSU

Theme: Intelligence, Media Disinformation

In-depth Report: UKRAINE REPORT

On July 22nd, zerohedge bannered sarcastically, “Flight MH-17 Black Boxes To Be Analyzed In ‘Impartial’ London,” and reported that they would be analyzed by the U.S.-allied, anti-Russian, pro-Ukrainian, British Government.

A mere four days later, on the 26th, CBS News  headlined the results, “Black box findings consistent with missile blast,” but they declined to report who, or even what country’s government, had actually done the analysis. CBS reported merely: “Unreleased data from a black box retrieved from the wreckage of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 in Ukraine show findings consistent with the plane’s fuselage being hit multiple times by shrapnel from a missile explosion. ‘It did what it was designed to do,’ a European air safety official told CBS News, ‘bring down airplanes.’ The official described the finding as ‘massive explosive decompression.’” That’s all. Nothing more.
However, this “explosive decompression” would have happened with bullets too, if the pressurized airliner were punctured by bullets instead of shrapnel. Why did that person (whomever it was) assume that the plane had been hit by a missile’s shrapnel, instead of by hails of bullets fired by machine-guns from a fighter-plane flying alongside it? Maybe because Britain is allied with the Obama-installed Ukrainian Government, against the anti-Government rebels who have no airplanes at all and thus cannot get gunmen 33,000 feet up into the air to shoot directly at the Malaysian airliner’s pilot, and that that’s what actually brought this plane down. We’ll show that the latter scenario is, indeed, correct.

Only idiots would trust Britain to interpret these black boxes to determine what and who brought down that plane. But, fortunately, the physical evidence lying on the ground at the site in Ukraine was photographed very quickly by locals there and uploaded to the Internet sometimes before any fighters and any governments were able to tamper with anything; and there happened to be one modest-looking item found at the site that tells a remarkably complete and entirely credible and convincing account of how this plane came down.

It tells that the Ukrainian Government itself did this airliner-downing, with bullets, not with shrapnel. You’ll see the evidence laid out before you here; you won’t need to rely upon the British Government to tell you how this event happened. The evidence will tell you that.

On July 30th, the retired Lufthansa pilot and published historian Peter Haisenko issued his “Shocking Analysis of the ‘Shooting Down’ of Malaysian MH17,” in which an extremely close-in photo of the most important piece of physical evidence regarding this event is shown — it’s the side-panel on the left-hand side of the cockpit directly where the downed plane’s pilot was seated — and this photo shocked me, too.

Here, first, is that side-panel shown inserted back onto its airliner, so that you can see precisely what and where this piece of the wreckage was on the plane. You will immediately notice the big gaping hole that had been shot through the side-panel where the pilot sits — in other words, targeting directly  at the plane’s pilot.

This is incredibly precise targeting, of a specific person, and not merely  of the far larger body of an airliner. A ground-based missile-shot fired from 33,000 feet below cannot achieve that gaping hole precisely where the pilot sits. A fighter jet plane that’s escorting the airliner into the conflict-zone can. This is how:

Here is that side-panel shown close-up, from Haisenko. Some of the projectiles that pierced it, as you can see, were inbound into the plane (or bent inward), and some of them were coming out of the plane (or bent outward). In other words, going back again to the full-cockpit photo, and if there were two fighter jets escorting this plane into the conflict-zone, and if one of them was below the pilot and cockpit to the left, and the other was below them to the right, and if both of those fighter-planes then suddenly fired machine-gun magazines directly into the pilot, so that the bullets that were coming from his right exited outward from this left-side cockpit-panel, while the bullets that were coming into the pilot from his left entered into and through this cockpit-panel and bent the panel inward to the cabin, then the evidence would be able to look exactly like what we see it as being here — but otherwise, probably not (and we’ll get to that in a moment).

Here is the entirety  of the side-panel piece that so struck Haisenko.

Haisenko further managed to post to the Web an astoundingly clear and detailed photo of this cockpit-panel, so that even individual screws and their deformations can be seen and examined now by the general public. Looking at that, some of the holes to the aluminum-layer on the plane’s outside are splayed outward as if the projectile were outbound, while the plastic layer toward the plane’s inside is obviously splayed inward, and this divergence there, between the inward-folding plastic layer and the outward-folding aluminum layer, can indicate that the aluminum layer was getting pulled back either by the wind on the descent downward to the ground, or else by the ground itself as the panel impacted with the ground — that aluminum outer-layer didn’t always have to be ripped into an outward-folding position by a projectile’s actually coming  outward. It could sometimes result instead from the wind-impact and/or the ground-impact. Moreover (and this is very important here), since a bullet has a sharp point going into an object, even an inbound bullet can peel outward  in a rush the relatively brittle aluminum outer layer, by the mere fact of its own impact, violently throwing that aluminum layer sideways  as the point pierces and forces that aluminum outward, while the more-yielding inner plastic layer simply yields into the direction that the bullet is traveling, and is pushed and then pulled by that bullet inward into the plane, as the bullet thence proceeds onward into the plane. A shrapnel projectile, by contrast, doesn’t have a bullet’s sharp front, and so would not produce such outward flares in the aluminum layer  while penetrating into the plane from the plane’s outside.

So, what is seen in this photo is 100% consistent with the projectiles going in both directions (inbound and outbound), and with the projectiles being bullets instead of  shrapnel.

Haisenko examined the many online photos of this wreckage, and he saw nothing like the concentration of projectiles that were focusing on that pilot, such as is displayed by this side-panel: it’s unique. His article says, “This aircraft was not hit by a missile in the central portion.” He’s a retired airline pilot, and so he knows how missile-shrapnel-punctures are splayed over a rather broad surface-area of a plane, and all of them are inbound into the plane; a shrapnel-spray onto a plane isn’t  bi-directional. Here is a photo of such a plane that was hit by missile-shrapnel in Iraq.

In my article on August 5th, I noted, regarding that photo:

As you can see there, a plane that’s hit by a ground-fired missile, instead of by bullets fired from an attack-plane only a few yards away, has the damage spread rather widely over its body, not concentrated into a tiny area, such as to where the plane’s pilot is seated. Certainly, the contrast between that photo and this one is enormous.

Furthermore, note also that the shrapnel damage to that plane comes from above it, which is where missiles usually hit a plane from, releasing their shrapnel from above, down onto the plane. By contrast, the hail of bullets to the Malaysian plane’s pilot came from below the plane, aiming upward at the cockpit, from both sides of the cockpit.

Furthermore, note also that all of the holes appear to be inbound into the plane, none outbound.

It’s radically different: what hit the Malaysian airliner wasn’t  missile-shrapnel.

What, then, could have been the military planes that actually did this?

On 17 July 2014 the pro-junta Kiev Post  headlined “Russian military plane shot down Ukrainian Su-25 aircraft in Ukraine,” and reported that, “The Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council (NSDC) has said that a Russian military aircraft launched a missile strike against a Su-25 aircraft of the Ukrainian Armed Forces over Ukrainian territory on Wednesday, July 16.” So, even the Ukrainian military admitted that they had Su-25 jets flying in the conflict-zone. But Su-25s are designed only for low-altitude combat and bombing; so, Su-25s would be the type of planes that the rebels would likeliest succeed at bringing down (and did on July 16th), as opposed to the higher-flying Su-27s, which are far less likely to be hit by the rebels’ ground-based fire. (There’s no independent confirmation that “Russian military aircraft” had actually been involved in the incident reported in the Kiev Post;  and there have been numerous instances when the Ukrainian Government charged that there was such direct Russian involvement and it was subsequently established that there hadn’t been any at all. Obama and the Ukrainian Government want a pretext to extend their war into Russia, but Russia has not  been cooperating with their desire. Thus, “(NSDC) has said that a Russian military aircraft launched a missile strike” there was probably reporting a lie.)

During the very late afternoon in Ukraine on July 17th — the same day as the headline “Russian military plane shot down Ukrainian Su-25 aircraft in Ukraine” — the Malaysian airliner, MH-17, went down. The most-thorough article on the plane’s flight-path and timeline was published by Twenty First Century Wire on July 25th here. Two of the fighter jets it notes to be in the Ukrainian Government’s air force are:

“Su-25 ‘Frogfoot’ fighter – Ceiling: 23,000 ft/ 7,000 m, or up to 32,800 ft/ 10,000 m(depending aircraft modifications)

Su-27 ‘Flanker’ fighter – Ceiling: 64,000 ft/ 19,000 m”

Su-25s could barely have escorted the Malaysian airliner into the conflict-zone at around 33,000 feet where it was hit, but Su-27s definitely could easily have done that job.

On July 21st, The Aviationist  bannered “All flights, including Malaysian B777, were being escorted by Ukrainian Su-27 Flanker jets over Eastern Ukraine” and (though in language that’s cumbersome to understand) reported that, “Six fully armed Flankers [or Su-27s] have always been in the sky especially when the other Ukrainian Air Force airplanes such as transporters and attackers like Fulcrums and Rooks were in the East of Ukraine,” and that, “Provided the Su-27s were really escorting or (more likely) watching from their CAP station,” the Malaysian airliner could have been hit by a Buk missile 33,000 feet below from the ground, just as the Ukrainian Government was saying, notwithstanding its “escorting or (more likely) watching from their CAP station.” The speculation continued on like that, stenographcally following the Ukrainian Government’s line (that ground-fired Buks did it, via rebels, not via the Government), by asserting that, “in the wake of the downing of the Su-25 [on July 16th], the operators inside the Buk [what Buk? – The Aviationist  was merely assuming this] may have mistaken the Boeing 777 shadowed by/near two Flankers for a high-value plane of the Ukrainian Air Force. On their radar screens, the sight of a large plane with two accompanying (or circling in CAP not too far away) fighter jets was completely new and may only mean the Ukrainians were escorting an important plane. And that would be the reason why they downed it.” If  ”they” downed it.

The Twenty First Century Wire article also noted that, “The BBC reported on July 17th:

‘Ukraine’s SBU security service has confiscated recordings of conversations between Ukrainian air traffic control officers and the crew of the doomed airliner, a source in Kiev has told Interfax news agency.’”
However, the BBC subsequently removed from their online article the statement that was quoted there, perhaps as part of their cleansing history of things that are subsequently determined by the managers to be inappropriate for readers to know. However, that quoted assertion does appear also in a web-search (quoted at other sites), where it is also attributed to the BBC. Perhaps, then, after the Snowden affair, more-ironclad means of whitewashing “history” will become established, so as to cleanse “history” of the sorts of things that aren’t supposed to be known by the wrong people (such as are you and I). It’s not just the Ukrainian Government that retrospectively removes what it wishes the public not to know (such as radar-records).

The Twenty First Century Wire article also mentioned that, “On June 4, 2014, Janes Defense reported that Kiev have recently returned to service two other higher performance fighters, including the Su-27 ‘Flanker’ and the MiG-29 ‘Fulcrum’ fighters.” Moreover: “According to IHS Jane’s World Air Forces data, Ukraine still possesses a fleet of 24 Su-24Ms, 36 Su-25s, 45 Su-27s, 20 An-26s and 140 MiG-29s,” but regarding the MIGs, “39 of these were captured” by Russia when Crimea broke away from Ukraine and rejoined Russia, of which it had been a part between 1783 and 1954. Obama and his regime demand that Crimea be returned to Ukraine, which the Crimeans never ever voted to become part of. He supports the Ukrainian Government’s promise to seize it by military means.

Some readers have objected that it’s difficult to bring down a plane by air-to-air fire. One person cited the shooter’s need to take into account the other plane’s evasive maneuvers, and to aim at where the target-plane will be when the bullets are expected to get there. This is a valid point, if the targeted plane is an enemy’s fighter-jet. That’s called a “dogfight in the air.” However, if the target-plane isn’t military, and if the pilot in the target-plane has been given to understand that the fighter jets that are accompanying him are friendly, he’s just a sitting duck for those “escorts,” and the targeters can align themselves exactly where they want to be, and coordinate when they will jointly commence firing at him. The result will be like this side-panel is.

There was another expert who happened to be shocked by this side-panel and who concluded from it what Haisenko does. As I have previously noted and explained in detail, the first member of the international investigating team to arrive on the scene in order to negotiate with the locals the safety of the entire team that was to come into this civil war area, was immediately struck by the fact that, “There have been two or three pieces of fuselage that have been really pockmarked with what almost looks like machine-gun fire, very very strong machine-gun fire.” However, he didn’t examine it then as closely as Haisenko has now done, to such a fine point as to have noticed that some of those bullet-holes came from the plane’s right, and some came from the plane’s left. That fact is even more remarkable than that the projectiles were probably bullets, because this fact confirms that they actually had to be.

I also made note in that article that:

The latest report from the intelligence community was headlined on August 3rd by Robert Parry, “Flight 17 Shoot-Down Scenario Shifts,” and he revealed there that, “Contrary to the Obama administration’s public claims blaming eastern Ukrainian rebels and Russia for the shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, some U.S. intelligence analysts have concluded that the rebels and Russia were likely not at fault and that it appears Ukrainian government forces were to blame, according to a source briefed on these findings. This judgment — at odds with what President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry have expressed publicly – is based largely on the absence of U.S. government evidence that Russia supplied the rebels with a Buk anti-aircraft missile system that would be needed to hit a civilian jetliner flying at 33,000 feet, said the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity.”

It’s actually based on lots more than that; it’s based not on an absence of evidence, but on positive proof that the Ukrainian Government shot the plane down, and even proving how it was done.

Unlike what Parry’s source alleged, there does exist powerful and convincing evidence of how this plane was downed, and it’s that side-panel.

What, then, of the possibility that the inbound and outbound bullet-holes might have been produced by just a single Su-27? That scenario has been proposed, but it fails to account for the event, and here is why: The very moment when that gunman poured his hale of bullets into the pilot and thereby pulverized and blew open that huge gaping hole where the pilot was sitting, the plane’s pressurized air would have immediately rushed out that hole. It might have broken into pieces within seconds. As Haisenko said, due to the air-pressure-shock to the plane, “The largely intact fragments of the rear sections broke in mid air at the weaker points of contstruction [sp],” thereby producing “the widely scattered field of debris.”

I shall close with what I think is the most important fact of all:

No matter whom the trigger-pullers at the bottom of any power-and-authority hierarchy are who actually did this (gunmen or else missilemen), and regardless of whether they even did it intentionally at all, or else entirely by mistake, a far deeper and indisputable reality is that “Obama Definitely Caused the Malaysian Airliner to Be Downed.” That’s true in the same sense that Adolf Hitler definitely caused the Holocaust to happen: It wouldn’t have happened but for him and the decisions and choices that that person at the very top of the power-structure made, which were merely being carried out by his subordinates.

He is the one person who should be held accountable the most of all. Obama intends the ethnic-cleansing campaign that is occurring in southeastern Ukraine to get rid of the people who live in the areas that overwhelmingly elected as Ukraine’s President in 2010 the man whom Obama’s February 2014 coup in Ukraine overthrew. Without that ethnic-cleansing campaign and the consequent need of the residents there to shoot down the Government’s planes, even the Obama-team’s explanation — that the aircraft-downing was a case of the residents there firing upon what they thought to be a Government bomber — wouldn’t have existed at all, because there wouldn’t then have been the ethnic-cleansing campaign for them to be protecting themselves from. So: even if the downing of that airliner hadn’t  been done intentionally by the Ukrainian Government as a “false flag event” to blame the victims in order to get the EU to go along with stiffened sanctions against Russia for helping the rebels, those sanctions would still  be an outrage: morally, practically, and also violations of international law: aggression that’s based on lies. The fact that this was a false-flag event by Obama’s people only makes it, and the current U.S. President, an outrage squared:  an outrage upon an outrage.

There need to be EU sanctions now against the United States — my own country — or else the EU itself is as rotten as the U.S. has become. Instead, the EU has joined Obama’s sanctions against Russia. America under Clinton, Bush, and Obama, has performed fine for its aristocracy (which control them all), but abominably for everyone else. Is that the kind of model the EU wishes to copy? If so, it should end, because the EU’s leadership then seeks to go the way of the U.S., aristocratically controlled, against the public, a model that’s shameful — scandalous, in fact: something not to be perpetrated against anyone, neither the victims in Obama’s MH-17 downing, nor the victims in his ongoing ethnic-cleansing campaign against the residents in Ukraine’s southeast. Obama’s crimes are much bigger than just the downing of that single airliner.

There is a subordinate fact that extends from this central fact of Obama’s clear guilt — his guilt that would apply regardless of whether some Buk missile system had been fired by rebels to protect themselves and their families from being bombed by planes of the Kiev government: Even if that were the case, the rebels’ measure in that matter was purely defensive. Contrast that with the situation that has been described here: The situation that has been described here is that the Kiev government intentionally brought this airliner down. That’s not an innocent error; it is instead an enormous intentional war crime, planned as such. If the rebels made a tragic error, by falling for a trap in which the Kiev government had escorted the Malaysian airliner into the war-zone hoping that the rebels would make such an error, then who is the actual guilty party? Is it Obama and the Kiev regime that he installed in order to do this ethnic cleansing so that Ukraine in the future will have only anti-Russian Presidents? Or is it the victims of that ethnic cleansing?

No matter how one looks at this, the guilt is clear and damning against Barack Obama: first, by his installing this ethnic-cleansing regime into power in Ukraine; and then, by his continued support of those bloody psychopaths whom he had empowered there.

No matter what, Barack Obama has massive innocent blood on his hands. And the victims of the MH-17 disaster are only a relatively small part of that much bigger picture.

Thus far, the penalties have fallen on Russia and Vladimir Putin, not on the Ukrainian Government and Barack Obama.

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of  They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010,  and of  CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.