Puppet MastersS


Take 2

YouTube clip "proving" pro-Russian rebels shot down Flight MH-17 full of holes

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Almost exactly one year ago, the world was nearly brought to the verge of a global war by proxy involving the US and Russia (and Europe and China) over a staged, false flag YouTube clip "proving" the Assad regime had used toxic gas (gas that was made in Britain as it was later revealed) to kill several hundred civilians in the country's ongoing war against what subsequently turned out to be al-Qaeda funded and trained rebels (and which now are fighting across the border with another former US-puppet state, Iraq). Luckily, back then an all out confrontation was averted in the last minute over what was ultimately nothing but a gambit by Qatar to have its gas pipeline enter Europe and leave Gazprom in the cold (literally and metaphorically).

A year later, it is deja vu all over again, when the same energy and geopolitical tensions (Europe, natural gas, etc) are once again at the frontline, and while the theater of combat may be different, the same key players - Russia and the US - are once again behind the proxy conflict in Ukraine, and where Gazprom is once again the fulcrum party. The only missing link was a YouTube clip which would bring the world to the edge of war again.

Moments ago Ukraine released what may be just that missing "YouTube" link, when it unveiled a 2:23 minute video supposedly proving that "militants of "Bes" group shot down with a Russian anti-aircraft missile a Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777 passenger jet heading from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur."

Bomb

No surprise! Once again, Israel targets Palestinians with DIME weapons

al-Shifa hospital staff
© Basel Yazouri / ActiveStillsStaff at al-Shifa Hospital treat a victim of Israel’s current attack on Gaza.
Doctors treating patients in Gaza have accused Israel of using experimental weapons on Palestinian civilians.

Addressing reporters at a press conference on Sunday, Youssef Abul Resh, undersecretary of the health ministry in Gaza, said, "Medical teams have registered injuries consistent with those caused by DIME [dense inert metal explosives] and other banned weapons."

He added, "Israel has mercilessly targeted Palestinian civilians, leaving many of them with life-threatening injuries and future handicaps."

In the last week, Israeli airstrikes have killed more than 190 people, eighty percent of them civilians, including at least 34 children.

Comment: See also:


Sherlock

Key facts that point toward Ukraine being responsible for downing Flight MH17

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Yesterday, we laid out extensively what the official Ukrainian case was when it came to "proof" that Russian separatists had launched the Buk missile which allegedly took down flight MH-17; we also highlighted several glaring inconsistencies and questions that still remained open after the "incriminatory" YouTube clip release. So far, any international response has been muted to this hastily prepared evidence of Russian involvement, although the day is still young.

So what about the Russian side? Below we present the key arguments made by Russia to suggest that not it, but Ukraine, was responsible for taking down the Malaysian Boeing.

As reported earlier by RIA, the Russian Defense Ministry says it had intercepted the activity of a Ukrainian radar system on the day the Malaysian plane went down in eastern Ukraine, the ministry's press service said Friday.

"Throughout the day on July 17, Russian means of radar surveillance intercepted the operation of the Buk-M1 battery's Kupol radar station located in the region of the populated area of Styla [30 kilometers south of Donetsk]," the press service said in a statement.

"The technical capabilities of the Buk-M1 allow the exchange of data on air targets between batteries of one battalion. Thus, the launch of rockets could have also occurred from any of the batteries deployed in the populated area of Avdeevka [8 kilometers north of Donetsk] or from Gruzsko-Zoryanskoe [25 kilometers east of Donetsk]," the ministry said.

Vader

Obama and the West's coup in Ukraine ultimately responsible for crash of Flight MH17

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A lot of things are questionable about what happened immediately before the Malaysian airliner with nearly 300 passengers was downed on June 17th, but those things concern only the immediate cause, and not the ultimate cause, including the motive that ultimately brought this plane down. The ultimate cause of this event is clear.

In the event's immediate cause, even the Ukrainian government - which instantly accused the anti-government rebels of having shot this plane down - said that rebels did it because rebels confused the civilian airliner with one of the Ukrainian government's troop-transport planes or bombers in the government's civil war against the people in that area. If that statement by the Ukrainian government is true, then here are pictures of the sorts of troops and bombs that these rebels were then trying to protect themselves and their families from:

(The first four photos below were posted here, while the fifth, the last, is from the youtube that is indicated.)

Top Secret

Moscow has no plans to seize black boxes from Flight MH17

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© RIA Novosti / Mikhail VoskresenskiyThe crash site of the Malaysian Boeing 777 outside Shakhtyorsk, Donetsk Region
Moscow has no plans to seize the flight recorders from the Malaysia Airlines flight MH17, which crashed in eastern Ukraine on Thursday, Sergey Lavrov, Russia's foreign minister, told Rossiya 24 channel.

The seizure of flight records would violate international law as it's up to relevant international agencies to investigate of the incident, he explained.

The analysis of the flight recorders "is the responsibility of ICAO [International Civil Aviation Organization]; it's the responsibility of those states which have the most direct connection to this tragedy - the Netherlands, Malaysia and the states whose citizens were on board, and of course Ukraine,"Lavrov said.

The minister also called on the UN Security Council to urgently launch an open and impartial investigation into the plane crash in Ukraine.

"We want international experts to arrive on the crash site as soon as possible and retrieve the flight recorders in an instant," the FM stressed. "Despite statements coming from Kiev, we have no plans to seize the flight recorders."

Black Magic

Bodies and debris from Flight MH17 rained down on Ukraine village

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© REUTERS/Maxim ZmeyevMembers of the Ukrainian Emergency Ministry carry a body at the crash site of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17, near the settlement of Grabovo in the Donetsk region July 19, 2014.
First came the loud explosion that made buildings rattle: then it started raining bodies.

One of the corpses fell through the rickety roof of Irina Tipunova's house in this sleepy village, just after Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 exploded high over eastern Ukraine, where pro-Russian separatists are fighting government forces.

"There was a howling noise and everything started to rattle. Then objects started falling out of the sky," the 65-year-old pensioner said in front of her grey-brick home.

"And then I heard a roar and she landed in the kitchen, the roof was broken," she said, showing the gaping hole made by the body when it came through the ceiling of the kitchen in an extension to the house.

The dead woman's naked body was still lying inside the house, next to a bed.

Light Saber

Sanctions done right: Russia bars entry to 12 American torturers and inquisitors involved in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib

Guantanamo
© Agence France-Presse/John MooreAn inmate being escorted in Guantanamo
Russia has responded to US sanctions against its officials and businessmen by banning 12 more Americans from entering the country. Ten of those in the list are implicated in the Abu Ghraib torture scandal, and two are connected to Guantanamo.

"We have mentioned before that it is futile to communicate with us in the language of sanctions. Such measures will not be allowed to pass without consequence," said a statement on the foreign ministry website.

Among the most high-profile targets are Rear Adm. Richard W. Butler the Commander, of the Guantanamo Joint Task Force, who is accused of "approved the use force to end the hunger strike among inmates", and Ricardo Sanchez, a retired general who commanded the Coalition Ground Forces in Iraq in 2003 and 2004, who was "directly responsible for the control of Abu Ghraib prison."

Most of the others on the "stop-list" are military personnel, who were found guilty of self-documented mistreatment and torture of Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib.

It also includes the high-profile US District Judge Gladys Kessler, who has repeatedly ruled on the legality of force feeding at Guantanamo's Camp Delta, though ironically, was responsible for the landmark ruling, passed in May, that bans the US Army from force feeding Syrian detainee Abu Wa'el Dhiab.
Guantanamo
© Agence France-Presse/John MooreAn inmate being escorted in Guantanamo
The Russian foreign ministry says that it is preparing further bans.
"The latest wave of sanctions over Ukraine will necessarily result in counter-measures. Firstly, the border is being closed to multiple American citizens, which they will discover upon submitting a visa application. Meanwhile, economic sanctions will have a boomerang effect, and harm US business interest on Russian territory, In essence, the US is punishing itself."
The initial round of sanctions and counter-sanctions between Moscow and Washington was set off with the passing of the Magnitsky Act in the US in 2012.The act intended to prevent free entry to several Russian officials connected with the death of Russian lawyer Sergey Magnitsky, who passed away while in police custody in 2009.

Comment: The sanctions are pretty much symbolic, much as the American sanctions on Russian businessmen, but at least they single out some of the most egregious criminals in the U.S. military, and those who support them.


Question

Best of the Web: 10 questions the Russians have for Ukraine after crash of MH17

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Russia’s Deputy Defense Minister Anatoly Antonov
Some Western states and Kiev rushed to find Russian involvement in the MH17 crash having no evidence to back their claims, Russia's Deputy Defense Minister told RT. He invited Ukraine to answer 10 questions to prove their commitment to an impartial probe.

Speaking to RT, Russia's Deputy Defense Minister Anatoly Antonov has criticized Western countries for jumping to conclusions just "24 hours after the crash" while there is no evidence.

"They try to show to the whole world that we are responsible for the crash. It is very strange that without any evidence my colleagues from western media would like to find somebody who is responsible for the crash," Antonov said. "It seems to me that this is part of information warfare which has been started against the Russian Federation and armed forces."

Instead of using the incident as the pretext for groundlessly blaming one of the sides, the catastrophe over Ukrainian sky should be used as a possibility to restart cooperation to "prevent such tragedies in the future."

Compass

Malaysian Plane Crash: Lies and sinister political agenda by the West

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© Rob Stothard / Getty ImagesA woman places flowers in memory of Flight 17 victims in front of the Netherlands Embassy in Kiev, Ukraine.
Almost immediately after the news began to spread that a Malaysian Airlines plane was apparently shot down over Ukraine, Western media and politicians blamed Russia for the event, claiming that Russian President Vladimir Putin should be directly responsible, despite complete lack of concrete evidence about who is to blame. This event is being used by the United States and its Western allies to further isolate Russia, after they failed to achieve this objective by provoking Russia in Ukraine.

Unjustified blame on Russia

While Putin took the right approach by stating that the plane crash in eastern Ukraine must be investigated thoroughly and objectively, Western politicians used the disaster for their own political agenda of isolating Russia. Former U.S. Secretary of State Hilary Clinton has stated that the crisis should "wake Europe up to the threat posed by Putin". In fact, this event is very beneficial to the United States, who have been unsuccessfully trying to persuade its European allies to slap heavy sanctions on Russia. NATO and the US have been provoking Russia to intervene in Ukraine by allowing Western-backed Ukrainian President Poroshenko to kill ethnic Russian civilians in Ukraine and even shelling Russian territory, killing a Russian national. Putin rightly did not fall for these provocations. The United States, therefore, wasted no time in using this plane crash for their own political gains, pressuring Europe to escalate sanctions against Moscow. Clinton has already called for the EU to increase sanctions on Russia, while the Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott called on Russia to explain the disaster as it "now seems certain it's been brought down by a Russian-supplied surface-to-air missile", despite complete lack of strong evidence for such a claim.

Network

Russia plans to launch 'doomsday sputnik', a new missile-attack warning satellite

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© RIA Novosti/Oleg UrusovProton-M carrier rocket with Kosmos military-purpose satellite transported to the launch pad. Baikonur space center.
After years of delay, Russia plans to deploy this year the first satellite of its new constellation replacing the space component of the early warning system, Russian media reported. It will also double as an emergency communication satellite.

The satellite was developed for the military, so naturally little is known about it. Identified by disambiguation 'product 14F142', it is expected to be launched in the fourth quarter of 2014, according to Kommersant newspaper.

The spacecraft will be the first in a constellation, aimed to replace the old Oko-1 early warning system, which allows Russia survey countries possessing nuclear-capable ballistic missiles and detect possible launches.

Oko-1 is currently in bad shape. To be fully operational, it needs four 73D6 satellites in placed in a highly elliptical orbit, dubbed 'Molnya' (lightning) orbit, to provide full-time coverage of the area of interest, and an additional backup satellite in a 71X6 geosynchronous orbit. Russia lost the last of the 71X6s in April this year and has not launched replacements for the 73D6s since 2008, with only two still operational.