By Lee Fang, Substack, 1/25/24

The year is 2028, and a new and highly infectious coronavirus has struck the sailors of the U.S. Pacific Fleet stationed in the South China Sea. As the world grapples with this emerging pandemic, confusion runs rampant among officials at the CIA, CDC, and DOD, who bicker over the most effective response strategies. 

Meanwhile, China, seemingly immune to the novel virus, seizes the opportunity to launch a full-scale assault on Taiwan, capitalizing on the global chaos. 

While the World Health Organization praises China’s successful social distancing measures, little do they know that the Chinese government had covertly vaccinated its military and essential workers under the guise of a standard COVID-19 booster campaign.

This scenario, initially conceived by Pentagon researchers, may sound like science fiction, but military strategists believe that a “coronavirus bioweapon” may lurk on the horizon. This possibility is one of several outlined in a new report sponsored by the Office of the Secretary of Defense. The report “Plagues, Cyborgs, and Supersoldiers: The Human Domain of War Research” delves into how CRISPR gene-editing technology, mRNA vaccines, brain networking, and other technological advancements could unleash new forms of military conflict.

Released earlier this month and reported here for the first time, this provocative report, conducted within the Acquisition and Technology Policy Program of the RAND National Security Research Division, offers futuristic scenarios that military planners should consider.

“We see a complex, high-threat landscape emerging where future wars are fought with humans controlling hyper-sophisticated machines with their thoughts” and “synthetically generated, genomically targeted plagues” that cripple the American military-industrial base,” the report warns.

In another intriguing scenario, seemingly inspired by the decline of Sen. Dianne Feinstein, and this time set in a more distant future, the report suggests that elderly congressional leaders, desperate to retain power, secretly install state-of-the-art Brain-Computer Interface devices. These devices, commonly used among wealthy senior citizens in the scenario, initially help the senators regain mobility and speech after years of clear cognitive decline. However, when the brain implants malfunction, causing erratic and belligerent behavior, foreign allies begin to distance themselves from the U.S., damaging national security.

The report further highlights the potential hacking vulnerabilities associated with BCI implants, which, while promising for patients with neuromuscular impairments, could be exploited to inject fear, confusion, or anger.

Additionally, the authors caution against the possibility of government employees replacing their natural eye lenses with artificial ones containing tiny cameras connected to micro-storage devices. The small cameras could collect classified intelligence and leak it to foreign adversaries.

However, not all aspects of the report focus on vulnerabilities. In a section discussing human genomic editing, the researchers explore the potential for creating “supersoldiers” through genetic modifications that enhance physical and psychological capabilities. Despite their vulnerabilities, BCI devices could also serve as a means for commanders to communicate swiftly with their forces during military operations.

The report extensively analyzes the technological capabilities of both China and the U.S. in biotechnology and brain technology, highlighting the differences in focus and status between the two nations. It highlights previous reporting on Chinese research into “ethnic-specific genetic weapons” and “purported brain-control weaponry.”

Nevertheless, the report ventures into cultural observations, emphasizing that the U.S. values openness, diversity, and democratic principles. In the face of a more contagious and deadly pandemic, China’s ethnically homogenous and compliant population could give it an advantage in deploying vaccines swiftly. At the same time, authoritarian states might similarly brutally suppress “anti-vaccine populists” and enforce compliance. The report claims this could hinder the U.S. due to its more relaxed regulatory environment that values individual liberties, where such crackdowns and forced vaccinations are more difficult to deploy…

Subscribe to Lee Fang’s Substack to read the full article.

By Prof. Geoffrey Roberts, Brave New Europe, 1/18/24

As the world is facing up to Ukrainian defeat, what are the most important propaganda points that continue to enable a doomed war?

Geoffrey Roberts is Emeritus Professor of History at University College Cork and a member of the Royal Irish Academy

Cross-posted from Geoffrey’s Website

1. Putin as Hitler. The über alles of these mis-analogies is the one with the least foundation. Putin is not a maniacal, genocidal, war-mongering dictator. He is not a racist or a militarist bent on European or world domination. Nor does he have a messianic ideology driving him to re-make the world in Russia’s image. Putin’s geopolitical ambitions are remarkably conservative: security and respect for Russia and its civilisation, a peaceful and prosperous, multipolar world of sovereign states in which there is a balance of interests mediated and harmonised by multilateral institutions such as the United Nations. Such aspirations seem radical only in the context of crumbling Western global hegemony.
2. Putin as Stalin. Putin is a true son of the post-Stalin Soviet system, but he hasn’tbeen a communist since the late 1980s. As he said not long after he first became President of the Russian Federation, anyone who doesn’t regret the destruction of the Soviet Union has no heart; anyone who wants to see it re-created has no brain. A pro-Western liberal in the 1990s, nowadays his ideology is Christian and capitalistic, not Marxist or socialist. He wields enormous power in Russian politics but does not preside over a totalitarian party dictatorship like Stalin did. The soft authoritarianism of the Russian Federation bears no resemblance to the mass repressions of the Stalin era and not a lot to the much less violent and repressive one-party state of Stalin’s communist successors. Patriotism, multinationalism, internationalism and a love of history are what Putin has in common with Stalin, not dictatorship.
3. Appeasement and the Munich Syndrome. This most damaging of historical mis-analogies has popularised the idea that the Munich agreement betrayal of Czechoslovakia in September 1938 shows you can’t appease aggressors. Actually, the problem wasn’t appeasement per se, it was the fact that Hitler was bent on world war and didn’t want to be appeased. Stalin was the leader the British and French should have sought to appease, but they eschewed a collective security alliance with the USSR in favour of deals with Nazi Germany. Before invading Ukraine, Putin was desperate to be appeased by the West. That’s why he proposed a comprehensive European security deal between Russia and the West. A few weeks into the war he sought a compromise peace that would have left Russia with a neutral and disarmed Ukraine on its doorstep but gained relatively little additional territory. Moscow remains open to such a negotiation, though the price of peace will be a lot higher than it was two years ago. The sooner Putin is appeased, the quicker the war will end and save Ukraine from further unnecessary suffering.
4. The Prague analogy. An extension of the Munich analogy which claims Hitler’s occupation of Prague in March 1939 shows that if you concede Putin a territorial inch he will take a proverbial yard. However, Poland was Hitler’s target in 1939, not Czechoslovakia. German troops entered the country, supposedly to impose order, because of an internal crisis that split Slovakia and the Czech lands following the loss of German-populated Sudetenland at Munich. Ukraine may well suffer a deep domestic crisis following military defeat by Russia, but the more likely ‘restorers of order’ in Lviv and Kiev are Polish and Romanian troops. Completely reliant on foreign aid, battered Ukraine is half-way to becoming a Western protectorate not a Russian one.
5. Finland and the Winter War. Not the worst analogy but more complicated than its proponents may think. Yes, the Finns did sensibly sign a peace treaty with the USSR in March 1940 to save the country’s independence and sovereignty, but they had previously spurned a similar Soviet offer that would have seen them gain as well as lose territory in the borderland region of Karelia. It was not plucky Finnish defence that stopped the Soviet onslaught but Stalin’s fear that an Anglo-French military intervention would turn the country into a battleground of the wider European war – a fate the Finns did not relish either. Finland could have sat out the rest of the Second World War as a neutral but, disastrously, chose to ally itself with Nazi Germany in the so-called ‘continuation war’. Finnish leaders redeemed themselves by turning their armed forces against the Germans in 1944 and then refused Western meddling in their affairs with the Soviets – a stance that persuaded Stalin to allow Finland to become a semi-detached member of the Soviet bloc. ‘Finlandisation’ – domestic autonomy in exchange for restricted external sovereignty – was a far better model for independent Ukraine than the internally divisive path that has led to its partition.
6. Genocide and the Holocaust. Both sides have bandied the g-word but the atrocities committed during the Russo-Ukrainian war bear no comparison whatsoever with the Nazi mass murder of millions of Jew during World War II. In fact, this war has been notably free of large-scale, systematic atrocities against civilians. The vast majority of the war’s casualties have been combatants. That doesn’t negate the immense suffering of millions of Ukrainian civilians, but as Gaza, Iraq, Syria, Libya and Afghanistan show us, it could have been a lot worse. The g-word propaganda battle also serves to obfuscate two essential facts about the actual Holocaust: it began with the SS’s execution of a million Soviet Jews in 1941-1942 and ended with the Red Army’s liberation of Nazi death-camps in 1944-1945.
7. Containment and the Cold War. Staring defeat in the face, Western hardliners are increasingly agitating for a long-term strategy to contain Russia that will involve extensive militarisation of their own societies, including, perhaps, the re-introduction of conscription. This re-vamped cold war strategy bears little relation to the views of the containment concept’s originator, George F. Kennan, who saw the policy as primarily a political device: the US would win the cold war not by confrontation and military competition with the USSR but by the demonstrated superiority of its domestic system. Kennan, who vociferously opposed NATO’s post-Soviet expansion eastwards, was fond of quoting President John Quincy Adams’s aphorism that “America should not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy”.
8. The Domino Theory. President Eisenhower’s eponymous theory was devised, in part, to entice British involvement in France’s losing colonial war in 1950s Indochina. But Winston Churchill didn’t buy the idea that a Red victory there would be followed by the fall of the rest of South-East Asia to the communists, and neither did his Tory and Labour successors as PM when the domino concept was revived in the 1960s to justify massive US intervention in the Vietnam War. Its current incarnation is that if Putin wins in Ukraine, the Baltic States will be his next target. There is no evidence that Putin has any such intentions. No doubt Russia could occupy the Baltics if it chose to do so, but not without running the risk of a nuclear war with NATO. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was risky and adventuristic but his restrained conduct of the war has shown that he is far from reckless – unlike some of his Western counterparts, who have sought every opportunity to escalate the conflict.
9. The Korean Stalemate Scenario. The Korean War bogged down quite quickly after a few dramatic months of invasion and counter-invasion in the summer and autumn of 1950 but an armistice was not signed until July 1953. Some Western hardliners yearn for a repeat of that scenario, hoping that hostilities will resume once Ukraine has recovered its strength and NATO countries have ramped up their armaments industries. But the Ukraine war is not a stalemate – it is a war of attrition that Russia is slowly but surely winning. Putin will never agree to a ceasefire that does not ensure Russia’s security and safeguard the situation of its Ukrainian supporters. The longer the war goes on, the more likely becomes a dictated peace on the back of a Russian victory.
10. Proxy Wars Past & Present. Conflicts labelled proxy wars come in all different shapes, sizes and guises. The Russo-Ukrainian war has some similarities with the Spanish Civil War, the Korea and Vietnam wars, and the Soviet war in Afghanistan, but its scale, scope, intensity and dangerousness are unprecedented. It is simultaneously a civil war between Ukrainian nationalists and Russia-leaning Ukrainians; an inter-state war between Ukraine and the Russian Federation; and a Western-waged proxy war on Russia. Without Western military, economic and political support, Ukraine would have lost the war long ago. It is the West’s over-arching anti-Russia and anti-Putin goals that have prolonged the war and could yet transform it into a truly existential conflict.

YouTube link here.

By Patrick Lawrence, Consortium News, 1/22/24

Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s steady, able, intellectually quick foreign minister, last week held one of those wide-ranging press conferences he and his boss favor. Lavrov’s remarks are subtly delivered but of a significance we must not miss.

Tass published a useful summary of them on Jan. 18.

Here are a few of Lavrov’s pithier remarks. The first of these appeared under the subhead, “On friends of Russia.” I take the liberty of minorly cleaning up the English translation:

“Relations between Russia and China currently experience the best period of their centuries-long history.

Their relations are firmer, more reliable, and more advanced than a military union as we understood these in the previous Cold War-era.

In all cases, the interests of Russia and China reach a common denominator after negotiation, and this is an example for resolution of any issues by any other participants in global communication.

Relations of particularly privileged cooperation with India develop gradually. Russia also takes relations with African states to a truly strategic level. It develops relations with the Latin American continent. Russia’s close circle also includes Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the U.A.E. and Qatar.”

Here is Lavrov on the BRICS–Plus group, which expanded last year from its original members, Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa:

“About 30 states are interested in rapprochement with BRICS. This association has a great future. Being a superregional global structure, BRICS symbolizes the diversity of a multipolar world.”

At one point Lavrov turned, inevitably, to the conflict in Ukraine:

“It is not up to Ukraine to decide when to stop and when to talk seriously about realistic preconditions for the end of this conflict. It is necessary to talk with the West about it.

The West wants no constructive resolution that would take Russia’s legitimate concerns into account. This is indicated by incitement and coercion of Kiev for increasingly aggressive use of long-range weapons to strike Crimea, in order to make it unsuitable for life, as well as deep into Russian territory, and not only incitement, but the handover of corresponding weapons as well.”

Three practical questions as Russia’s top diplomat interpreted them in a review of “Russia’s diplomatic work in 2023,” as TASS put it. This is fine as it is, but Lavrov’s comments are a case of the subtext being vastly larger than the text. Russia’s objective in 2024 — this is TASS again — is “to remove any dependence on the West.”

I am sure you know the old adage, derived from an 18th century Christian hymn, “God moves in mysterious ways.” So does history. Let us, then, consider this history in brief. Lavrov’s press conference brims with implied references to it.

Notions of Progress

Red Square, Moscow, 2015. (Misha Sokolnikov, Flickr,CC BY-ND 2.0)

Russia is considered among the scholars what is called “a late developer.” Such nations are so named because they were a century or more behind the West as it entered the age of scientific and industrial advances and then — regrettably enough, I would say — on to the Age of Materialism. Railroads, telegraph lines, steamships, photography, Bessemer steel, and all the rest: Late developers, lagging in these technologies, looked Westward with envy well-mixed with a felt inferiority.

The premier case of late development is Japan. Among Russians as among the Japanese, the condition of being “behind” produced profound confusion as to identity and their place in the modern world. This confusion is still easily detected.  At its core lie two very consequential misunderstandings.

One, there is the fraudulent Western notion of “progress” as this became an orthodoxy from the mid–19th century onward. I say “fraudulent” because history does not advance in anything like a straight line, and progress is measured in the West strictly according to material advances. In matters of ethos, humaneness, equality, environmental stewardship, the settling of conflicts — of the human spirit altogether — the West remains more primitive than many “primitive” societies.

Two, and the larger point here, from the 19th century onward, there was only one way to modernize. All colonized people who chose the capitalist road understood the imperative this way: modernization = Westernization. All of a sudden, to advance, to make a future in the modern world, meant to repudiate who one was and imitate being someone else.

How hard is it to imagine the deep disturbances and distortions — at bottom psychological but also political, social, economic, and cultural — that arose in consequence of this misapprehension? I count the equation of modernizing with Westernizing, as measured by the extravagant damage it did, among the gravest errors of the late 19th century and all through the 20th to our time.

Russia has spent nearly three centuries in this state of turmoil and — maybe not too strong a term — disorientation. Periods of orthodox conservatism have been followed by cycles of Westward-looking liberalization, this followed by a return to previously abandoned traditions, which have included over many years a return to reaction and a new valorization of one or another kind of nativism and nationalism.

A New Course  

U.A.E. welcoming ceremony for Russian President Vladimir Putin, Abu Dhabi, Dec. 6, 2023. (President of Russia)

There is another factor to consider. From the 1830s onward to NATO’s post–Cold War expansions, the horrific U.S.–led program to turn the Russian Federation into a capitalist greedfest after the Soviet Union’s collapse, and now the conflict in Ukraine, Russia’s struggle to understand itself has been accompanied by more or less incessant Western efforts decisively to reshape Russia in the West’s image.

We cannot understand Lavrov’s press conference, or many, many of the things Vladimir Putin has said these past few years, without this historical context. In so many words, all of them well-chosen, the foreign minister and the president have announced that Russia will no longer look Westward as it advances into the 21st century. Modernization will no longer mean Westernization.

It would be altogether impossible to overstate the historical magnitude of what Russia has set as its new course. We live in the most interesting times, to put this point another way — even if most of us, mesmerized by the propaganda of eternal Western superiority, cannot see five feet in front of us as the most significant events of our time unfold.

Many things will now fall into place. Lavrov, in enumerating the members of Russia’s “close circle,” describes, a couple of years on, the “new world order” the Chinese frequently reference.

The 5,000–word charter Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping made public two years ago next month, “Joint Statement of the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China on International Relations Entering a New Era and the Global Sustainable Development,” can be understood now as what your columnist called it at the time: the most important political document to be issued so far in the 21st century.

Gordon Hahn, the accomplished scholar of Russia and Eurasia, last week offered a superb history of Russia’s relations with the West during an appearance last week on The Duran, the daily web program produced by Alexander Mercouris and (in this case) Glenn Diesen. In the course of this long, rich interview Hahn notes, “Putin, as he has stated over and over again now recently, the [Russian] elites routinely demonstrate that they do not trust anyone in the West anymore.” He elaborates:

“For Russia, it looks now, the West is no longer its ‘Other.’… Russia has always identified itself, motivated itself, driven itself in relation to Europe. Now Putin is turning away from that. He said that we are no longer to define ourselves, look at ourselves, through the European prism. For now, we will put all our eggs in one basket, and that is Eurasia…. This close bilateral relationship, of Europe as Russia’s Other, is ending, and therefore the cycle [from conservatism to Westernization and back] is probably ending.”

This moment has been a long time coming. A shallow peruse of the past brings us back to 1990–91, when Michail Gorbachev accepted Washington’s assurance — without a signed document, imprudently — that NATO would not expand eastward from the reunified Germany.

As is well-known, 30 years of betrayals and diplomatic dishonesty followed as Moscow sought a new security architecture that would provide the Russian Federation a place in that “common European home” for which Gorbachev longed.

“I am extremely pessimistic,” Hahn says of the outlook for U.S.–Russian relations. “I can’t see that, even with an agreement between Russia and Ukraine, the West will cease trying to expand NATO. They will try to repeat the same scenario unless something changes in the West itself, in Washington.”

The world turns, even as the West declines or is incapable of turning with it. The teaser on The Duran’s segment with Gordon Hahn reads, “Russia ends 300 years of west-centric foreign policy.” This is big. It rarely gets bigger. History’s mysterious ways lie before us.

Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, lecturer and author, most recently of Journalists and Their Shadows, available from Clarity Press or via Amazon.  Other books include Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. His Twitter account, @thefloutist, has been permanently censored.

By Robert Parry, Consortium News, 2/7/24

Robert Parry was in the forefront of questioning official narratives about the downing of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 in Ukrainian airspace on July 17, 2014, which Western officials immediately, and inquiries later, blamed on Russia.

But the International Court of Justice in The Hague on Jan. 31 refused to assign responsibility to Moscow and rejected Ukraine’s 2017 request that it order Russia to pay compensation. 

The ruling vindicated Parry who came under heavy criticism from Bellingcat and the Australian version of the 60 Minutes program for his reporting questioning the official Western story.

Parry wrote numerous articles on the affair, including: 

Jan. 19, 2015: The Danger of an MH-17 ‘Cold Case;

May 18, 2015:  Fake Evidence Blaming Russia for MH-17?;

May 20, 2015:  You Be the Judge;

Oct. 20, 2015:  MH-17 Case: ‘Old’ Journalism vs. ‘New’;

July 3, 2016:  MH-17 Probe’s Torture-Implicated Ally

July 19, 2016: Fraud Alleged in NYT’s MH-17 Report;

Sept. 29, 2016: The Official and Implausible MH-17 Scenario,

The following is the republication of one of these articles: 

The Ever-Curiouser MH-17 Case

March 16, 2016

Exclusive: The shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over Ukraine has served as a potent propaganda club against Russia but the U.S. government is hiding key evidence that could solve the mystery, writes Robert Parry.

By Robert Parry
Special to Consortium News

The curious mystery surrounding the shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine on July 17, 2014, gets more and more curious as the U.S. government and Dutch investigators balk at giving straightforward answers to the simplest of questions even when asked by the families of the victims.

Adding to the mystery Dutch investigators have indicated that the Dutch Safety Board did not request radar information from the United States, even though Secretary of State John Kerry indicated just three days after the crash that the U.S. government possessed data that pinpointed the location of the suspected missile launch that allegedly downed the airliner, killing all 298 people onboard.

Although Kerry claimed that the U.S. government knew the location almost immediately, Dutch investigators now say they hope to identify the spot sometime “in the second half of the year,” meaning that something as basic as the missile-launch site might remain unknown to the public more than two years after the tragedy.

The families of the Dutch victims, including the father of a Dutch-American citizen, have been pressing for an explanation about the slow pace of the investigation and the apparent failure to obtain relevant data from the U.S. and other governments.

I spent time with the family members in early February at the Dutch parliament in The Hague as opposition parliamentarians, led by Christian Democrat Pieter Omtzigt, unsuccessfully sought answers from the government about the absence of radar data and other basic facts.

When answers have been provided to the families and the public, they are often hard to understand, as if to obfuscate what information the investigation possesses or doesn’t possess. For instance, when I asked the U.S. State Department whether the U.S. government had supplied the Dutch with radar data and satellite images, I received the following response, attributable to “a State Department spokesperson”: “While I won’t go into the details of our law enforcement cooperation in the investigation, I would note that Dutch officials said March 8 that all information asked of the United States has been shared.”

I wrote back thanking the spokesperson for the response, but adding:

“I must say it seems unnecessarily fuzzy. Why can’t you just say that the U.S. government has provided the radar data cited by Secretary Kerry immediately after the tragedy? Or the U.S. government has provided satellite imagery before and after the shootdown? Why the indirect and imprecise phrasing? …

I’ve spent time with the Dutch families of the victims, including the father of a U.S.-Dutch citizen, and I can tell you that they are quite disturbed by what they regard as double-talk and stalling. I would like to tell them that my government has provided all relevant data in a cooperative and timely fashion. But all I get is this indirect and imprecise word-smithing.”

The State Department spokesperson wrote back, “I understand your questions, and also the importance of the view of these families so devastated by this tragedy. However, I am going to have to leave our comments as below.”

Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777-2H6-ER (9M-MRD) at the international terminal at Perth Airport. This aircraft crashed over Ukraine on 17 July 2014. (Darren Koch/Wikimedia Commons)

Propaganda Value

This lack of transparency, of course, has a propaganda value since it leaves in place the widespread public impression that ethnic Russian rebels and Russian President Vladimir Putin were responsible for the 298 deaths, a rush to judgment that Secretary Kerry and other senior U.S. officials (and the Western news media) encouraged in July 2014.

Once that impression took hold there has been little interest in Official Washington to clarify the mystery especially as evidence has emerged implicating elements of the Ukrainian military. For instance, Dutch intelligence has reported (and U.S. intelligence has implicitly confirmed) that the only operational Buk anti-aircraft missile systems in eastern Ukraine on July 17, 2014, were under the control of the Ukrainian military.

In a Dutch report released last October, the Netherlands’ Military Intelligence and Security Service (MIVD) reported that the only anti-aircraft weapons in eastern Ukraine capable of bringing down MH-17 at 33,000 feet belonged to the Ukrainian government.

MIVD made that assessment in the context of explaining why commercial aircraft continued to fly over the eastern Ukrainian battle zone in summer 2014. MIVD said that based on “state secret” information, it was known that Ukraine possessed some older but “powerful anti-aircraft systems” and “a number of these systems were located in the eastern part of the country.”

The intelligence agency added that the rebels lacked that capability: “Prior to the crash, the MIVD knew that, in addition to light aircraft artillery, the Separatists also possessed short-range portable air defence systems (man-portable air-defence systems; MANPADS) and that they possibly possessed short-range vehicle-borne air-defence systems. Both types of systems are considered surface-to-air missiles (SAMs). Due to their limited range they do not constitute a danger to civil aviation at cruising altitude.”

One could infer a similar finding by reading a U.S. “Government Assessment” released by the Director of National Intelligence on July 22, 2014, five days after the crash, seeking to cast suspicion on the ethnic Russian rebels and Putin by noting military equipment that Moscow had provided the rebels. But most tellingly the list did not include Buk anti-aircraft missiles. In other words, in the context of trying to blame the rebels and Putin, U.S. intelligence could not put an operational Buk system in the rebels’ hands.

So, perhaps the most logical suspicion would be that the Ukrainian military, then engaged in an offensive in the east and fearing a possible Russian invasion, moved its Buk missile systems up to the front and an undisciplined crew fired a missile at a suspected Russian aircraft, bringing down MH-17 by accident.

That was essentially what I was told by a source who had been briefed by U.S. intelligence analysts in July and August 2014. [See, for instance, Consortiumnews.com’s “Flight 17 Shoot-Down Scenario Shifts” and “The Danger of an MH-17 Cold Case.”]

Kerry meeting Putin in Moscow, Sept. 5, 2016 (Press Service President of Russia/Wikimedia Commons)

But Ukraine is a principal participant in the Dutch-led Joint Investigation Team (JIT), which has been probing the MH-17 case, and thus the investigation suffers from a possible conflict of interest since Ukraine would prefer that the world’s public perception of the MH-17 case continue to blame Putin. Under the JIT’s terms, any of the five key participants (The Netherlands, Ukraine, Australia, Belgium and Malaysia) can block release of information.

The interest in keeping Putin on the propaganda defensive is shared by the Obama administration which used the furor over the MH-17 deaths to spur the European Union into imposing economic sanctions on Russia.

In contrast, clearing the Russians and blaming the Ukrainians would destroy a carefully constructed propaganda narrative which has stuck black hats on Putin and the ethnic Russian rebels and white hats on the U.S.-backed government of Ukraine, which seized power after a putsch that overthrew elected pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych on Feb. 22, 2014.

Accusations against Russia have also been fanned by propaganda outlets, such as the British-based Bellingcat site, which has collaborated with Western mainstream media to continue pointing the finger of blame at Moscow and Putin – as the Dutch investigators drag their heels and refuse to divulge any information that would clarify the case.

Letter to the Families

Perhaps the most detailed – although still hazy – status report on the investigation came in a recent letter from JIT chief prosecutor Fred Westerbeke to the Dutch family members. The letter acknowledged that the investigators lacked “primary raw radar images” which could have revealed a missile or a military aircraft in the vicinity of MH-17.

Ukrainian authorities said all their primary radar facilities were shut down for maintenance and only secondary radar, which would show commercial aircraft, was available.

The Buk missile system 9K37M “Buk-M1” (SA-11). (Ukrainian Air Force Museum in Vinnitsa.)

Russian officials have said their radar data suggest that a Ukrainian warplane might have fired on MH-17 with an air-to-air missile, a possibility that is difficult to rule out without examining primary radar which has so far not been available. Primary radar data also might have picked up a ground-fired missile, Westerbeke wrote.

“Raw primary radar data could provide information on the rocket trajectory,” Westerbeke’s letter said. “The JIT does not have that information yet. JIT has questioned a member of the Ukrainian air traffic control and a Ukrainian radar specialist. They explained why no primary radar images were saved in Ukraine.” Westerbeke said investigators are also asking Russia about its data.

Westerbeke added that the JIT had “no video or film of the launch or the trajectory of the rocket.” Nor, he said, do the investigators have satellite photos of the rocket launch.

“The clouds on the part of the day of the downing of MH17 prevented usable pictures of the launch site from being available,” he wrote. “There are pictures from just before and just after July 17^th and they are an asset in the investigation.” According to intelligence sources, the satellite photos show several Ukrainian military Buk missile systems in the area.

Why the investigation’s data is so uncertain has become a secondary mystery in the MH-17 whodunit. During an appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press on July 20, 2014, three days after the crash, Secretary Kerry declared,

“We picked up the imagery of this launch. We know the trajectory. We know where it came from. We know the timing. And it was exactly at the time that this aircraft disappeared from the radar.”

But this U.S. data has never been made public. In the letter, Westerbeke wrote, “The American authorities have data, that come from their own secret services, which could provide information on the trajectory of the rocket. This information was shared in secret with the [Dutch] MIVD.”

Westerbeke added that the information may be made available as proof in a criminal case as an amtsbericht or “official statement.”

Quinn Schansman, a dual U.S.-Dutch citizen killed aboard Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 on July 17, 2014. (Facebook)

Yet, despite the U.S. data, Westerbeke said the location of the launch site remains uncertain. Last October, the Dutch Safety Board placed the likely firing location within a 320-square-kilometer area that covered territory both under government and rebel control. (The safety board did not seek to identify which side fired the fateful missile.)

By contrast, Almaz-Antey, the Russian arms manufacturer of the Buk systems, conducted its own experiments to determine the likely firing location and placed it in a much smaller area near the village of Zaroshchenskoye, about 20 kilometers west of the Dutch Safety Board’s zone and in an area under Ukrainian government control.

Westerbeke wrote,

“Raw primary radar data and the American secret information are only two sources of information for the determination of the launch site. There is more. JIT collects evidence on the basis of telephone taps, locations of telephones, pictures, witness statements and technical calculations of the trajectory of the rocket.

The calculations are made by the national air and space laboratory on the basis of the location of MH17, the damage pattern on the wreckage and the special characteristics of the rockets. JIT does extra research on top of the [Dutch Safety Board] research. On the basis of these sources, JIT gets ever more clarity on the exact launch site. In the second half of the year we expect exact results.”

Meanwhile, the U.S. government continues to stonewall a request from Thomas J. Schansman, the father of Quinn Schansman, the only American citizen to die aboard MH-17, to Secretary Kerry to release the U.S. data that Kerry has publicly cited.

Quinn Schansman, who had dual U.S.-Dutch citizenship, boarded MH-17 along with 297 other people for a flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur on July 17, 2014. The 19-year-old was planning to join his family for a vacation in Indonesia.

In a letter to Kerry dated Jan. 5, 2016, Thomas J. Schansman noted Kerry’s remarks at a press conference on Aug. 12, 2014, when the Secretary of State said about the Buk anti-aircraft missile suspected of downing the plane:

“We saw the take-off. We saw the trajectory. We saw the hit. We saw this aeroplane disappear from the radar screens. So there is really no mystery about where it came from and where these weapons have come from.”

Although U.S. consular officials in the Netherlands indicated that Kerry would respond personally to the request, Schansman told me this week that he had not yet received a reply from Kerry.

The late investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s.  In 1995 he founded this website for a consortium of journalists to publish work that was being suppressed by their mainstream editors.