|
No Evidence – Administration’s MH17 Case Against Russia Falls Apart
The federalists fighting in east Ukraine just took down two more SU-25 ground attack fighters that were bombing their positions. The weapons used against these planes are either simple air-defense guns or short ranged missiles unlike the missiles that allegedly took down the Malaysian passenger jet.
The case the Obama administration made against the federalists and Russia in connection with that MH-17 flight is completely falling apart.
Even the aggressive State Department spokesperson has to admit (vid) there is no real evidence at all. The “mountain of evidence” Secretary of State Kerry talked about is nothing but doctored photos and sound files provided by the Ukrainian coup government. One photo, for example, is supposed to show a missile system in federalists hands in a town in east Ukraine. But two reporters asking locals there can not find anyone who has seen the bulky and loud system. The photo is therefore likely a montage.
After being public criticized for showing no real evidence the Obama administration trotted out some “senior intelligence officials” who then admitted that they have nothing, NOTHING, to connect the case to Russia and only vague circumstantial “social media evidence” that federalists COULD have downed the jet:
But the officials said they did not know who fired the missile or whether any Russian operatives were present at the missile launch. They were not certain that the missile crew was trained in Russia, although they described a stepped-up campaign in recent weeks by Russia to arm and train the rebels, which they say has continued even after the downing of the commercial jetliner.
In terms of who fired the missile, “we don’t know a name, we don’t know a rank and we’re not even 100 percent sure of a nationality,” one official said, adding at another point, “There is not going to be a Perry Mason moment here,” a referenc to a fictional detective who solved mysteries.
Most damning for the case may be this:
The senior intelligence officials said spy agencies were not aware that an SA-11 system was in eastern Ukraine until the attack had happened.
So the alleged transfer of such a big weapon system from Russia was either not observable for the multi-billion dollar, all seeing, all hearing U.S. intelligence or it never happened. Case closed.
But the neolibcons in the Obama administration do not despair yet. The murky Ukrainian company that hired Vice President Biden’s son is now paying more lobbyists in Washington. The bribes will flow in bigger amounts. The lies from the Obama administration, and especially from Kerry, will continue as its tries everything possible to restart a Cold War against Russia or, if possible, even a hot one.
Let the Europeans bleed. As long as the U.S. is safe everything is hunky dory.
Some Thoughts on slothrop, Proyect, Chomsky and Putinism: What is to be Done?
@59:
What could possibly be more cartoonishly right wing then Putinism?
Certainly, you would not waste your time with this blog if you were born and raised in Bezirk Chemnitz.
What could possibly be more cartoonishly left-wing than hysterical slothrop, or for that matter, grubby Little Louie Proyect, feverishly supporting the US-led, unipolar, Empire of humanitarian Imperialism, murderous hordes of mercenary marauding military Takfiris and Fascists, secret free trade deals, secret rendition, false flags, meretricious corporate media and social media, IMF imposed austerity, and hopeless grinding poverty for half of its denizens (who, of course, are free to sell their blood and organs, since humane work is not to be had, and blind obedience no longer pays)?
Well, at least Little Louie, the self-appointed sys-admin of Marxism (who has richly benefitted from a life sucking at the very tit of empire) can write well, and is knowledgeable and insightful about many things (see older issues of Swans). Although, it must be noted, that he reviews film with all of the insight of a 250 lb. 11 year old reviewing a new bounty of cookies, hot off the grocery racks, from the crumb-infested sweaty corners of his adolescent bedroom.
As opposed to Little Louie’s hectoring Old Testament verbiage, slothrop sounds more like the patient who, upon awakening from the disorienting gas of the dentist’s chair, feels around tentatively with his tongue amid the bloody tissue and sharp shards of enamel swimming about in his mouth only to find that the wrong tooth has been pulled! — and yet manages angrily to spit out a few indignant, but unintelligible, syllables before passing out from shock. So writing well, slothrop, sadly,… not so much.
Is Putin a faultless socialist in shining armor standing up for the long-oppressed working class? Obviously not — but one must live in the real world that exists around us, with the imperfect choices that exist around us, and not in the 11 year old imaginary world of shiny new, sleekly clothed, abundantly muscled, Karl Marx/Prince Pyotr Kropotkin comic book super-heroes swooping down from the etheric realms of Social Justice, their bushy beards peaking out from behind their anonymous “V for Vendetta” masks, to save (OK, if you’re 12 years old, “organize”) the honest Toilers of the fields and the factories from the predations of the evil Capitalists (Who are not even capitalists anymore, but an inbred gang of cronyist thugs whose very goal is to NOT compete).
slothrop and Louie, self-righteous as you are — call the readers of this blog hopelessly naïve — but ALL of us, I believe, from many different political, cultural and religious persuasions, would much rather see an imperfect International rule of law upheld by flawed populist sentiment, such as it may be, than rule by the most violent, sociopathic, and well armed criminals that the human race is capable of spawning, unquenchably grasping and clawing for “More” like a nightmarish horde of devilish Sisyphuses who labor with zombie-like resolution to achieve their goal of the “End of History.” And I believe that most of us, having seen how easily perfectly legitimate grievances are subverted and redirected by the Global Oligarchs, and their dirty henchmen, utilizing Baudrillard-level, mass-media spectacle-inducing emotional hysteria and ad-campaign perfect Gene Sharp color revolutions, as in The Ukraine x 2, Libya, Egypt, etc., would settle for incremental change for the better, rather than waiting with messianic zeal for the “Big One” — the incontrovertible, all-just, and eternal salvation of “The Revolution” by the blameless, high-minded and altruistic Workers of the World. And yes, I can say this with confidence, and still get teary eyed listening to David Rovics sing “After the Revolution.”
One needn’t throw away one’s ideals to live in the real world.
Simply put, the past twenty five years have convinced us that a multi-polar world (with multiple “Development Banks” and multiple fungible currencies, and law written by multiple centers of power) could not possibly be worse than the “Washington Consensus” that has reigned since the fall of the Soviet Union.
Few, if any of us, believe that the worsening human and environmental standards, presciently depicted by Yeats as “Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide…” brings us any closer to the “Second Coming.” Perhaps if we had only studied “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon” better…
I’m sure the two of you could point out where we have strayed from Marxist orthodoxy.
This is not to knock Marxism, or Marxian analysis, but only to point out that in theory, there is no difference between theory and practice; but in practice, there is 😉
slothrop and Louie, with their attachment to idealization, and specifically to idealized Platonic worker-states, strike me as the type of person who would abandon a long-term beloved spouse because they farted too much, or their tits sagged, or they ate ice cream late at night and had a harmless crush on the 16 year old paperboy. Sorry guys, the real world is warty and imperfect — live with it. “With the ideal comes the actual, like a box all with its lid…” (Sandokai, Zen scripture)
Indeed, it is the very attachment the two of you have to idealization (political idealization, in this case) that, despite all of your erudition, leaves you sounding like pre-teenage boys in harping at others and in prescribing solutions for the often thorny and intractable problems and challenges of the real world. Not to worry, you are in good company: despite Hugo Chavez catapulting Chomsky’s book “Hegemony or Survival” onto the best-seller lists and world awareness, Chomsky had little love lost for Chavez, incessantly criticizing him. Simply put, the man who advocated voting for Gore in 2000 and Kerry in 2004, as “realistic alternatives to insane statists,” did not find Chavez supportable. And yet, how many in the real world believe that Chomsky, despite all his erudition, could have done half the job Chavez did in holding the reigns of power against the full might of Empire and bettering the lives of the Venezuelan people. The very thought is laughable; he wouldn’t have lasted five minutes in power, and would have been followed by a violent and deadly retrenchment. And you two, my friends, are no Chomskys, even.
One can read Chomsky with much profit, and still not agree with his political stances (Palestine comes to mind). Similarly, one can read Marx with much profit, and not use it as a modern day Bible to divine all of one’s current political positions. Proyect is getting harder and harder to read with any profit, and slothrop, sad to say, is unreadable, regardless of any profit motive in personal reading.
Which brings us to your favorite charge — “Putinism” — that you so love to sling around. Yes, Putin is a Conservative and this is a generally left-leaning blog. In my pantheon of favorite recent world leaders, Fidel and Hugo place ahead of Volodya. But if you look dispassionately at what he has done for his country, and the world recently — coming to power in arguably a more difficult and challenging situation than the others faced — in a similar span of time, he has bettered the lives of his citizens as much as the other two. (None could compare to what Gaddaffi, with all his imperfections, achieved for his people, moving them from last to first place on the continent of Africa, progress that sadly is largely destroyed, much to your unalloyed glee.) In my brief time upon this planet, I have seen the world descend from the euphoria of Post-Colonial Africa, Civil Rights, and Kennedy tentatively standing up to the “Deep State,” to, as Hobbes rightly predicted, with the Neoliberal destruction of the Social Contract and the covert conversion of corporate wish lists into International Law, a state of “bellum omnium contra omnes.” Country after country is laid to waste in an ever more manic rush for complete control. The planet, and human society is in an immeasurably worse state than it was half a century ago. But it must be remembered that most of all the worst challenges facing the species at the moment — rampant militarism, the chaotic destruction of states and the resulting human and environmental destruction, the frenetic rush for unlimited growth, Tar sands, nuclear pollution from depleted uranium, fracking, the destruction and commoditization of potable water, GMO’s, the unrestrained vaccination and drugging of vast populations, the death of bees from persistent agrichemicals, etc. — are of Western origin. If Putin can stop the unrestrained destruction of countries resisting US hegemony and create a true multi-polar world, as he publicly claims to be working towards, we also stand a much better chance of rolling back the unrestrained rights of corporations to own the planet. If he succeeds, I could leave this planet as optimistic as I came into it; if he fails, hope will be — at least temporarily — lost. So is this “Putinism?” One can call it a sort of negative Putinism: that is, not a slavish adherence to the details of social and economic policy in a land I do not live in, but an abiding concordance with the deeper geo-political goals of shaping a multi-polar global order. If that is Putinism, than I stand guilty as charged, as I believe you rightly perceive that most everyone on this blog stands equally guilty.
You guys are free to stand on the sidelines and jeer because the solution is not “leftist” enough or Marxist enough, and not completely just (which no one argues that it is.) It is just a single step away from the path to annihilation. But from that position, we can perhaps take another step.
As far as wasting one’s time with this blog — slothrop, you probably, no definitely!!!, take gold medals in at least three Moon of Alabama Olympic events: for historical longevity in frequenting this blog, inarticulacy, and fruitlessness in convincing argument. (Have you planted a seed of doubt in anyone?) Fat little Louie must perchance settle for the silver — and no tantrums Louie, you know how mummy hates your little fits! And Onkel Karl won’t let you review his new restaurant, Chez Brumaire, or his new film, “Remedial Marxism for Recalcitrant Bloggers,” if you kick him in the shins again!
Posted by: Malooga | Jul 24 2014 5:02 utc | 76
|
