Eric Zuesse

Regarding what caused the downing of the Malaysian airliner MH-17 in Ukraine on July 17th, the Ukrainian news agency UNIAN, reported in a brief Russian-language news story on August 12th, that four days earlier (August 8th) a representative of that nation's Prosecutor General office, Yuri Boychenko, had said that (as auto-translated by google), “the results [of the investigation] will be announced upon completion of the investigation and with the consent of all the parties who signed the corresponding agreement.” This UNIAN report said that, "As part of the four-party agreement signed on August 8 between Ukraine, the Netherlands, Belgium and Australia [all of which nations are allies of the United States and are cooperating with its new Cold War against Russia], information on the investigation into the disaster Malaysian ‘Boeing-777’ will not be disclosed." In other words: the official 'investigation' is being carried out by four nations that, as U.S. allies, are hostile toward Russia. One of those four nations, Ukraine, is not only a prime suspect in possibly having shot this airliner down, but is currently waging a hot war to ethnically-cleanse the pro-Russian population out of southeastern Ukraine; and the initial 'news' reports in Western 'news' media regarding the downing of MH-17 had stenographically repeated the Ukrainian Goverhment’s line that said that this airliner was probably downed by the local rebels there, who were trying to shoot down the Ukrainian Government's bombers that are constantly bombing them. Some Western 'news' reports even speculated that perhaps Russia itself had shot this airliner down. If the UNIAN news-report is correct, then there is no way that the 'investigation' will be able to be released to the public if it indicates that the Ukrainian Government (which, according to that news-report has veto power over the making-public of the study's findings) is blamed for having shot the airliner down.

On August 12th, another pro-Ukrainian-Government 'news' site, gordonua.com, headlined, as auto-translated by google, "GPU: The results of the investigation [into the] crash [of] the Boeing 777 will be released with the consent of the parties," and said, "Information about the accident MH17 in the Donetsk region will be published in obtaining the consent of all the parties that are involved in the investigation." UNIAN was cited there as gordonua’s sole source. ‘News’ media didn’t probe the matter further.

Until 23 August 2014, that seems to have been the last of the matter, as far as news reports were concerned, and both of those two news reports were just tiny squibs in the Russian language, published only in Ukraine, by supporters of the Obama-installed Ukrainian Government. The news was ignored both inside and outside Ukraine.

Then, on 23 August 2014, Global Research News published the first English-language news-report on this matter; it was based on the second Russian-language news-report, the one that had appeared at gordonua.com on August 12th. Global Research concluded from it that, “The Causes of the MH17 Crash are ‘Classified’." Of course, this way of phrasing the matter is a slight oversimplification, because, actually, the findings will remain 'classified' only if, and to the extent that, the Ukrainian Government is found to have caused the airliner's downing. In other words: this 'investigation' will not be published unless the Ukrainian Government and the other three nations that are performing it agree unanimously to publish it.

So: imagine a murder-case in which 298 innocents are slaughtered, and in which there are only three suspects (here: Ukraine, the pro-Russian rebels, and Russia itself), and one of those three suspects has veto-power on the making-public of the 'investigation' into that crime. Well: this is that murder-case, and the veto-holding ‘investigator’ and suspect is Ukraine. Neither of the other two suspects holds any such veto-power over this ‘investigation.’

In a sense, whether the official investigation into the downing will ever be made public is insignificant, just as would be any 'investigation' that is carried out by, or with veto-power from, one of the prime suspects in the crime that is being investigated.

The international public would obviously need to be fools in order for them to trust such an 'investigation' as that. Case closed?

President Obama got the economic-sanctions-increase against Russia, that he had wanted out of this shoot-down. Who needs any 'investigation' to determine this mass-killing's actual perpetrator? Certainly not Obama. Ultimately, it is he who caused it, because he was the person behind this ethnic-cleansing campaign, without which ethnic-cleansing campaign the airliner itself wouldn't have been downed.

The downing of this airliner goes straight back the U.S. White House, which has already won what it wanted from it.

Those 298 corpses are just casualties of this U.S.-caused war, like the Ukrainians are casualties of it who live in the portions of Ukraine that had overwhelmingly elected in 2010 the Ukrainian President whom Obama ousted from office in 2014. Obama doesn't want a President like that elected ever again in Ukraine; so, those voters are being gotten rid of, and ethnic cleansing is how it's being done. And the residents there are likewise not being heard from in Western 'news' media, and nobody in the West is asking these victims what they think of the Ukrainian Government that Obama installed. Perhaps that's because they are increasingly becoming a guerilla army to defeat the regime that Obama installed.

As to the specific operation that downed the plane, there is already a lot more information about that than the official 'investigation,' if that's ever published, is likely to reveal, and it points clearly to the Ukrainian military as the perpetrator, in yet another of their 'false flag' operations. And unlike the Ukrainian Government’s charges that rebels shot it down by mistake, Ukraine shot it down with deadly purpose and knowing full well what they were doing.\

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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.