Piece of information
Yesterday, Fre 8.08.2014, and today, Lördag, I was running into a problem which I think I should report, in order to prevent a possibly valuable piece of information from getting lost:
Yesterday I found in my email, under (I think) Care2 Causes, some information concerning the shooting-down of the Malaysian airliner above Ukraine; as soon as I had seen it I had to leave on business (from which I returned so late that I did not switch on the computer any more that day); and when I today wanted to have a closer (and more critical) look at the information, I could not find it any more – as if I had deleted it (although I could nearly swear that I had not). Thus, I have to write the following from memory.
The information was that a non-mainstream news channel claimed that a German pilot had had a look at pieces of the shot-down airliner and noticed that pieces of the airliner’s pilot cabin were showing holes from 30 mm bullets going in and also out again. As a conclusion from this it was suggested that the airliner had been shot down by a Sukhoi Su-25, a type of airplane which both the Russian and the Ukrainian airforces are using. – So far the piece of information. And what to make from it now?
Airliners will usually fly at heights of 10.000 m or more, and there is certainly no anti-aircraft artillery of 30 mm calibre which would shoot that high. Thus, the bullets must have come from some armed airplane. Then, nobody has claimed that the separatists in the eastern Ukraine had airplanes at their disposal, and if one wants to assume that the shooting plane had been Russian, then there were at least the question what good that could have done to Russia. And the official versions of the event do up to now not either claim that there had been any Russian airplanes present in the area. – It has to be mentioned, though, that Russia has gone public with a version (claimed to be based on satellite pictures and similar) that at the time of the event there had been several airplanes in the area and that the airliner had been deviating from its usual course to the north. The USA have, to my knowledge, as yet not been coming out with any official report (though with masses of accusations and propaganda). Altogether, up to now it seems most probable that the armed airplane(s) was/were Ukrainian.
As to the 30 mm bullets going in and out again, 30 mm is a calibre which is in Russian-produced jet fighters quite usual, but one would not expect a usual interceptor to be equipped with ammunition which would cleanly pass through a pilot cabin; rather, one would expect the projectiles to explode on impact. The Su-25, though, is meant to knock out armoured vehicles with its 30 mm cannon – which in turn would require projectiles which really go through thick plates without (or before) exploding. From there, then, presumably the conclusion that just Su-25 planes should have been involved. – The difficulty with this, though, is that airliners will fly at 10.000 m or higher, whereas the Su-25 has a service ceiling of 7000 m.
From all this then my (very preliminary and not very probable-sounding) conclusion that, if there were really Su-25 planes involved, that they first must have launched a missile (intentionally?, by misunderstanding?, by accident? – and the Su-25 carries up to 4400 kg of, e.g., missiles) which forced the airliner to come down from its usual height (by loss of air pressure in the cabin?), after which at least one of the Su pilots must have thought it good to riddle the airliner’s pilot cabin with his cannon (e.g. to make sure that the pilots could not report any details of the situation to some outside listeners by radio).
This is, so far, pretty academic. But IF there really were some such report about bullet holes, etc., then one should definitely hurry up to support Putin’s suggestion that the matter should be investigated by the UN. Because, certainly the Ukrainian government would not be interested in the truth to come out, nor would the USA (nor the USA’s obedient European followers). And otherwise and anyway, one would wish that there were soon some official comment on this matter (preferably a convincing one), because a usual (and not unreasonable) conclusion from official silence would of course be that the authorities were trying to hide something. – Such a conclusion, in turn, would then of course be ridiculed by the mainstream media as a ”conspiracy theory”, but I can only ask the reader to realize that conspiracy theories are in fact the daily bread of (and certainly expected from) any criminal investigator (the job then being to find sufficient evidence for any suggested theory).
This comes of course a bit late, but during the demonstration against TTIP on Sat 11.10. somebody was asking me about the matter.
Since I wrote the above ”Piece of Information” the official commission has seemingly published the results of its inverstigation. Their opinion is that the airliner was brought down by a missile of a type which is usually fired from the ground. What I find – somehow – convincing is their description of the way how the missile is supposed to work: when approaching the target closely, the missile is not simply exploding but instead launching a shower of fragments against the target, piercing it in very many places at one stroke. This of course could well have produced the observation which I took as my starting-point when speculating about the above ”Piece …”.
Still, up to now we do not know who was launching that missile (at least the Ukrainian army has it in its arsenal) and for what reason. Russia has gone public with what it claims are its observations about the whole event, whereas it seems that the USA do not have any material which they think fit (or politically wise?) to go public with. So that I am still not inclined simply to agree with all those writers in Hbl who take it for granted that it was the East Ukrainian separatists who (possibly by mistake) shot down the airliner.