More Russian MH-17 Fabrications to Deflect Their Guilt Odnako, Zdavstvuite! So begins Mikhail Leontev’s several minute-long disinformation “opinion” programme “Odnako” (“However”) once or twice a week following the evening news (disinformation) programme on ORT state TV. Leontev, an obnoxious weasel of a propagandist who likes his three-day beards, consistently puts out the most venomous and vile anti-US/UK/French/EU/NATO/West lies. Tonight (Friday) was a whopper. 1tv.ru/news/leontiev/271840 He happens to have come by a “US or UK” satellite photo that by the slimmest of chances was shot right at the moment above Hrabohe Ukraine when the Malaysian 777, Flight MH-17, was shot down. The black and white picture shown is a nearly cloudless day, and clearly shows the 777 flying toward the southeast, while at the bottom image perpendicular to it and a couple of kilometers away is what appears to be an Su-27 FLANKER flying in the direction of the 777. The pure chance does not stop here. An air-to-air missile with a plume is seen just ahead of the Su-27 flying in the direction of the doomed Boeing, with the missile having been launched from an inside pylon on the left wing of the fighter. This is the most exceptional good luck it seems. Imagine the odds of an imagery satellite flying at 25,000 kph and orbiting the Earth every 90 minutes just by chance shooting that particular spot at precisely the time the Malaysian airliner was there as well as an Su-27 and just when the Sukhoi was launching an AAM. And it was all visible from space. In my career I have worked a bit with satellite imagery and can flat-out say it is impossible. Imagery is not like in Hollywood when some general just commands a live image of a place to be shot. Chances of this area getting shot and getting priority for getting shot and getting shot at this exact moment are—less than zero. (Also the date and time markings on the image are not the way it is done in the real world.) And not to mention, how did Leontev manage to get the image (which his not annotated as such an imager would be (as shown in the NATO press briefings)? Answer is, he did not get it, since it was an FSB fabrication. A few other things wrong with the story. Leontev quotes an American aviation expert named George Bilt who was a graduate of MIT as saying it is clear an air-to-air missile shot down the plane, even though Google searches for such en expert only turn up this reference to him as reported on Russian TV). Based on the damage to the 777, which clearly was caused by a large (LARGE) warhead exploding to the right front of the cockpit (which received by far the most damage), this was not done by a small fighter-launched AAM, which in any case would have been IR homing so would have hit one of the engines, creating nothing like the massive shrapnel damage to the plane, and could well have been a controllable situation. Also, Russia since July has been putting out many versions, including that it was a Ukrainian Su-25 ground attack aircraft, which can only reach half of the altitude where the 777 was flying. Their version mainly focused on the mythical Su-25 firing its 30mm cannon to kill the airliner, with RT’s ridiculous long disinfo documentary a few weeks ago even showing the Russian military demonstrating how an Su-25 attacking some derelict planes on the ground at a range had similar holes to those seen in the 777 (actually the 777 had holes ranging form tiny to about 30cm in diameter). But anyhow, their whole focus was “Ukrainian Su-25 firing 30mm cannon.” Now in their fantastical satellite photo there appears to be a Su-27 firing a missile. Consistency is not a strong trait in Russian disinformation. The final bit of idiocy is that the “satellite photo” in question is indeed a satellite photo—from Google Earth in August 2012 (not the current one online but the historical one from 2012 as can be dug up on dropboxusercontent). Someone in the FSB fabrication shop just took an old Google Earth image of that area of Ukraine, superimposed a fuzzy image of a 777 on it, and added a Su-27 in the bottom corner firing a missile. Cloud patterns on the Google photo and the US/UK “satellite” image are amazingly the same. Must have been a Friday afternoon rush job, or just the usual sloppy disinfo without concern for anything like reality. Other bit of reality is that on the day when the plane was shot down, there was fairly heavy cloud cover in the area. Lots of blue sky too, but lots of cloud, which certainly was not evident in their fake which was nearly cloud-free. But such little “details” never bothered the Kremlin fakers. As for whether people will buy it—of course many will. Already the internet is full of conspiratorial blogs and leftist/rightist blogs and websites re-launching the same story word for word, as usual. No fact checks. Just spreading the Kremlin lies to idiotic audiences. But one thing this idiotic attempt at producing yet another version (which is contrary to all the previous Kremlin ones) does is further prove that the Russians did indeed shoot the 777 down, since they are so intent on showing that anyone but them did it. They did.
Posted on: Sat, 15 Nov 2014 00:18:04 +0000
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