In the first two hours of the first day of the Dutch trial of allegations of murder in the shooting-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17, Hendrik Steenhuis, the presiding judge, revealed that the judgement for Dutch court jurisdiction for the case to proceed is inevitable. He did that three months before he has scheduled a hearing on the question. Steenhuis also revealed that a judgement of guilt against the three Russian and one Ukrainian defendants is not less inevitable.
Judgements in a trial scheduled to run for at least twelve months, issued before lunch was served to the judges on their first day, are the makings of a show trial.
Russia is not the
initiator of the war on the oil front which is now under way. Not Russian
Energy Minister, Alexander Novak (lead image, right), but Mohammed Bin Salman
(left), the Saudi Crown Prince and chief executive of the sheikhdom.
This is war propaganda from the Financial Times : “ ‘There was a consensus among Opec [to cut production]. Russia objected and has said that from April 1 everyone can produce whatever they like. So the kingdom too is exercising its right,’ said one person familiar with Saudi oil policy.”
This is more lying from the New York Times: “Moscow refused to accept production cuts to offset the effect of the coronavirus outbreak”
What is true is that the war started with the US Government; its spetsnaz, the shale oil producers; and their offensive to capture market share from the traditional producers, the member states of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries led by Saudi Arabia, plus Russia (OPEC+). Pressing this attack when oil demand started falling, as the corona virus damaged the global economy, obliged the defenders to agree between themselves on tactics. The Russians argued for holding the current position, and let the virus, the demand dynamic, and the elapse of time damage the Americans. The Saudis argued for a break-out, a counter-offensive. Between lower-risk defence in place, and a higher-risk sally, it’s impossible to do both at the same time. Three things happened next.
They illustrate the lesson the Russian command will now teach Mohammad Bin Salman, as last week’s lesson was taught on the Syrian war front to Tayyip Recep Erdogan, Turkey’s President. Defence in depth will usually defeat offence, even surprise attack, when it runs beyond the lines of supply and reserve.
Bribes; early release
from prison; threats to kill; covert operations inside Russia, including
rendition; and intimidation of relatives.
These have been five
of the methods planned for obtaining witness testimony for the trial of the criminal
destruction of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 on July 17, 2014. The trial opens on Monday, March 9, in The
Netherlands. The Dutch prosecution alleges that three Russians and one
Ukrainian intended to murder the 298 passengers and crew on board the aircraft
by firing a BUK missile.
Details of the witness tampering plan have been released to reporters in The Hague by Bonanza Media this weekend. In their secret conference police officers and prosecutors from The Netherlands, Australia, Belgium and the Ukraine acknowledged they knew what they were planning was a violation of the law of the states they represented. This was acceptable to the Australian police representative so long, he said, as it was a “covert operation”. The Ukrainian prosecutor said he “sees no problem if this is done by The Netherlands. It’s like a regular intelligence operation.”
In Operation MINCEMEAT,
the brightest and the best of British secret intelligence available in London
between January and March 1943, dressed up a corpse as a high-ranking British
Army courier. He was dropped into the
water off the Spanish coast, so that he would wash up for a German Army patrol to
find, along with a briefcase of top-secret General Staff letters and plans.
They were fakes made to fool Adolph Hitler and his military commanders about
where the D-Day invasion would take place.
Deceiving the enemy turned out to be a big success. The corpse belonged to a 34-year old
Welshman, homeless and mentally ill, who had been taken to St. Pancras Hospital
in London and treated for acute organo-phosphate poisoning. He died. He had
committed suicide with rat poison.
In Operation MINCEPIE,
what’s left of British secret intelligence in March 2018 dressed up two Russians – Sergei and Yulia Skripal, 66 and 33
years old respectively (lead images) – knocked them out on a bench in the
middle of Salisbury, and took them to Salisbury District Hospital where
they were treated for acute organo-phosphate poisoning. But they didn’t die so
they have been locked up ever since. This, too, has proved to be a big success at
deceiving the enemy.
No! Whoa! Cut! Roll that sentence back! This, too, was a big success at deceiving the British people. The difference between MINCEMEAT and MINCEPIE isn’t between rat poison and the nerve agent the British call Novichok; nor between the corpse of the Welsh tramp and the live Russians who are now dead to the world. The telling difference is that the secret intelligence boys have given the game away the second time round. The biggest similarity is that Hitler and the British people didn’t notice until it was too late.
Between 11:30
Moscow time on Thursday and 14:00, President Vladimir Putin spent two and a half
hours talking with the Turkish President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, with
interpreters present but no one else, and including lunch and toilet breaks.
The two presidents then spent three hours and twenty minutes in talks with
delegations of their officials before appearing at 17:22 for another sixteen minutes
in front of the press. The Turkish clock for the negotiations counted 5 hours
40 minutes; the Kremlin clock, six hours.
The outcome was a document entitled “Additional Protocol to the Memorandum on Stabilization of the Situation in the Idlib De-escalation Area”. This comprises an agreement of three paragraphs amounting to ten lines, and a preamble of four paragraphs repeating what professionals call boilerplate; that’s to say, points with which everyone agrees in principle, and no one in practice.
The difference between the amount of time and effort expended and the outcome isn’t between the mountain and the molehill. It is the result of the Russian side applying the brief script dictated to Putin by the Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu, the Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, and the General Staff led by General Valery Gersasimov, and confirmed the day before by the Security Council.
The script is dictated by the principle of the tsarina, Empress Catherine II, during the Turkish-Russian wars of 1768 to 1792. The principle is that nothing the Turks say they agree to or sign can be relied upon; and that everything the Turks can’t achieve with their army will be tested again and again, until and unless they are defeated by the battle of arms and the defence of territory by more force than the Turks can overcome. The corollary of the Catherine principle is that the new agreement between Putin and Erdogan cannot last for long. Because both sides know this, their heads were in the down position, their eyes averted, for longer than has ever been recorded at their summit meetings before.
A new document, leaked
from the files of the Joint Investigation Team (JIT) in The Netherlands, reveals that Dutch prosecutors told the
Australian, Belgian and Ukrainian representatives on the team, that the US
Government had not presented any satellite evidence of a BUK missile firing at
Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17. The aircraft was destroyed above eastern Ukraine
on July 17, 2014, killing all 298 people on board.
“We haven’t received
anything from them”, one of the Dutch officials told the JIT, according to
minutes of a meeting of JIT leaders on December 4, 2015. There were eight officials recorded at the meeting, four of
them Dutch, two Belgians, one Australian, and one Ukrainian. The Malaysian Government,
which is also a member of the JIT but refuses to endorse the Dutch allegations
of Russian culpability in the shootdown, was reported to be absent from
the JIT meeting recorded on February 12,
2016. The leaked document claims the Dutch had made “unsuccessful attempts to
connect both with Royal Malaysia Police and Malaysia Attorney-General’s
Office.”
The meeting was held at the Dutch National Police Central Crime Unit at Driebergen. The Ukrainian official participated by video link to the Ukrainian Embassy in The Hague.
“We should receive the official report from Dutch Military [Intelligence] on U.S. data by mid-March [2016],” the JIT officials agreed. “Then we can determine future actions.”
The disclosure of their
classified meeting record took place at a public briefing in London this week by
Max van der Werff and Yana Yerlashova, the Bonanza Media partners in a
long-running independent investigation of the MH17 crash.
The document provides evidence directly contradicting US Secretary of State John Kerry. He announced on July 20 and August 12, 2014, that he had seen US satellite imagery of the attack on the MH17 flight – the launch of a ground-based missile, its flight, and then detonation beside the civilian aircraft in flight. “We picked up the imagery of this launch,” Kerry announced on NBC television just three days after the crash. “We know the trajectory. We know where it came from. We know the timing….And it was exactly at the time that this aircraft [MH17] disappeared from the radar.” US officials have been unable to substantiate this in public or in the Dutch proceedings.
The leaked document also reveals that by February 12, 2016, no US satellite data had been handed over to the JIT. Seven months later, on September 21, 2016 – another leak from JIT files revealed last week — the head of the Dutch military intelligence agency MIVD, Major-General Onno Eichelsheim, reported to the Dutch prosecutors that the US and NATO satellite data shown to his agency revealed that no Russian BUK missile radar and launch units had crossed the border into Ukraine before or on July 17, 2014; no BUK missile radar targeting or firing on MH17 had been detected; and no identified Russian units on the Russian side of the border had launched missiles.”
Cyber attacks have been launched in England to stop publication of new evidence in the Skripal case from being published this week on the second anniversary of the attack on Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury, March 4, 2018.
The targets were The Blogmire produced by Rob Slane from Salisbury, and this website produced from Moscow. The Blogmire was disabled and inaccessible to readers between last Thursday and Saturday. Then on Monday evening this site was attacked. The evidence left behind by the attackers shows they come from the same source, using the same unusual method of attack and concealment.
Reporters and columnists for the London papers also say they are under pressure from their editors not to report on or review the new book, Skripal in Prison, published on February 13. According to Mary Dejevsky, columnist for The Independent, “the govt’s info people have managed by various stratagems, incl silence, to close the whole thing down.”
The Blogmire publishes essays by Slane (right), a church minister, on a range of religious, political and social topics. The website opened in 2014; Slane’s reports on the Skripal case began on March 12, 2018. Printed out, they currently run to more than three hundred pages. They have also drawn comments, additional data, factual corrections of police, prosecutor, and politician claims, together with speculations about motive, timing and modus operandi. Altogether on the website, attached as threads to Slane’s reports, there are several thousand comments from individuals, some of whom identify themselves, some of whom prefer to stay anonymous; some are very well-informed. MI6 and the BBC have dismissed them as “truthers or pro-Kremlin users”.
The Skripal archive is here. Peak readership has been running at more than 90,000.
“When I began writing about the Skripal case,” Slane said in August 2018, “I was moved to do so by three main considerations. Firstly, I really am passionate for the truth, and whatever the truth happens to be in this case, I strongly desire it to be made manifest. It was clear to me fairly early on that this was not happening. Secondly, I am also very passionate about concepts such as the rule of law, innocent until proven guilty, and the apparently quaint notion that investigations should precede verdicts, rather than the other way around. And so when I saw accusations being made before the investigation had hardly begun, verdicts being reached before the facts were established, I was appalled – appalled that this was happening in what we British pride ourselves is the Mother of Parliaments, and equally appalled that this meant the investigation was inevitably prejudiced and – pardon the expression – poisoned from the off. Thirdly, the incident happened to have taken place pretty much on my doorstep, which made it of even more interest to me.”
“I still do not have any clear idea of what happened on that day, but what I am certain of is that the official narrative is not only untrue, but it is manifestly inconceivable that it could be true. There are simply too many inconsistencies, too many holes and far too many unexplained events for it to be true.”
Last week, after the cyber attack began on The Blogmire, the website’s server reported: “A recent review of your account uncovered it has been compromised. We found malicious scripts running in the background that appear to be sending spam emails. In order to prevent further abuse/spam, we have suspended your account.” A server notice posted at the site’s address told readers the site had been suspended, but no details were provided. After a lengthy damage assessment and repairs, Slane reported: “Was this the work of Spook Bots, intent on disabling the site because of its investigations and the insightful thoughts from many wonderful commentators? Possibly. Or just the work of Bog Standard Bots with nothing better to do with their time? Possibly.” That was on February 29.
More evidence materialized on Monday, March 2. This was left behind after a cyber attack on this website, Dances with Bears. This was not the usual type of operation.
Attacks of the distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) type are frequent, usually in response to investigations of Russian oligarchs and their London lawyers or of major court cases or stock exchange flotations involving Russian businesses with big money at stake. DDoS attacks work by generating very large volumes of near-simultaneous reader clicks on a portal address, server or network, overloading it and forcing it to shut down.
Some of these incidents have been reported, though for our security and defence, the details and the methods developed to identify and repel the attacks have not. If you see the sign of the fighting bears, you know someone powerful enough to employ hackers doesn’t want you to read the new publication.
The operation against this site and the Blogmire was not DDoS. The telltale signs indicate a source with cyber warfare expertise which is different from that of commercial hackers and the companies which employ them. The source has been profiled and tracked, and new defences established.
Skripal in Prison, which was the target, can be read here.
To prevent the book from being read, and its evidence of British government faking from being reviewed, methods which are more human, less electronic, are being used. The main London newspapers, the weeklies, and book reviews have come under pressure not to challenge the official narrative of the Skripal case, and not to allow the book to be reported.
Mary Dejevsky, a Russia specialist and columnist for The Independent, says the British government “has ensured that there’s nothing new to say that they wouldn’t immediately dismiss as speculation or worse.” The Skripal case is a “scandalous saga”, she adds, but “govt info people” are actively deterring a review of the new book because “no outlet would take it.”
by Editor - Wednesday, March 4th, 2020 No Comments »
Everything,
including artillery fire, infantry movements, launch of drones, rockets and
refugees, even losses of territory and
men, is planned by three Turks – President Tayyip Recep Erdogan (lead images); Defence Minister and former head of the
Turkish General Staff, Hulusi Akar; and Hakan Fidan, head of the National
Intelligence Organization (in Turkish, MIT). Call them the Sultan and the Ugly
Viziers (SUV).
An SUV is never
as serious as it would like to appear. This Turkish SUV also planned the July 2016
coup in Istanbul and Ankara. Nothing they do, including the sacrifice of large
numbers of their own people, will result in a military coup to remove them, no
matter how costly their mistakes. Those Turks who can calculate their mistakes
are in jail or dead.
The SUV has
decided to fight for Syria outside the lines of the Sochi agreement. With
artillery firing from the Turkish side of the Syrian border, they decided to
fight a new battle for Saraqib, east of Idlib, and succeeded. In the battle
they lost up to 60 regulars; the Syrian Army lost more than a thousand. The
Syrians have gained in the south of Idlib; they have lost Saraqib. They must retake it and hold it; they will;
they have done so.
Russian forces
have now established a cordon around the city. They have restored air cover for
the Syrian Army, and just as importantly, extended their electronic counter
measure (ECM) defences to the frontier and further. The drones on which the SUV
depended for targeting their long-range guns and for attacking Syrian Army units
have been neutralized. The Russian resupplies now arriving by sea and air are
more than a match for the small force the SUV has committed so far.
Defeat makes the SUV keener than ever to hide their weakness. Akar has retreated from his field headquarters in the south to Ankara, as the SUV prepares to meet Putin and the Stavka on Thursday in Moscow. A Russian military analyst reports the General Staff assessment awaiting him: “General Akar should keep himself in check, because it is one thing to inflate the enemy’s losses somewhat and pass off old videos as fresh ones. It’s quite another to write fiction novels in the context of information war.”
The SUV responds to force of arms more than to the force of money. They calculate President Vladimir Putin and his Kremlin advisors are the opposite. The SUV will continue to operate NATO AWACS aircraft for attempting the same ambush tactics they used against the Russian Air Force in November 2015. The SUV will try to threaten with US weapons the Pentagon will not hazard in a losing fight. The Turks will push against the cowardice they have come to expect from the Greek Government in Athens and President Nikos Anastasiades in Nicosia. This has been a winning strategy for the SUV until they overreached with force instead of bluff. When the SUV goes through the Spassky Gate on Thursday, for the first time in the four hundred years since the Ottoman siege of Vienna, a single army, Russia’s, is defending all of Europe.
A London
newspaper on Sunday, citing “security insiders” as the source, claims Sergei
and Yulia Skripal are “desperate to leave the UK”, and are “living under house
arrest…[at] a secret location where [they are] guarded by British intelligence
agents.” The report also claims they “may have already travelled to Australia
and New Zealand to scout possible locations.”
The newspaper
report has appeared days before the second anniversary of the incident in
Salisbury, England, on March 4, 2018. Then, according to British Government
allegations, the Skripals were the targets of a murder attempt by a nerve agent
manufactured in Russia and delivered by Russian assassins. The attempt failed.
In the history of
the British criminal law, the Skripals are the only targets of a crime who have
not been allowed to testify in public nor communicate with their kin; Sergei
Skripal was last heard of in a telephone call to his mother’s house on June 26,
2019; Yulia Skripal on July 18, 2018. The British authorities have yet to
produce in court evidence of the crime, the weapon, the crime scene, or even
the arrest warrants allegedly issued by the Crown Prosecution Service for the
culprits.
The book, Skripal in Prison, just published, provides the full story.
Sources in the Australian Federal Police (AFP), the organisation in charge of witness protection in that country, indicate there is “no verification that the [London] article is correct.” The Australian Minister of Home Affairs, Peter Dutton, to whom the AFP reports, refuses to say whether the Skripals have visited Australia, or whether there has been any discussion with the British Government on relocation to Australia and protection for the Skripals. Nicole Chant, confirming her role as Dutton’s spokesman and agreeing to follow up on the London press report, said by telephone: “I don’t want to be referred to in any article.”
Two weeks is not
a long time in Russian politics. But it’s just enough for Kremlin deputy staff
chief Sergei Kirienko to send the instruction to the Central Election
Commission head Ella Pamfilova (lead image) that any turnout, big or small, for
the national vote on constitutional amendments will be enough. The 50% turnout required for the validation
of the constitutional referendum in December 1993 has been abandoned.
Pamfilova announced in Moscow yesterday: “The individual who considers himself an active citizen, the one who believes that his opinion can and should influence certain decisions, takes part. Knowing our realities, the obligation to vote [Обязаловка] always gives the opposite result.” This is the strongest indication yet that the Kremlin is afraid that the national turnout for the vote, now confirmed for April 22, will be less than 50%.
