USA Today reports: “Pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine agreed Friday to allow investigators access to the scattered crash site of a Malaysian airliner that was shot down, killing all 298 aboard. …
“Separatists and Ukraine’s government have both denied involvement.”
RAY MCGOVERN, rrmcgovern at gmail.com
McGovern is a former CIA analyst whose responsibilities included chairing National Intelligence Estimates. He is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. He regularly writes for Consortium News and just wrote the piece “When the US Welched on Its NATO Promise” which states, “The Ukraine crisis owes its roots to a deal America made and broke with the recently deceased Soviet foreign minister.” Today he said, “Lack of clarity as to who fired the missile is likely to persist for weeks, at least. Meanwhile, the shootdown provides raw meat for those who will use it to blacken Russia, just as the downing of KAL007 in 1983 allowed the Reagan administration to hype charges that the Soviet Union ‘deliberately’ downed a passenger aircraft. The evidence indicated that the Soviets thought they were downing an American spy plane, but U.S. propaganda, including the altering of electronic evidence, left no room for a ‘mistaken identity’ explanation.
“More generally, Russian President Vladimir Putin is probably correct in saying the tragedy would not have happened if Ukrainian President Poroshenko had agreed to prolong the fragile cease-fire, as the leaders of Germany, France, and Russia pleaded with him to do during a two-hour conference call on June 30th.”