The surprising results of the MH17 criminal investigation

[Will Wiley]

Jay Jay youre Finnish aren't you? Are you able to shed any light on why the Finnish reportedly won't release the results of their test. It looks suspicious.

FINLAND WON’T SHARE DATA WITH MH17 INVESTIGATION TEAM

An international controversy is brewing over data that the Finnish government reportedly withheld from international investigators regarding the 2014 downing of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17.

According to a report in Helsingin Sanomat, Finland has prevented researchers from the Dutch led Joint Investigative Team (JIT), who investigated the downing of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 in 2014 over Eastern Ukraine, from accessing data from a Finnish experimental detonation of a BUK Missile.

 

[barbos]

 

[Jayjay]

How do you know they don't? Maybe it just happens that the data they got from Ukraine passed the scrutiny, while the data from Russia did not.

What kind of scrutiny original phone intercept ukrainians manipulated had?
And it's not just scrutiny, it's the fact that dutch commission intentionally distort what russians are saying.

When did they do that? If you are referring to using the Almaz-Antey simulation results despite Russian objections in the DSB report, that's hardly a distortion. It's simply not allowing Russia to dictate what evidence to use and what not to use.

As for how the tapped phone calls were scrutinized:

Tapped telephone conversations

Beyond the investigation area of the MH17 investigators office is a long narrow room filled with desks, after which there is another small room. Not exactly a room like you may imagine on the basis of the name “Field Office”, but still, it is the name used for this accommodation.

Since the first week of September 2014, investigating officers from The Netherlands and Australia have worked here. They work in close cooperation here with the Security and Investigation Service of the Ukraine (SBU). Immediately after the crash, the SBU provided access to large numbers of tapped telephone conversations and other data.

Russian-speaking investigating officers

Both the Australian and Dutch police identified Ukrainian and Russian-speaking police officers amongst their personnel to work in the Field Office. These investigating officers listen to telephone conversations in order to classify the importance of the material. They also search through audio recordings with special computer programs for the name of the airplane and other important search terms. Locally recruited interpreters translate all relevant conversations into English, the working language of the Joint Investigation Team (JIT).

(...)

Cross-checks

With the tapped telephone conversations from SBU, there are millions of printed lines with metadata, for example, about the cell tower used, the duration of the call and the corresponding telephone numbers. The investigating officers sort out this data and connect it to validate the reliability of the material. When, for example, person A calls person B, it must be possible to also find this conversation on the line from person B to person A. When somebody mentions a location, that should also correlate with the cell tower location that picked up the signal. If these cross-checks do not tally, then further research is necessary.

And so on. The SBU did provide the phone intercepts, but they did so immediately after the crash. And they provided complete metadata for all the calls, which would be extraordinarily difficult to forge in a convincing way.

 

[Jayjay]

Jay Jay youre Finnish aren't you? Are you able to shed any light on why the Finnish reportedly won't release the results of their test. It looks suspicious.

FINLAND WON’T SHARE DATA WITH MH17 INVESTIGATION TEAM

An international controversy is brewing over data that the Finnish government reportedly withheld from international investigators regarding the 2014 downing of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17.

According to a report in Helsingin Sanomat, Finland has prevented researchers from the Dutch led Joint Investigative Team (JIT), who investigated the downing of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 in 2014 over Eastern Ukraine, from accessing data from a Finnish experimental detonation of a BUK Missile.

Finland did not in fact cooperate with JIT directly, but with the Dutch criminal investigation. The confusion is about JIT not being able to use the results, but according to Finnish foreign minister and president the secrecy and discretion was requested by the Dutch and they are blaming it squarely on them. Finland did not even know that it would be mentioned in the JIT report.

Another factor is that Finland is bound by non-disclosure agreements in the trade deals it has with Russia, which could get it into trouble. So there are likely some technical details of the BUK missiles that Finland has refused to share.

 

[barbos]

What kind of scrutiny original phone intercept ukrainians manipulated had?
And it's not just scrutiny, it's the fact that dutch commission intentionally distort what russians are saying.

When did they do that? If you are referring to using the Almaz-Antey simulation results despite Russian objections in the DSB report, that's hardly a distortion. It's simply not allowing Russia to dictate what evidence to use and what not to use.

We've been over this, you know what I meant. Dutch distorted what Almaz-antey said, they did not say "almaz-antey is wrong so and so", they basically said "Almaz-Antey agrees with us" which was not true at all.

As for how the tapped phone calls were scrutinized:

Tapped telephone conversations

Beyond the investigation area of the MH17 investigators office is a long narrow room filled with desks, after which there is another small room. Not exactly a room like you may imagine on the basis of the name “Field Office”, but still, it is the name used for this accommodation.

Since the first week of September 2014, investigating officers from The Netherlands and Australia have worked here. They work in close cooperation here with the Security and Investigation Service of the Ukraine (SBU). Immediately after the crash, the SBU provided access to large numbers of tapped telephone conversations and other data.

Russian-speaking investigating officers

Both the Australian and Dutch police identified Ukrainian and Russian-speaking police officers amongst their personnel to work in the Field Office. These investigating officers listen to telephone conversations in order to classify the importance of the material. They also search through audio recordings with special computer programs for the name of the airplane and other important search terms. Locally recruited interpreters translate all relevant conversations into English, the working language of the Joint Investigation Team (JIT).

(...)

Cross-checks

With the tapped telephone conversations from SBU, there are millions of printed lines with metadata, for example, about the cell tower used, the duration of the call and the corresponding telephone numbers. The investigating officers sort out this data and connect it to validate the reliability of the material. When, for example, person A calls person B, it must be possible to also find this conversation on the line from person B to person A. When somebody mentions a location, that should also correlate with the cell tower location that picked up the signal. If these cross-checks do not tally, then further research is necessary.

And so on. The SBU did provide the phone intercepts, but they did so immediately after the crash. And they provided complete metadata for all the calls, which would be extraordinarily difficult to forge in a convincing way.

That's all very interesting but I asked about the itntercept which circulated right after the crash, the one which was interpreted certain and completely false (to anyone who speak russian well) way. This is a kind of shit which make people like me to distrust this whole thing.

 

[barbos]

I am also confused about this 150,000 phone conversations SBU recorded. I am no expert but this number is kinda weird. It's too big to be recordings of selected set of known people and too small for a total surveillance which I am not sure is even technically possible or legal.

 

[Jayjay]

They have no such power. That's just one of the conspiracy theories that is being circulated in an attempt to discredit the investigation. The DSB report shows, that none of Ukraine's requests to change the report were accepted, for example.

Jay Jay. We have been over this in previous discussions but you seem to have forgotten.
https://sandervenema.ch/2014/12/ukrainian-veto-mh17-report-will-not-reveal-truth/

To even get in the report there had to first be consensus.

On the other hand, Russia has also been involved in the investigation,

Sigh.... Russia is not part of the team

Russia provides information and evidence to JIT. So does Ukraine. Only difference in being "part of the team" is that Ukraine gets inside info what's going on, but they can't change the minds of Dutch investigators or veto anything any more than Russia can.

Wrong. See the letter about the secret agreement (linked to above) where they all had to agree before anything went in. And you still are digging your heels in about a well known principle of law. The more you dig your heels in the clearer it is you don't want to see. Regardless of who did it the investigation is corrupted.
https://www.rt.com/op-edge/361088-mh17-jit-investigation-ukraine/

James O'Neill, Australian barrister and international lawyer commented on the issue:“It is a fundamental principle of any kind of criminal investigation that it is done independently of the people who may be said to be involved. And we have had here right at the outset the involvement the Ukrainian police and the security services when Ukraine is clearly one of the prime suspects for being responsible for shooting down the plane.”

“The Dutch-led investigation gave Ukraine – one of the prime suspects – the right to veto anything they did not like in the report. This has not been addressed by the Dutch authorities. One cannot have any confidence in these kinds of secret agreements that were entered into in 2014 and which have been carefully not reported by the Western media ever since.”

The letter you quoted does not in fact say that "they all had to agree before anything went in". It explicitly says that everyone has to agree before releasing any information. This is a crucial difference, because it means the investigators are not bound by any censorship as to the evidence going in, and if Ukraine ever used its alleged "veto" to try to hide its culpability or prevent release of important information, Netherlands and Malaysia at least would scream bloody murder.

The confidentiality agreement probably exists, but it is unlikely to be any kind of blanket veto that you suggest. In fact it is more likely that the conditions are set to prevent Ukraine from blurting out any details that might compromise the investigation.

Third, there is a Dutch criminal investigation ongoing that is not bound by a veto, imaginary or real, from any other country. This independent line of investigation keeps the JIT honest.

 

[Jayjay]

When did they do that? If you are referring to using the Almaz-Antey simulation results despite Russian objections in the DSB report, that's hardly a distortion. It's simply not allowing Russia to dictate what evidence to use and what not to use.

We've been over this, you know what I meant. Dutch distorted what Almaz-antey said, they did not say "almaz-antey is wrong so and so", they basically said "Almaz-Antey agrees with us" which was not true at all.

Almaz-Antey's launch site simulation results (which was the part used in the DSB report) did in fact agree with the DSB and Ukrainian simulations, given the same initial conditions. What Almaz Antey disagreed was those detonation conditions. The report is perfectly transparent about it (DSB report, page 145):

JSC Concern Almaz-Antey performed a simulation of the effects that would be expected
from this weapon using detonation data that TNO had calculated and was included in
the draft version of this report. This was done without confirming that a 9N314M warhead,
carried by a 9M38-series missile and launched from a Buk surface-to-air missile system
had caused the crash. The material provided by JSC Concern Almaz-Antey was used by
the investigation as a validation of the models used by NLR and Kyiv Research Institute
for Forensic Expertise.

So, Almaz-Antey's simulation did in fact agree with the other models, it's just that AA disagreed about the initial conditions that they fed to the simulation and then tried to veto publishing their results altogether.

That's all very interesting but I asked about the itntercept which circulated right after the crash, the one which was interpreted certain and completely false (to anyone who speak russian well) way. This is a kind of shit which make people like me to distrust this whole thing.

I can't say anything whether those recordings were shit or not, but they were circulated by Ukraine before the JIT was even formed and it's hardly fair to judge the whole investigation based on something that happened before it even started. It would be an interesting question to pose to the JIT now though.

By the way, since you watched the part of the video of the JIT press conference, were any of the calls that they played back there also parts of the calls that Ukraine released after the crash? Or entirely new ones?

 

[barbos]

We've been over this, you know what I meant. Dutch distorted what Almaz-antey said, they did not say "almaz-antey is wrong so and so", they basically said "Almaz-Antey agrees with us" which was not true at all.

Almaz-Antey's launch site simulation results (which was the part used in the DSB report) did in fact agree with the DSB and Ukrainian simulations, given the same initial conditions. What Almaz Antey disagreed was those detonation conditions. The report is perfectly transparent about it (DSB report, page 145):

JSC Concern Almaz-Antey performed a simulation of the effects that would be expected
from this weapon using detonation data that TNO had calculated and was included in
the draft version of this report. This was done without confirming that a 9N314M warhead,
carried by a 9M38-series missile and launched from a Buk surface-to-air missile system
had caused the crash. The material provided by JSC Concern Almaz-Antey was used by
the investigation as a validation of the models used by NLR and Kyiv Research Institute
for Forensic Expertise.

So, Almaz-Antey's simulation did in fact agree with the other models, it's just that AA disagreed about the initial conditions that they fed to the simulation and then tried to veto publishing their results altogether.

It did not agree.

That's all very interesting but I asked about the itntercept which circulated right after the crash, the one which was interpreted certain and completely false (to anyone who speak russian well) way. This is a kind of shit which make people like me to distrust this whole thing.

I can't say anything whether those recordings were shit or not, but they were circulated by Ukraine before the JIT was even formed and it's hardly fair to judge the whole investigation based on something that happened before it even started. It would be an interesting question to pose to the JIT now though.

These recordings were released by SBU the same SBU which is collaborating with JIT.

By the way, since you watched the part of the video of the JIT press conference, were any of the calls that they played back there also parts of the calls that Ukraine released after the crash? Or entirely new ones?

I only watched cursing part.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Russia has been caught fabricating data in the MH-17 case. Ukraine hasn't.

Somehow I think Russia is on the right here.

 

[Jayjay]

Almaz-Antey's launch site simulation results (which was the part used in the DSB report) did in fact agree with the DSB and Ukrainian simulations, given the same initial conditions. What Almaz Antey disagreed was those detonation conditions. The report is perfectly transparent about it (DSB report, page 145):

JSC Concern Almaz-Antey performed a simulation of the effects that would be expected
from this weapon using detonation data that TNO had calculated and was included in
the draft version of this report. This was done without confirming that a 9N314M warhead,
carried by a 9M38-series missile and launched from a Buk surface-to-air missile system
had caused the crash. The material provided by JSC Concern Almaz-Antey was used by
the investigation as a validation of the models used by NLR and Kyiv Research Institute
for Forensic Expertise.

So, Almaz-Antey's simulation did in fact agree with the other models, it's just that AA disagreed about the initial conditions that they fed to the simulation and then tried to veto publishing their results altogether.

It did not agree.

Yes, it did. Here is the relevant illustration from the report:



We know this picture comes from AA because it uses the same kind of map and format that AA used in its own presentation. The smaller parts inside the four points are AA results (based on TNO data), and clearly that is in agreement with the other simulations.

 

[barbos]

Almaz-Antey's launch site simulation results (which was the part used in the DSB report) did in fact agree with the DSB and Ukrainian simulations, given the same initial conditions. What Almaz Antey disagreed was those detonation conditions. The report is perfectly transparent about it (DSB report, page 145):

JSC Concern Almaz-Antey performed a simulation of the effects that would be expected
from this weapon using detonation data that TNO had calculated and was included in
the draft version of this report. This was done without confirming that a 9N314M warhead,
carried by a 9M38-series missile and launched from a Buk surface-to-air missile system
had caused the crash. The material provided by JSC Concern Almaz-Antey was used by
the investigation as a validation of the models used by NLR and Kyiv Research Institute
for Forensic Expertise.

So, Almaz-Antey's simulation did in fact agree with the other models, it's just that AA disagreed about the initial conditions that they fed to the simulation and then tried to veto publishing their results altogether.

It did not agree.

Yes, it did. Here is the relevant illustration from the report:

View attachment 8255

We know this picture comes from AA because it uses the same kind of map and format that AA used in its own presentation. The smaller parts inside the four points are AA results (based on TNO data), and clearly that is in agreement with the other simulations.

I am not going to discuss it again. Dutch distorted russian claims, period.

 

[barbos]

Russia has been caught fabricating data in the MH-17 case.

When?

Ukraine hasn't.

Ukrainian SBU fabricated that intercept. I mean they knew damn well, that some of it had no relation to MH17 and that interpretation which was circulated in the West was false.

Somehow I think Russia is on the right here.

 

[Jayjay]

I am not going to discuss it again. Dutch distorted russian claims, period.

Suit yourself. I guess it would be hard to do when all the facts are against you.

 

[barbos]

I am not going to discuss it again. Dutch distorted russian claims, period.

Suit yourself. I guess it would be hard to do when all the facts are against you.

No, facts are against you.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Russia has been caught fabricating data in the MH-17 case.

When?

Ukraine hasn't.

Ukrainian SBU fabricated that intercept. I mean they knew damn well, that some of it had no relation to MH17 and that interpretation which was circulated in the West was false.

Somehow I think Russia is on the right here.

There was a supposed satellite image showing a Su-24 firing on it. Obvious photoshop.

 

[Will Wiley]

When?

Ukraine hasn't.

Ukrainian SBU fabricated that intercept. I mean they knew damn well, that some of it had no relation to MH17 and that interpretation which was circulated in the West was false.

Somehow I think Russia is on the right here.

There was a supposed satellite image showing a Su-24 firing on it. Obvious photoshop.

That did not come from the Russian government....sigh.

 

[Will Wiley]

I am not going to discuss it again. Dutch distorted russian claims, period.

Suit yourself. I guess it would be hard to do when all the facts are against you.

Jay Jay ,you are being disingenuous. AA had the missile coming from the side, which explained the damage to the plane.

To keep trying to make out tey agreed by carefully choosing your words here is wrong. They came up with a very different conclusion.

The JIT presentation doesn’t address the difference in impact evidence between the two engines as they were found on the ground. The Russian presentation makes this an important source of evidence for proving which side of the aircraft was struck by the warhead. The Russian presentation also distinguishes between simulation models of what happened – a Dutch model, as reported by the DSB reports last October and the JIT report this week; a Russian model, as reported by Almaz-Antei – and the actual evidence of the aircraft parts recovered from eastern Ukraine and reassembled at a military base in The Netherlands.

So the question for Dutch prosecutor Fred Westerbeke (lead image, left) and Dutch policeman Paulissen, along with the 100 members of the JIT staff, is which engine is which in their evidence? Why does it appear that the MH17’s port engine – left-side looking forward, compass north for the plane flying east — not impacted by warhead blast or shrapnel? Why are there shrapnel hits on the starboard engine (right-side looking forward , compass south) and why was it deformed so differently? Why has the JIT omitted to analyse the engine positions and report this evidence?

http://johnhelmer.net/?p=16468

 

[Will Wiley]

It is still unclear whether a coverup is going on but the JIT report is interesting in it's wording.

In response to a Dutch request for legal assistance, the US submitted a report in which they present their assessment of the information regarding the shooting down of flight MH17. This report can be used in court. The conclusion of the American authorities is that flight MH17 was shot down by an SA-11 surface-to-air missile, i.e. a BUK-missile, which was launched from a site about six kilometres south of the village of Snizhne in Eastern Ukraine. This is consistent with the distance to aforementioned launch site near Pervomaiskiy. The US also explain how they reached this conclusion. In addition, they mention that they are sure of the fact that the Ukrainian air defence systems could not have done it and that an air-to-air scenario is impossible.

One of the issues pointed to by a former CIA analyst was that intelligence officers would not sign off on the US accusations, so they were forced to release a "government assessment" rather than one signed off by actual intelligence offocers.

MH-17’s Unnecessary Mystery

The Los Angeles Times article said: “U.S. intelligence agencies have so far been unable to determine the nationalities or identities of the crew that launched the missile. U.S. officials said it was possible the SA-11 [the designation for a Russian-made anti-aircraft Buk missile] was launched by a defector from the Ukrainian military who was trained to use similar missile systems.”

That uncertainty meshed somewhat with what I had been told by a source who had been briefed by U.S. intelligence analysts shortly after the shoot-down about what they had seen in high-resolution satellite photos, which they said showed what looked like Ukrainian military personnel manning the battery which was believed to have fired the missile.

There is also an important distinction to make between the traditional “Intelligence Assessment,” which is the U.S. intelligence community’s gold standard for evaluating an issue, complete with any disagreements among the 16 intelligence agencies, and a “Government Assessment,” like the one produced in the MH-17 case.

As former CIA analyst Ray McGovern wrote: “The key difference between the traditional ‘Intelligence Assessment’ and this relatively new creation, a ‘Government Assessment,’ is that the latter genre is put together by senior White House bureaucrats or other political appointees, not senior intelligence analysts. Another significant difference is that an ‘Intelligence Assessment’ often includes alternative views, either in the text or in footnotes, detailing disagreements among intelligence analysts, thus revealing where the case may be weak or in dispute.”

In other words, a “Government Assessment” is an invitation for political hacks to manufacture what was called a “dodgy dossier” when the British government used similar tactics to sell the phony case for war with Iraq in 2002-03.

 

[Will Wiley]

Jay Jay here is the representative of Almaz Antey explaining why the Dutch theory appears to be wrong.

[YOUTUBE]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=od8hg-UL3nc[/YOUTUBE]