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Episode 116 (Redux) - Whatever happened to MH17?
31 Plays3 years ago
Another look at one of our earlier accounts of the fate of MH17, in preparation for the next episode!
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Transcript
Podcast Introduction
00:00:03
Speaker
The podcast is Guide to the Conspiracy, with Dr. M.R. Extenteth, and featuring Josh Addison as the interlocutor.
00:00:14
Speaker
Hello, you're listening to the Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy. I'm Josh Addison, sitting here in sunny-ish Auckland, while, meanwhile, young Matthew is, of course, over feasting on the blood of the innocent in Bucharest. Um, not quite sure how many more vampire Romania jokes I can do before it just becomes plain old cultural stereotyping, but I'm gonna stick with it for now. I'm feeling good about it still. We'll see, we'll see.
00:00:36
Speaker
So once again, the episode will be curiously bifurcated. I'm recording part of it here. Matthew's going to record part of it over there and then jam them together and hopefully it'll sound okay.
Matthew's Travels
00:00:51
Speaker
So we're going to start with a news update. I'm doing that one. Although perhaps, perhaps before I start that, Matthew, would you like to give us an update on what you've been up to in Romania at the moment?
00:01:00
Speaker
Boona, Joshua, Boona, and Boona to our loyal listeners who are putting up with our now strangely bifurcated podcast, as Joshua's wants to call it. I'm doing well. I'm doing lots of excellent work at the Institute for Research and the Humanities at the University of Bucharest. In fact, such excellent research
00:01:20
Speaker
I've been invited to present a keynote at Psychons in Padua at the end of November this year which is a big conference on science and conspiracy and a really conspiratorial conference. The first day is public and I'll be giving a public presentation which all can attend if you can get to Padua at the end of November of this year and then the next two days the researchers will be cloistered
00:01:45
Speaker
and we'll be doing our work in secret. So yes, we're going to have an open conspiracy on the first day and a traditional closed conspiracy for two days afterwards. And not just that, next week I'm off to Venice to attend a conference there, but I'm not presenting a paper. I'm simply going on what we might call a junket to go visit one of my favorite cities on earth. So I would say at this stage, being in the Northern Hemisphere for a year is really, really working out for me.
00:02:14
Speaker
But enough about my news. Let's hear the news.
October Surprise in Elections
00:02:19
Speaker
Breaking breaking conspiracy theories in the news.
00:02:28
Speaker
So, to the news. Well, it's October, which means there's less than an month until the US presidential election, and it means it is now time for the October surprise. Every politician's worst nightmare, there's some sort of scandal coming out just before the November election, which will derail a wannabe president's campaign.
00:02:49
Speaker
Trump has already had one, perhaps in the form of the leaked tax records, which happened, what, a week ago or so. Vaguely conspiratorial there, especially since they do appear to have been leaked from, you know, inside Trump's organization. But who knows, knowing Trump, there could be even more than that. But in terms of an October surprise for Clinton, there hasn't been one yet, although according to WikiLeaks, there was going to be one.
00:03:17
Speaker
various people had been saying that Julian Assange and WikiLeaks had dirt on Hillary Clinton that was going to sink her campaign completely and he was going to hold a press conference about it and then he wasn't and then they did but then there was a conference that just sort of involved them talking about themselves a bit and plugging their books and really said bugger all to do with Hillary Clinton so
00:03:40
Speaker
The WikiLeaks October surprise has not been forthcoming, no less than our friend Alex Jones has been quite upset about that and has been saying that perhaps Julian Assange, he's just run out of documents, he's got nothing left and now he's just self-aggrandising. But one thing that has come up over the last week was in the lead up to the presidential debate of last week, the week before, whenever it was,
JASTA and International Relations
00:04:08
Speaker
So even before the debate had happened, people were saying that, oh, you know, obviously Clinton's going to cheat somehow because that's what she'll do. She'll probably be wearing an earpiece or something so that her opponents, so not her opponents, so that her support team can be feeding her lines and so on during the debate.
00:04:28
Speaker
And then that didn't appear to have happened, and yet many people have pointed out that you could see there was some sort of rectangular object underneath her jacket that appeared to be attached to the belt of her pants. That's trousers for our British listeners.
00:04:49
Speaker
and suggesting maybe this was some sort of a receiver for her microphone claiming that there was you could possibly see some little earbuds sticking out of her ear although again people have sort of said if she really did have a tiny thing hidden in her ear she wouldn't she could have very easily worn her hair over her ears like she does a lot of the time which would have hidden it completely why would she have had her hair out if she was going to do that but nevertheless the folks at Prison Planet part of the info was
00:05:17
Speaker
group, umbrella, whatever the hell they call themselves. I've put up an article saying here was this this this mysterious thing. Was it a micro? Was it a microphone, earphone receiver? Something was it? Was it something medical? Was it some sort of a people thought it looked like the possibly the size and shape of some device that sort of delivers electric shocks to your brain to offset seizures or something like that? I don't even know.
00:05:45
Speaker
But even the present planet people didn't actually seem overly convinced by that. Interesting though, you may recall, it was 12 years ago now, the 2004 debate between George W. Bush and Kerry. At the time, people pointed out that Bush appeared to have some sort of a strange lump sort of showing under his jacket on his back kind of in between his shoulder blades.
00:06:12
Speaker
and people sort of pointed to that and also a couple of cases where Bush appeared to sort of pause for an unusually long amount of time before replying as though he were being fed lines and one point where he
00:06:29
Speaker
said don't cut me off despite the fact that no one had tried to cut him off as evidence that all he was being fed lines and this device on his back was obviously you know some sort of receiver but again those rumors also never really came to anything and I don't think anything came of it or actually the other thing interesting though again because
00:06:51
Speaker
People suggested for Clinton it may have been some sort of medical device again playing on her supposed physical decrepitude and her recent bout of pneumonia. Again, with Bush they thought it was some sort of portable defibrillating pacemaker-y thing because he'd had that choking business at one point, I can't remember what else, but supposedly there were questions raised about his health.
00:07:17
Speaker
Interesting to see that sort of come up again for the other side. Oh, because the other thing was a bulletproof vest was one idea, that he was wearing some sort of a thin bulletproof vest because he feared assassination or something and hadn't divulged that and was sort of denying it because he didn't want to look fearful and weak or something. Interesting theories, but don't actually appear to have anything behind them.
00:07:39
Speaker
Now, staying in America, the Senate has voted, and I think we mentioned this earlier, the possibility that was going to happen, the Senate has voted to allow families to sue Saudi Arabia over the 9-11 attacks. Now, there was this bill, the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act, or JASTA, because all the good acronyms were taken.
00:08:04
Speaker
President Obama vetoed this bill and the Senate has voted to overturn his veto. Now initially this seemed like a very sort of laudable goal of Saudi Arabia which has appeared to have a large – in some way been behind the attacks. It has never been held to account in wanting victim – families of these victims.
00:08:27
Speaker
to be able to sue them and hold them to account some way. But the downside of it, and this was the stated reason for Obama's veto of it, was that generally people aren't allowed to sue other countries' governments, and that kind of goes in both directions. We don't allow our citizens to sue your government, and you won't allow your citizens to sue our government. And so the worry about
00:08:57
Speaker
the reason why this act was vetoed rather was that people worried, you know, so if we allow American citizens to start suing foreign countries and, you know, to be clear, this isn't the families of victims of 9-11 being allowed to sue Saudi Arabia bill. This is the bill would allow any country would allow a lawsuit against any country
00:09:22
Speaker
by any US citizen who claims the country financed or otherwise aided and abetted a terrorist attack on US soil. And then it goes on to say liability would only attach if the plaintiff could show the country acted with knowledge in providing the support. But yes, so it opens the doors for any American citizen to sue any foreign government if they believe the government had in some way supported terrorism.
00:09:44
Speaker
And they're worried that this might open the floodgates for other countries to say, oh, really? Well, you're going to let your citizens sue us? Well, maybe we'll let our citizens sue you. Apparently, having been confronted with this Mitch McConnell, the Senate House leader thing, whatever he is, has sort of said, oh, well, he probably should have mentioned that to us first, which
00:10:10
Speaker
probably he would have got from the fact that he vetoed it. I don't know, it all seems to be a little wonky. An interesting thing though about the article that I was reading this in, at one point it includes the line, the 9-11 Commission found no evidence that the Saudi government as an institution or senior Saudi officials were involved. Now that's word for word from those missing 28 pages of the 9-11 Commission report that we talked about earlier in the year.
00:10:38
Speaker
And as we noted at the time, it was very specifically worded. No evidence the Saudi government as an institution or senior Saudi officials were involved, which does leave the door open for junior officials to have been involved or for elements of the government to have been involved, but not in the capacity as government members, but, you know, it wasn't an official government action, but there could still have been government
00:11:06
Speaker
members involved and that statement could still remain true. So, more on that as it happens, or not, we'll see.
00:11:18
Speaker
Now, where to go now?
SpaceX Explosion Speculations
00:11:20
Speaker
Let's go into space. Or not, as it turned out. The SpaceX program had a launch failure the other week. One of their rockets exploded, basically, as rockets do from time to time, being still very highly experimental things.
00:11:39
Speaker
But there was slight sort of conspiratorial mutterings about supposedly footage of the explosion appeared to show possibly something coming from another rooftop towards the rocket as though something had been fired at it or there had been some element of sabotage. And the rooftop that it appeared to come from was a building owned by the United Launch Alliance, who are another basically private space
00:12:07
Speaker
travel space rocket launching company. And so things became a little bit uncomfortable. Supposedly the SpaceX people essentially said, hey guys, I'm not accusing you of anything, but can we come and look at your rooftop please? And they unsurprisingly said bugger off. So nothing has been proven there, but it all looks just a little bit strange and fishy.
00:12:36
Speaker
Continuing on the theme, so last week we had a little article that mentioned how a science fiction writer was involved with some of the very earliest UFO sightings in America. Matthew has sent another article my way about the history of human deception during the earliest days of UFO sightings.
00:13:03
Speaker
I'm going to be honest, Matthew, I tried reading the article several times and my eyes just kept glazing over. The word deception shows up so often that if we were having a drinking game and I drank alcohol in the first place, I would have done some fairly serious damage to myself. Essentially what it seems to be saying, though, you had a group involved in World War II who were all about deception.
00:13:31
Speaker
And then one of the head guys in this group ended up being involved in the earliest sort of cases of reports of flying saucers in Area 51 and all that nonsense. I shouldn't say nonsense, but I did, so whatever. And yes, the fine details of it, my brain somewhat recoiled from, to be perfectly honest.
00:13:53
Speaker
But basically, maybe this is something we should go into in greater detail in a subsequent episode, so Matthew can actually explain it all to me, because I could certainly get the impression that there were murky dealings, murky goings-on in the earliest days of UFO sightings, but the specific details of them somewhat elude me, shall we say.
Maori Rights in New Zealand
00:14:13
Speaker
Now one more, we've been to America, we've been to outer space, let's come back home to New Zealand and look at the launch of the Hobson's pledge campaign. This is a campaign recently launched in New Zealand by former prime... No, he was never prime minister, he was just leader of the national party when they weren't in power, former national party leader Don Brash.
00:14:38
Speaker
who has a history of, as he would put it, anti-separatist rhetoric. Others would say it's more like blatant racism, but there's some controversy there. So the Hobson's Pledge refers to, is reference to a copy of the Treaty of Waitangi that was found or in the possession of some dude called Hobson.
00:15:03
Speaker
In this case, I'm also not entirely clear on the details, not because I've tried and failed, but because I just simply don't care enough to look. It strikes me as being more of the same old crap. They're all about how we don't want separate Maori seats, separate Maori representation. No separatism at all. There should be one law for all.
00:15:21
Speaker
But making no attempt to address or even acknowledge any sort of systemic problems that may result in disadvantages towards the Māori people, even existing at all.
00:15:37
Speaker
One of the backers of this campaign, Mike Butler, is sympathetic to the Celtic New Zealand thesis, which you will have recalled us talking about in earlier episodes. They don't really seem to have any interest in social issues at all. It's just about sort of property and legal rights. Everyone should have the exact same rights and there should be no separate rights for Maori and other citizens and so on and so forth.
00:15:57
Speaker
ignoring any sort of relationship that might or might not exist between legal and property rights and laws and current social situations.
00:16:12
Speaker
Apparently, like a reporter making irony, Forbes asked several of the campaigners how parky-har they were. Mr. Butler claimed that this question was completely irrelevant, but then, as often happens, when you get these things started talking about Maori not being pure Maori, and you hear this a bit, there are no pure Maori left anyway. The only people who claim to be Maori just sort of have part Maori blood, and how far do you take that? Everyone could claim to be Maori, and then we'd have to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
00:16:41
Speaker
And it all kind of sounds like bollocks, really. Which makes it a sad thing to go out on. Matthew! Matthew, I'm directing these comments at you specifically now. Do you have any further comments on the Hobson's Pledge thing? I imagine you probably have some feelings about it. Let me know what those are. And then, if you feel like it, would you mind checking in on that Andy Bichago fellow again? Haven't heard from him in a while.
00:17:07
Speaker
So first things first, Joshua, you a historical bastard. We're not talking about the treaty version found that belonged to William Hobson. That's known as the Littlewood Treaty, which was drafted by one of Hobson's secretaries. We're talking about William Hobson, the first governor of New Zealand. So the reason why Don Brash and Co. are talking about Hobson's pledge is they're talking about the we are the one people
00:17:35
Speaker
epitaph that Hobson gave when the treaty was signed. And that's why it's called Hobson's Pleasure. It wasn't because it belonged to some random guy called Hobson, the first governor of New Zealand. Know your own history, boy. Know your own history. Secondly, it's really hard to get around the claim of conspiracy inherent.
00:17:55
Speaker
in the Hobson's pledge campaign because the campaigners have to claim that Māori gets special privilege in New Zealand slash Aotearoa despite the fact that according to all the social stats they really don't and secondly they've got to also make the claim that the reason why their position the Hobson's pledge position is not orthodoxy is really due to some kind of social engineering going on at the academic and political level
00:18:24
Speaker
which does suggest a conspiracy by political and academic elites to hide the truth, and I'm putting truth in quote marks but I'm realising you can't see that because this is a podcast, of the real natural situation in Etoro'a slash New Zealand politics or economics or societal structure
00:18:43
Speaker
et cetera, et cetera. So despite what the Hobson's pledge people say, which is we're only interested in talk about property rights when we think there's clear inequality in the system, they have to buy into a conspiracy that the reason why they claim it's just about property rights is constantly being besmirched in the press and by the government of the day is due to a conspiracy to hide the fact that actually property rights are the only thing we should be interested in
00:19:12
Speaker
And those social stats are in some way either irrelevant, untrue, or just not salient to a political debate in modern society within Kiwi culture at this particular point in time. So it's important to note the Hobson's pledge campaign and to stress the racist undertone and the conspiratorial claims within it
00:19:33
Speaker
to point out that this is really the last gasp of a certain set of, and I'm going to say boomer white males within New Zealand culture trying to cement their property rights at a point in time where we're reevaluating what happened during the colonisation process and the consequences of breaking the treaty so quickly after it was signed, which does ask, or at least raise the question,
00:20:01
Speaker
Maybe some of the land that we took from Maori, we took illegally. Actually, that's not even in dispute. It's known that large amounts of land were seized. And that may be the best way to have restorative justice between the two peoples mentioned in the treaty document, Pākehā and Maori.
00:20:20
Speaker
and the best way to improve the lot of Maori who have been robbed of their land and their natural sources of income is maybe reassessing some of that property and going maybe Maori should have that back or at least have equal access to it in the same way the crown does at this particular point in time. But apparently asking those questions about modern New Zealand slash Aotaro society
00:20:48
Speaker
and asking questions about how can we repair the damage between the two parties to the treaty is, somehow, separatism, as opposed to, you know, restorative justice. So, there you go. That's why it's important.
Solar Roads Proposal
00:21:05
Speaker
But you know what else is important? Finding out the terms and conditions of our next US President, Andy Bichago.
00:21:20
Speaker
This week on Andy Bashiago, we point the spotlight at the policy of urging American billionaires to take American solar. Let me give you Andy's glass.
00:21:33
Speaker
In a previous era, America's most wealthy families, including the Carnegies, the Melons, and the Rockefellers, gave vast sums of money to charity. Today's billionaires show no such th...ah! I cannot say the word philanthropy. Philanthropy? Is it philanthropy? Let's say it's philanthropy. I'm fairly sure it's philanthropist, so therefore it must be pronounced philanthropy.
00:21:59
Speaker
And I must be engaging in philanthropophobia by not being able to say the word philanthropy. Let's try that again. Today's billionaires show no such philanthropy. This all doesn't sound right, but still, we're going to move on. We're going to move on. The president should summon America's billionaires to the White House and urge them to finance a bold, new national project retrofitting America's roads and highways with solar energy technology.
00:22:26
Speaker
This will guarantee the residential energy supply, help make our country independent from foreign sources of oil, and free us from the foreign walls that are necessary to secure the supply of that foreign oil.
00:22:45
Speaker
Now you might be going, Dr. Dentist, Dr. Dentist, why bring this up on a podcast about conspiracy theories? And that's a good point. This actually seems like a really good plan. Electric roading and electric cars seem like a really good band-aid to the climate crisis that we are suffering at this particular point in time. However, I do detect a secret plan behind
00:23:08
Speaker
Andy's plan. I mean, we're talking here about retrofitting America's roads and highways with solar energy technology. That sounds like heat rays. I think Andy Basiago is going to convert the entire American highway system into one giant heat ray weapon system to use against the alien invaders and the people from Mars that he is so concerned we already have contact with. So Andy,
00:23:38
Speaker
I would ask you, come clean. Is this really about renewable energy? Is this really about making highways better? Or is this actually part of a grandiose plan to turn America into one giant heat ray death machine to destroy Mars and to save us from invading aliens? The people ought to know Andy. The people ought to know. Because you are going to be president. This has already been decided.
MH17 Conspiracy Theories
00:24:08
Speaker
So, to the main topic of today's episode, which now that I think about it, I realise I haven't actually mentioned in any of my earlier pieces. I'm going to assume Matthew did though, because he's the conscientious type and probably would have been on top of all that sort of thing. But just in case, we are talking about the downing of flight MH17. You'll recall a couple of years ago when Malaysian Airlines had a particularly bad run of it, first losing flight MH370 completely,
00:24:34
Speaker
And then, having flight MH17 shut down over Ukraine. Now, unlike in the case of MH370, we know precisely what happened to MH17. It was hit with a missile, it crashed and killed everyone on board.
00:24:49
Speaker
But in this case, there has still been a fair amount of controversy and conspiracy theorizing about exactly who fired the missile and where it came from and why the plane was shot down in the first place. So as you are no doubt aware, Russia is in dispute, shall we say, with Ukraine about whether or not Ukraine is part of Russia or not, as they would have it.
00:25:14
Speaker
There's been a fair amount of fighting going on and so with a fair amount of troops and army and indeed missile launchers in the area, it was not immediately clear whether the plane had been downed by Russian or Ukrainian forces. Obviously neither would want to take responsibility for downing a civilian airplane.
00:25:37
Speaker
And it's never been quite certain, or at least initially it was not quite certain, who had fired it and why. Whether or obviously to begin with, there were any number of false flag theories that perhaps, you know, it had been downed by the Russians, but who were wanting to make it look like the Ukrainians had done it to get sort of, you know, the world on Russia's side and so on.
00:26:01
Speaker
The reason why we're talking about it today though is that a recent investigation has concluded that MH-17 was shot down by a Russian missile. The report details how basically where this missile came from, they claimed to have records of where the specific missile was, where it came from, where it was moved to
00:26:26
Speaker
and having combed through millions of pages of social media posts, eyewitness accounts, physical evidence, and I see more than 150,000 secretly taped phone calls. They've come up with this conclusion. They claim to have phone calls of people basically requesting this missile be brought to this area and so on and so forth.
00:26:54
Speaker
So their conclusion is fairly cut and dried. It was Russia. They did it with a Russian missile.
00:27:01
Speaker
There has been some criticism of it, though. I'll leave it to Matthew to provide the details. But essentially, some people have claimed that they've cherry-picked the evidence a bit and that there are other, say, taped phone calls that show Ukrainian troops requesting a missile of that type and so on and so forth. So there's still a fair amount of controversy around it. It's an interesting affair. It's obviously very, very politically sensitive.
00:27:30
Speaker
Very controversial and not a little bit conspiratorial, but I think perhaps the best person to talk to you about this would be a certain Dr. Matthew R.X. Denteth. So, Mr. Denteth, Dr. Denteth, please take it away. Yes, there's been another report on the downing of MH17. This is, I think, the third one thus far. The first one was an American intelligence report prepared by the American military.
00:27:56
Speaker
using sensor data and the like, and it quite squarely pointed the finger at Russian-backed insurgents
00:28:04
Speaker
in the eastern Ukraine. Then there was a Dutch safety board report which came out in 2013 and it claimed that MH-17 was brought down by a surface-to-air missile located somewhere in the eastern Ukraine controlled by Russian sympathizing rebels at the time. And now there's this new 2016 Dutch-led report, once again, the JIT, the Joint Investigative Team Report,
00:28:30
Speaker
It's called a joint investigative team because it included members from Belgium, the Ukraine, Australia and Malaysia. And its investigation concluded that MH17 was indeed shot down by a Russian supplied missile, a book, or maybe it's a BUK, don't really know enough about surface to air missile technology, know whether we call them books or BUKs. I've seen it both spelt with upper and lower case letters.
00:28:58
Speaker
Who knows? So Russian missile basically fired from a Russian-provided BUK missile system fired by Russian sympathizing and Russian-supplied rebels in the Eastern Ukraine. So we've got three reports now and all three reports indicate that MH17 was brought down by basically
00:29:19
Speaker
either the Russians, because they supplied the surface-to-air missile and maybe provided the information which led to the downing of MH-17, or at least by people in the eastern Ukraine who are sympathetic to and supplied by the Russians. So ipsofacto, people are saying
00:29:36
Speaker
Is there a way to use ipso facto? Now I'm using, I'm going, ooh, am I using ipso facto correctly? Or is it one of those academic words which I think I know what it means because everyone else thinks they know what it means and actually it isn't? You don't need to worry about whether I'm using ipso facto correctly. What you need to worry about is the fact that it appears to be the case that Russia was largely, I'm using this in a kind of vague sense, behind the downing of MH-17.
00:30:03
Speaker
Now this new report comes to this particular conclusion basically by trawling through millions of pages of social media posts, hundreds of eyewitness accounts and basically lots of containers of actual physical evidence which includes missile systems, our report paperwork and the like and also 150,000 secretly taped phone calls captured in the regions in the days before and after the disaster.
00:30:34
Speaker
150,000 secretly taped phone calls.
00:30:41
Speaker
That's a lot of phone calls, imagine being members of the investigative team who have to sit down and act, well maybe they stood up, maybe they've got those nice standing desks, but they have to spend a large amount of time listening to phone calls, presumably in some cases, in languages they don't understand, or reading transcriptions, doing translations, or to try to get to the bottom of who had the surface air missiles at the time, who were firing them on the day,
00:31:11
Speaker
and do we have any talk of potential targets and the like.
00:31:16
Speaker
So this report's fairly interesting because it uses an awful lot of data, a lot of which is now in the public domain. So you can actually go and look at the report, look at the annexes of the report, and actually look at the bits of information the report relies upon to come to this particular conclusion. So we've got three reports now, and all three reports agree as to the basic location of where the missile attack started, the eastern Ukraine,
00:31:46
Speaker
and all three seemed to point the finger that it were, that's terrible grammar, that it was Russian supplied rebels who fired the missile at MH-17. Now of course the Kremlin disagrees. They claim this is a hatchet job against the Russians at this particular point in time.
00:32:07
Speaker
And there are people out there who are pouring scorn or criticism on the report, namely one Robert Parry, he who uncovered or covered the iron contra affair. And he's gone through the report and pointed out that there are a few inconsistencies.
00:32:25
Speaker
So snippets of discussions where rebels make claims inconsistent with the general thesis of the JIT report and things like that. So taped phone conversations which indicate the rebels don't know what's going on. Taped phone conversations where people describe particular convoys in different ways depending on who's holding the conversation at a particular point in time. And he's claiming this indicates this wriggle room here
00:32:51
Speaker
to indicate that the JIT report is in fact not the full story of what went on at the time. Now, I'm not convinced by Parry's argument in this particular case, in part because what he's pointing out is that there are little bits of information in what we might now call the official theory of the downing of MH17, which indicates that maybe the JIT report isn't the most fulsome story of what went on.
00:33:20
Speaker
but I would argue what Robert Perry has found here are bits of data which are errant to the main thesis but not errant in such a way they show that the main thesis is so inconsistent that the main thesis must in fact be wrong. So when you've got a general explanation of a complex phenomena which let's face it the downing of a
00:33:44
Speaker
aircraft by either Russian insurgents or Ukrainian Patriot forces. It's going to be a rather complex issue to unpack because no one's willing to admit on either side exactly who did it to try to get to a general thesis based on a whole bunch of rather disparate data. You are going to then find that there are bits of data in the evidential record which don't quite fit with the general thesis.
00:34:12
Speaker
And that's in part because you're dealing with human beings, and human beings, as we've seen in this particular recording, sometimes make mistakes in the things they say. Aha! There we go, I can now justify that earlier paverication about...
00:34:26
Speaker
and such like as being a kind of illustrative example to make sense of what I'm talking about here. So when people are having conversations, their language is often imprecise. And that's fine in most part because the person you're having the conversation with by and large knows what you're talking about. But if people then go and look at that conversation several years later trying to pick up exactly what went on,
00:34:52
Speaker
those inconsistencies or those ambiguities in human language end up being a fair whack of trouble for trying to work out, now I wasn't party to this conversation but I'm trying to work out what did they mean at the time and he said something really weird and she said something really weird which indicates another rival hypothesis that could come into play here. Now that seems fair when you're looking at the evidence after the fact
00:35:20
Speaker
But during the conversation, presumably those people, even if they were using language imprecisely, knew what they were talking about because they were talking in the context of a conversation where they knew what their aims and desires were. So Perry's issues with the evidence here aren't necessarily issues which show that the general thesis is inconsistent. What it shows is that there are bits of evidence in the record
00:35:47
Speaker
which are inconsistent for a variety of different reasons, some of which are going to be in preciseness of language, some of it's going to be confusion amongst the people involved in the particular event, so not everyone knew what was going on. In fact, what's interesting about looking at a lot of the data that the JIT put forward is that it's quite clear there's a lot of confusion amongst the insurgents
00:36:12
Speaker
as they're trying to work out exactly what's going on, what the chain of command looks like, and where information is coming from and who gets priority when judging some bits of evidence or information to be good or the most recent, etc.
00:36:30
Speaker
So no, I'm not convinced that Perry's argument about the JIT hypothesis being inconsistent actually hold all that much water. We should expect there to be errant data in the official theory, as I'm saying here in air quotes, official theory, because once again, this official theory is a kind of conspiracy theory. We'll get on to that in just a second. It's just to be expected that there are going to be inconsistencies. The question is,
00:36:57
Speaker
are the inconsistencies so big that it then casts doubt upon the particular hypothesis. And I would argue that Parry has shown some interesting inconsistencies, but those inconsistencies aren't so big that they actually cast doubt upon the general thesis itself.
00:37:16
Speaker
Where Perry actually does have a point though is that the JIT investigation is heavily tied into the Ukrainian government. So the investigators were based in the Ukraine. They worked with Ukrainian investigators. Part of the investigative team was in fact Ukrainian.
00:37:36
Speaker
And they agreed to release a redact data in accordance with Ukrainian law and wishes. Now, as my friend and colleague Lee Basham would point out, this leads to questions as to whether the report would ever release any information, which would be toxic to the host regime.
00:37:54
Speaker
So there is a question here as to whether we can trust the report for the sheer fact it's heavily in bed with the Ukraine. And of course we've got a classic he said he said or she said she said situation. The Russians claim it was the Ukrainians. The Ukrainians claim it was the Russians. This report's coming out of the Ukraine. That's kind of expected.
00:38:19
Speaker
that the report will point the finger not at the host government but at the enemy across the border. Now I have two responses to this and neither of these are cutting in such a way that they get us away from the toxicity issue of would the report say something bad about the Ukraine but they are things that point towards the fact that maybe Russia might be protesting just a little too much. So
00:38:48
Speaker
The first issue is of course Russia doesn't actually need people to be saying bad things about it for us to be suspicious of what Russia is up to. Russia is quite happy to engage in extrajudicial murder using complex chemicals or radioactive isotopes. Russia is quite content to engage in
00:39:11
Speaker
fairly terrible activities both home and abroad with respect to its own citizens. Russia is quite willing to back the hacking of democratic candidates who are standing for president in the United States elections in November of this year. So Russia is quite willing to do things and then deny that they've actually done it even though the evidence is clear they actually did. So in that particular respect
00:39:36
Speaker
Russia might be protesting a little bit too much to go, or this is just a hatchet job against us. Actually, we're quite used to Russia doing things just like this and covering the information up, and so it's reasonable to suspect that maybe Russia did do it. The other thing, of course, is that even if we're worried,
00:39:55
Speaker
about the Ukrainian influence on the JIT report, a lot of the information the report relies upon is now in the public domain. Not all of it is. Some of it was considered to be sensitive information. The Ukrainians did not want revealed about troop movement and the like, given there is still an ongoing conflict there. But a lot of the data is available for people to look at. And thus, it's possible for people to go away and test parts of the general thesis.
00:40:24
Speaker
and see whether they hold water. Now, this doesn't mean that there's not a conspiracy at the heart of the JIT report or that the Ukrainians have done things to mislead the investigators in the joint investigative team, but it does go some way to mollifying critics of the report by going, well, look, go and look at the data yourself like Robert Parry has and see if you can find things that show it up. So, yeah.
00:40:55
Speaker
By and large it does seem that there's been a considered conspiracy by someone, either the Ukrainians or the Russians, to hide exactly what happened to MH-17. It seems reasonable to suspect that maybe Russia was behind it, because no matter what you think about whether the missile was fired or who fired it,
00:41:16
Speaker
Russia is the origin point for the book missile system in the first place. So that's kind of questionable as to why the Ukrainians would have a Russian missile system, although some people are saying that's because Russian Ukraine are side by side. Of course, they've got Russian military tech before the conflict. They were kind of in a true state and trading weapons all the time. But there is definitely a conspiracy here. The question is whose conspiracy?
00:41:44
Speaker
and exactly what's going on to cover this information up. So yes, those are some of my thoughts about the downing of MH17.
00:41:54
Speaker
Back to you Joshua.
New Zealand Beer in Bucharest
00:42:15
Speaker
Well Joshua, this week's thought, a new segment we'll probably never do again, is why can you get Monteith Summer Ale in Bucharest Supermarkets? Because you can!
00:42:28
Speaker
I don't know why, but you can. Anyway, this week's song is Tchaikovsky's Dance of the Sugar Plum Theory. I thought it'd be nice to have a bit of a Russian theme. And it is, of course, produced by the wonderful Kevin MacLeod. So play on, Kevin, and show us how that Sugar Plum Theory dances.
Podcast Conclusion
00:42:47
Speaker
Tchaikovsky.
00:42:51
Speaker
You've been listening to the podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy, hosted by Josh Addison and Imdenteth. If you'd like to help support us, please find details of our pledge drive at either Patreon or Podbean. If you'd like to get in contact with us, email us at podcastconspiracy at gmail.com.
00:43:26
Speaker
ś ś
00:44:02
Speaker
you
00:44:31
Speaker
Yeah.