Two days later, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a "Government Assessment," also citing "social media" seeming to implicate the rebels. Then, this white paper listed military equipment allegedly supplied by Russia to the rebels. But the list did not include a Buk missile battery or other high-powered anti-aircraft missiles capable of striking MH-17, which had been flying at around 33,000 feet.
The DNI also had U.S. intelligence analysts brief a few select mainstream reporters, but the analysts conveyed much less conviction than their superiors may have wished, indicating that there was still great uncertainty about who was responsible.
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 U.S. 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 2002-2003.
However, more relevant to the recent Times article is the fact that the U.S. government has withheld from the public -- and even from official investigators -- important information for determining the guilty parties and holding them accountable. For instance, neither the Dutch Safety Board, which headed up the initial investigation, nor the Joint Investigation Team (JIT) has been able to pinpoint the site of the missile firing.
Though Kerry insisted that the U.S. government knew that fact three days after the incident, the Dutch Safety Board said last October that it had narrowed the likely firing location only to an area of 320-square kilometers covering territory used by both the rebels and the government. The JIT has promised the families of Dutch victims that it would determine that detail later this year (now more than two years after the shoot-down).
If one wants to apply Sherlock Holmes logic to this "dog not barking" problem, you would probably conclude that the U.S. government clammed up after Kerry's statements and the DNI's sketchy white paper because -- as more evidence was uncovered and analyzed -- it was not pointing in the direction that U.S. propagandists wanted.
Lacking Balance
Yet, it is Russia, not the United States, that is taken to task for not providing its data in the most pristine fashion, even as the U.S. government provides nothing at all. And whenever the MH-17 issue is raised in the major Western news media, this strange official U.S. silence is ignored or excused while other inconvenient facts are also left out, such as a report by Der Spiegel that the German intelligence service, BND, had found that MH-17 photos supplied by the Ukrainian government "have been manipulated."
Even more egregious is the blackout that the Times and other news organizations have applied to the Dutch intelligence report regarding the presence of Ukrainian military anti-aircraft batteries in eastern Ukraine capable of bringing down a commercial airliner at 33,000 feet and the rebels lack of such a powerful weapon.
Plus, there have been official disclosures that raise serious doubts about the integrity of the JIT, which has investigators from the Netherlands, Australia, Ukraine, Belgium and Malaysia, but has fallen increasingly under the control of Ukraine's SBU, a security and intelligence agency that is responsible for protecting Ukrainian government secrets and that has been implicated in torture and other war crimes against the ethnic Russian rebels.
Earlier this year, an interim JIT report revealed how cozy the relationship had grown between the SBU and especially the Dutch and Australian investigators who have had long stints in Kiev, getting fed "evidence" by the SBU, and depending on the Ukrainian host's hospitality.
Though this JIT report was released publicly, its contents were ignored by the Times and other publications even amid formal complaints from the United Nations about the SBU blocking human rights investigations into alleged Ukrainian government torture centers.
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