THE ROVING EYE - Vanishing point … By Pepe Escobar

THE ROVING EYE            Vanishing point … By Pepe Escobar  First, passenger airliner MH370 vanished from Planet Earth. Then MH370 vanished from the news cycle. First, MH17 was shot down by "Putin's missile" - as Planet Earth was told. Then MH17 vanished from the news cycle. Where's Baudrillard when we need him? Had he been alive, the dervish of simulacra would have already deconstructed these two Malaysian planes as mirror images; from absolute vanishing to maximum exposure, then vanished again. They might as well have been abducted - and shot - by aliens. Now you seem them, now you don't. Black boxes, data recorders - everything MH17 is now floating in a black void. The British are taking forever to analyze the data - and if they have already done so, they are not talking. It's as if they were singing, I see a black box / and I want it painted black … void. The Pentagon, with 20-20 vision over Ukraine, knows what happened. Russian intelligence not only knows what happened but offered a tantalizing glimpse of it in an official presentation, dismissed by the "West". The best technical analyses point not to "Putin's missile" - a BUK - but to a combination of R-60 air-to-air missile and the auto-cannon of an Su-25. A reader led me to this fair assessment by former USAF and Boeing engineer Raymond Blohm: "With proper vectoring, a Su-25 need not be quite as fast as a Boeing 777 in cruise. It just has to get to a missile-firing position. Since the 777 was not maneuvering, it would be simple to pre-calculate when to get in a certain spot in the sky below the 777. From there, it's the missile that has the speed and altitude capability to hit the 777. (The R-60 is a very capable missile.) After the missile takes out an engine, both the 777's max speed and its max altitude are well within the Su-25 fighter's speed & altitude capabilities. Then, the Su-25 can show off its cannon power." Follow the engine wreckage. Follow the cockpit wreckage. Follow the motive. One cannot even imagine the tectonic geopolitical plates clashing were the Kiev regime to be deemed responsible. It would be the vanishing point for the whole - warped - notion of the Empire of Chaos's "indispensable" exceptionalism. So as MH370 totally vanished, the MH17 story must also totally vanish. The Dutch and the British might eventually come out and hold a high-profile press conference telling the world what His Master's Voice finally redacted. Still, one may count on certified, residual outrage, if not puzzlement, by a large number of grieving Dutch families. And one may count on certified outrage by Malaysia as a nation. As in Why Us? And not once but twice? Moscow, after deconstructing the "logic" of the ongoing Russia/Putin hysterical demonization, knows that whatever they say will be invalidated by the Orwellian Thought Police. Yet as much as His Master's Voice controls what the Dutch and the British might eventually reveal, Russia can counterpunch by leaking the crucial scenario to Malaysia. And Malaysia will talk. MH370 vanished as in a video game. MH17 was hit as in a video game. Now their respective narratives are being vanished. It's as if we are living a tiny rehearsal of the black hypothesis of post-history. Postmodernist star Jean-Francois Lyotard and later Flemish thinker Lieven De Cauter were the rarified few who dabbled in studying the black hypothesis. The black hypothesis is the ultimate dystopia - playing out in the cosmological time of the death of the sun, something like 4.5 billion years away. Basically this is about techno-science surviving the death of the sun and the death of humanity itself. So MH370 may have vanished into an antechamber of the black hypothesis. But MH17 is much more prosaic; it could have been just a false flag gone wrong. Thus, under Empire of Chaos's rules, it must also vanish. The question is whether global civil society will accept it - or has already entered its own vanishing point. Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007), Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge (Nimble Books, 2007), and Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009). He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.

THE ROVING EYE - Western plutocracy goes bear hunting By Pepe Escobar

THE ROVING EYE Western plutocracy goes bear hunting By Pepe Escobar The post-Cold War status quo in Eastern Europe, not to mention in Western Europe, is now dead. For Western plutocracy, that 0.00001% at the top, the real Masters of the Universe, Russia is the ultimate prize; an immense treasure of natural resources, forests, pristine water, minerals, oil and gas. Enough to drive any NSA-to-CIA Orwellian/Panopticon war game to ecstasy. How to pounce and profit from such a formidable loot? Enter Globocop NATO. Barely out of having its collective behind unceremoniously kicked by a bunch of mountain warriors with Kalashnikovs, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization is now fast "pivoting" - that same old Mackinder to Brzezinski game - to Russia. The road map will be put in place at the group's summit in early September in Wales. Meanwhile, the MH17 tragedy is undergoing a fast metamorphosis. When the on-site observations by this Canadian OSCE monitor (watch the video carefully) are compounded withthis analysis by a German pilot, a strong probability points to a Ukrainian Su-25's 30 mm auto-cannon firing at the cockpit of MH17, leading to massive decompression and the crash. No missile - not even an air-to-air R-60M, not to mention a BUK (the star of the initial, frenetic American spin). The new possible narrative fits with on-site testimony by eyewitness in this now famously "disappeared" BBC report. Bottom line: MH17 configured as a false flag, planned by the US and botched by Kiev. One can barely imagine the tectonic geopolitical repercussions were the false flag to be fully exposed. Malaysia has handed out the flight recorders to the UK; this means NATO, and this spells out manipulation by the CIA. Air Algerie AH5017 went down after MH17. The analysis has already been released. That begs the question of why it is taking so long for MH17's black boxes to be analyzed/tampered with. Then there's the sanctions game: Russia remains guilty - with no evidence - thus it must be punished. The EU abjectly followed His Master's Voice and adopted all the hardcore sanctions against Russia they were discussing last week. Yet there are loopholes. Moscow will have reduced access to US dollar and euro markets. Russian state-owned banks are forbidden from selling shares or bonds in the West. Yet Sberbank, Russia's largest, has not been sanctioned. So Russia in the short and medium term will have to finance itself. Well, Chinese banks could easily replace that kind of lending. Don't forget the Russia-China strategic partnership. As if Moscow needed another warning that the only way to go is to increasingly bypass the US dollar system. EU nations will suffer. Big time. BP has a 20% stake in Rosneft, and it's already freaking out on the record. ExxonMobil, Norway's Statoil and Shell will also be affected. Sanctions don't touch the gas industry; now that would have propelled the EU's counterproductive stupidity to galactic levels. Poland - hysterically blaming Moscow for everything under the sun - gets more than 80% of its gas from Russia. The no less strident Baltic states, as well as Finland, get 100%. The ban on dual-use goods - civilian and military applications - will badly affect Germany, the top EU exporter to Russia. On defense, the UK and France will suffer; the UK has no less than 200 licenses selling weapons and missile launching gear to Russia. Yet the French 1.2 billion euro (US$1.6 billion) sale of Mistral assault ships to Russia will go ahead. Meanwhile, in the demonization front ... This is what Associated Press spins as "analysis" and distributes to papers around the world; a collection of cliches desperately in search of a thesis. Dmitri Trenin of the Carnegie Moscow Center, faithful to who pays his bills, gets a few things right and most things wrong. David Stockman at least has a ball deconstructing the lies of the Warfare State. But the real thing is definitely Putin's economic adviser Sergei Glazyev. One of his key theses is that European business must be really careful to protect their interests as the US attempts to "ignite a war in Europe and a Cold War against Russia". This, though, is the ultimate bombshell - delivered by a cool, calm and collected Glazyev. Watch it carefully. A detailed reappraisal of what Glazyev has been saying for weeks now, mixed with some outstanding comments here leads to a inevitable conclusion: key sectors of Western plutocracy want a still ill-defined war with Russia. And journalism's Holy Grail - never trust anything until it's officially denied - confirms it. NATO's Plan A is to install missile batteries in Ukraine; that is already being discussed in detail in the run-up to NATO's summit in Wales in early September. Needless to say, if that happens, for Moscow, that's way beyond a red line; it implies a first strike capability at Russia's western borderlands. Washington's short Plan A, meanwhile, is to organize a wedge between the federalists in Eastern Ukraine and Russia. This implies progressive, direct funding of Kiev in parallel to building up, via American advisers already on the ground, and vast weaponizing, a huge proxy army (nearly 500,000 by the end of the year, according to Glazyev's projection). Endgame on the ground would be to seal the federalists off into a very small area. Ukrainian President Petro Poroshensko has been on the record saying this should happen by early September. If not, by the end of 2014. In the US, and a great deal of the EU, a monstrous grotesquerie has developed, packaging Putin as the new Stalinist Osama bin Laden. So far, his strategy on Ukraine was to be patient - what I called Vlad Lao Tzu - watching the Kiev gang hang themselveswhile trying to sit down with the EU in a civilized manner working for a political solution. Now we may be facing a game changer, because the mounting evidence, which Glazyev and Russian intel relayed to Putin, points to Ukraine as a battlefield; a concerted drive for regime change in Moscow; a concerted drive aiming for a destabilized Russia; and even the possibility of a definitive provocation. Moscow, allied with the BRICS, is actively working to bypass the US dollar - which is the anchor of a parallel US war economy based on printing worthless pieces of green paper. Progress is slow, but tangible; not only the BRICS but BRICS aspirants, the G-77, the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), the whole Global South is absolutely fed up with the Empire of Chaos's non-stop bullying and want another paradigm in international relations. The US counts on NATO - which it manipulates at will - and mad dog Israel; and perhaps the GCC, the Sunni petro-monarchies partners in the Gaza carnage, which can be bought/silenced with a slap on the wrist. The temptation for Putin to invade Eastern Ukraine in 24 hours and reduce the Kiev militias to dust must have been super-human. Especially with the mounting cornucopia of dementia; ballistic missiles in Poland and soon Ukraine; indiscriminate bombing of civilians in Donbass; the MH17 tragedy; the hysterical Western demonization. A bear with limited patience But Putin is wired for playing the long game. The window of opportunity for a lightning strike is gone; that kung fu move would have stopped NATO in its tracks with a fait accompli, and the ethnic cleansing of 8 million Russians and Russophones in Donbass would never have developed. Still, Putin won't "invade" Ukraine because Russian public opinion doesn't want him to. Moscow will keep supporting what is a de facto resistance movement in the Donbass. Remember: in give or take two months, General Winter starts to set in those broke, IMF-plundered Ukrainian pastures. The leaked German-Russian peace plan will be implemented over Washington's collective dead body. This New Great Game, to a great extent, is also about preventing Russia-EU economic integration via Germany, part of a full Eurasian integration including China and its myriad Silk Roads. If Russia's trade with the EU - about US$410 billion in 2013 - is due to take a hit because of sanctions, then that also spells out a Go East movement. Which implies a Russian fine-tuning of theEurasian Economic Union project. No more a Greater Europe from Lisbon to Vladivostok - Putin's original idea. Enter the Eurasian Union as a brother in arms of China's myriad Silk Roads. Still, this spells out a strong Russia-China partnership at the heart of Eurasia - and still this is absolute anathema to the Masters of the Universe. Make no mistake, the Russia-China strategic partnership will keep evolving very fast - with Beijing in symbiosis with Moscow's immense natural and military-technological resources. Not to mention the strategic benefits. A case could be made this has not happened since Genghis Khan. But it's not like Xi Jinping is pulling a Khan to subdue Siberia and beyond. Cold War 2.0 is now inevitable because the Empire of Chaos will never accept Russia's sphere of influence in parts of Eurasia (as it doesn't accept China's). It will never accept Russia as an equal partner (exceptionalists don't do equality). And it will never forgive Russia - alongside China - for openly defying the creaking, exceptionalist, American-imposed order. If the US deep state, guided by those nullities who pass for leadership, in desperation, goes one step beyond - it could be a genocide in Donbass; a NATO attack on Crimea; or worst case scenario, an attack against Russia itself - watch out. The Bear will strike. Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007), Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge (Nimble Books, 2007), and Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009). He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.

THE ROVING EYE - Crime (Israel) and punishment (Russia) By Pepe Escobar

THE ROVING EYE Crime (Israel) and punishment (Russia) By Pepe Escobar The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but that it was impossible to avoid joining it ... A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledgehammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one's will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic -George Orwell, 1984 So Obama, Merkel, Cameron, Hollande and Italian Premier Matteo Renzi - let's call them the Fab Five - get on a video conference call to muster their courage and "increase pressure" asking for a cease-fire in Gaza. Later in the day, Israel's Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu delivers his answer, in plain language: he remains dead set on achieving his version of a Final Solution to Gaza. [1] With or without "pressure". So what's left for the Fab Five after having their illustrious Western collective behinds solemnly kicked? They decide to dump Gaza and instead sanction Russia - again! How brilliant is that as an exit strategy? Spectacular non-entity Tony Blinken, who doubles as deputy national security adviser to Barack Obama, was keen to stress to Western corporate media that the unruly Eurotrash mob is now "determined to act". No, not against Israel because of Gaza; against Russia because of Ukraine. Such a lovely Orwellian symmetry: the extended Two Minutes Hate from Israel towards Gazans morphs into the extended Two Minutes Hate from the "West" towards Russia, mirroring the extended Two Minutes Hate from Kiev towards Eastern Ukrainians. Not even Hollywood could come up with such a plot; Israel gets away with unlawful premeditated mass murder of civilians, while Russia gets framed for a (smaller-scale) airborne mass murder of civilians that has all the makings of being set up by the Kiev vassals of Russia's Western "partners". Here I have exposed how sanctions, sanctions, sanctions is the one and only official Obama administration "policy" on Russia. On top of the next European Union sanctions, coming soon, the US will be piling up - what else - more sanctions. After all, Washington is so "concerned" that Moscow will sooner or later invade Ukraine; that would certainly, and finally, answer all those In God We Trust prayers. Where we stand now Let's follow the facts. Washington from the get-go said it was Russian President Vladimir Putin's missile that downed MH17. They swore they had evidence. Like in "We know. Trust us". The historical record for the past 60 years at least shows they cannot be trusted. There was never any evidence. Just spin. Moscow, via the Defense Ministry, presented hard evidence. And called for an unbiased international investigation. Washington ignored it all - the call and the hard evidence. The US Navy, crammed with state-of-the-art missile defense radars, has been in the Black Sea for weeks now. As much as the Russians, they have tracked every particle flying over Ukraine. The NSA goes for signals intelligence; the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency goes for phenomena in the imagery realm; the Defense Intelligence Agency adds Humint; there's the CIA; and there's the all-seeing, all-knowing Director of National Intelligence. How come all this trillion-dollar Full Spectrum Dominance apparatus cannot come up with a single, conclusive piece of evidence? The only risible "evidence" presented so far pictures the acronym salad of US intel agencies spending their time reading blogs and Twittering. As in the State Department head in Kiev twittering satellite imagery that the New York Times parroted "proved" Russia is shelling Ukraine from across the border. The proverbial "senior US officials" even had to tersely admit on the record they have no proof whatsoever about "Putin's missile". If they had, NATO would be ready to flip burgers in Red Square. Based on the wealth of info now in the open, the top probability of what caused the MH17 tragedy was an R-60M air-to-air missile shot from a Ukrainian Su-25 - and not a BUK (there's also the possibility of a double down; first an R-60M and then a BUK). The R-60M is very fast, with an ideal engagement distance of up to five kilometers. That's how far the Su-25 detected by the Russians (they showed the graphics) was from MH17. SBU - Ukrainian intel - for its part confiscated the recordings of Kiev control tower talking to MH17. That would certainly explain why MH17 was overflying a war zone (Malaysian Airlines revealed they were forced to). Hefty bets can be made the recordings are now being "doctored". Then there are the black boxes, which will not de decoded by the Malaysians or by the Dutch, but by the Brits - acting under Washington's orders. As The Saker blogger summed up the view of top Russian specialists, "the Brits will now let the NSA falsify the data and that falsification will be coordinated with the SBU in Kiev which will eventually release the recordings who will fully 'confirm' the 'authenticity' of the NSA-doctored recordings from the UK." To make it more palatable, and erase suspicions about Anglo-American foul play, the Dutch will announce it. Everyone should be forewarned. NATO heads, for their part, are droolin'. Kiev's forces/militias will hold "joint exercises" with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in Ukraine in slightly over a month from now, on September 1; red alert applies, because this is when Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said the slow motion ethnic cleansing of Donbass will be finished. As for the R2P ("responsibility to protect") angle, it sounds quite improbable. True, Moscow can always say that unless the slow motion ethnic cleansing of Donbass stops they will recognize the Donetsk and Luhansk Republics. In that case, Moscow would be replaying Abkhazia and South Ossetia; a de facto R2P backed by military muscle. Under international law - which Washington never respects, by the way - this is not the same as "invading" Ukraine. The frankly scary Samantha Power, the US Ambassador to the United Nations, would obviously freak out - but that's a dose of her own medicine. It would indeed be comparable to what the Americans are doing to the benefit of those Salafi-jihadis in Syria; and better yet, to what the US did in Kosovo. The $50billion vultures And now, on top of sanctions, Moscow also has to contend with a massive US$50 billion theft attempt. The International Arbitration Court in The Hague found that the Kremlin's pursuit of Yukos and its main shareholder, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a decade ago was politically motivated. Moscow can't appeal - but it will pursue all legal avenues for trying to get this ruling "set aside". Well, it's The Hague's decision itself that is political. Khodorkovsky was found guilty not only by the Russian judicial system but also by the European Court of Human Rights. Yukos and Menotep shareholders were and remain a bunch of oligarch gangsters - to put it mildly. So here's the Empire of Chaos once again in action, manipulating a Dutch court after literally stealing Germany's gold and fining France for selling warships to Russia. In this case though, the "West" has more investments in Russia than the Russian government in the West. Payback could be a bitch - as in Moscow, for instance, freezing all US and EU energy investments especially in the new ultra-profitable frontier, the Arctic oil fields. Western Big Oil will never allow this to happen. This could go on forever. The bottom line: the Russian state simply won't allow itself to be robbed by a dodgy ruling on behalf of a bunch of oligarchs. In parallel, a case can be made that not only the Return of the Living (Neo-Con) Dead but also substantial sections of the deep state in Washington DC and environs - as well as "Western" plutocracy - want to provoke some sort of NATO war against Russia, sooner rather than later. And in another parallel line, Moscow rumor has it that the Kremlin finds this protracted post-Yukos battle just an afterthought compared to the economic war about to convulse Europe and eventually pit Europe against Russia: exactly what the Empire of Chaos is praying - and working - for. "Two Minute" Hate? Talk about hours, days, weeks, and years. Note: 1. Netanyahu: We're prepared for an extended operation in Gaza, The Jerusalem Post, July 28, 2014. Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007), Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge (Nimble Books, 2007), and Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009). He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.

THE ROVING EYE - A chessboard drenched in blood By Pepe Escobar

THE ROVING EYE A chessboard drenched in blood By Pepe Escobar "The intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." Everyone remembers the Downing Street Memo, which unveiled the Bush/Blair "policy" in the run-up to the 2003 bombing/invasion/occupation of Iraq. The "policy" was to get rid of Saddam Hussein via a lightning war. The justification was "terrorism" and (non-existent) weapons of mass destruction (WMD), which had "disappeared", mounted in trucks, deep into Syria. Forget about intelligence and facts. The tragedy of MH17 - turned, incidentally, into a WMD - might be seen as a warped rerun of imperial policy in Iraq. No need for a memo this time. The "policy" of the Empire of Chaos is clear, and multi-pronged; diversify the "pivot to Asia" by establishing a beachhead in Ukraine to sabotage trade between Europe and Russia; expand the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to Ukraine; break the Russia-China strategic partnership; prevent by all means the trade/economic integration of Eurasia, from the Russia-Germany partnership to the New Silk Roads converging from China to the Ruhr; keep Europe under US hegemony. The key reason why Russian President Vladimir Putin did not "invade" Eastern Ukraine - as much as he's been enticed to by Washington/NATO - to stop a US military adviser-facilitated running slaughter of civilians is that he does not want to antagonize the European Union, Russia's top trading partner. Crucially, Washington's intervention in Kosovo invoking R2P - Responsibility to Protect - was justified at the time for exactly the same reasons a Russian intervention in Donetsk and Luhansk could be totally justified now. Except that Moscow won't do it - because the Kremlin is playing a very long game. The MH17 tragedy may have been a horrendous mistake. But it may also have been a desperate gambit by the Kiev minions of the Empire of Chaos. By now, Russian intel may have already mastered the key facts. Washington's predictable modus operandi was to shoot from the hip, igniting and in theory winning the spin war, and doubling down by releasing the proverbial army of "top officials" brimming with social media evidence. Moscow will take time to build a meticulous case, and only then lay it out in detail. Hegemony lost The Big Picture spells out the Empire of Chaos elites as extremely uneasy. Take Dr Zbigniew "The Grand Chessboard" Brzezinski, who as a former foreign policy mentor has the ears of the increasingly dejected White House paperboy. Dr Zbig was on CNN this Sunday challenging Europe's leaders to "stand up to Putin". He wonders if "Europe wants to become a satellite" and worries about "a moment of decisive significance for the future of the system - of the world system". And it's all Putin's fault, of course: "We're not starting the Cold War. He [Putin] has started it. But he has gotten himself into a horrendous jam. I strongly suspect that a lot of people in Russia, even not far away from him who are worried that Russia's status in the world is dramatically being undermined, that Russia's economically beginning to fail, that Russia's threatened by the prospect of becoming a satellite to China, that Russia's becoming self-isolated and discredited." Obviously Dr Zbig is blissfully unaware of the finer points of the Russia-China strategic partnership, as well as their concerted voice inside the BRICS, the G-20 and myriad other mechanisms. His trademark Russophobia in the end always gets the better of him. And to think that in his latest book, Strategic Vision (2012), Dr Zbig was in favor of an enlarged "West" annexing Turkey and Russia, with the Empire of Chaos posing as "promoter" and "guarantor" of broader unity in the West, and a "balancer" and "conciliator" between the major powers in the East. A quick look at the record since 2012 - Libya, Syria, Ukraine, encirclement of China - reveals the Empire of Chaos only as fomenter of, what else, chaos. Now compare a fearful Dr Zbig with Immanuel Wallerstein - who was a huge influence in my 2007 warped geopolitical travel bookGlobalistan. In this piece (in Spanish) Wallerstein argues that the Empire of Chaos simply can't accept its geopolitical decadence - and that's why it has become so dangerous. Restoring its hegemony in the world-system has become the supreme obsession; and that's where the whole "policy" that is an essential background to the MH17 tragedy reveals Ukraine as the definitive do or die battleground. In Europe, everything hinges on Germany. Especially after the National Security Agency scandal and its ramifications, the key debate raging in Berlin is how to position itself geopolitically bypassing the US. And the answer, as pressed by large swathes of German big business, lies in a strategic partnership with Russia. Show me the missile Slowly, with no hype and no spin, the Russian military are starting to deliver the goods. Here, courtesy of the Vineyard of The Saker blog, is their key presentation so far. As The Saker put it, Russia had - and has - a "20/20 radar vision", or full spectrum surveillance, on everything going on in Ukraine. And so, arguably, does NATO. What the Russian Ministry of Defense is saying is as important as the clues it is laying out for experts to follow. The damaged MH17 starboard jet engine suggests a shape charge from an air-to-air missile - and not a Buk; that's consistent with the Russian Ministry of Defense presentation graphically highlighting an Ukrainian SU-25 shadowing MH17. Increasingly, the Buk scenario - hysterically peddled by the Empire of Chaos - is being discarded. Not to mention, again, that not a single eyewitness saw the very graphic, thick missile trace that would have been clearly visible had a Buk been used. Way beyond the established fact of a Ukrainian SU-25 trailing MH17, plenty of unanswered questions remain, some involving a murky security procedure at Amsterdam's Schiphol airport - where security is operated by ICTS, an Israeli company based in The Netherlands and founded by former officers from the Israeli Shin Bet intel agency. And then there is the unexplained presence of "foreign" advisors in Kiev's control tower.  As much as Bashar al-Assad in Syria had absolutely no motive to "gas his own people" - as the hysterical narrative went at the time - the Eastern Ukraine federalists have no motive to down a civilian airliner. And as much as Washington doesn't give a damn about the current civilian slaughter in Gaza, it doesn't give a damn about the MH17 civilian deaths; the one and only obsession is to force Europeans to sanction Russia to death. Translation: break up Europe-Russia commercial and geopolitical integration. One week before the MH17 tragedy, the Russian Institute of Strategic Studies was already sounding the alarm concerning the Empire of Chaos's "policy" and its refusal to "adhere to the principles and norms of international law and the rules and spirit of the existing system of international relations". Moscow, in building its case on the MH17 tragedy, will bide its time to debunk Kiev's claims and maximize its own credibility. The game now moves to the black boxes and the cockpit voice recorder. Still Ukraine will remain the do or die battlefield - a chessboard drenched in blood. Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007), Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge (Nimble Books, 2007), and Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009). He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.

THE ROVING EYE It was Putin's missile! (they claim) By Pepe Escobar

THE ROVING EYE It was Putin's missile! By Pepe Escobar And here's the spin war verdict: the current Malaysia Airlines tragedy - the second in four months - is "terrorism" perpetrated by "pro-Russian separatists", armed by Russia, and Vladimir Putin is the main culprit. End of story. Anyone who believes otherwise, shut up. Why? Because the CIA said so. Because Hillary "We came, we saw, he died" Clinton said so. Because batshit crazy Samantha "R2P" Power said so - thundering at the UN, everything duly printed by the neo-con infested Washington Post. [1] Because Anglo-American corporate media - from CNN to Fox (who tried to buy Time Warner, which owns CNN) - said so. Because the President of the United States (POTUS) said so. And mostly because Kiev had vociferously said so in the first place. Right off the bat they were all lined up - the invariably hysterical reams of "experts" of the "US intelligence community" literally foaming at their palatial mouths at "evil" Russia and "evil" Putin; intel "experts" who could not identify a convoy of gleaming white Toyotas crossing the Iraqi desert to take Mosul. And yet they have already sentenced they don't need to look any further, instantly solving the MH17 riddle. It doesn't matter that President Putin has stressed the MH17 tragedy must be investigated objectively. And "objectively" certainly does not mean that fictional "international community" notion construed by Washington - the usual congregation of pliable vassals/patsies. And what about Carlos?  A simple search at reveals that MH17 was in fact diverted 200 kilometers north from the usual flight path taken by Malaysia Airlines in the previous days - and plunged right in the middle of a war zone. Why? What sort of communication MH17 received from Kiev air control tower? Kiev has been mute about it. Yet the answer would be simple, had Kiev released the Air Traffic Control recording of the tower talking to flight MH17; Malaysia did it after flight MH370 disappeared forever. It won't happen; SBU security confiscated it. So much for getting an undoctored explanation on why MH17 was off its path, and what the pilots saw and said before the explosion. The Russian Defense Ministry, for its part, has confirmed that a Kiev-controlled Buk anti-aircraft missile battery was operational near the MH17's crash. Kiev has deployed several batteries of Buk surface-to-air missile systems with at least 27 launchers; these are all perfectly capable of bringing down jets flying at 33,000 ft. Radiation from a battery's Kupol radar, deployed as part of a Buk-M1 battery near Styla (a village some 30km south of Donetsk) was detected by the Russian military. According to the ministry, the radar could be providing tracking information to another battery which was at a firing distance from MH17's flight path. The tracking radar range on the Buk system is a maximum of 50 miles. MH17 was flying at 500 mph. So assuming the "rebels" had an operational Buk and did it, they would have had not more than five minutes to scan all the skies above, all possible altitudes, and then lock on. By then they would have known that a cargo plane could not possibly be flying that high. For evidence supporting the possibility of a false flag, check here. And then there's the curiouser and curiouser story of Carlos, the Spanish air traffic controller working at Kiev's tower, who was following MH17 in real time. For some Carlos is legit - not a cipher; for others, he's never even worked in Ukraine. Anyway he tweeted like mad. His account - not accidentally - has been shut down, and he has disappeared; his friends are now desperately looking for him. I managed to read all his tweets in Spanish when the account was still online - and now copies and an English translation are available. These are some of his crucial tweets: "The B777 was escorted by 2 Ukrainian fighter jets minutes before disappearing from radar (5.48 pm)" "If the Kiev authorities want to admit the truth 2 fighter jets were flying very close a few minutes before the incident but did not shoot down the airliner (5.54)" "As soon as the Malaysia Airlines B777 disappeared the Kiev military authority informed us of the shooting down. How did they know? (6.00)" "Everything has been recorded on radar. For those that don't believe it, it was taken down by Kiev; we know that here (in traffic control) and the military air traffic control know it too (7.14)" "The Ministry of the Interior did know that there were fighter aircraft in the area, but the Ministry of Defense didn't. (7.15)" "The military confirm that it was Ukraine, but it is not known where the order came from. (7.31)" Carlos's assessment (a partial compilation of his tweets is collected here http://slavyangrad.wordpress.com/2014/07/18/spanish-air-controller-kiev-borispol-airport-ukraine-military-shot-down-boeing-mh17/ ): the missile was fired by the Ukraine military under orders of the Ministry of Interior - NOT the Ministry of Defense. Security matters at the Ministry of the Interior happen to be under Andriy Parubiy, who was closely working alongside US neo-cons and Banderastan neo-nazis on Maidan. Assuming Carlos is legit, the assessment makes sense. The Ukrainian military are divided between Chocolate king President Petro Poroshenko - who would like a d?tente with Russia essentially to advance his shady business interests - and Saint Yulia Timoshenko, who's on the record advocating genocide of ethnic Russians in Eastern Ukraine. US neo-cons and US "military advisers" on the ground are proverbially hedging their bets, supporting both the Poroshenko and Timoshenko factions. So who profits?  The key question remains, of course, cui bono? Only the terminally brain dead believe shooting a passenger jet benefits the federalists in Eastern Ukraine, not to mention the Kremlin. As for Kiev, they'd have the means, the motive and the window of opportunity to pull it off - especially after Kiev's militias have been effectively routed, and were in retreat, in the Donbass; and this after Kiev remained dead set on attacking and bombing the population of Eastern Ukraine even from above. No wonder the federalists had to defend themselves. And then there's the suspicious timing. The MH17 tragedy happened two days after the BRICS announced an antidote to the IMF and the World Bank, bypassing the US dollar. And just as Israel "cautiously" advances its new invasion/slow motion ethnic cleansing of Gaza. Malaysia, by the way, is the seat of the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Commission, which has found Israel guilty of crimes against humanity. Washington, of course, does profit. What the Empire of Chaos gets in this case is a ceasefire (so the disorganized, battered Kiev militias may be resupplied); the branding of Eastern Ukrainians as de facto "terrorists" (as Kiev, Dick Cheney-style, always wanted); and unlimited mud thrown over Russia and Putin in particular until Kingdom Come. Not bad for a few minutes' work. As for NATO, that's Christmas in July. From now on, it all depends on Russian intelligence. They have been surveying/tracking everything that happens in Ukraine 24/7. In the next 72 hours, after poring over a lot of tracking data, using telemetry, radar and satellite tracking, they will know which type of missile was launched, where from, and even produce communications from the battery that launched it. And they will have access to forensic evidence. Unlike Washington - who already knows everything, with no evidence whatsoever (remember 9/11?) - Moscow will take its time to know the basic journalistic facts of what, where, and who, and engage on proving the truth and/or disproving Washington's spin. The historical record shows Washington simply won't release data if it points to a missile coming from its Kiev vassals. The data may even point to a bomb planted on MH17, or mechanical failure - although that's unlikely. If this was a terrible mistake by the Novorossiya rebels, Moscow will have to reluctantly admit it. If Kiev did it, the revelation will be instantaneous. Anyway we already know the hysterical Western response, no matter what; Russia is to blame. Putin is more than correct when he stressed this tragedy would not have happened if Poroshenko had agreed to extend a cease-fire, as Merkel, Hollande and Putin tried to convince him in late June. At a minimum, Kiev is already guilty because they are responsible for safe passage of flights in the airspace they - theoretically - control. But all that is already forgotten in the fog of war, tragedy and hype. As for Washington's hysterical claims of credibility, I leave you with just one number: Iran Air 655. Notes: 1. Missile Downs Malaysia Airlines Plane Over Ukraine Killing 298, Kiew Blames Rebels, Washington Post, July 18, 2014. Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007), Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge (Nimble Books, 2007), and Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009). He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.