The MH17 Pilot’s Corpse: More on the Cover-Up. Even His Family Was Blocked from It. Here’s Why.

by Eric Zuesse

It might be the decisive piece of evidence proving who and what and how and why the MH17 Malaysian airliner over the conflict zone in Ukraine on 17 July 2014 was shot down, but the pilot’s corpse has been hidden even from the people who have the most right to see it.

The corpse of the pilot of the MH17 Malaysian airliner might contain in it bullets, or bullet-residues, that can prove a Ukrainian military jet intentionally fired into the pilot; or else it might contain only missile-shrapnel, which would be consistent only with the plane’s having been erroneously shot down by a ground-based missile such as the Ukrainian government says it was; but the Malaysian government has prohibited anyone to see it — not even his relatives, who are still trying to find out how and who murdered their loved-one and the 297 other people who were aboard that tragic plane on July 17th of 2014.

Until recently, the Malaysian government itself had had no access to the coroner’s report on the corpse: it was done by a Dutch coroner, in Holland.

The corpse has been hidden from everyone, and the Malaysian government isn’t even being permitted, by the other four nations on the official investigatory commission, to say anything to anyone outside the commission — not even to the pilot’s family. The coroner’s report on the pilot’s body exists, but has been seen by no one outside of the now 5-nation investigatory commission. (The commission was originally just Netherlands, Belgium, Australia, and Ukraine, but Malaysia was recently added. The Dutch government heads the commission. The Dutch government had helped to install the current Ukrainian government, whose Air Force is a suspect in having possibly shot down the MH17 airliner.

Netherlands, along with the U.S., and also along with George Soros’s International Renaissance Foundation, had funded Hromadske TV, which propagandized heavily for forcing the democratically elected Ukrainian President, Viktor Yanukovych, to leave his Presidency before the next election would be held, and which then propagandized Ukrainians heavily for the ethnic cleansing operation to get rid of the residents in Ukraine’s Donbass, the only area of Ukraine that had voted 90%+ for Yanukovych. So: the Dutch government had actually helped to install the current Ukrainian government — which might have shot down the MH17, and yet which is a member of the official ‘investigation.’)

This cover-up of what might be the decisive evidence in the MH17 case was revealed when Russian Television sent reporters last month to interview the pilot’s family.

See the brief Russian documentary interviewing the pilot’s wife here:

The pilot’s wife says, at 5:42 on the video, “We were not allowed to open” the coffin.

Q: “Not allowed by who?”
A: “Not allowed by the [Malaysian] government.”

The existing four-nation team had required the Malaysian government to sign onto their secret 8 August 2014 agreement, in order for Malaysia to be allowed to join. This agreement says that Ukraine will have a veto-power over any report that the commission produces — and this veto-power is the reason why the ‘investigation’ continues dragging on. The now-five nation commission can’t yet produce a report that the Ukrainian government will sign onto.

Then, the interviewer in the documentary says that she had taken her camera-crew to the crash site two months after the plane’s downing, and says that they saw there, still in the field of grass, the pilot’s chair. This video at 6:21 shows it — its bare frame, because the padding had blown off. Here is the pilot’s chair:

Those 30 mm round holes through it are bullet holes; they’re definitely not shrapnel holes, which are larger and very irregular (not at all round). Furthermore, the bullet-holes through the side-panel of the chair’s backrest are fairly head-on instead of at any steep angle; and, so, might have been from stray bullets among the gunner’s fusillade into the left cockpit-side that was focused around the pilot’s belly-area. This chair backrest is thus yet further evidence suggesting that the pilot’s corpse had bullets, or bullet-residues, in it.

For more background on the pilot’s corpse’s evidentiary importance to solving this crucial mass-murder case, see this. For my reconstruction of the evidence, and of where it points to regarding guilt and motive, see this.

RUSSIA’S GAME ON THIS:

On July 29th, Russia vetoed at the United Nations an attempt by the U.S. and its allies to transfer the MH17 investigation to a rigged UN commission that would be set up in order to enable the guilt for the cover-up to be transferred away from Netherlands, Belgium, Australia, and Ukraine, the four nations that set up the existing official corrupt ‘investigation,’ whose ‘findings,’ at this late stage, would be believed only by outright suckers in the West — and that number of people might not be enough now to protect the actual guilty parties in the case. Russia wants the guilty parties to bear the blame not merely for the mass-murder itself, but for the subsequent and ongoing cover-ups.

If the official ‘investigation’ finds Russia and/or the people of Donbass to have perpetrated it, then Russia will presumably make public, evidence, which it has thus far withheld just in case America and its allies turn out to be that brazen. So, Russia might even be eager for that to happen. The official ‘investigation’ has already announced that its conclusions will be made public in October. Until then, the commission is doing everything they can to forestall, if not prevent, a scandal-squared, from resulting. (For example: if anything, Richard Nixon’s Watergate cover-up doomed him even more than the Watergate-crime itself did.)

Here are some of the typical ways the Western press have reported on Russia’s veto:

• Russia threatens UN veto on Julie Bishop’s MH17 tribunal
• Why Russia Vetoed the MH17 Tribunal
• Russia says no to MH17 justice
• Alternative solution needed for investigating loss of MH17: Russia’s Security Council veto means other means may be used to find those responsible

For some unexplained (though accepted-without-question by the Western press) reason, the Western powers aren’t satisfied for the official ‘investigating’ commission (though itself entirely Western until the recent addition of Malaysia to the commission) to be blamed for producing the official ‘findings.’ Western leaders had wanted the UN to be blamed instead. Russia voted no on the Western proposal (which was fronted by Malaysia, on behalf of the West); China abstained (perhaps in the hope that the West won’t go after them, too).

The result is heightened fear within the official ‘investigating’ commission. On 3 August 2015, Russian Television headlined “Dutch Safety Board asks for RT’s assistance in MH17 probe after documentary,” and reported that:

On 17 July 2015, Rupert Murdoch’s Australian Courier-Mail published behind a paywall, and his The Australian republished open on their website, the complete transcript, plus video excerpts, of 17 minutes of video footage that had been taken by the independence fighters in Donbass at the wreckage site while the fires were still aflame on the fateful day, 17 July 2014; and this remarkable footage, never before made public, and published here by a lifelong anti-Russian, shows the rebels’ “Commander,” trying to understand what he was seeing, and saying that there are two planes destroyed in the area, one a Malaysian airliner, and the other a Sukhoi fighter-jet, the latter from which had parachuted out five (or perhaps two) people.

Someone off-camera in the background is saying, “They decided to do it this way, to look like we have brought down the plane.” In other words: these people speculated immediately that the presence of the downed fighter-jet indicated that the Ukrainian authorities were trying to pin onto the rebels the blame for shooting down the airliner. Here is that link, and the relevant passages in the transcript itself:

Of course, at that chaotic moment, everything was new, and so the assertions by those people (for example, as regards whether there were five parachutists, or only two) were uncertain. One early reader of this article, who looked at that video, made the following insightful observation: “Ironically, the Dutch wanted the piece of cockpit roof of the plane. That piece showed no bullet or shrapnel impacts – which in essence excludes a Buk missile. Buk missiles engage the target from above.” That’s entirely correct.

So: Might the Dutch Safety Board actually have been trying to nail down a case so strong against Ukraine, as to now be negotiating with Ukraine Ukraine’s capitulation – the degree of guilt that Ukraine must sign onto in the final report? (Sort of like in a plea-bargain.) How could Obama (whose power stands above all of the nations on the commission) deal with such a situation?

CONCLUSION:

It’s like the way the West handled the 2008 economic crash: extend-and-pretend. While Western leaders transferred their aristocracy’s investment losses onto future taxpayers and pretended that the enormous governmental debts that resulted from these ‘bailouts’ to the aristocracy won’t destroy the economic future for the public, no one can yet say with certainty that they were lying about that. As ridiculous as extend-and-pretend seems to be, no appropriate historical precedent exists to show with any near certainty that no way will be found for it to ‘succeed.’ Russia has apparently placed its bet that it won’t succeed, in regards to the MH17 case.

Russia’s game seems to be: In the short term, we’ll suffer contempt from the West’s suckers while Western leaders keep on doing this; but, the longer the West’s leaders do that, the worse the outcome will be for those leaders.

So: will that game on Russia’s part work? The precedents don’t look favorable:

After George W. Bush kept lying about “Saddam’s WMD,” and became exposed simply by none being found, did his extend-and-pretend on the truth there hurt his Republican Party? They extended the lie so far that even today most Republicans still think that WMD did exist there in 2002 and 2003, and they even think that WMD were subsequently found there — though none of that was at all true.

Even in 2015, 51% of Republicans agree with the statement, “American Forces Found an Active Weapons of Mass Destruction Program In Iraq.” (32% of Democrats do. 46% of Independents do.) (40% of Republicans said it was “Definitely not true” or “Probably not true,” but yet even they continued to label themselves as “Republican,” even after their own Party had deceived them for so long on such a crucial matter, which had produced America’s invasion of Iraq.) Despite such brazen lying, the Republican Party still has as many suckers as before. (And, in the Democratic Party, Barack Obama is still overwhelmingly supported, despite being now exposed, to all open-minded people, to be the best asset the Republican Party has had within recent decades.)

Extend-and-pretend can work for a very long time, indeed. Russia’s game could fail. But it might nonetheless be their best chance to win.

If the West’s game succeeds, then the entire world will fail as a result. If some power-group — here, the West’s aristocrats — can get away with lying, no matter how long they persist in it, they might as well own the entire world: the public are then just their slaves. The public might as well have no minds at all. Anyone who accepts a politician who has lied is either an aristocrat or an idiot. There are only a few thousand aristocrats in the world, but there are, it is clear, plenty of idiots — perhaps the majority of people — so that everyone else, the decent people, suffer constantly the many idiots who believe the few aristocrats. That combination is toxic to democracy.

The MH17 case started before the event itself, as Barack Obama’s desperate attempt to get the EU to agree to hiking the economic sanctions against Russia. It succeeded. Now the world is waiting to see what Obama’s long game is, and whether Putin’s long game (which is the only game he’s got) will beat it. Whatever the outcome, it’ll be interesting.

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.

SUPPORT OFFGUARDIAN

If you enjoy OffG's content, please help us make our monthly fund-raising goal and keep the site alive.

For other ways to donate, including direct-transfer bank details click HERE.