14A028 The Smoking Tape by Jim Davies, 7/25/2014    

Cor Pan, a young Dutch musician, took a photo of the Malaysian 777 he was about to board for Kuala Lumpur on July 17th and sent it to his friends via Facebook, with the caption "If it disappears, this is what it looks like." His zany sense of humor referred to the missing MH 370. Four or five hours later Cor and his girlfriend Neeltje Tol were dead, their remains lying in an Ukrainian field with those of 296 other passengers and crew. Who did it?

Plenty of fingers point to possible culprits. KerryBama's point to Putin, and Putin's point to Poroshenko of Ukraine, who could only have done it on KerryBama's say-so. The trigger on the Buk missile was pulled by pro-Russia rebels, or by Russian helpers, or by Poroshenko's soldiers, according to one's viwpoint. But 298 innocent, neutral people died and a fine aircraft was destroyed. Which view is correct?

As I see it, that question will be answered primarily by a recording of a phone call between an anti-Kiev rebel near Donetsk and his helper across the Russian border, a Major in the Russian army. The conversation very clearly shows:

• The rebels shot down MH17, mistakenly believing it to be a Ukrainian army supply plane
• The Russians had supplied the weapon
• The Russians knew of the plan to shoot down that supply plane
• The Russians had failed to remind their friends that a civilian air corridor operated overhead

In other words, Russian fingerprints were all over the tragedy. However, next question: is the recording genuine, or was it fabricated as in Wag the Dog?

If it's genuine, then Putin is ultimately responsible, as head of the Russian government. We are also told in that case that US-enabled Ukrainian electronic spying is altogether as effective as Ed Snowden revealed. In fact, the audio is amazingly clear; almost as if it had been made by actors in a studio, not field officers in a war zone.

There are three reasons to think it's a fake; that unusual clarity, the inherent improbability that rebels and Russians would be talking about such a sensitive issue on what amounts to an open line, and a time-stamp on the recording, said to be non-erasable. My Ukrainian never had time to get rusty but this source shows that the tape was made in the evening of July 16th, the day previous to the crash.

I speculate that audio techies might have recorded the voices conversing over several days, then cut and spliced sentences together so as to create the sequence desired; then released it a couple of hours after the crash to provide a "smoking gun." Difficult, but do-able. If that were so, Obama would have to have chosen MH17 specifically, perhaps because there was no US passenger expected to be aboard (later, one was found) because the recorded conversation refers to "Malaysian" aircraft markings.  That would make him the premediated murderer of 298 people, using a weapon operated by Ukrainians. In either case, the curious time-stamp error remains.

So the existence of this recording narrows our choices to only two; in the one case the rebels shot down the 777 by accident after being equipped but poorly trained by their Russian allies, while in the other case it was brought down by the deliberate intent of the US President - who also prepared this false trail - so as to embarrass those who have been running rings around his mid-East diplomacy for a year and a half. On present evidence I'm leaning toward the former, because it's more credible to make an elementary mistake in the chaotic aftermath of an unexpected disaster, than after many days of careful preparation by a false-news fabricator. On the other hand the error might have been made on purpose, so as to produce exactly that opinion. John LeCarré, where are you when we need you?

In either case, a government is absolutely responsible. If there were no government, even the wanabee government of the rebels, nobody would be playing a lethal game of world domination, or squabbling over who is to rule Ukrainians, and Cor Pan and his fellow passengers would still be pursuing happiness. Governments never create order, they create conflict, mayhem, misery and death. If you're not already doing so, please help end their existence.