19A010 MH 370, Five Years On by Jim Davies, 3/5/2019    

This week in 2014, there began one of the greatest real-life mysteries ever: the total disappearance of a large airplane. It compares with Amelia Earhart's two-person Electra, which vanished in the South Pacific in 1937 and was never found. This was a Boeing 777, with 239 aboard, surrounded by a huge range of position-logging sensors which could barely be imagined in that pioneer's time.

The ZGBlog Five Eyes, No Sight commented that a good part of the confusion was caused by several governments concealing what they probably knew about the disappearance, and how such absurdity will not pollute the coming zero government society. Now, with ample search time having passed, this one offers a little further insight.

It comes largely from one of a handful of books that have been written about the mystery; Peter Lee's MH 370: By Accident or Design. Lee is an experienced pilot, air traffic controller and crash investigator, who located a helicopter that had disappeared without trace, just by applying reason to the available evidence. He does the same in that book for the Malaysian flight, and his rigorous logic is very impressive. Only $3 for the Kindle version, it's a very worthwhile read.

Written in the Summer of 2014, nearly all the evidence available now had been gathered already! That's a measure of how well the facts are concealed. Only the discovery of some wreckage off the coast of East Africa was made later, and Lee inserts that into the e-book version as an add-on. It does not change his analysis of what took place; it just confirms that as already suspected, the 777 lies on the sea bottom somewhere West of Australia.

The flight was a red-eye, on a long-haul journey from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing and had just passed out of Malaysian ATC and was expected to call up the Vietnamese counterpart; but didn't. Two minutes later the transponder was turned off and all communication ceased. Subsequent readings of military radar showed the plane turned SW back over land, then North of West to cross the Malaysian peninsula, wiggled round Sumatra, then headed NW into the Indian Ocean. Later yet, analysis of a satellite link with a Rolls Royce engine "I'm Okay" transmission showed it then turned South and vanished, beyond the reach of all radar.

Peter Lee examines all known alternative theories and concludes that only one fits the known facts, and fits them very well: that Captain Shah deliberately took his plane off-radar, killed all his passengers by depriving them of oxygen, and headed the flight into part of the Southern Indian Ocean over a large area of little-mapped, rugged sea bed. Unlike the smooth flat sands on which Titanic came to rest, the remains - of the plane, the passengers and its Captain - lie entangled in the sea-bed mountain ranges. But, why?

Evidently, this 63-year-old man with an impeccable flying record of 25,000 hours had trouble at home. The day before March 7th 2014, his wife left him. Then two further blows struck him on March 7th itself: first his mistress indicated their affair was over, and secondly his cousin Anwar Ibrahim was imprisoned for sodomy. Any one of those misfortunes was enough to send anyone off kilter; that the three should coincide created for him a perfect storm and he apparently decided to end his life. Along, shockingly, with 238 others.

That's one part of Lee's book that would benefit from further analysis. As Shah was cheating on his wife, how devastating to him would her departure be? And if he could attract one mistress, as a prestigious airline captain could he not rather easily attract another? So the third item may have been the dominant motive and it would be useful to know how passionate was his interest in politics.

So the matter of Anwar most concerns us here. Shah liked and admired him, mostly because he was leader of a party in opposition to the government of Malaysia. He had earlier been accused of sodomy (possibly as a political "dirty trick") but acquitted. The prosecutors appealed the acquittal, and on March 7th they won. Shah's hero Anwar Ibrahim was put in a cage, and Shah's anger at the Malaysian government boiled over. As Lee sees it, that was his motive; by causing a flight bearing their nation's name to vanish altogether along with the lives of the mostly Chinese passengers, he could maximize their embarassment. And he did. What can be said about the case?

1. Even if "guilty", Anwar committed a victimless crime. In the coming zero government society, sodomy may well remain distasteful to most people but there will be no laws against it... because there will be no laws at all. Had this been the case in Malaysia, Ibrahim would not even have been on trial.

2. The ZGS will have a justice industry, not a government monopoly system, and if it tries but acquits anyone of any krime, that will be it; there will be no double jeopardy. If the accuser fails, he fails. No court will risk its competitive reputation by re-accusing someone a rival has acquitted. Heck, even in the present US system, that principle is honored; an acquittal is final. That principle has applied in most of the Western world, since Roman times. That it's otherwise in Malaysia, South Africa and elsewhere is an outrage.

The government of Malaysia, therefore, bears a large if indirect share of the blame for the disaster of MH370. Now, the direct culprit is Captain Shah, and if some government agent had been able to read his mind as he prepared for departure at Kuala Lumpur, I concede he would have taken him off the plane; it had no direct intention to murder the passengers and other crew. But it was an unintended consequence of its political existence and judicial chicanery, and so it certainly deserved the embarassment it was caused by the tragedy.

But the 238 who died with the demented Captain whom they trusted, did not.