Discussion for article #225283
What difference does any of this make?
The plane was shot down, 298 people died, and the crash site has been compromised and looted.
On top of that, the separatists and the Russians are deliberately making it difficult for officials to investigate the crash at the site—and the bodies of the dead are still lying in the field, mostly unidentified and beginning to decompose.
None of this “woulda-shoulda-coulda” bullshit matters.
14 Likes
OR,
Not giving dangerous weapons to people who aren’t capable of using them without taking proper precautions to, say, avoid killing nearly 300 innocent people on an international commercial flight, might have also saved the Malaysian Plane.
8 Likes
“They didn’t have the right systems in place to distinguish between military and civilian aircraft.”
You mean, like a brain?
7 Likes
The point should be that amateurs should NEVER have dangerous weapons without QUALIFICATION and TRAINING! Speculation is beside the point. wee putin should never have given them these surface to air killing machines.
6 Likes
It was known publicly over 2 weeks ago that Ukrainian separatists had this weaponry.
That they did-- and Russia wasn’t actively hunting the system down?
Should have been a very large red flag being raised.
Avoiding the airspace was a known flight control issue.
U.S. airlines were banned from routes over the Ukraine.
Other countries must have had the same intel-- and Malaysia’s FAA equivalent chose not to heed it.
It was an economic decision by Malaysia and/or Malaysia Airlines. Period.
Fuel rules.
That is how this tragedy could have been avoided.
jw1
3 Likes
No, they were only banned from Crimea, and that was because of the uncertainty over who if anyone was doing air traffic control.
2 Likes
Over Crimea, only now Ukraine proper is a no fly for US carriers.
The issue is that Ukraine’s military systems emit a friend’s to Russia’s military systems. Some moron overrode that and shot down a commercial airliner. There’s no way some random “rebel” had access to or the skills to do such a thing, it has to be Russia.
The only way that this is Ukraine government’s doing is if the “rebels” had access to transport aircraft that they fly around at 30,000 feet.
The only logical explanation is the Russia did this and now it’s payback. Time for Europe to stop being a bunch pussies and get on-board with more sanctions.
2 Likes
I do not like the word games that are being played. The Russians are responsible. Not separatists or pro-russian forces or Ukrainian separatists.
The US does not get to claim US separatists do something bad when it happens. It is the US, no matter what.
We are not stupid. Jouralist need to tell it like it is.
3 Likes
Wow, imagine that.
Making a list of militaries shooting down civilian airliners and leaving off when the Israelis shot down
Libyan Arab Airlines Flight 114
and murdered over one hundred people?
Your “only way” is pretty simplistic and in no way admits to the possibility of the general dumbassery of the Ukrainian military.
Guess you are just as concerned with the list lacking this one:
On 27 July 1955, a Lockheed Constellation operating El Al Flight 402, was shot down by two Bulgarian Air Force fighter jets over Blagoevgrad, near Sofia, Bulgaria, after it strayed into Bulgarian airspace in rough weather. All 58 passengers and crew were killed
1 Like
So you think that the “rebels” are flying transport aircraft at 30,000 feet? There’s no reason for the Ukraine military to fire on a aircraft like that.
I guess it’s possible, but it’s not likely.
“…Ukrainian rebels shot down the Malaysian jetliner…”
I want to thank TPM and congratulate Maddow and other liberal broadcast channels for keeping focus on this story.
Without their persistence, I honestly might have ho-hummed right past it. Not that I’m indifferent to mass murder. The difference is that I realize this time how closely the anger of people far from me – the international community – matches my own.
If all decent people in the world could somehow unite as a force for peace, maybe we could take the world back from the little boys who want to turn each of our neighborhoods into their own playground battlefields, casually shrugging off their murders of hundreds of innocent people a day as just the occasional oopsie of their sport.
Whether the thugs are in the Ukraine, Honduras, or Idaho, calling themselves patriots, priests, drug runners, or rebels, the demand of decent people world-wide is the same – keep your freaking war toys to yourselves.
3 Likes
There was a posting of an FAA warning from April 2014 that included Crimea and Eastern Ukraine.
Then there’s this from Business Insider:
FlightAware also indicated MH17 should have been on a path that would have taken it over Western Ukraine, not the volatile eastern part of the country. That flight path would have taken the plane near Crimea. However, the air traffic site Flightradar24 showed the plane’s final signal came from the east of the country. The security intelligence firm Stratfor also noted the plane reportedly went down near Shakhtyorsk, Ukraine in the east near the Russian border.
So was it the MH17 pilot/Malaysian Airlines who made the decision to veer north instead of south to supposedly avoid inclement weather?
Or was it by direction of the Aeronautical Information Service (AIS) (Malaysia’s FAA equivalent)?
What were the motivations to do so?
Doesn’t seem to be for safety concerns.
So. We’re either back to the price of fuel.
Or to save an hour of flight time-- and the cost of passengers missing connecting flights.
Seems pretty shallow either way.
jw1
EDIT: An interesting graphic from the time of MH17’s explosion (from International Business Times)
20:18 This photo shows how airspace over Ukraine is almost completely clear in comparison with the rest of Europe following the crash.
1 Like
Agreed. I read the headline and thought that not shooting at the plane in the first place certainly would have saved it.
2 Likes
What could have saved the Malaysian plane?
Deflector shields.
1 Like
Don’t give them any ideas. 
If I can extrapolate from the WSJ, the real dumbassery is the Ukraine government’s failure to close the air space to commercial traffic over Eastern Ukraine. Kiev keeps saying they have evidence that Russia supplied the rebels with the Buk launcher, and that they knew of this days before the this incident, but they didn’t take any of the normal precautions.
1 Like