The Mystery of the Malaysian Airlines Crash Over Ukraine

[Blue_Tires]

27. uh..the one near the bottom under "opinion"?

According to Ukraine, rebels possessed one Buk launcher capable of shooting down airplanes, even at the height of 10,000 meters. As for the Buk anti-aircraft system, it is quite a complicated system. When fully installed, the system consists of four vehicles. It's hard to imagine how the launcher could "accidentally" lock onto a Boeing 777 passenger aircraft and shoot it down without guidance and targeting stations present and operational.

A friend of mine, an air defense officer, told me an interesting thing. The Buk launcher hitting range is about 30 to 40 kilometers. Militaries always use several missile launchers to destroy air targets, as at a high altitude and speed (about 900 kilometers per hour), an aircraft stays in the hitting area of one launcher for four to six minutes only.

I can't imagine how untrained personnel could lock onto a target and hit it. It is known that most of the rebels are workers - miners, metal workers, etc. They are unlikely to have the necessary skills to manage a complex weapons system requiring special education and training.

At the same time, we are aware that Ukrainian military personnel do have the required skills. In 2001, Ukraine had the sad experience of shooting down a civilian aircraft by mistake. Siberia Airlines Flight 1812 from Israel to Russia was shot down over the Black Sea by a Ukrainian ground-to-air missile on October 4 of that year.

Furthermore, Ukrainian air defense experts may have been directly involved in shooting at Russian military aircraft in the skies over Georgia in August 2008. The Ukraine government of the time supported Georgia in its brief war with Russia that month. That decision came under sharp, critical review in Ukraine afterward.

We know that Russian satellite images show a Ukrainian Buk system positioned near the MH17 crash site, and Ukraine officials did not refute that.

So...You say he ISN'T trying to draw premature conclusions, when he spends a sizable chunk of his piece explaining why the missile was fired by the Ukrainians and not the separatists...

I don't have enough hours in a day to point out all the ways he's playing fast-and-loose with his "facts" (and for the record, several of his "facts" are completely imaginary) including his unnamed, unquoted "air defence officer" friend and that's before I get to the question about why this name of "Zhuge Li" doesn't show up anywhere on google aside from this one truthout piece...

The mods need to start putting these MH-17 threads in the conspiracy forum until the Dutch release their prelim report, at least...I've grown tired of debunking the bullshit only to see it reposted the very next day...