THAT MYSTERIOUSLY MISSING AIRLINER…AGAIN…

The story of Malaysia Air Flight 370 just will not go away, I suspect, in spite of the best attempts and wishes on the part of certain people that wish it would go away. This week, the obfuscation game continues, with RT reporting that satellite data has been made available by the Malaysian government, and, in the same week, a set of remarks blogged by the former Prime Minister of that country, Mr. Mahathir Mohamed, which appears yet again to contradict the official line being put out by the current government of his country. Consider the timing alone of these two articles:

MH370 search: Government releases data

MH370 flight satellite data released shows how Malaysia Boeing 777 went missing

Consider the contradictory nature of the assertions of these two articles. In the first article, we are assured of this:

"Close to three months after the Malaysian jetliner disappeared, the government released reams of raw satellite data it used to determine that the flight ended in the southern Indian Ocean, a step long demanded by the families of some of the passengers on board."

And a little later in the first article, this:

"The release of the information came as the underwater hunt for the jet is poised to pause until later in the summer while new, powerful sonar equipment is obtained, a sign of just how difficult it will be to locate the jet and finally get some answers on how it went missing with 239 people on board.

"Air traffic controllers lost contact with the Boeing 777 soon after it took off from Kuala Lumpur on March 8 on a night flight to Beijing over waters between Malaysia and Vietnam.

"An international investigation team led by Malaysia has concluded that the jet flew south after it was last spotted on Malaysian military radar to the west of peninsular Malaysia and ended up in the southern Indian Ocean off western Australia. The conclusion is based on complex calculations derived largely from brief hourly transmissions or "handshakes" between the plane and a communications satellite operated by Britain's Inmarsat company."

Now juxtapose these observations about the Malaysian government's release of satellite data with these statements of Mr. Mohamed, a former prime minister of that country, as reported in the second article in RT(Russia Today):

"In his personal blog, the ex-PM claimed that the CIA seized control of the Boeing 777 jet after takeoff, pointing out that these days an aircraft could be remotely controlled by certain government agencies, such as the CIA, which then staged a fruitless rescue operation.

“'It is a waste of time and money to look for debris or oil slicks or to listen for pings from the black box,' Mohamad said, as quoted by Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald.

“'The plane is somewhere, maybe without MAS (Malaysia Airlines) markings,' wrote Mohamad on his blog.
'Someone is hiding something,” he added. “It is not fair that MAS and Malaysia should take the blame.'

"Mahathir Mohamad is Malaysia’s longest serving prime minister, remaining in office for 22 years until 2003." (Emphases in the original)

In other words, one official Malaysian source releases satellite data that indicates the flight crashed in the Indian Ocean, and another Malaysian source - a "quasi-official" one in the form of one of its former Prime Ministers, says this is all nonsense, and the flight disappeared as part of some CIA- or Western-led covert operation. Notably, the former Prime Minister does not(at least in the RT version of the story), offer any motivation or speculative scenario for why such a drastic action would have been either necessary or taken.

So what are we looking at here? One possibility is that the two statements out of Malaysia represent real internal factional disagreements within that country, for Mr. Mohamed's remarks clearly suggest - with their explicit reference to searches in the Indian Ocean - that he had some sort of inside knowledge of the impending release of satellite data. His remarks in my opinion do not merely suggest the response of a prominent Malaysian politician after the fact, but rather, the carefully considered remarks of someone concerned about the direction the investigation was taking. They seem prepared and considered.

Another possibility is that we are looking at deliberate coordination of two very contradictory views, in an attempt to deliberately obfuscate the story even more. This pattern has been apparent in the story from the outset, but the question then becomes: why the pattern of obfuscation in the first place, and why its reinforcement now, and in such a blatant manner? One possibility is that that obfuscation is being created to draw attention to "western plots", precisely in the fashion Mr. Mohamed is doing, by pointing out inconsistencies and problems in the Indian Ocean story. Indeed, this author also raised the concern, early on in the story, that if the plane was alleged to have crashed in the Indian Ocean, that should raise the bar of suspicion, since recovery - and hence verification of the story - would only be possible to the very few with technological capability. In other words, an Indian Ocean crash meant that the official story had to be accepted on faith. My difficult with this covert operations scenario all along has been the fact that in today's geopolitical climate, if the West or its agencies were involved in such a nefarious deed(and mind you, I put nothing past them), Russia, China, and possibly India would be making much more noise about this possibility than they are. True, the second article linked above is from Russia Today, but reporting on a Malaysian Prime Minister's thoughts is hardly "noise." Russia and China are not, of course, above using proxies to make noises, but if the goal is to draw attention to the "western covert operations" hypothesis, it remains a rather weak one.  The other possibility is that the obfuscation, at least in Malaysia's case, may be deliberately attempting to draw attention to the one hypothesis no one yet - other than this author - wants to consider: the plane simply disappeared and no one knows why nor by what instrumentality. By repeating the now all too sad but familiar pattern of obfuscation surrounding the story, attention is drawn to the possibility by dint of its significant absence in the discussions that still surround the event. There is another possibility too: that the plane really did go down in the Indian Ocean (for whatever reasons still to be "determined"), and that the obfuscation is a bit of deliberate social engineering designed to create a community of skepticism surrounding whatever consensus as does eventually emerge. 

Any way one slices it, however, the announcements coming out of Malaysia have not resolved, but only added to, the mystery.

See you on the flip side.