The Political Response to the Dutch Report on MH17

By James O’Neill*

The political and media response to the report of the Dutch Safety Board into the crash of MH17 on 17 July 2014 has been unfortunately predictable.

It is clear from the comments, both in and out of Parliament by the Prime Minister and the Foreign Minister respectively, that they have not read any of the 278 page report nor its equally voluminous appendices.

That is a great pity because the Report and its appendices contain  a wealth of information that does not support either specific allegations or the more general “blame Russia/Putin” meme beloved of the Murdoch press.

There is also a great deal that is not in the Report.  This is partly because the scope of the Report did not include determining criminal culpability for the shoot down.  That is to be determined, if possible, by a separate criminal investigation not due to report for several months.

Even then, it may not be able to establish a case that is prosecutable in a court.  This is for the very good reason that a lot of the forensic evidence, as the Report makes clear, is contaminated and therefore likely to be inadmissible in accordance with normal principles of the admissibility of evidence.

Rather than being obstructive, as the Prime Minister alleges, Russia has been very helpful to the inquiry, as again the report makes clear.  They released, for example, previously classified material relating to the design, construction and capabilities of the BUK missile to which the destruction of MH17 has been attributed by the report, although there are still some doubts about that conclusion.

Other relevant information released by the Russians has not been incorporated into the Report.  This includes, for example, detailed radar and satellite data that was given in a public presentation by the Russian authorities on 21 July 2014.  This was scarcely reported in the western media.  It is hardly reasonable to suppress relevant information provided by a country and then accuse them at a later date of not being forthcoming.

Neither the Prime Minister nor the Foreign Minister have ever acknowledged that any Report was going to be necessarily circumscribed by the existence of the 8 August 2014 agreement.  This agreement, signed by Australia, Belgium, Netherlands and Ukraine (and Malaysia in December 2014) provided that nothing would be in the Report that all the parties to the agreement did not consent to.

This gave any one party an effective veto.  Given that the Ukraine is at least a prime suspect in the investigation, despite the willful refusal of our politicians to acknowledge this, that is an extraordinary situation.

The precise contents of that agreement remain suppressed and thus far resistant to FOI requests.  Again, the politicians can hardly pretend that such an agreement does not exist and simultaneously proclaim that Russia is not being transparent.  The mainstream media has also manifestly failed in its responsibilities in not giving the existence of this agreement the attention it deserves.

There has in fact been a significant suppression of highly relevant data, but it was not by the Russians.  The Americans had a satellite overhead the location of the missile launch that led to MH17’s destruction.  The Russians noted that fact in their 21 July 2014 presentation when they invited the Americans to release that data.

If you are not inclined to accept the Russian version, then you need look no further than John Kerry the US Secretary of State.  On 20 July 2014 on NBC;’s “Meet the Press” Mr Kerry said:

 “We picked up the imagery of this launch.  We know the trajectory.  We know where it came from.  We know the timing.  And it was exactly at the time that this aircraft disappeared from the radar.”

American technical capabilities in this area are well known.  There is no reason to doubt Mr Kerry’s statement.  Yet the Americans refused to release that satellite data to the Dutch Inquiry.

This is very important.  The Inquiry was only able to limit the area of the missile launch to an area of some 320 square kilometers.  Contrary to the plainly untrue assertion of the Foreign Minister that large area was partially controlled by the Kiev forces and partly by the separatists.

The American satellite data was capable of pinpointing the exact location to within a few square metres.  This would probably have definitely resolved the question of who fired the missile.  The identity of the perpetrators being known is probably the reason the data have not been released.  The facts are being subsumed to the political imperative to demonize Russia and Mr Putin in particular.

It also has to be assumed that the Russians know precisely where the missile was fired.  Their air defence systems rely in part in being able to quickly identify where a missile originates, its trajectory and type.  Rather than releasing this data themselves it has instead been presented in two parts, leaving us to put the two together and draw the obvious inference.

The first part came from the Russian presentation of data on 21 July 2014 when they identified Ukrainian radar systems that were operative in the Donetsk region on 17 July 2014.  These systems are an integral component of the successful firing of a BUK missile.

The second component came from the BUK missile manufacturer Almaz-Antey that conducted its own forensic tests and presented the results on the same day as the Dutch report was released.  Almaz-Antey pinpointed the most probable missile launch site as being an area to the south of the village of Zaroschenskoe.  That was an area controlled at the relevant time by the Ukrainian military.

There is one other area where the Australian government has been less than forthcoming.  Autopsies were carried out on the Australian victims at the facility at Hilversum in the Netherlands.  The head of the Australian team was Professor David Ranson.  His eight-page autopsy report was given to the Victoria Law Institute and a summary of the findings was published in the December issue of the Institute’s Journal.

That summary suggested that none of the victims examined by Professor Ranson and his team had any injuries consistent with shrapnel wounds from a BUK missile.  A BUK missile contains about 8000 metal pieces.  If, as has been suggested, the missile exploded less than two metres from the left front cockpit area of the plane, then the basic laws of physics would suggest that at least some of the 8000 metal fragments would have been distributed throughout the front section of the plane and into the bodies of the victims located there.

The detailed autopsy evidence however, has been suppressed.  The Victorian Coroner Judge Gray has met a formal request for its release with refusal.  Those autopsy details are clearly relevant to a determination of exactly what happened to the plane and its passengers.

A failure to make all the relevant evidence available leaves the door ajar for some sections of the mainstream media to propound baseless allegations that owe more to a political agenda than they do to a determination of the truth.

Instead of making inflammatory statements, the Prime Minister and the Foreign Minister would better direct their energies to insisting that all the relevant evidence should be released.

The victims and their families are surely entitled to that.

* Barrister at Law.  He may be contacted at joneill@qldbar.asn.au