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September
18
2018

Evidence Is No Longer A Western Value
Paul Craig Roberts

Russia Provides Conclusive Proof That Ukraine Downed Malaysia Airlines MH17

Of course, proof, facts, evidence are no longer of any consequence in the Western World. Transparently false accusations can be leveled without any evidence provided, and the lie becomes a fact. “Russiagate” is a perfect example. 

Feminist students in Western universities, who find themselves “offended” by scientific fact, denounce scientists for speaking truth that contradicts feminist ideology, and the university administrations, obedient to feminish ideology, haul the scientists before hearings ideologically prepared to declare the scientist, if male, a misogynist. 

History is rewritten into fantasy because the historical facts are “offensive” to one “victim group” or the other. Identity politics has birthed a new world: history is whatever serves agendas. Nothing else counts. Truth least of all. 

Justice no longer exists in America as 97% of felony convictions result from self-incrimination—plea bargains in which the defendant, innocent or guilty, advised by his attorney that a fair trial is impossible, admits to some offense in exchange for a watered-down sentence. See Roberts and Stratton, The Tyranny of Good Intentions.

Decades ago when there was still some semblance of justice in the American justice system, police had to provide sound evidence for their case in order for the prosecutor to take up the case. The reason was that prosecutorial budgets were limited, and the career interests of prosecutors was to get as many convictions out of their budget as possible. Today, however, when even the innocent prefer to admit a crime rather than run the risk of a trial, prosecutors have endless strings of “convictions” without having to spend days or weeks in trial. 

Today prosecutors no longer have to prove a case before a jury. They only negotiate with the defendant’s attorney a crime, whether committed or not, that settles the case.

Consequently, the police, knowing that there is scant chance of their evidence ever being tested in court, “solve” crimes by simply picking up someone and charging them. The explanations of some experts, who are not beholden to the corrupt system, is that the police, confronted with a robbery, for example, look to see who in the area had previously served time for robbery and select a former convicted robber to construct a case against. The police, like prosecutors, can rely on paid “informers” to provide “evidence.” Drug gangs, for example, use “cooperation with the police” to clear out rivals. The defendant’s attorney knows that, with his client’s prior record, he will be convicted by the naive jury regardless of the absence of evidence. Jurors very seldom believe a defendant instead of a prosecutor. The hapless and ignorant jurors think that defendants, i. e. criminals, lie, but not prosecutors or police. Consequently, no defense attorney trusts a jury. The easy conviction of the prior convicted is the reason for the high recidivism rate. Many of the convicted are serving a second or third prison time for something that they did not do.

Unless the defendant and his attorney are double-crossed, as happened to “junk bond king” Michael Milken, the plea bargain sentence is less than a trial conviction sentence. The prosecutor gets another notch on his gun, the judge’s court docket is cleared, and the police can go back to coffee and donuts.

The persons who pay for the convenience of the justice (sic) system are the wrongfully convicted and their famlies, and Amerian taxpayers who fund the incarceration of innocents so that crime-scared Americans are “safe.”

The US Constitution is a dead letter document. The Cheney/Bush and Obama regimes destroyed it, and Trump has done nothing to revive it. 

The separation of powers is also lost as is, in many instances, judicial review. Dick Cheney, his minions, and the Republican Federalist Society succeeded in giving the office of the president dictatorial powers that vacate the Bill of Rights and American civil liberties. The only protection still standing is the Second Amendment, and the entirety of the liberal-progressive-left and the police state have the Second Amendment in their sights. The liberal-progressive-left is so insouciant that it either does not know or does not mind that it is allied with Dick Cheney’s police state to take away the last protection that the American people have from organized state tyranny.

I have written many times about all of these things and many more of the same nature. To wake up the American people, indeed any Western people other than Hungary, whose president is awake, https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2018/09/17/is-hungary-the-last-remaining-european-country/ , is like trying to waken the dead. 

Sometimes I wonder if, other than my readers, the entire American public is dead, walking zombies taking their directions from CNN, BBC, NPR, the New York Times, the Washington Post.
This crowd of zombies is marching into Armageddon.

The source for Russia’s evidence that Ukraine shot down the Malaysian airliner is Johnson’s Russian List at George Washington University, 17 September 2018

#24
Russia presents audio recording proving Ukraine’s complicity in MH17 tragedy

MOSCOW, September 17. /TASS/. The Russian Defense Ministry has ascertained that the videos showing the movement of a Buk missile system from Russia to Ukraine, presented by the Joint Investigation Team (JIT) probing the Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 crash in eastern Ukraine, were fabricated, ministry spokesman Major General Igor Konashenkov told reporters.

According to him, Russian experts thoroughly scrutinized those videos and came to the conclusion that they had been fabricated.

The Russian Defense Ministry has held a press conference devoted to the MH17 crash, presenting a detailed analysis of those videos and proof of their fabrication

The Defense Ministry also presented an audio recording proving Ukraine’s complicity in the MH17 disaster in 2014, Major General Igor Konashenkov, spokesman for the ministry, told the media.

General Konashenkov said the audio recording of a conversation between Ukrainian military servicemen was made back in 2016 in the Odessa Region during the Rubezh-2016 exercise and published in the Ukrainian mass media.

“If so, we’ll … [a synonym of the verb ‘shoot down’ – TASS] another Malaysian Boeing,” one of the Ukrainian military servicemen said in the conversation.

How the projectile was identified as Ukrainian

The missile, which downed Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17, was made in the town of Dolgoprudny outside Moscow in 1986, delivered to a military unit deployed to Ukraine and was never brought back to Russia, Chief of the Russian Defense Ministry’s Missile and Artillery Department Lieutenant General Nikolai Parshin told reporters.

According to him, the missile fragments presented by the Joint Investigation Team (JIT) looking into the MH17 crash carried the numbers of the missile’s nozzle and engine. “Once we had the nozzle and engine numbers, we were able to find out the missile’s number,” he specified.

“There are documents in the archives of the Dolgoprudny Research Institute, which made it possible to find out the missile’s tail number. It came out that the missile was assembled on December 24, 1986, and delivered by rail to the military unit number 20/152, officially named the 223rd Air Defense Missile Brigade. It was deployed to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic’s Ternopol Region, which was part of the Subcarpathian Military District,” he added.

According to the general, the military unit was never withdrawn to Russia 

MH17 crash

The Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17, a Boeing-777 passenger plane travelling from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, was shot down on July 17, 2014, over Ukraine’s eastern region of Donetsk. The crash killed all the 283 passengers and 15 crewmembers. There were nationals of ten states among the dead. The Joint Investigation Team (JIT) looking into the crash is comprised of representatives from the Netherlands, Australia, Belgium, Malaysia and Ukraine.

On May 24, the team provided an update on the criminal investigation, claiming “the Buk-TELAR that was used to down MH17, originates from the 53rd Anti-Aircraft Missile brigade… a unit of the Russian army from Kursk in the Russian Federation.”

Russia’s Defense Ministry rejected all the allegations and said that none of the missile systems belonging to the Russian Armed Forces had ever been taken abroad.

Nevertheless, on May 25, Australia and the Netherlands issued a statement saying that they “hold Russia responsible for its part in the downing of flight MH17.” The two countries called on Russia to hold talks in order to find an appropriate solution and warned that the case could be submitted to an international court or organization.

Australia, the Dutch, the entirety of Western Europe and the UK are reliable accomplices to Washington’s and Israel’s enormous crimes against humanity. 

The question before the world, the question that neocon John Bolton most fears, is whether Russian truths will prevail over Washington’s lies.

Washington is prepared to initiate World War 3 rather than accept the prevalence of truth over its lies.

Hon. Paul Craig Roberts is the John M. Olin Fellow at the Institute for Political Economy, Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and Research Fellow at the Independent Institute. A former editor and columnist for The Wall Street Journal and columnist for Business Week and the Scripps Howard News Service, he is a nationally syndicated columnist for Creators Syndicate in Los Angeles and a columnist for Investor's Business Daily. In 1992 he received the Warren Brookes Award for Excellence in Journalism. In 1993 the Forbes Media Guide ranked him as one of the top seven journalists.

He was Distinguished Fellow at the Cato Institute from 1993 to 1996. From 1982 through 1993, he held the William E. Simon Chair in Political Economy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. During 1981-82 he served as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy. President Reagan and Treasury Secretary Regan credited him with a major role in the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981, and he was awarded the Treasury Department's Meritorious Service Award for "his outstanding contributions to the formulation of United States economic policy." From 1975 to 1978, Dr. Roberts served on the congressional staff where he drafted the Kemp-Roth bill and played a leading role in developing bipartisan support for a supply-side economic policy.

In 1987 the French government recognized him as "the artisan of a renewal in economic science and policy after half a century of state interventionism" and inducted him into the Legion of Honor.

Dr. Roberts' latest books are The Tyranny of Good Intentions, co-authored with IPE Fellow Lawrence Stratton, and published by Prima Publishing in May 2000, and Chile: Two Visions - The Allende-Pinochet Era, co-authored with IPE Fellow Karen Araujo, and published in Spanish by Universidad Nacional Andres Bello in Santiago, Chile, in November 2000. The Capitalist Revolution in Latin America, co-authored with IPE Fellow Karen LaFollette Araujo, was published by Oxford University Press in 1997. A Spanish language edition was published by Oxford in 1999. The New Colorline: How Quotas and Privilege Destroy Democracy, co-authored with Lawrence Stratton, was published by Regnery in 1995. A paperback edition was published in 1997. Meltdown: Inside the Soviet Economy, co-authored with Karen LaFollette, was published by the Cato Institute in 1990. Harvard University Press published his book, The Supply-Side Revolution, in 1984. Widely reviewed and favorably received, the book was praised by Forbes as "a timely masterpiece that will have real impact on economic thinking in the years ahead." Dr. Roberts is the author of Alienation and the Soviet Economy, published in 1971 and republished in 1990. He is the author of Marx's Theory of Exchange, Alienation and Crisis, published in 1973 and republished in 1983. A Spanish language edition was published in 1974.

Dr. Roberts has held numerous academic appointments. He has contributed chapters to numerous books and has published many articles in journals of scholarship, including the Journal of Political Economy, Oxford Economic Papers, Journal of Law and Economics, Studies in Banking and Finance, Journal of Monetary Economics, Public Finance Quarterly, Public Choice, Classica et Mediaevalia, Ethics, Slavic Review, Soviet Studies, Rivista de Political Economica, and Zeitschrift fur Wirtschafspolitik. He has entries in the McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Economics and the New Palgrave Dictionary of Money and Finance. He has contributed to Commentary, The Public Interest, The National Interest, Harper's, the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Fortune, London Times, The Financial Times, TLS, The Spectator, Il Sole 24 Ore, Le Figaro, Liberation, and the Nihon Keizai Shimbun. He has testified before committees of Congress on 30 occasions.

Dr. Roberts was educated at the Georgia Institute of Technology (B.S.), the University of Virginia (Ph.D.), the University of California at Berkeley and Oxford University where he was a member of Merton College.

He is listed in Who's Who in America, Who's Who in the World, The Dictionary of International Biography, Outstanding People of the Twentieth Century, and 1000 Leaders of World Influence. His latest book, HOW THE ECONOMY WAS LOST, has just been published by CounterPunch/AK Press. He can be reached at: [email protected]

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