WASHINGTON (Sputnik) — On July 17, 2014, Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 crashed in Ukraine's eastern region of Donetsk en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur. All 298 people on board, mostly Dutch citizens, died.
“If the United States wants to implicate Russia — and the analysts discovered more evidence to do that — why wouldn't that information have been made public?” Parry commented on Tuesday.
Parry deduced that the logical answer was the evidence had veered off in a different direction that did not support the US propaganda narrative.
“So the curtain of ‘classification’ [of the report] has come down while US ‘soft power’ assets are free to build their circumstantial cases against Russia.”
Parry became internationally known in the 1980s for his major role in helping expose the Iran-Contra affair.
“Given the scope of this human tragedy and the significance of US-Russian relations, this [US] behavior is the opposite of acceptable.”
Parry also noted that the secrecy surrounding the crash investigation over the past year was extremely unusual, even unprecedented, raising suspicions that the veil of silence was politically-motivated from Washington.
“It has been extraordinary, the level of secrecy surrounding this investigation,” he said. “Normally, airplane tragedies are examined much more transparently because of the desire to reassure the public.”
Even investigations involving politically sensitive matters, such as the South Korean KAL-007 shoot-down by the Soviet Air Force in 1983, and the Iranian airliner shot down by the United States in the Persian Gulf in 1988, “were far more transparent than this one which has been extremely opaque,” Parry pointed out.
The veteran journalist dismissed arguments that the investigation into the MH17 crash had to remain confidential as being entirely unjustified.
“The excuse that it's an open investigation and therefore US intelligence and other entities can't talk about it simply doesn't hold water.”
Previous airliner disaster investigations that had to probe terrorist connections had been far more open than the MH17 probe, Parry noted. He cited the investigation into the Pan American 103 bombing over Lockerbie Scotland in 1988 as an example of a significantly more open investigation.
Right after the MH17 disaster, the Ukrainian authorities “pushed out scattered ‘social media’ tidbits immediately,” Parry said.
He recalled that Secretary of State John Kerry reiterated allegations damaging to Russia just three days after the crash, while the US intelligence community issued a “government assessment” suggesting Russian culpability two days later.
However, over the past year, “as the analysts had a chance to begin seriously examining the evidence, all we've gotten is silence,” Parry added.
July 22 marks the first anniversary when the US “Government Assessment” was released. However, since then, “not a single update,” Parry emphasized.
“In fact, when I spoke with a US Director of National Intelligence official on July 17, the first anniversary of the crash, she was still referring me to that rush-to-judgment report.”
Robert Parry was awarded the George Polk Award for National Reporting in 1984. He has been the editor of Consortium News since 1995.
