The super-awesome & miraculous intelligence scoops from Bellingcat

In the summer of 2014, things were pretty hot in the eastern reaches of Ukraine. The democratically elected Yanukovych government had been overthrown in a US engineered coup. Russia had subsequently absorbed Crimea, and there were fears of a wider conflict. This was the context of the shooting down of MH 17, a civilian Malaysian airliner.

The Americans realized they had a potential propaganda bonanza on their hands, if only they had something they could pass off as proof to pin the blame on the Russians. Alas, in spite of an army of thousands of analysts and data scientists, in spite of an array of spy satellites monitoring every square inch of Ukraine 24/7 in real time, in spite of vast networks of on-the-ground informants, and in spite of a budget in the many billions of dollars, they had nothing.

Enter Eliot Higgins, a thirty-something unemployed loafer in England. Eliot was able to prove what the US intelligence apparatus couldn’t. Sure enough, the Ruskies had sneaked one of their missile systems across the border, shot down MH 17, and then skedaddled back over to Russia!

Hmm…

The nature of Higgins’ “proofs” tends to leave more than a little bit desired, like any actual solid proof in the conventional sense of the word. Nevertheless, that was good enough to get him on the grant list at the National Endowment for Democracy, that US government-funded “non-government organization” specializing in distributing seed money to whatever fifth columns might further US interests in target nations.

Eliot was a guest on The Current this morning. Needless to say, host Matt Galloway didn’t ask any  awkward questions about that US financing, or about anything else for that matter. Instead, we were treated to what was essentially twenty minutes of anti-Russian propaganda by a guy who collects money from the American government.

The CBC; using Canadian tax dollars to spread US propaganda.