Social Media Cracked the Case of MH17
bloombergview.com
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There are some official and close-to-official social media accounts that are used by the Russian rebels to announce progress (Twitter, Facebook, VK) usually straight from the mouths of commanders and higher ups.
When MH-17 was downed they boasted about shooting down a Ukrainian plane only to find themselves quickly deleting all mention of it several hours later.
Those same accounts also boasted about acquiring a Buk missile launcher weeks earlier, but those status updates were also deleted.
As for the actual content in question - here's an archive of a tweet of them boasting about having Buk missile launcher, the tweet was later deleted:
http://web.archive.org/web/20140707150151/https://twitter.co...
Here's a screenshot of the VK account where their (now former) commander and defense minister (and allegedly "ex" FSB member) claimed the downing of a Ukrainian plane, later the content was deleted:
http://i.imgur.com/fi4Zkx6.png
The Wikipedia article covers all that in depth:
From http://blog.storyful.com/2014/07/19/how-social-sleuthing-unc...
The official also hinted that the missile was fired from a village in the Donetsk region, where Ukrainian forces were said to have been stationed at the time of the crash.
Russian deputy foreign minister Sergei Ryabkov called the report an attempt to make a biased conclusion. He argued that the report had failed to take account of the Russian investigations."
From:
http://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/english/news/20151014_06.html
So, even if the truth is out in the open (and given the tweets right after hitting the plane there wasn't much doubt) there is apparently no way Russia is going to own up to this.
https://www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-europe/2015/10/08/mh1...
- "Mówiłem, żeby mu dać tylko parę 'rad'!" ("I told you to only give him some 'advice'!")
- "Rad, polon, co za różnica towarzyszu?" ("Radium, polonium, what's the difference comrade?")
It came to a similar conclusion as the dutch report, the main issue with the dutch report is it's too little to late and the government had repeatedly delayed publishing it while they searched for a way to indirectly accuse Russia. The dutch report is quite weak in that it won't take the next logical step given the evidence available and accuse Russia of ordering the downing of MH17.
http://www.icao.int/secretariat/postalhistory/annex_13_aircr...
It's actually quite logical to split these two types out. One is about who is responsible, another is pure about what happened.
The next logical step will be taken by the Dutch criminal investigation due to be completed at the end of the year and published in the beginning of 2016.
Surely you mean the retired and very much ex-Russian Army civilians who voluntarily felt it was their civic duty to travel to a neighboring country and voluntarily engage in civil war... right, comrade?
Higgins had played an important role in surfacing the use of chemical weapons in Syria by the regime of Bashar al-Assad
relate to this?
"Serious Questions about the Integrity of the UN Report"
http://web.mit.edu/sts/Analysis%20of%20the%20UN%20Report%20o...
From the director of strategic communications, UNAMA: "Verification of civilian casualties is a painstaking, long and often extremely difficult and sensitive process, involving multiple sources and sometimes conflicting data and reports."
What he said is an understatement. The 2011 casualty numbers for aerial strikes in Afghanistan started at 305 at end of 2011, rose to 353 by end of 2012 and then rose to 415 by end of 2014. It took four years to get to that "415" number and this highlights that it can take years to get accurate counts. This year's UNAMA report, due soon, is bound to raise this number.
Don't get me wrong. I think every life is sacred and a single loss is an incredible tradgedy. But I tend to think spending effort on the living is more useful.
I'll argue that this IS spending effort on the living. UN report is a credible figure, which CENTCOM can't ignore, and that hopefully will result in strategy or tactics change that result in fewer civilian casualties.
Take a look at this infographic, and you'll hopefully spot 2011 in it at once on the top/bottom graphs: http://projects.voanews.com/aircraft-weapons-released-in-afg...
It's 2010 that appears like it has greater number of aerial strikes, but that's not the case. Yes, it has some big spikes, but it's actually 2011 that cumulatively has more strikes. Below is the corresponding number of civilian victims of aerial strikes as determined by the UN. The bottom numbers, the casualty numbers, are going down after 2011. Note that the last "15" number came from a preliminary UN report and will be updated soon.
Back to the person-hours you mentioned. Was it worth it to keep counting 2011 statistics, four-five years later? I think yes, because otherwise it's really easy for CENTCOM or anyone else to either miss the correct numbers, or cherry-pick them. If anyone had only cited the 2011 UNAMA report (which was initially reported as 305), it would imply that number of casualties remained the same instead of rising sharply like it did.
Unless you believe that it's Bellingcat that's manipulating photos, their narrative seems pretty sound.
Spiegel.de != Jens Kriese
Deleted comment
It has come to something when social media can point the same spotlight on whole armies doing things they would rather keep secret as it has done on politicians doing the same.
It's older than that. I remember 40 years ago it was possible that rather obvious facts (such as "you need to queue a long time to get basic consumer goods in the USRR") were dismissed simply because they could be labeled "CIA propaganda". In my country we even had an initiative for a "peace law", whose purpose was to outlaw discussion that might pose negative light on the Soviet empire, as any such discussion was obviously only there because it is spouted by the discredited Western intelligence agencies.
This was even scarier before that. Check out the following biography review[0]; it's worth the time to read. Some quotes:
"although it is clear to him that the Soviet economy is struggling, every dispatch they are given to send home declares that things are better than ever, that the Workers’ Paradise is even more paradisiacal than previously believed, that the evidence is in and Stalinism is the winner. It doesn’t matter what he makes of this, because anything he writes which deviates from the script is rejected by the censors, who ban him from sending it home. He is reduced to sending secret messages at the bottoms of people’s suitcases, only to find to his horror that even when they successfully reach the Guardian offices back in Britain, his bosses have no interest in publishing them because they offend the prejudices of its progressive readership.
(...)
His final break with the rest of the enlightened progressive world comes when he decides to do something that perhaps no other journalist in the entire Soviet Union had dared – to go off the reservation, so to speak, leave Moscow undercover, and see if he can actually get into the regions where rumors say some kind of famine might be happening. The plan goes without a hitch, he passes himself off as a generic middle-class Soviet, and he ends up in Ukraine right in the middle of Stalin’s Great Famine. He describes the scene – famished skeletons begging for crumbs, secret police herding entire towns into railway cars never to be seen again. At great risk to himself, he smuggles notes about the genocide out of the country, only to be met – once again – with total lack of interest. Guardian readers don’t look at the newspapers to hear bad things about the Soviet Union! Guardian readers want to hear about how the Glorious Future is already on its way! He is quickly sidelined in favor of the true stars of Soviet journalism, people like Walter Duranty, the New York Times‘s Russia correspondent, who wrote story after story about how prosperous and happy and well-fed the Soviets were under Stalin, and who later won the Pulitzer Prize for his troubles."
Guessing from the review, the book paints a scary picture of how West intellectualists basically fooled themselves and self-spun propaganda about the Soviet Union for decades.
[0] - http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/08/11/book-review-chronicles-...
That's an excellent article, with deep insights. Thank you!
Western intelligence came to the conclusion pretty early on that Russian separatists were to blame -- only Russia's intelligence still contradicts the content of this article, insisting that Ukraine was at fault.
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/how-professional-trolls-hel...
http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/10/13/russias-reality-trolls-a...
"Such groups can be more nimble than government bureaucracies. They also have more credibility -- something that the intelligence agencies of some Western democracies have squandered with skewed findings, serial violations of privacy and repeated evasions of oversight. For one thing, because the material Higgins and others draw on is publicly available, anyone can check their findings."
The average man or woman doesn't trust them to be the "good guys" any more. A lone wolf on YouTube is apparently more trustworthy now.