However, Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir bin Mohamad denounced the charges brought against the Russian and Ukrainian nationals indicted in the NATO-led investigation, dismissing the entire probe as a politically motivated effort predetermined to scapegoat Moscow and exclude Malaysian participation in the inquiry from the very beginning.

Mohamad is featured in the excellent documentary MH17: Call for Justice made by a team of independent journalists which contests the NATO-scripted narrative and reveals that the Buk missile was more likely launched from Ukrainian Army-controlled territory than the DPR. One of Kolomoisky’s hired guns could also have been responsible.

The Bellingcat ‘investigative journalism’ collective which made its name incriminating Moscow for the MH17 tragedy are the principle offenders. Bellingcat bills itself as an ‘independent’ citizen journalism group even though its founder Eliot Higgins is employed by the Atlantic Council think tank which receives funding from NATO, the U.S. State Department, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), George Soros’ Open Society Foundation NGO, and numerous other regime change factories.

Despite its enormous conflict of interest, Bellingcat remains highly cited by corporate media as a supposedly reputable source. At the outset, nearly everything about the PS752 tragedy gave one déjà vu of the MH17 disaster, including the rush to judgement by Western governments, so it was only natural for many to distrust the official narrative until more facts came out.

In 1997, the U.S. National Archives declassified a 1962 memo proposed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Department of Defense for then-Secretary of State Robert McNamara entitled “Justification for U.S. Military Intervention in Cuba.”

The document outlined a series of ‘false flag’ terrorist attacks, codenamed Operation Northwoods, to be carried out on a range of targets and blamed on the Cuban government to give grounds for an invasion of Havana in order to depose Fidel Castro.

These scenarios included targets within the U.S., in particular Miami, Florida, which had become a haven of right-wing émigrés and defectors following the Cuban Revolution.

In addition to the sinking of a Cuban refugee boat, one Northwoods plan included the staging of attacks on a civilian jet airliner and a U.S. Air Force plane to be pinned on Castro’s government:

8. It is possible to create and incident which will demonstrate convincingly that a Cuban aircraft has attacked and shot down a chartered civil airliner enroute from the United States to Jamaica, Guatemala, Panama or Venezuela. The destination would be chosen only to cause the flight plan route to cross Cuba. The passengers could be a group of college students off on a holiday or any grouping of persons with a common interest to support chartering a non-scheduled flight.

9. It is possible to create an incident which will make it appear that Communist Cuban MIGs have destroyed a USAF aircraft over international waters in an unprovoked attack.

Although Operation Northwoods was rejected by then-U.S. President John F. Kennedy – which many believe was a factor in his subsequent assassination – Cuban exiles with the support of U.S. intelligence would later be implicated in such an attack the following decade with the bombing of Cubana Airlines Flight 455 in 1976 which killed all 73 passengers and crew on board.

In 2005, documents released by the National Security Archive showed that the CIA under then-director George H.W. Bush had advanced knowledge of the plans of a Dominican Republic-based Cuban exile terrorist organization, the Coordination of United Revolutionary Organizations (CORU), at the direction of former CIA operative Luis Posada Carriles to blow up the airliner.

The U.S. later refused to extradite Carriles to Cuba to face charges and although he never admitted to masterminding the bombing of the jet, he publicly confessed to other attacks on tourist hotels in Cuba during the 1990s and was later arrested in 2000 for attempting to blow up an auditorium in Panama trying to assassinate Castro.

In 1962, the planners of Operation Northwoods concluded that such deceptive operations would shift U.S. public opinion unanimously against Cuba.

World opinion and the United Nations forum should be favorably affected by developing the international image of Cuban government as rash and irresponsible, and as an alarming and unpredictable threat to the peace of the Western Hemisphere.”

Initially, some Western intelligence sources also concluded that it was a malfunction or overheated engine that brought PS752 down in corroboration with the Iranian government’s original explanation until the narrative abruptly shifted the following day.

That they were so quick to hold Iran accountable without any investigation gave the apparent likelihood that PS752 could have fallen prey to a Northwoods-style false flag operation designed to further isolate Iran and defame its leaders after they took precautions to avoid U.S. casualties in their retaliatory strikes for the killing of Soleimani.

It was also entirely plausible that U.S. special operations planners could have consulted the Northwoods playbook replacing Cuba with Iran and the right-wing gusanos who were to assist the staged attacks in Miami with the Iranian opposition group known as Mujahedin e-Khalq (MEK/People’s Mujahedin of Iran) to do the same in Tehran.

In July of last year, Trump’s personal lawyer and former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani gave a paid speech at the cult-like group’s compound in Albania where he not only referred to the group as Iran’s “government-in-exile” but stated the U.S’s explicit intentions to use them for regime change in Iran.

The MEK enjoys high-level contacts in the Trump administration and the group was elated at his decision to murder Soleimani in Baghdad.

The latter disputed territory is a perfect fit for the rebranded group having been founded by another deregistered foreign terrorist organization, the al-Qaeda linked Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), whose leader, Hashim Thaçi, presides over the partially-recognized state. The MEK are no longer designated as such despite the State Department’s own account of its bloody history:

During the 1970s, the MEK staged terrorist attacks inside Iran to destabilize and embarrass the Shah’s regime; the group killed several US military personnel and civilians working on defense projects in Tehran. The group also supported the takeover in 1979 of the US Embassy in Tehran. In April 1992 the MEK carried out attacks on Iranian embassies in 13 different countries, demonstrating the group’s ability to mount large-scale operations overseas.”

That the U.S. is still cozy with “former” terror groups like MEK seeking to repatriate is good reason to believe its use of militant exiles for covert operations like those from Havana has not been retired.

If there were jumps to conclusions that proven serial liars could be looking for an excuse to stage an attack to lay the blame on Iran, it is only because the distinct probability was overwhelming.

Even so, a stopped clock strikes the right time twice per day and that is all Iran’s acknowledgment of its liability proves — that even the world’s most unreliable and criminal sources in Washington and Langley can be accurate sometimes, even if by accident.

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