On the menu today: Two days after Christmas, in what is traditionally a slow period before New Year’s Eve, the news cycle returns to two of my obsessions — the characteristic callousness, murderous recklessness, and habitual dishonesty of the Russian government, and the similar traits found in the regime in Beijing. The Russians have shot down another passenger airliner, and a huge scoop in the Wall Street Journal reveals that the U.S. intelligence community’s shoulder-shrugging inconclusive investigation into the origin of Covid left out a lot of assessments that concluded a lab leak was the most likely cause. To paraphrase Norm Peterson, it’s a dog-eat-dog world, and our government is wearing Milk-Bone underpants.
Once Again, Incompetent Russians Shoot Down a Passenger Airliner
For at least the third time in my lifetime, the Russian military has shot down a commercial passenger airliner and killed scores of people through incompetence, recklessness, and arrogance.
On Christmas Day, 62 passengers and five crew members departed Baku, Azerbaijan, on Azerbaijan Airlines Flight 8243, headed to Grozny, the capital of the Chechnya region in southern Russia. The flight was diverted because of fog; after two unsuccessful attempts at landing, surviving passengers said they heard and felt an explosion.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Russia’s Federal Air Traffic Agency said the crash happened after the plane had hit a flock of birds.
Birds.
Apparently, those birds had been armed with explosives because portions of the plane looked like they had been damaged by either an antiaircraft missile or shrapnel from it, and several passengers inside the plane had wounds from shrapnel that preceded the crash.
About an hour and 20 minutes into the flight, the pilots appear to have started to lose control of the aircraft, likely caused by puncture holes in the plane’s vertical stabilizer, aviation experts said. The crew then battled — for at least 75 minutes — to maintain a constant speed and altitude, with the aircraft rising and falling by as much as 8,000 feet many times until ultimately crashing into the ground, according to data and analysis from tracking specialist Flightradar24.
A passenger on the Embraer 190 aircraft told the Russian television network RT that the plane had tried to descend twice but both times pulled back up. On the third attempt, he said, he and other passengers heard an explosion outside the cabin, and pieces of the aircraft’s shell flew off.
“Everyone heard the explosion,” said Subkhonkul Rakhimov, speaking to RT.
Aviation security firm Osprey Flight Solutions, citing assessments of footage of the crash, the damage to the aircraft, and recent military activity, said that the flight “was likely shot down by a Russian military air-defense system.” The plane’s undulating flight path — and a sudden downward turn at a dangerously steep angle ahead of landing — suggests the pilots were struggling to guide it, experts said.
Caliber, an Azerbaijan media site, contends that once the Russian air defense systems damaged the plane, Russian authorities attempted to get it to crash into the Caspian Sea to hide the evidence:
. . . As a result of the use of Russian electronic warfare (EW) systems, the communication system of the Azerbaijani aircraft was completely paralyzed. This disruption caused the aircraft to disappear from radar within Russian airspace and only reappeared in the area of the Caspian Sea . . .
As is known, the Grozny airport refused to allow the aircraft to land. Moreover, the Azerbaijani aircraft was also denied permission to land at Makhachkala and Mineralnye Vody airports. The disoriented crew, subjected to air defense fire and electronic warfare (EW) systems, was redirected to the Kazakh city of Aktau. It can be assumed that this recommendation was given with one goal: to have the aircraft crash into the Caspian Sea, where all witnesses would perish and the aircraft would sink. However, this is merely our assumption. Alternative versions circulating in Russian media are deliberate disinformation attempts to mislead public opinion. Video recordings from the aircraft cabin indicate that two passengers were injured by shrapnel. All eyewitness testimony, including reports of explosions heard outside the aircraft, points to the involvement of air defence systems.
For those wondering about the three outrages I referred to in the first sentence, the first was the Soviets shooting down Korean Airlines flight 007 on September 1, 1983. The second was Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, which was shot down over eastern Ukraine on July 17, 2014, brought down by a missile fired by a Buk system operated by a militia of the Donetsk People’s Republic, a so-called Russian republic in eastern Ukraine that was fighting forces of the legitimate Ukrainian government.
The Flight Safety Foundation’s Aviation Safety Network, a global database of accidents and incidents, now says that accidental military strikes have become the leading cause of commercial-aviation deaths in the last decade.
Back in January 2020, in response to the U.S. killing of Qasem Soleimani, Iran launched a barrage of missiles, and Iran’s Revolutionary Guard admitted it accidentally shot down a Ukrainian International Airlines passenger jet, killing all 176 on board. That plane was downed by a Russia-built Tor-M1 surface-to-air missile system known to NATO as Gauntlet. Thus, the Iranian response to the U.S. strike on Soleimani ended up accidentally killing 82 Iranians, 63 Canadians, eleven Ukrainians (including the crew members), ten Swedish, seven Afghans, and three Germans. But no Americans.
(After that outrage, I wrote, “If you’re a foreign country that’s using a Russian-built air-defense system, maybe you should ask for a refund. Apparently, they’re not so great at distinguishing between passenger airliners and military jets.”)
Our Mark Wright observes, “Here’s a Christmas pro tip: Avoid flying on any airliner anywhere near Russian air-defense systems and their twitchy trigger fingers.”
Unfortunately, Russian missiles don’t always stay in Russian airspace. In recent years, Russian missiles, drones, and debris have landed in just about every neighboring country multiple times, according to a review by the independent Russian media group Verstka – at least 34 occasions in seven countries, from NATO members Latvia, Poland, Romania, Croatia, and Bulgaria, and at least 10 in Moldova.
And it’s not like Russia’s neighbors can move. Oh, and remember, the Russians are jamming GPS systems over the Baltic Sea.
One last note: check out a map. Aktau, Kazakhstan, is on the east coast of the Caspian Sea. The original flight path took the plane along the west coast of the Caspian, hundreds of miles from the front in Ukraine. Two weeks ago, the Ukrainian drones were spotted over the skies of Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, and hit the Akhmat Grozny riot police battalion.
A few days before Christmas, Ukrainian drones reportedly hit residential buildings and an industrial facility in Kazan, Russia, more than 600 miles from the front lines. That is well beyond the range of Moscow and St. Petersburg.
Oops, We Forgot to Tell the President About the Lab Leak Evidence
For the second time in two weeks, the Wall Street Journal serves up a major “now it can be told” scoop:
Three scientists at the National Center for Medical Intelligence, part of the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency, conducted a scientific study that concluded that Covid-19 was manipulated in a laboratory in a risky research effort. But that analysis was at odds with the assessment of their parent agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and wasn’t incorporated in the report presented to Biden.
Remember when the U.S. intelligence community served up an infuriatingly vague and unedifying conclusion to its investigation into the origin of Covid? At the time, I wrote that it was “an oddly worded, frustrating document that seems to bend over backward to give Beijing the benefit of the doubt.”
Starting in early 2021, people such as myself asked what the point of the U.S. intelligence community was if 18 separate government agencies with amazing technology, enormous resources, and thousands upon thousands of smart and highly trained people couldn’t provide policymakers and the public with clearer answers about life-and-death issues involving the secretive actions of hostile foreign countries.
Well, it turns out we have some very smart and highly trained people who can follow a chain of evidence and apply Occam’s razor. The problem was that when it came time to report to the president, higher-up officials in the intelligence community left out some of the assessments that it was a lab leak. Whoopsie!
The National Intelligence Council had prepared a chart for inclusion in the report that depicted how the Covid-19 pandemic compared with past zoonotic outbreaks in which pathogens had leaped to humans from animals, including Ebola, MERS, and Nipah. FBI experts argued that this was a case of apples and oranges, saying these earlier diseases were strikingly different from coronaviruses, which previously had been far less contagious. But the council’s intelligence officers argued that the chart illustrated the principle of zoonotic transfer, and it was included in the report.
Another debate erupted over the geographic origin of Covid-19. FBI experts argued that a thesis by Yu Ping, a young scientist at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, indicated that the type of coronavirus that was responsible for the pandemic was indigenous to the mountainous Yunnan province in western China and wasn’t found in Hubei province where the city of Wuhan is located. If Covid-19 had spread naturally from a bat to a host animal and then a human, as proponents of the zoonotic theory argued, early cases should have also been detected in the vast area between Yunnan and Wuhan, a distance of more than 1,500 kilometers. That region, which has a population of hundreds of millions of people, contains thousands of live animal markets.
But [Adrienne Keen, a State Department official who had served as a consultant to WHO] took the view that the geographic origin of the virus wasn’t known and that the absence of cases in southwest China wasn’t relevant. Keen, who is now a scientist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, also argued that the Chinese didn’t have an effective surveillance network to uncover such outbreaks in rural areas, an argument the FBI experts also challenged. That left the two sides far apart on the most fundamental questions of how the virus emerged.
In fact, managers at the National Center for Medical Intelligence effectively told the three scientists — John Hardham, Robert Cutlip, and Jean-Paul Chretien — to shut up about the evidence pointing to a lab leak.
They briefed their counterparts, including one of Bannan’s partners, an FBI agent with a Ph.D., on their initial findings. However, in July 2021, they were instructed by a superior at the medical intelligence center not to continue sharing their work with the FBI, who told them that it was “off the reservation,” according to people familiar with the matter. That order was earlier reported by The Australian.
And when it was time to brief the president, guess which perspective wasn’t at the table, literally and metaphorically?
At the time, the FBI was the only agency that concluded a lab leak was likely, a judgment it had rendered with “moderate confidence.” But neither [FBI specialist in biological weapons with a Ph.D. in microbiology, Jason] Bannan nor any other FBI officials were at the briefing to bring their case to the president.
“Being the only agency that assessed that a laboratory origin was more likely, and the agency that expressed the highest level of confidence in its analysis of the source of the pandemic, we anticipated the FBI would be asked to attend the briefing,” Bannan recalled in his first on-the-record interview on the subject. “I find it surprising that the White House didn’t ask.”
. . . Since the National Intelligence Council was among proponents of the zoonotic theory, and the CIA, like two other agencies, had declined to take a stand either way, the makeup of the briefing meant that no proponents of the lab leak theory were present.
Why did our intelligence community return with a “gee, we don’t know, boss” answer to a presidential request and the biggest, most consequential mystery in years? Because some people within our government did not want to know — and it appears they didn’t want Biden to know, either. If the U.S. government concluded that a pandemic that had killed more than a million Americans and anywhere from 7 million to 20-some million people around the world was the fault of the regime in Beijing being reckless and dishonest, the U.S. government would have been obligated to do something about it and enforce some consequences.
As I noted in February, those of us who find the lab leak the most plausible explanation “won the argument in the realm of public opinion” in the United States and then “nothing happened. There have still been few real consequences for the Chinese government, and certainly no consequences commensurate to unleashing a plague.”
Biden has not spoken publicly about the origin of Covid-19 since August 27, 2021. After receiving the report from the intelligence community, Biden issued a three-paragraph written statement, “We will do everything we can to trace the roots of this outbreak that has caused so much pain and death around the world, so that we can take every necessary precaution to prevent it from happening again. . . . The world deserves answers, and I will not rest until we get them.” (One of the reasons this statement is largely forgotten is that the Abbey Gate terrorist attack in Kabul occurred the previous day.)
The Wall Street Journal notes that the “pace of U.S. intelligence investigation has slackened, as many intelligence analysts who were assigned to the crash effort have shifted to other priorities.”
Xi Jinping and the regime got away with it — because some people in our government wanted it that way.
ADDENDUM: I hope you’re enjoying the end of the year awards over at the Three Martini Lunch podcast.