Kuda Huvadhoo Toward Diego Garcia
The mysterious and sordid Diego Garcia island, south of where the islanders sighted a jumbo, is a military base that ABC reported Wednesday as having a notable landing strip, with US military personnel. It is one of the black sites where the US has transported and detained so-called terrorists.
The Maldive’s civilian airport is also notable for a secret drug dealers’ flight exit, exposed in 2013 by a reporter in Vanuatu, BJ Skane.
Those considerations, added to facts that: 1) Malaysia officials based their sighting dismissal on the military, Maldives Chief of the Defence Force, 2) the Maldives was excluded from countries participating in the search and rescue (SAR) countries, and 3) the United States military base Diego Garcia south of the Maldives - more strongly suggest a U.S. military operation, coverup and false flag event, as Dupré detailed in a report Monday.
Malaysian acting transport minister Hishammuddin Hussein told reporters Wednesday in Kuala Lumpur that authorities in the Maldives told Malaysia the reports are “not true,” reports Farah Ahmed of Haveeru newspaper, who originally reported the islanders’ accounts of seeing the odd, low-flying plane with Malaysia Airlines’ stripe emblem and colors.
“I can confirm that the Malaysian Chief of the Defence Force has contacted his counterpart in the Maldives, who has confirmed that these reports are not true,” Hishammuddin said, accusing the islanders and/or Maldives’ reporters of lying.
Major General Ahmed Shiyam ndc, psc is serving as Chief of Defence Force of the Maldives National Defence Force.
Malaysian government’s transport ministry excluded Maldives from their SAR operation, one heavily domintaed by United States agencies. This is despite pings showing it in the vicinity of the Maldives.
In a statement released Sunday, the Malaysian government listed countries it appealed for assistance in their SAR regarding the missing flight: Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, China, Myanmar, Laos, Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, Australia and France.
Several residents of Kuda Huvadhoo in the Maldives on Tuesday told Haveeru newspaper reporters that they saw a “low flying jumbo jet” at around 6:15am on March 8. They said that it was a white aircraft, with red stripes across it – “what the Malaysia Airlines flights typically look like,” the paper reaffirmed Wednseday. They noted the incredibly loud noise the flight made when it flew over houses in the island.
Eyewitnesses from Kuda Huvadhoo concurred that the airplane travelled from the North to South-East, toward the Southern tip of the Maldives – Addu. South is where Diego Garcia black site is and where Malaysia Airlines 370 had enough fuel to reach.
“A local aviation expert told Haveeru that it is ‘likely’ for MH370 to have flown over the Maldives. The possibility of any aircraft flying over the island at the reported time is extremely low, the expert added,” the paper said.
Maldives police have launched an investigation into the reported sightings of the low-flying aircraft, according to Haveeru newspaper.
The Malaysia airlines jet disappeared on March 8 with 239 people on board after departing Kuala Lumpur International Airport bound for Beijing. Investigators say it was deliberately diverted off course, what most reporters and some officials have viewed as a hijacking, while many have viewed it as a false flag.
Black Site Diego Garcia Home to Decades of Military Human Rights Abuses
Twenty-six countries are reportedly involved in the SAR after satellite and military radar data projected two huge corridors through which it might have flown – but for some reason excluded the Maldives, despite satellite data suggests that the last “ping” was received by a satellite somewhere close to the Maldives and the US naval base on Diego Garcia.
“The island atoll is a British territory in the central Indian Ocean and is home to a United States Navy support facility — not exactly a U.S. base, but home for 1700 military personnel, 1,500 civilian contractors, and various Naval equipment,” ABC reports Wednseday. ”The island — named after 16th century Spanish explorer Diego Garcia de Moguer — gained some notoriety in the past 10 years after reports claimed that the U.S. used Diego Garcia to transport and detain alleged terrorists.”
“Time published allegations by a former senior US official that at least one terror suspect was imprisoned on the island in a secret jail, known as a “black site”. The island had already been implicated as a “staging post” in secret flights transporting suspects from one country to another, as part of so-called extraordinary rendition measures.” (Metro)
ACLU executive director Anthony Romero stated at that time: “The ACLU is proud to join Liberty in the effort to uncover the truth about what happened at Diego Garcia.
Clive Stafford Smith, director of the legal charity organization Reprieve (that unearthed flight logs recording arrivals and departures of a CIA rendition plane at Diego Garcia), wrote in the Guardian in 2008:
British denials are difficult to square with the words of U.S. Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey … recently retired from running Southcom, the military command that oversees Guantanamo.
He was asked in May 2004 where the thousands of ghost prisoners were being held. “You know, Bagram Air Field, Diego Garcia, Guantánamo, 16 camps throughout Iraq,” he replied.
MH370 carried passengers who were possibly persons of interest to the U.S. It had over 20 employees of military-linked employees, some working for companies Congress has deemed national security risks.
‘Stealing A Nation’ (2004), an extraordinary John Pilger film, shows the plight of Chagos Islands, whose indigenous population was secretly and brutally expelled by British Governments in the late 1960s and early 1970s to make way for an American military base. This tragedy, falling within remit of the International Criminal Court as “a crime against humanity”, is told by Islanders dumped in slums of Mauritius and by British officials, who left a damning trail of Foreign Office documents.
Before Americans went to the Malives, over 2,000 people lived on those islands in the Indian Ocean, many with roots back to the late 18th century. There were thriving villages, a school, a hospital, a church, a railway and an undisturbed way of life.
The islands were, and still are, a British crown colony. In the 1960s, the Harold Wilson government struck a secret deal with the United States to hand over the main island of Diego Garcia. The Americans demanded that the surrounding islands be “swept” and “sanitized”. Unknown to Parliament and to the US Congress and in breach of the United Nations Charter, the British Government plotted with Washington to expel the entire population.
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http://www.secretsofthefed.com/breaking-hijacked-flight-370-passenger-sent-photo-hidden-iphone-tracing-back-secret-u-s-military-base-diego-garcia/
LONDON - Malaysian opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim has accused the government of hiding information on missing flight MH370, telling Britain's Daily Telegraph that the country's radar system would have detected any change of course.
Anwar, who recently had his acquittal on sodomy charges overturned in what he claims is a political smear, said he was "baffled" why the sophisticated Marconi radar system that he authorised as finance minister in 1994 had failed to immediately detect the plane's deviation.
Anwar: "We have the capacity to protect our borders."
The Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 went missing in the early hours of March 8 during a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, carrying 239 people on board.
In an interview carried by the Friday edition of the newspaper, he described it as "not only unacceptable but not possible, not feasible" that it could travel across "at least four" Malaysian states undetected, adding: "I believe the government knows more than us".
"We don't have the sophistication of the United States or Britain but still we have the capacity to protect our borders," he stressed.
The radar system, based near the South China Sea, covers mainland Malaysia.
Anwar defended the aircraft's pilot, 53-year-old Zaharie Ahmad Shah, who is also a personal friend and a member of his political party.
"If you say or suggest that the pilot may have been involved, what about the concealing (of information)?" he told the Telegraph.
"He could not have concealed the radar readings. He could not have instructed the air force to remain completely silent."
Anwar was sentenced to five years in jail just hours before MH370 took off after a Court of Appeals panel sided with a government challenge to his 2012 acquittal on charges he sodomised a male former aide. He is currently on bail.
He leads a pro-democracy coalition of parties that shocked the government by claiming over half of the popular vote in last year's general election, though it was not enough to secure victory.
Crisis of credibility in Malaysian plane search
By Anil Netto
PENANG - It has been a sight that Malaysians are unaccustomed to - senior ministers and officials shifting uncomfortably and bristling in delivering curt responses to journalists trying to extract more information about the still unresolved March 8 disappearance of a Malaysia Airlines jetliner destined for China.
A series of false leads and apparent withheld information about the airliner's known pathway has resulted in a wild goose chase involving dozens of countries. Today, Australia's Air Force said it sighted two objects in the southern Indian Ocean that may be related to missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370.
The Malaysian government's unexplained delay in disclosing the
plane's turn back from its scheduled route toward an area near Penang in the west coast of the peninsula has exposed Prime Minister Najib Razak's government to global criticism of its perceived as inept crisis management.
The government in general and air force in particular have faced uncomfortable questions over how its three radar locations in the north of the peninsula failed to detect the plane in the early hours of March 8 - an apparent failure that prevented fighter jets stationed at the air force base in Butterworth on mainland Penang from scrambling to intercept the jetliner and guide it to a safe landing.
Contradictions and dithering over the findings of primary radar records meant precious time was lost searching for the Boeing 777 aircraft over the South China Sea instead of the Straits of Malacca and Indian Ocean. The costly delay in disclosure of crucial information to the global community, however, is symptomatic of Malaysia's wider governance problem.
Whatever the outcome into the investigations of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, "this could prove be a turning point for Malaysia," said an economics lecturer in Penang who requested anonymity.
The confusion on a global scale has laid bare the poor performance of senior ministers and raised new concerns about the competence of the upper echelons of Malaysia's civil service. That has included a glaring lack of proficiency in English in the early days of the crisis, before Acting Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein, cousin of premier Najib, took over as main government spokesperson.
That it took nearly a week for the government to admit that the global search including naval ships, surveillance planes and satellites for the massive jetliner should focus in areas other than the South China Sea has also raised questions about the military's basic operating procedures and surveillance capabilities.
Its apparent initial refusal to accept international assistance from countries with superior surveillance capacities have simultaneously revealed an obdurate nationalism, analysts say. On March 19, 11 days after the plane disappeared, Malaysian authorities made their first high-level request for American assistance in recovering data deleted from a flight simulator installed in one of the pilot's homes.
(Malaysian officials insist they have been sharing information and cooperating with global partners from the start.)
"What I would like to know is, with all our defense expenditure, why did our military not detect immediately the plane was flying back? That is the most crucial point," said a Penang-based business analyst who declined to be identified. "Based on our misinformation, we sent so many nations to the South China Sea in the first week, which was a major error."
To be sure, the bewildering circumstances surrounding the disappearance of the aircraft, including the apparent switching off or malfunctioning of the plane's communication devices, would have tested any government's mettle. But bumbling officials, conflicting accounts of what the primary radar actually showed, and lack of intra-agency coordination in the first week of the crisis has exposed the country's top leadership to unprecedented and unflattering global scrutiny.
It has since been learned that fisher folk situated on the east coast of the Malaysian peninsula had lodged police reports of a low-flying aircraft on March 8. A news portal in the Maldives, about 3,000 kilometers west of the Malaysian peninsula in the Indian Ocean, reported on Tuesday that residents on a remote island witnessed a "low-flying jumbo jet." If accurate, the report would seem to confirm the plane's westward trajectory.
Other theories discounting possible hijacking or pilot sabotage scenarios have gained in currency in on-line forums. An "old pilot" writing on one Internet chat room played down the official theory of deliberate intervention and instead suggested that the westward turn back was consistent with a captain trying to head towards the nearest safe runway - perhaps Malaysia's northern Langkawi island, after a possible malfunction or fire on board the plane.
According to earlier reports, radar in Aceh, Indonesia and Hat Yai, Thailand failed to detect the plane, but ten days after the disappearance the Thai air force said its radar in southern Surat Thani province detected a plane over Butterworth on mainland Penang that had diverted from its original route.
China, which is known to have significant surveillance capabilities in the Indian Ocean region, has not yet indicated whether its satellites trained on the area detected the wayward plane. The majority of the passengers on the flight were Chinese nationals. The Chinese media and relatives of those onboard have been especially strident in their criticism of Malaysia's perceived incoherent response to the crisis.
Malaysian government officials have for decades faced a pliant domestic media that dutifully spin flattering reports about their policies and performance. Mainstream media journalists have often been content to publish government statements at face value and rarely probed deeper, especially if such investigations would potentially put the government in a poor light.
Now, official incoherence and obfuscation is being revealed in the press conference grillings of a more probing and persistent global media. Following that cute, the upstart domestic on-line media has grown more emboldened in reporting on the government's crisis management, while Malaysian netizens have liberally posted their own criticism of the government's performance.
"Our [former premier] Mahathir-inspired mediocrity for decades set us up for something like this," wrote one such critical commenter on a blog. "What you have is basically a national system in denial about excellence [for] meeting the demand of global standards - and it failed."
Others have drawn connections to a sharp drop in the country's rankings in international education assessments for mathematics and science - a decline that has persisted in recent years. Still others have pointed to endemic corruption and crony capitalism as the root of top level incompetence. The Economist magazine recently ranked Malaysia as number three in its crony-capitalism index, trailing only Hong Kong and Russia.
Ironically, the jumbo jet disappeared just hours after opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim was again convicted of sodomy (a crime in Muslim majority Malaysia) and sentenced to five years in prison. Anwar said he would appeal the decision, but it effectively disqualified him as a candidate for a crucial by-election on March 23, which would probably have seen him score a thumping win in Kajang in the central state of Selangor.
When Anwar was first arrested in 1998 under Mahathir Mohamad and later charged with alleged sodomy and corruption, it spawned a reform movement (reformasi) calling for political change and greater accountability in government. The Barisan Nasional-led government's mishandling of the plane's disappearance has demonstrated to many Malaysians just how little progress has since been made in those regards.
The government's perceived mismanagement of the crisis has exposed Najib's administration to waves of unflattering global scrutiny and raised questions of official competence that will endure long after the mystery of the missing jetliner is resolved. The political fallout could be immense and will only further erode the government's sinking credibility both at home and now also abroad.
Anil Netto is a Penang-based writer
