Is MH370 The Latest Casualty Of The Pentagon's Pivot To Asia?

By Yoichi Shimatsu 3-20-14

The closer that millions of online sleuths come to tracing the trajectory and destination of the missing Malaysian Airlines jetliner, the likelier it becomes that the National Security Agency and CIA will resort to disinformation, including the planting of falsified evidence, to throw off their pursuers in what increasingly appears to be an electronic hijacking by those spy agencies. More layers of the ongoing cover-up are being hatched now that eyewitnesses at the Huvadhu Atoll, a diving area in the southern Maldives,, have reported sightings of "a low-flying jumbo jet.: South of Huvadhu Atoll, the closest U.S. military facility is Diego Garcia in the Chagos Islands. The joint U.S. Navy submarine and Air Force facility has underground hangers huge enough to conceal B-52 bombers, a convenient hiding place for a Boeing-777. Huvadhu is a prominent marker in the vast Indian Ocean, used as the turning point for flights into Diego Garcia. There valuable cargo - either classified documents or a human intelligence asset - can be secretly landed and reloaded on a USAF cargo jet or a Navy submarine. Countless secret and illegal "extraordinary rendition" flights were sent to Diego Garcia in the war on terror, and there is no practical reason why the same US intelligence agencies would not use it to land a civilian aircraft hijacked by remote control. Pieces of the wreckage spotted by US ally Australia further south of Diego Garcia could be a decoy site, salted with physical evidence of airplane parts that have been moved surreptitiously. As in the unsolved mystery of Amelia Earhart, who was on an espionage mission against the Japanese forces in the South Pacific  before her disappearance, there is the possibility that a hostile military force moved tantalizing evidence from the actual landing site to a more distant remote island by plane or ship. Malaysia Targeted by Air-Sea Battle Plan The case of a MH370 has been solely focused on the possibility of a route diversion by the on-board crew. Completely ignored in press releases and news reports so far is the elephant in the room, or perhaps a better analogy of a Great White Shark in the bathtub - the massive U.S. Navy and Air Force presence in the seas and airspace surrounding Malaysia. There is absolutely no way that a flying object as large as a Boeing-777 could evade the 24- hour watch over the South China Sea and the Andaman Sea by NSA-USAF spy satellites, high-tech AEGIS destroyers, the new class of Littoral Combat Ships and P3 surveillance planes. The reasons for targeting Malaysia becomes clearer by examining the bigger picture of an aggressive military build-up in the Southeast Asia region by the combined armed forces of the US, Japan and Australia under Washington's "strategic pivot to Asia" policy. This geopolitical strategy is carried out by the Pentagon and its military allies through the Air-Sea Battle Concept, which disperses Navy and Air Force fighter jets across a network of civilian airfields and secret landing strips. Beijing is not the only target of the Air-Sea Battle Concept. Malaysia runs a close second to China on Washington's enemies list. Flight MH370, destined for Beijing, is the literal embodiment of the economic alliance and political relationship between : China and Malaysia, making the airliner a most convenient target. Pressuring Kuala Lumpur Located on the geostrategic Malacca Strait, Malaysia is a predominantly Muslim oil-producing nation with a "Look East" policy allying itself with Japan and China. Last year the Malaysian and Chinese governments established an economic alliance, which includes Asian access to world oil reserves. In the eyes of Washington and its allies, these are sufficient grounds to treat Kuala Lumpur as an adversary. Even though the Malaysian police force has cooperated closely with the US Embassy in the war on terror, which led to arrests of top-ranking Al Qaeda-linked terrorists, that is not good enough. The late Moammar Gaddhafi of Libya and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad also aided Washington in post-911 anti-terrorism, and look where it got them. It is not enough to be a friend of America. For a leader to survive, he must be a groveling yes-man, a political slave - and never mind America's long-forgotten principles of sovereignty or  self-determination. Warnings from Washington were repeatedly given to Malaysia over the past few years. In late August 2013, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel flew to Kuala Lumpur last year to pressure the Defence Ministry to cooperated with the strategic pivot through joint naval-and- air exercises directed against Chinese forces in the Malaysian-claimed islets in the Spratley group. These spits of rock and sand located off of Sabah, the Malaysian state in northwest Borneo, have names longer than their diameters, for instance, Investigator Reef and Mariveles Reef. At the same time, a mystery force led by a claimant to the title of Sultan of Saah send a group of Filipino gunmen, allegedly trained by a retired American commando, attacked Sabah with a series of shootouts with the Malaysian Army. US counterinsurgency troops happened to be operating in the southern Islamic-dominated areas of the Philippines, where the "sultan" recruited his desperado guerrillas. Meanwhile, as disclosed by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, Washington with the cooperation of Singapore was massively eavesdropping on Malaysian communications, banking and Internet traffic. Kuala Lumpur filed a diplomatic protest with Singapore, which downplayed its role as an agent for American, British and Israeli interests in Southeast Asia. Not by any coincidence, this writer earlier exposed the role of Google in trying to block visitors to pro-Palestinian websites in Malaysia and Kuala Lumpur. Malaysia has taken an active role in sending aid boats to Gaza and speaking on behalf of Palestinian rights at the UN. Google has close relations with the electronic warfare operations of the Pentagon and the Israel Defense Force, and sponsors a research center in Technion, a technical university in Haifa closely integrated with the IDF. MH370 is not the first possible casualty of the strategic pivot policy. In May 2011, a Sukhoi Superjet 100 airliner was "accidentally" downed in nearby Indonesia. That mysterious crash into a mountain on a clear day happened after takeoff from Halim Air Base, the planning center for the Air-Sea Battle Concept across the vast Indonesian archipelago. Sukhoi Aircraft Industries had strong connections with Malaysia, where Russian plane manufacturer was planning to build a regional maintenance center - a business plan since canceled under pressure from the Pentagon, Boeing and Lockheed. The Malaysia has the only air force in the region that flies Sukhoi jet fighters, which unlike US- supplied war planes, cannot be electronically controlled and disarmed by a computer-code signal from the Pentagon. How to Knock Out Aviation Electronics The flight paths of MH370 were not across uncharted waters, as news reports suggest, but over  some of the world's most heavily watched maritime channels. As soon as the jet lifted off Kuala Lumpur, its communications signals and radar image were picked up by US Navy signals intercepts officers stationed at Changi Navy Base and Sembawang dockyard in Singapore, which are effectively bases for the 7thFleet. Triple coverage would have been provided by USAF listening posts at Halim Air Base near Jakarta. The Malaysian airliner would then been picked up by the many USN ships patrolling the South China Sea, in and around the Spratley Islands. Besides AEGIS radar ships, the Navy has dispatched a new class of Littoral Combat Ships, including the USS Freedom, to the pivot. Beamed from one of these ships, a powerful type of radar called X-band or narrow-aperture radar could easily have disabled all of the planes. The advanced radar system, now used in electromagnetic warfare to knock out missile and planes, led to the unintended blackout of Los Angeles Airport (LAX) in April 2004. As told to me by a former Navy communications officer, "the new type of radar was commissioned by Admiral Jeremy Boorda, who was an enthusiast for anything hi-tech. When our destroyer came to the port of Los Angeles, someone switched on the radar and the electrical power went down at LAX and all of the surrounding area. LAX was closed for hours, but the incident was hushed up by the Pentagon." Boorda was the victim of an apparent suicide in 1996 after infuriating the officer corps by exposing widespread problem of rape in the naval ranks. As reported in the news, MH370 was steered toward the Indian Ocean by the insertion of a computer command into its navigation system. Since at least the 911 incident and possibly earlier, Boeing passenger jets can be remote-controlled by the US intelligence agencies. Any recently built American-built aircraft can now be electronically commandeered and operated like a drone. The only question is whether the American government is willing to engage in such a reckless disregard innocent lives. That point has already been proven in countless drone strikes against civilian compounds in places like Afghanistan, Yemen, Iraq, the Horn of Africa and many unreported locales. Though illegal and immoral, death from the skies is official policy. Without any effective restraints, the Pentagon can easily eliminate the passengers of Malaysian Airlines. Perhaps it is not too late to save any surviving hostages, but that task would require a commando team capable of rescuing them from inside a heavily guarded U.S. Military base in the center of the Indian Ocean and flying them to India, the only coastal country in the region secure enough from a Pentagon counterstrike.  Rambo, are you ready? Flying Under the Radar After its electronic systems were knocked out, MH370 made a sharp left turn toward the Kra Peninsula along the thinly populated and insurgency-troubled Malaysia-Thai border. The jet dove to 6,000 feet and possibly lower, enabling it to evade detection by flying below the ground radar. Its path, however, was briefly picked up from the northern side, where the Thai Air Force bases a fleet of Saab jet fighters.Significantly, the plane did not crash into the steep mountain range along the Kelantan-Kedah state border, but managed to fly in between the taller peaks. Either the passengers and crew were blessed with incredible luck or the MH370 was flying under remote control. Remote piloting software for a plane, now a readily available for drones, was first developed by Israeli programmers, all of them former IDF officers, in Atel,  Israel, prior to 911. The same team created the hacker-immune Waterfall software for critical infrastructure, which was released coincidentally at the same time as the Stuxnet virus. Then MH370 crossed over the Strait of Malacca and the Andaman Sea, which is crowded  with commercial vessels and oil tankers. That particular section of the strategic passage is constantly monitored by NSA-CIA surveillance stations assigned to protect Indonesia's Sumatra offshore oil platforms operated by Exxon and BP. Just north of Phuket is the Thai Navy's 3rd  Headquarters, where American servicemen keep track of all ship and airplane traffic over the Andaman Sea. It is impossible, in short, with so many radar facilities and airbases in that oil-rich sea for any jetliner, especially along an unscheduled air route, to go unspotted. So somebody is lying, and perhaps everybodys lying. The Impunity of Criminal States The cargo manifest for MH370 has yet to be released, just like the SwissAir 111 shipment of pallets of bonds was never disclosed. Perhaps the motive was an economic crime, although that possibility is far-fetched since Malaysia is not a major holder of US Treasury bonds The other possible motive is the human assets aboard the jet. The passenger manifest does not disclose the occupation or rank associated with the names. Was there a VIP on board of extreme high value to Western intelligence agencies? The lesson of MH370 is that the Great Powers act in secrecy and with impunity. Wars of strategic interest are no longer waged openly but are conducted by proxy armies, mercenaries with guns, propaganda agents placed inside of human-rights groups, media blackmail, social media manipulation and spies in the sky. Electronic warfare against planes or against smartphones is by now routine and accepted by dumbed-down users, with no apologies or regrets expressed by the NSA or the Pentagon. Smaller players who cross those invisible red lines or dare to put a stick in the eye of the big boys, end up broken into tiny pieces. In this cruel new world of subterfuge and sabotage, one learns to play the game or is quickly ejected into oblivion like a  lost airliner. Against the prospect of total domination of global society by spy agencies, resistance by any means and for whatever the cost is not just a game; it is political duty and moral obligation to restore long-ignored constitutional principles and the rule of law. The all-powerful hunters will become the frightened hunted, as is starting to happen now as millions of online users narrow down the destination of MH370. Yoichi Shimatsu, former editor of the Japan Times Weekly, is a Hong Kong-based science and  technology writer.