MH-370 SHOOT-DOWN
…. by Michael Shrimpton
The reaction to last week’s column has been extraordinary. It touched a nerve with the Bad Guys, with hints that my life might be cut short, and provoked much positive response from the Good Guys.
On Thursday a legal gossip website in the UK, Legal Cheek (well-named) sought to encourage complaints about me to the Bar Standards Board, as Gordon well knows, the theory appearing to be that a barrister should be gagged from saying anything which might be controversial, even if it is wholly unrelated to his or her legal practice.
The Bar Standards Board, very wisely with respect, have so far refrained from seeking to violate the United States Constitution and Article 10 of the European Convention of Human Rights by suppressing my inalienable right to freedom of expression.
For the record I am opposed to mass-murder, indeed even single murder, and the mounting of armed attacks upon civilian aircraft proceeding upon their lawful occasions in international airspace.
Whether such an attack was mounted upon MH370 is a question of fact. Much intellectual energy has been expended in putting forward one implausible theory after another, most involving character attacks upon the late Captain Zaharie Shah of the most disgraceful kind. I note that none of these explanations has been accompanied by an actual airplane, or wreckage which can be proved to have come from a Boeing 777, unlike the explanation I advanced last week.
Legal Cheek then decided to write an attack piece based on the fact that I used to be a part-time immigration judge. Quite where that was going to get them I don’t know with respect. Yes I was a part-time Chairman of the Immigration Appeal Tribunal, and yes I sat as a judge hearing many hundreds of appeals against refusal of political asylum. Their point was? I dealt with appeals fairly, so fairly indeed the Home Office idiotically once tried to stop me sitting at the old Wood Green Crown Court because I was allowing “too many appeals”.
I did not get a reputation for being in awe of authority, nor for allowing my political opinions to influence my judicial decisions. The Home Office once decided that they needn’t send a senior barrister along to resist an application by a German barrister for a reference of questions of European Community law to the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg, based partly on the German text of the treaty!
The case was el-Yassini v. Secretary of State for the Home Department. For some reason they decided that I might be anti-German (I have no idea where they got that from!) and as a Eurosceptic would not be keen to become the first Immigration Adjudicator to refer a point of law to Luxembourg. The barrister later told me that he knew he’d won when I strode back into court and started my judgment by solemnly referring to the Appellant as a “Subject of His Majesty the King of Morocco”, which he was.
I was no more going to deprive him of his rights in an English court to have a legitimate point of treaty law decided by an international court constituted for the purpose than I was going to burst into song, or perform a dance routine. The ECJ by the way upheld my decision that I was competent to be a referring national court under the Treaty of Rome and heard the argument in plenary session, indeed I was present when the case was argued, and treated with great courtesy if I may say so.
Legal Cheek can fire away if they want to, but there will be a few brickbats headed back in their direction!
CAPTAIN SHAH
Captain Shah (I hope I am referring to him correctly – some commentators have referred to him as Captain Zaharie) is dead and cannot answer back. I can speak up for him however, and I am damn well going to carry on doing so until somebody can take me to some credible evidence supporting the outrageous assertion that he deliberately disabled his aircraft’s ACARS and transponder and endangered the lives of his passengers by flying his aircraft so far off course he had no hope of successfully landing her.
I am not acting as a barrister when I write this weekly intelligence column but I bring my barrister’s instincts and desire to do right by all manner of men and women to my intelligence work. I will not suffer this good man’s reputation being traduced in this way. I am not just any old national security barrister, as Gordon knows, but a bad-ass national security barrister. If I believe I am in the right I will say so and I will not varnish my opinion just to keep Peking or the White House happy, or anyone else for that matter. Right or wrong you will always get my true opinion.
Allow me to state the facts as I see them. Captain Shah was a good man and a great pilot. He did his level best to save his passengers and appears to have thrown his 777 around the sky like a fighter, trying to evade the incoming. The overheads are said to be very impressive. As a Commonwealth Citizen he should be posthumously awarded the Queen’s Commendation for Valuable Service in the Air.
The MSM sub-text that as a Muslim he was probably a terrorist is outrageous. He was a Sufi Muslim, i.e a man of peace. He was also a man of honor and his name should be held in the highest of esteem by his fellow aviators. May he rest in peace.
THE SOUTHERN OCEAN ‘OBJECTS’.
Sometime during the night of the 19th and 20th somebody appears to have dumped some wreckage over a very deep part of the Southern Ocean. It looks a bit like it came off an old 747-200 in a boneyard. Since the White House have been frantically leaning on the Pentagon to join in the cover up of this Chinese atrocity I would not be at all surprised to learn these bits had been offloaded out the back of a C-5 or C-17 out of Diego Garcia.
The choice of the Southern Ocean may even have been a nod in our direction, since VT is the only media organisation in the world to report this story with intellectual rigor and a regard for the truth. We suggested last week, in jest, that the next search area would be the Southern Ocean!
The ‘objects’ have sunk, or if they have not sunk they have made themselves scarce. They have not been positively ID’d as coming off a 777, unlike the over-wing hatch in the target area, i.e where the plane was shot down. You can bet your bottom dollar the boys at Boeing were asked if they could recognise that bit of wreckage and I gather they said ‘yes, with a bit of computer enhancement’. All the bits on a 777 are tooled off a computer and you can do amazing things with images of wreckage.
The silence out of Chicago and Seattle on that all-important piece of wreckage is deafening. My understanding is that it is off a 777, but that Boeing cannot say it is definitely off a Dash 200. They don’t need to. We don’t have any missing Dash 100s or 300s off South Vietnam. There is no problem with minimal wreckage on the surface by the way – so far as I know the plane went in hull intact, i.e. she did not break up in mid-air. That will give us a pretty tight wreckage field on the seafloor. She went in fast and steep, and we would not expect to find a large amount of wreckage on the surface. The Phoenix has a proximity fuze and we would expect warhead detonation before impact, as with Air France.
Could somebody please tell me what in the cotton-pickin’ hell would a highly experienced professional pilot be doing with a Boeing 777 over the Southern Ocean, flying towards Antarctica, way past the Point of No Return, with a better chance of finding an open Macdonalds than an open runway able to take his plane? For the avoidance of doubt the boys at Boeing, innovative company that they are, have not yet taken to offering ski-equipped versions of the 777.
THE EYE-WITNESSES
Oh yes. We have three live eye-witnesses to the shoot-down now and they all say pretty much the same thing – blazing airliner falling out of the sky. I think the better view is that the fire they saw was either missile exhaust, the warhead explosion, or the Rolls-Royce Trents flaming out as the plane nosed over into her terminal dive.
ACARS
Like any networked system ACARS can be disabled remotely. The idea that you need a Bad Guy turning up on your doorstep and physically accessing your computer before he can insert a virus only needs to be stated for its absurdity to be apparent. The transponder was probably turned off by inserted lines of software code, more of a Chinese specialty than Peking Duck.
THE MALDIVES
We are now being treated to eye-witness accounts of a ‘red and white jumbo jet’ flying low over the Maldives on the day in question. If the plane was cruising as low as reported then she would not have made the Maldives. The range charts accompanying this feeble-minded nonsense are for an airplane at altitude. Range decreases dramatically below FL300 (30,000’). The expression ‘Jumbo Jet’ is normally taken as referring to a 747 and this somewhat dubious sighting does not appear to be of a 777 at all. Sounds more like an Air India 74 to me.
I stand by my story. If those who have applied pressure to me this week to change it (this does not include Gordon Duff or anyone at VT, who have backed me to the hilt – thanks guys) want me to change my opinion then please present me with facts, or credible arguments. Pressure won’t work. Rational arguments backed by solid evidence will.
MOVIE OF THE WEEK – Abandon Ship (1957)
This is a good allegory of the Coalition Government in Britain. A tense and compelling movie, based on a true but long-forgotten incident from 1841, it stars that fine actor Tryone Power as the officer in command of an overloaded lifeboat in the South Atlantic. It’s from a cruise liner which has struck an old wartime mine and sunk. There is a strong supporting cast, including Mai Zetterling and Laurence Naismith, the captain, who dies early in the movie.
Power’s character, Holmes, faces the stark moral choice of forcing those too weak to row overboard to drown, or trying to save everybody, when his experience as a seamen tells him they cannot all be saved. He makes the wrong choices, but is an immensely sympathetic character. As is so often the case the people whose lives he saved turn on him when they are rescued, in this case by the British Soldier, which may have been a fictional name (it wasn’t the old Anglo-Iranian tanker – too big), although the ship they filmed was real enough. Sometimes in life there are no easy answers. The movie repays watching and makes you think.
SPYHUNTER
Publication is on schedule for mid-April. We are just finalizing the Index. Text has been signed off today and the cover design completed. Printing is a remarkably quick process these days. June Press will take your pre-publication order (£25) via their helpful website, www.JunePress.com.
MALICIOUS PROSECUTION
More on this next week, but the malicious prosecution of me by the CPS has run into big trouble, not unexpectedly. My trial was stood out by the court until November 10th 2014. My distinguished fellow author Dr Jerome Corsi was in court to watch proceedings, and I gather he’s doing a report for WDN. Jerry’s only criticism of my advocacy is that he thought that I was enjoying myself too much!! I have made some subpoena requests that are sending Whitehall into shock.
The radiation signature from Vulcan Two, the second warhead (yes – there was a back-up, sneaked in before the Olympic site and the nearby shopping centre were secured) was so large it was picked up by an EU satellite designed to track shipments of nuclear waste. Whoops. We know where nuclear waste goes and how it is shipped. It is not shipped in container lorries on cross-Channel ferries. Someone has finally coughed to the Kursk having carried nuclear-tipped cruise missiles, 6 of them in fact. Watch this space.
Editing: Jim W. Dean
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Michael Shrimpton was a barrister from his call to the Bar in London in 1983 until being disbarred in 2019 over a fraudulently obtained conviction. He is a specialist in National Security and Constitutional Law, Strategic Intelligence and Counter-terrorism. He is a former Adjunct Professor of Intelligence Studies at the American Military University.
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