[Peetwo]

In the lead up to tomorrow night's 60 Minutes MH370 exposé, courtesy Plane Talking...

MH370: It wasn't an FBI report so why was it given a false label?
If you are going to lie about something you need to have a very good recollection as to what you previously said, and Kuala Lumpur said back in early 2014 a great deal of what is causing so much amazed outrage in certain media.

Ben Sandilands

Remember these early ATSB search maps, this one from October 2014?

There is no FBI report into the data retrieved from the home flight simulator of dead MH370 captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah.

But there is a lengthy Malaysian Police report misrepresented as being from the FBI concerning the findings made by a forensic computing contractor for them, covering investigations which began in March 2014, days after MH370, a Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777-200ER disappeared on its way from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board earlier that month.

That report is dated in May 2014. The search for data in the home simulator, and its potential value to the criminal inquiry into the mystery, was referred to by Malaysian officials at the regular MH370 briefings held in Kuala Lumpur at that time,  and reported at various times in the general media and Plane Talking.

Nothing material arising from that investigation was announced or leaked, except in the vaguest of terms. The reports about this investigation began appearing in news archives late in March 2014.

The classified as secret police report does contain some positions in one game flight simulator path that indicate a track down over the southern Indian Ocean which wasn’t mentioned at the time, and many others that included routes that were either on the Malaysia Airlines network, or consisted of alternative or diversionary airports for such flights.

The ATSB guidance on that data, that it doesn’t indicate the location of MH370, or provide other assistance in refining the search, may be correct.

However, the important question arises, why was this presented to the gullible as an FBI report (the FBI has no interest in locating the sunk wreckage) when it was a Malaysia Police report?

One possible explanation is that this has allowed the Malaysian Government to correctly deny that there is any FBI report about the flight sim in the captain’s home, thus covering up the fact that there IS such a report, produced internally.

(There were also acknowledged, at that time, checks on the backgrounds of people on the passenger manifest in which the help of the FBI and other national criminal investigation agencies were enlisted, as they often are, and for many often routine reasons.)

The trouble with the possibility of Malaysia seeking to leave a false trail on this is also known as the liar’s challenge. If you are going to lie about something over a period of time you need to have a very good recollection as what you have previously said, and Kuala Lumpur basically said back in early 2014 a great deal of what is now causing so much amazed outrage in some media.

Let’s revisit that early but forgotten period in the MH370 mystery. Kuala Lumpur was very careful not to speak about either pilot as being suspected of a crime.  But it was very quick to argue, and most observers would concede, correctly, that MH370 was intentionally diverted from its route shortly after it was established on its filed flight path to Beijing and over the Gulf of Thailand.

Based on revelations made on May 1, 2014, by acting transport Minister  Hishammuddin Hussein senior government figures knew on the morning of March 8, 2014, that MH370 had been seen by military radar flying west across the Malaysia Peninsula.

This means that the Malaysia government and Hishammuddin Hussein lied to the media when they denied early reports that such tracking had taken place. It also means, as Plane Talking often reported that Malaysia, from its PM down, lied to Australia and the other early search partners, when it urged them to press deeper into the South China Sea, and across to India, and even deep into central Asia, in searching for wreckage when it would have known none would be found in any of those regions.

Malaysia knew what many of the less technically versed conspiracy theorists still deny, that the jet did indeed fly into the southern Indian Ocean, exactly where being the crucial question.

Why did Malaysia lie to us and others? One possibility is that it was engaged in a cover up concerning adverse intelligence about a Malaysia Airlines pilot that had been ignored, until the terrible night when the 777 vanished. Was if fearful of an early discovery of floating bodies and other clues as to events on MH370?

This suggestion, which this observer and others, including in other airlines, have discussed for more than two years, remains unproven, but definitely possible.

On Sunday night the Nine network will air a significant report on MH370. The promotional material has included the claim that the wife of Prime Minister Najib Razak said ‘the captain took the jet’.

This claim takes those who have followed MH370 from the outset back to the earliest months of the mystery in 2014, when the fingers of suspicion pointed at Zaharie Ahmad Shah were many. It doesn’t take us any closer to finding out where the jet is or if he really committed such a heinous crime.

MTF...P2