For weeks now, I've been patiently waiting for the US to release some (any!) definitive data about the Ukraine situation, including the MH17 shoot-down. After all, as everybody knows, the US has intensive satellite and electronic scanning technologies in place around the globe, and therefore should be able to provide some serious intelligence to make its case.
Many would go further and say that after the Iraq fiasco — which notably saw Colin Powell use manufactured data in front of the UN to "prove" a fraudulent case for invasion — the US actually has to present intelligence of the highest and most unimpeachable sort. That is, after lying to the world, "trust us" no longer cuts it.
So imagine my growing concern that the US has been largely relying on alleged 'confessions' of the MH17 shoot-down gleaned from social media pages, which are notoriously easy to fabricate or hack, and require a heavy dose of "trust us" to be believed.
Further, the US has cited a tape provided by the Ukraine's SBU security service, purportedly between a Russian and a Ukraine separatist acknowledging mistakenly shooting the plane down. While this could be a completely true tape, the source is very highly suspect (sorry, the SBU is the very last place I would trust on this matter) and therefore the US really needs to explain what sorts of analyses they have run to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that this particular recording is not a manufactured piece of propaganda courtesy of the SBU.
Frankly, the US needs to provide much harder evidence for its current claims to be credible.
But they haven't. For more than a week, the State Department has claimed to have rock-solid evidence, but then suspiciously denied any journalist requests to see source data. For example, watch this exchange with Mathew Lee of the AP [go to minute 5:00 where Marie Harf of the State Dept. lists all of the 'evidence' that is 100% either social media or SBU-derived]:
At the time of that video, there was still absolutely zero evidence coming straight from the US government – all of it was either from social media sites (which I consider to be unreliable) and the Ukrainian SBU (which for obvious reasons is even less reliable).
by cmartenson 
