With the news of "disappeared" Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 slapped across the headlines of major global and Asian news outlets for several days now, it seems that all the intrigues and possibilities for the flight has become the only newsworthy news as of the moment. In contrast, the ongoing crisis in Ukraine has been pushed way down the list of priorities for coverage, so much so that the author is starting to have fantasies that the country has gone back to its usual state as a decrepit but calm "transition economy" he met in person a few years ago.
And for an aviation accident to feature so prominently everywhere, as much as it is justified for an almost definite major loss of human lives, is nonetheless rarer than rare. Most, at least in the author's lifetime, did get major coverage but soon went away as quickly as the news came, when the causes of the accidents, along with the damaged plane and the innocent casualties, are all found and accounted for. MH370 defied the rapidity of the news cycle to immediately go after anything sensationalizing, precisely because its unsolved mysteries are more sensationalizing than any previous accidents.
Heck, as far as the author is observing, the world may not be dealing with an accident, in its traditional sense, at all. The facts causing suspicion are now lined up: at least two, if not four, stolen passports used to board the flight; some of which are those belonging to Westerners used by reported "Asian-looking" passengers. Debris of a massive plane that simply refused to be found anywhere between the Andaman Islands to the South China Sea. Death threats received from a self-claimed terrorist speaking French and Cantonese-tinged Mandarin. All on top of an eerily calm and slow Malaysian government.
The author is no conspiracy theorist, far from it. But the facts just do not add up for the casual audience. Sure, widespread online ticket sales means that anyone with a forged passport can purchase a valid airplane ticket, but how does one obtain a valid Chinese visa, have a valid ticket issued at the airport, get through immigration lines, and then security check, these four full layers of visual confirmation of identity, when the bearer of the passport look absolutely nothing like the person pictured on the profile page of the passport book?!
The author simply refuse to believe that these passengers using fake identities are "fortunate" to have met incompetently loose Malaysian airport authorities. A stroke of luck cannot get a person this far. Yes, it is true that most countries do not have the strict, almost-bordering-human-rights-violation sort of security checks enacted by American border control scared shitless by another act of terrorism that could come any day, but standard procedure itself stipulates that someone suspicious cannot smoothly get through without at least some hands of cooperation on the ground.
And it feels that the author can already smell those hands of cooperation by simply being an observer. How did fake passports, stolen in Thailand, end up in Malaysia? How come the tickets used by these passengers were bought from China Southern Airlines instead of Malaysian? Why is the terrorist threat given in French? And most of all, why was the disappearance of the aircraft so sudden that the pilot did not even have time to signal SOS? It should already be the time that international authorities rule out relatively benign possibilities of "technical malfunctions" and consider scenarios a lot more sinister.
A politically motivated network ought to be at work in this whole incident. While the author doubts the genuineness of the announced terrorist threat, he cannot ignore the tightness of the underlying organization power it took to get the assets on-board the flight. What those assets were doing on the flight is not as important in comparison. Perhaps they planned to wreck havoc on the flight itself, and succeeded. Maybe they were planning to get themselves to their European destinations and execute their orders there. Maybe the relevant authorities foresaw all this and destroyed the plane deliberately.
Either way, what people should consider, somewhere in the back of their hopeful and optimistic minds, is that there exists non-governmental criminal organizations so potentially powerful that halting their progress requires sacrifice of innocent lives in the process. The existence of such organizations, legally or morally, should not be tolerated. Yet, the specter of such piques the interest of the common people and give the media plenty more reason to leave MH370 on their front pages. Indeed, whether the plane is found in whatever state it might be in is no longer the most urgent question.
And for an aviation accident to feature so prominently everywhere, as much as it is justified for an almost definite major loss of human lives, is nonetheless rarer than rare. Most, at least in the author's lifetime, did get major coverage but soon went away as quickly as the news came, when the causes of the accidents, along with the damaged plane and the innocent casualties, are all found and accounted for. MH370 defied the rapidity of the news cycle to immediately go after anything sensationalizing, precisely because its unsolved mysteries are more sensationalizing than any previous accidents.
Heck, as far as the author is observing, the world may not be dealing with an accident, in its traditional sense, at all. The facts causing suspicion are now lined up: at least two, if not four, stolen passports used to board the flight; some of which are those belonging to Westerners used by reported "Asian-looking" passengers. Debris of a massive plane that simply refused to be found anywhere between the Andaman Islands to the South China Sea. Death threats received from a self-claimed terrorist speaking French and Cantonese-tinged Mandarin. All on top of an eerily calm and slow Malaysian government.
The author is no conspiracy theorist, far from it. But the facts just do not add up for the casual audience. Sure, widespread online ticket sales means that anyone with a forged passport can purchase a valid airplane ticket, but how does one obtain a valid Chinese visa, have a valid ticket issued at the airport, get through immigration lines, and then security check, these four full layers of visual confirmation of identity, when the bearer of the passport look absolutely nothing like the person pictured on the profile page of the passport book?!
The author simply refuse to believe that these passengers using fake identities are "fortunate" to have met incompetently loose Malaysian airport authorities. A stroke of luck cannot get a person this far. Yes, it is true that most countries do not have the strict, almost-bordering-human-rights-violation sort of security checks enacted by American border control scared shitless by another act of terrorism that could come any day, but standard procedure itself stipulates that someone suspicious cannot smoothly get through without at least some hands of cooperation on the ground.
And it feels that the author can already smell those hands of cooperation by simply being an observer. How did fake passports, stolen in Thailand, end up in Malaysia? How come the tickets used by these passengers were bought from China Southern Airlines instead of Malaysian? Why is the terrorist threat given in French? And most of all, why was the disappearance of the aircraft so sudden that the pilot did not even have time to signal SOS? It should already be the time that international authorities rule out relatively benign possibilities of "technical malfunctions" and consider scenarios a lot more sinister.
A politically motivated network ought to be at work in this whole incident. While the author doubts the genuineness of the announced terrorist threat, he cannot ignore the tightness of the underlying organization power it took to get the assets on-board the flight. What those assets were doing on the flight is not as important in comparison. Perhaps they planned to wreck havoc on the flight itself, and succeeded. Maybe they were planning to get themselves to their European destinations and execute their orders there. Maybe the relevant authorities foresaw all this and destroyed the plane deliberately.
Either way, what people should consider, somewhere in the back of their hopeful and optimistic minds, is that there exists non-governmental criminal organizations so potentially powerful that halting their progress requires sacrifice of innocent lives in the process. The existence of such organizations, legally or morally, should not be tolerated. Yet, the specter of such piques the interest of the common people and give the media plenty more reason to leave MH370 on their front pages. Indeed, whether the plane is found in whatever state it might be in is no longer the most urgent question.
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