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Dutch Report Concludes MH17 Shot Down by Missile; MH17: The Open Source Evidence; Niall Ferguson on Kissinger, "The Idealist"; Imagine a World. Aired 2-2:30p ET
Aired October 13, 2015 - 14:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
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FRED PLEITGEN, CNN HOST (voice-over): Tonight: MH17 was brought down by a Russian-made missile but who fired it?
Ukraine's foreign minister responds to the Dutch safety board's report.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
PAVLO KLIMKIN, UKRAINIAN FOREIGN MINISTER: . for us, it's critical to have a legally compulsory option for Russia to get those responsible for
this tragedy to this tribunal or to any legal vehicle. It's indeed critical.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
PLEITGEN (voice-over): Plus I speak with a blogger who says he's located the missile's launch site.
And "Henry Kissinger: The Idealist"? That's what Niall Ferguson says.
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NIALL FERGUSON, HISTORIAN AND AUTHOR: . he wasn't the American Machiavelli or Bismarck. That's what I'd been led to expect by previous
books.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
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PLEITGEN: Good evening, everyone, and welcome to the program. I'm Fred Pleitgen, in for Christiane this week.
And it was another heart-breaking day for the families of those killed on board flight MH17 as Dutch investigators laid out all the details they
have uncovered about the incident.
It's clear the 777 was shot down by a Russian made surface-to-air missile but they don't know who launched it, pro-Russian separatists or
Ukrainian forces. A separate criminal investigation will attempt to find the culprits and the Netherlands' prime minister urged Russia's full
participation.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
MARK RUTTE, DUTCH PRIME MINISTER (through translator): I want to call on Russian authorities to respect but also to provide complete cooperation
with this report and the following criminal investigation by the Dutch public prosecutor in collaboration with four other countries.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
PLEITGEN: Now, Moscow immediately lashed out at the report, calling it, quote, "biased and political." The maker of Buk missiles, a state-
owned company, said the model used in the attack was too old to belong to Russia.
The Dutch report says the airspace above the conflict zone should have been closed to civilian airplanes at the time the plane was shot down.
And for an official Ukrainian response I spoke with the country's foreign minister, Pavlo Klimkin, who joined me exclusively from the United
Nations in New York.
PLEITGEN: Pavlo Klimkin, welcome to the program.
KLIMKIN: It's a pleasure to be with you.
PLEITGEN: Sir, as you know, the report came out today by the Dutch safety board and it gave a lot of new facts but it did not assign blame for
who shot down MH17.
How satisfied are you with the report?
And what do you make of the findings?
KLIMKIN: Firstly, it's a technical investigation, the report. And it's about the reason why and in what way the Malaysian airplane has been
shot down.
We will have, in the future, the criminal investigation report, hopefully, at the beginning of next year. And we will definitely get more
about the chain of command.
PLEITGEN: Now right before the press conference happens today where the report was issued, the Russian maker of the Buk missile system came out
and issued their own report, where they said that the missile must have been fired from territory controlled by Ukrainian forces.
I want us to listen in to something that was said at that press conference.
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YAN NOVIKOV, CHIEF EXECUTIVE, RUSSIAN STATE ARMS PRODUCER (through translator): The results of the experiment have entirely refuted the
conclusions by the Dutch commission about the type of the rocket and the place of the launch.
Today we can say definitely -- and we will show it in our presentation -- that in case the Boeing 777 of Malaysia Airlines had been hit by a Buk
missile complex that would mean that it had been hit by an 9M38 missile launched from the village of Zaroshchenske.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
PLEITGEN: How do you respond to that, sir?
KLIMKIN: You know, my response is very straightforward and clear. Firstly, we had a unique investigation team. We've been given the lead for
the esteem -- for our Dutch esteemed friends and partners. It's about combined experience. It's about our key experts. And no doubt that is a
missile has been fired from the territory controlled by Russia and by pro- Russian proxies.
So in this sense, Russia can play any kind of game with any kind of quasi- --
[14:05:00]
KLIMKIN: -- evidences. But in any way, we have clear technical investigation reports.
PLEITGEN: One of the other things that was criticized in the report was that, prior to this happening, the airspace over the conflict zone was
not completely closed off.
Why didn't you do that?
KLIMKIN: The answer is also really straightforward. No one, literally no one could have imagined that such highly sophisticated and
extremely dangerous weapons could be brought into Donbas. And it was brought by Russia.
PLEITGEN: But, sir, I just want to stick with that point because, three days prior to the shootdown of MH17, on July 14th, 2014, an Antonov
26 of the Ukrainian Air Force was shot down at a height of 6,500 meters, which is about 22,000 feet.
So it must have been clear at that point that there was long-range, high-altitude anti-aircraft weaponry in that area, wouldn't it?
KLIMKIN: Our authorities, including the militaries, believe that Antonov airplane has been hit by Russian missiles and from the Russian
territory. And it was about different altitude.
And from the technical point of view, it's completely different from shotting (sic) down the airplane at the altitude more than 11,000 meters.
So in any kind of risk analysis and in any kind of imagination, there was no, in any way, understanding about Russia bringing such extremely
dangerous anti-air missile complex to Ukraine.
PLEITGEN: When we look at the investigation that's going forward, obviously a lot of things are still very murky; a lot of facts aren't
readily accessible.
Do you think that an international tribunal would be the best way forward to try and bring clarity rather than a criminal investigation
that's going on right now or technical reports that are done by countries, an international investigation into all this?
KLIMKIN: Look, I believe it could go along in a complementary way. We need criminal investigation reports for understanding who were behind
this tragedy. And I believe that international tribunal is the best legal vehicle to address this issue because it's fully accountable to the
Security Council. It's fully unbiased and it's fully transparent.
Why should you reject the whole notion of searching a national tribunal if you want the perpetrators to be brought to justice?
If we can't go along with such an option, we could come forward with the idea either of so-called hybrid tribunal or national jurisdiction.
But we could also try to find an option where, after legal shaping up for the future option, we could ask for the Security Council back in
because, for us, it's critical to have a legally compulsory option for Russia to get those responsible for this tragedy to this tribunal or to any
legal vehicle. It's indeed critical.
PLEITGEN: Pavlo Klimkin, thank you for joining the program.
KLIMKIN: It was a pleasure.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
PLEITGEN: And as we can see, still a lot of controversy, a lot of open questions.
Eliot Higgins, also known as Brown Moses, is a British blogger who spent countless hours verifying and geolocating crowd-sourced photos and
videos to try to provide evidence of the launch site of the missile that brought down MH17 as well as the big question of who fired it. He founded
the Bellingcat Blog and is a visiting research associate at the Kings College, right here in London and he joins me tonight.
Well, Eliot, thank you for joining the program. During the presentation today about the findings of the commission, they gave the area
from where the missile may have been launched at around 320 square kilometers. You say you know exactly where it was launched from.
How and why?
ELIOT HIGGINS, BELLINGCAT.COM: That's right. We've examined what we (INAUDIBLE) information from a variety of sources and it really points to
one very specific location south of the town of Snezhnoye. And this is part of the area that was shown today in the safety --
(CROSSTALK)
PLEITGEN: So you're talking about Twitter feeds, blogs, things people have said publicly on the Internet?
HIGGINS: Yes, and things like satellite map imagery and other information. What we have here, for example, is a tweet that was sent out
a few hours after MH17 was shot down. This shows smoke rising from the ground and this was said to be the Buk missile --
PLEITGEN: The trajectory of the missile.
HIGGINS: Yes, so you can see where the missile came from. So what we did, we looked at all this visual information here and we compared it to
satellite map imagery and what that gave us was the actual direction of the smoke.
In this --
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PLEITGEN: This is the field where it allegedly was shot from?
HIGGINS: -- it's around this area, we believe, because this field is very interesting because this has been plowed. We can see in the satellite
imagery just after July 17th that this was plowed.
Journalists went out to this location, they found various people pointing in this direction as the area the missile was launched from.
If we in fact look at imagery from July 16th, obviously, we can actually see that it wasn't plowed at that time. This is satellite imagery
of the field. So we have farmers saying in the local area the field was on fire on July 17th. What's also very interesting, if you look at the social
media posts in the area around moments after MH17 was shot down, you see people saying, I saw a missile, I saw a rocket, it came from this
direction. And every time it points in one direction, which is this general location.
So you start with the one photograph. What we do is build more information around those images.
What we have here is this is marking satellite data that was provided by the U.S. government and this again --
PLEITGEN: Open source, again, available to anyone.
HIGGINS: Well, this was something they published from a satellite that records various data and signals and it points to this specific --
this location is the approximate launch site. It was a very low resolution image so there's a certain degree of inaccuracy but again it points to this
same general location.
So time and time again we're able to build up these layers of information that point to this launch site.
And as the Dutch safety board showed today, that their calculations and the Russian calculations and the Ukrainian calculations all point to an
area that this is part of.
PLEITGEN: Now that's the one question. The other question is whose possession was the Buk missile battery in?
And you tracked that back as well, didn't you?
HIGGINS: That's correct. On the day very shortly after MH17 was shot down, we had images like this, which showed the Buk missile launch, which
you can see --
PLEITGEN: Right here, yes. Exactly.
(CROSSTALK)
PLEITGEN: -- tarpaulin or something right here or a net over the --
HIGGINS: -- camouflage netting covering the missiles. And we have several images -- it's always shown on this truck, with this white cabin
and this blue stripe and this yellow awning, it's the -- you know, loading ramps.
But we want to know exactly where these were taken. So what we did with this image, we had the shop, you can see here and we simply Googled
the name of the shop and the towns it could be in. And that actually took us to a wiki that was for Eastern Ukrainian streets. And it had a list of
streets with the shops that were on them.
So we then have the street name and the shop name. So we Googled that. That brought the court document where there had been a fight in the
shop which gave the full address.
We also found videos of a guy who was driving around, filming the streets, which we actually could use to find the precise location.
And once we have that precise location, we could use these shadows to tell the time of day, which gave us about 12:30. Then we found social
media posts made around 12:30 of people saying, I've just seen a Buk in this location.
And then we have journalists go in, again --
PLEITGEN: This area was controlled by Russian separatists at the time?
HIGGINS: Yes. We could see this Buk missile launcher, traveling through the area controlled by Russian separatists. But then it got to
Snezhnoye and unloaded from the truck and the last images we have of it is it driving south out of the town towards that launch site.
PLEITGEN: On its own power.
HIGGINS: On its own power.
PLEITGEN: Driving on its own power.
When you do something like this on the Web, you don't just make friends, you make enemies as well.
What sort of reactions have you gotten?
Have there been attempts to discredit to what you are doing?
HIGGINS: Yes, the -- I mean Russia today has put out something like five different reports on our work, criticizing it, in the last week alone.
What's very interesting, one part of the work we've done is looking at the claims of the Russian government, in particular, the Russian ministry of
defense. They had a big press conference in July 21st, 2014, and they presented a series of -- their evidence there.
We've gone through all the evidence and all of it is either fabrications or lies. And, you know, what happens is we -- we're attacked
by Russia today, for example, for the work we're doing but they never actually engage directly with the claims we've made.
You don't have to be Columbo to figure out the Russian government, you know, the Russian ministry of defense immediately lies about their evidence
and then the Russian media is attacking someone like me and then the Dutch safety board comes out and says their work supports the work we're doing.
So obviously we're causing concern with the Russians.
PLEITGEN: Eliot Higgins, thanks very much.
HIGGINS: Thank you.
And if you'd like to see and explore Eliot Higgins' investigative work in-depth you can find it at bellingcat.com. And of course also including
this very recent report about where the Buk missile came from and where the rocket was fired.
And also just a note to say that we did, of course, also reach out to the Russian government to come on the program tonight but, unfortunately,
no one was available to come on. And we are continuing to seek comment.
As Ukraine faces some criticism for not closing its airspace before the downing of MH17, the question is also what has the aviation industry
learned from the incident?
It seems at least they're more aware. Some airlines are avoiding Iraqi and Iranian airspace, fearing Russia's cruise missiles launched from
the Caspian Sea to hit targets in Syria as Moscow increases its military involvement there.
My next guest --
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PLEITGEN: -- Niall Ferguson, is highly critical of what of what he thinks is America's passive role in that and other conflicts. He thinks a
former diplomat would have done a better job.
But was Henry Kissinger really an idealist?
Find out after this.
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PLEITGEN: Welcome back to the program.
Statesman or modern-day Machiavelli, when it comes to Henry Kissinger, it depends on whom you ask. Nearly 40 years after the former secretary of
state left public office, his divisiveness was plain to see when he offered foreign policy advice to the U.S. Senate earlier this year.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Arrest Henry Kissinger for war crimes, arrest Henry Kissinger for war crimes.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
PLEITGEN: Now his story and Niall Ferguson is out to correct the record, at least the way he sees it, with volume one of an official
biography. I spoke to him earlier about why Kissinger might be more a realist than an idealist.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
PLEITGEN: Niall Ferguson, thank you for joining the program.
NIALL FERGUSON, HISTORIAN AND AUTHOR: My pleasure.
PLEITGEN: This is the first of two volumes of the biography of Henry Kissinger and the subtitle is, "The Idealist." That's the opposite of what
most people would call Henry Kissinger.
FERGUSON: It's the opposite of what I expected when I started this project more than 10 years ago.
I was really struck by his idealism in at least three senses. I mean, an idealist in the sense that he thought the policies of appeasement that
led to World War II were realist policies that had failed.
He was an idealist in the sense that he immersed himself in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, the great idealist philosopher at Harvard.
And then he was an idealist because he argued that the Cold War was about ideas or perhaps ideals, not about rival economic systems. And that
made him a bit of an outlier in the generation of the early 1950s.
PLEITGEN: At the same time, this is also a man who was a master at working bureaucracies, at amassing powers, at thinking ahead, a chess
player, if you will, in this game.
How does that fit?
FERGUSON: I think he was learning some of those chess moves. But one of the things I've tried to bring out is that, in the first half of his
life, he was a refugee; he was a soldier. He was a counter intelligence agent. And then he was an academic.
He really wasn't a master politician until later. And indeed, when he first enters the realm of power, he briefly serves in the Kennedy
administration, he's completely outmaneuvered by his bureaucratic --
PLEITGEN: And that was something he criticized. He criticized lawyers who were then career politicians, right, he wanted people with a
broader knowledge.
FERGUSON: That's right. He has a recurrent theme, that there are too many lawyers making decisions.
And Kissinger argues you really need to know some history if you're going to do foreign policy because, as he says, history is to nations what
character is to individuals.
And if you don't know Russian history, you're never going to understand what Khrushchev or Brezhnev or today Putin is going to do next.
PLEITGEN: The big question is, do idealism and realism have to be mutually exclusive?
Because on the one hand, this is a man who obviously knows a lot about the history, not just of the Soviet Union but, of course, many other places
well, but also someone who said, look, if we have a war that kills tens of thousands, it's still better than having Communism that's definitely going
to kill millions.
So there is realism and idealism.
FERGUSON: It's not a simple dichotomy and I think that's absolutely right to emphasize.
But in the big arguments about foreign policy in the 1960s, over the Berlin crisis, over the Cuban missile crisis and then over Vietnam, by and
large the young --
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FERGUSON: -- Kissinger takes the more idealist side. He's against accepting the Berlin Wall as a solution to the German question. He thinks
that's a grubby compromise.
He's against a tradeoff with missiles. You know, the Cuban missile crisis ends when Kennedy secretly agrees to withdraw U.S. missiles from
Turkey if Khrushchev takes the Soviet missiles off Cuba.
Kissinger goes, no, that's a grubby compromise. We shouldn't do that.
And then over Vietnam, which becomes the big headache of the Nixon administration, early in the '60s, Kissinger is saying, you know, the self-
determination of the South Vietnamese, they're right to live independent of communism, it's something we Americans should be willing to support.
Only gradually, when he actually goes to Vietnam, does he realize that it is a lot messier than that.
And I think the realism, the reality side --
(CROSSTALK)
PLEITGEN: -- support the South Vietnamese regime, even though he says that they're bad guys.
FERGUSON: Right. What's interesting here is that when he goes in 1965 on his first mission to Vietnam, he realizes very quickly that this
war cannot be won -- or at least it's going terribly wrong.
And he comes back, saying, we need to start thinking about a diplomatic exit.
PLEITGEN: I know the book only goes until 1968. But there were some very controversial things as well. And there are people in the -- who
accuse him of having committed crimes; if you look at the bombing of Cambodia, if you look at the role in the coup in Chile, how does that fit?
FERGUSON: Well, one thing I've been very careful about is not telling you ahead of time what I'm going to say in volume 2. I haven't written it
and I'm still doing the research.
But what I would say is that it's very striking that a double standard seems to be at work here.
I mean, let's take the case of Chile. If it's so criminal to have at least tolerated a military coup and the overthrow of a democratically
elected leader, which is what happened in Chile, that's exactly what's happened in Egypt.
So my attitude is if -- let's have a single standard. And if we're going to start using terms like "criminal" in terms of the 1970s' policies,
let's recognize that they may be applicable today; alternatively, let's recognize, as Kissinger said as a young man, most foreign policy decisions
are choices between evils.
And the moral thing is to choose the lesser evil.
PLEITGEN: You're very critical of the current president's foreign policy.
Would you say idealist or realist?
FERGUSON: He talks the idealist's talk. But I think when you look at closely at President Obama's policies, he walks more like a realist. And a
sometimes quite cynical one. I mean, if -- take the case of Syria or Egypt, as I mentioned earlier.
President Obama gets a pretty good reputation judged by his speeches and he comes across as an idealist.
In that, he's rather like Kennedy, who was great at speeches.
But when you look at the practice, there's a good deal of grainy and even cynical realism going on there. That's not necessarily a criticism.
Sometimes presidents do have to do, as I said, the lesser evil. It's not very nice and professors can throw up their hands in horror.
But that is the nature of power. That's the nature of foreign policy.
PLEITGEN: Right now, the U.S. is looking to find its next president. Tonight is the Democratic debate.
What do you think of the field of candidates?
FERGUSON: It's very hard to make a comment at this stage because it's a crowded field and there are some candidates it's just very hard to take
seriously, especially on foreign policy issues.
PLEITGEN: Well, it looks like it's Hillary Clinton to lose.
FERGUSON: It certainly does, judging by the polls. She's still the front-runner. I don't rule out Joe Biden's entering the race, though. The
more Hillary Clinton distances herself from President Obama's legacy, even although she was his secretary of state, I guess the more tempting it must
be for Biden to consider a run.
As for the Republicans, well, until Donald Trump returns to the realm of entertainment, it's going to be very hard to see who the more serious
candidates are. I would say that Marco Rubio at this point is doing a very impressive job of setting out his stall on the foreign policy issues.
But let's face it. I mean, foreign policy is not the number one issue for voters at this point. They tend to emphasize the economy and domestic
issues. This is not going to be decided by what happens in, say, Syria.
PLEITGEN: Niall Ferguson, thanks for coming on the program.
FERGUSON: Thank you very much.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
PLEITGEN: So there's our look at America's foreign policy legacy. And as we also just mentioned there, tonight there is another step in
determining its future and the Democratic debate contenders will make their case for why they should be on the party's ticket.
Behind me you can see a live shot of the venue there in Las Vegas. Favorites Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton and, of course, several others
are set to face off tonight at 8:30 Eastern time. You can see all that live right here on CNN.
And after a break, you can imagine a world moving towards a different future. Mozambique cleans out the conflict woven into its past. That's
next.
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PLEITGEN: And finally tonight, imagine building a new future on the remnants of a bloody past.
Haunted by decades of conflict, Mozambique is moving forward with aspirations of peace, transforming a massive weapons depot into a space for
nature reserves, museums, restaurants and children's playgrounds. It's a massive undertaking. The depot lies in a busy neighborhood of the capital,
Maputo, and a previous explosion there killed more than 100 people in 2007.
The grounds are still littered with unexploded ordnance, much of it of course hidden under the surface. The people there are not letting that
stop them, using metal detectors and even trained rats deployed to sniff out TNT. A long and dangerous road, they have just set a precedent for
success.
Last month, Mozambique declared itself land mine-free after a 20-year effort to rid the country of the curse that cost thousands of lives, all
part of this nation seizing its opportunity to leave the past behind and build a new legacy for a new generation.
That's it for our program tonight. And remember, you can always see all our interviews online at amanpour.com and follow me on Twitter and
Facebook. Thank you for watching, goodbye from London.
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