Exercising Futility Through Understatement

"[The Dutch Safety Board report] leads to the strong suspicion that a surface-to-air missile brought MH17 down, but further investigative work is needed."
Malaysia Prime Minister Najib Razak

"The pattern of wreckage on the ground suggests that the aircraft split into pieces during flight."
"[Images show that the fuselage was [pierced] in numerous places -- damage consistent with that which may be expected from a large number of high-energy objects that penetrated the aircraft from outside."
Dutch Safety Board report

"The normal pattern is you start your investigation on the site and continue from there."
"We more or less turned it around. We have some material via the Malaysian authorities, but we have a number of issues we'd like to review on site. Naturally, we would like to get parts of the cockpit. There are a number of instruments we're interested in."
Tjibbe Joustra, chairman, Dutch Safety Board

No doubt the investigators are indeed very interested in a number of instruments, and hope to be able to obtain them for obvious reasons. For the same obvious reasons it seems reasonable enough to doubt they ever will. Let alone any other incriminating evidence, such as clearly relateable pieces of the Malaysian airlines wreckage, and intact bodies that have not yet been recovered. How intact might they be after all this time has elapsed while they have been corrupted past the point of usefulness....

Still, the conclusion in the report was clear enough: Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 had been hit by "a large number of high-energy objects" causing it to crash; evidence consistent entirely with a missile attack on the jet. The Boeing 777 broke into pieces while airborne, caused by structural damage after penetration from its exterior, resulting in the deaths of 298 people who had nothing whatever to do with the conflict between Ukraine, pro-Russian rebels and Moscow.

The airline's decision to fly over a war zone aside, on its way from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, American intelligence points unerringly to its destruction by a missile fired by pro-Russian rebels. Ample evidence in the form of messaging between the rebels and their Russian handlers point the finger of blame directly where it belongs, though the rebels blandly insist they were not in possession of anti-aircraft weapons powerful enough to result in such carnage.

"Ukraine did not use such a weapon" said Ukraine's Deputy Prime Minister Volodymyr Hroisman, head of a government commission on the crash, who pronounced the Dutch report findings as "not unexpected". Has everyone forgotten the report by a few foreign (Associated Press) journalists who had reported witnessing the transit of a Buk launcher near the eastern Ukrainian town of Znizhne, close to the site of the crash?

First pictures of crash site -- Reuters

The investigators are treading on tiptoe, to avoid crushing eggshells, or more accurately, provoking the ire of Russian President Vladimir Putin. In the hopes of being allowed free access to the accident site? To enable recovery of more body parts and wreckage? As though the site hadn't been gone over with a fine-tooth comb of recovery of anything that might give investigators tools of evidence not already in their possession?

There were more than 190 Dutch travellers making up the total 283 passenger list, along with Malaysians, people from Australia, Indonesia, the United Kingdom, Germany, Belgium, the Philippines Canada and New Zealand. The conflict, where the ethnic Russian rebels hoped to bring down another Ukrainian military jet, brought the international community into the fray with a devastating loss of innocent life, will not permit justice to be done.

The Dutch Safety Board's Tjibbe Joustra has hope that with the recovery of more body parts his team, given "unfettered access" to the as-yet-unrecovered human remains may give evidence through metal extracted from bodies that the shrapnel didn't represent parts from the destroyed 777 itself. How likely is it that the humble investigation team will be given free access to recover more evidence when ample evidence already exists to unequivocally lay blame where it belongs?