How Digital Sleuths Unravelled the Mystery of Iran's Plane Crash (wired.co.uk) 172
Open-source intelligence proved vital in the investigation into Ukraine Airlines flight PS752. Then Iranian officials had to admit the truth. From a report: [...] In the days after the Ukraine Airlines plane crashed into the ground outside Tehran, Bellingcat and The New York Times have blown a hole in the supposition that the downing of the aircraft was an engine failure. The pressure -- and the weight of public evidence -- compelled Iranian officials to admit overnight on January 10 that the country had shot down the plane "in error." So how do they do it? "You can think of OSINT as a puzzle. To get the complete picture, you need to find the missing pieces and put everything together," says Lorand Bodo, an OSINT analyst at Tech versus Terrorism, a campaign group. The team at Bellingcat and other open-source investigators pore over publicly available material. Thanks to our propensity to reach for our cameraphones at the sight of any newsworthy incident, video and photos are often available, posted to social media in the immediate aftermath of events. "Open source investigations essentially involve the collection, preservation, verification, and analysis of evidence that is available in the public domain to build a picture of what happened," says Yvonne McDermott Rees, a lecturer at Swansea University.
Some of the clips in this incident surfaced on Telegram, the encrypted messaging app popular in the Middle East, while others were sent directly to Bellingcat. "Because Bellingcat is known for our open source work on MH17, people immediately thought of us. People started sending us links they'd found," says Eliot Higgins of Bellingcat. "It was involuntary crowdsourcing." OSINT investigators then utilise metadata, including EXIF data -- which is automatically inserted into videos and photos, showing everything from the type of camera used to take the images to the precise latitude and longitude of where the taker was standing -- to validify that the footage is legitimate. They'll also try and identify who took the footage, and whether it's practical for them to have been where they claim to have been at the time. However, for this instance, they couldn't use EXIF data. "People would share photos and videos on Telegram which strip the metadata, and then someone else would find that and share it on Twitter," says Higgins. "We were really getting a second-hand or third-hand version of these images. All we have to go on is what's visible in the photograph." So instead they moved onto the next step.
Some of the clips in this incident surfaced on Telegram, the encrypted messaging app popular in the Middle East, while others were sent directly to Bellingcat. "Because Bellingcat is known for our open source work on MH17, people immediately thought of us. People started sending us links they'd found," says Eliot Higgins of Bellingcat. "It was involuntary crowdsourcing." OSINT investigators then utilise metadata, including EXIF data -- which is automatically inserted into videos and photos, showing everything from the type of camera used to take the images to the precise latitude and longitude of where the taker was standing -- to validify that the footage is legitimate. They'll also try and identify who took the footage, and whether it's practical for them to have been where they claim to have been at the time. However, for this instance, they couldn't use EXIF data. "People would share photos and videos on Telegram which strip the metadata, and then someone else would find that and share it on Twitter," says Higgins. "We were really getting a second-hand or third-hand version of these images. All we have to go on is what's visible in the photograph." So instead they moved onto the next step.
They should collect mem chips from the crash site (Score:4, Interesting)
Oh they were collected for sure... (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm sure the passengers had enough time to fire up their phones and record the trip to the ground
Probably so, I'll bet you can find some on Ebay, whatever the locals got before the government came in and destroyed any remaining evidence before bulldozing the site [metro.co.uk].
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Or you can watch the video of the missile hitting the plane.
That works too.
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These work if you have Internet:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world... [bbc.com]
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/0... [cnn.com]
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Why the US didn't shoot down the missiles (Score:3)
I suspect a complex diplomatic motive behind the US not deploying its vaunted missile defense system. If there's even a microkernel of truth in the Wikipedia article on the Iranian missile attack [wikipedia.org], then it makes a weird kind of sense to just monitor the missiles closely and take whatever evasive actions necessary to avoid the loss of human life and the more expensive mobile hardware (e.g. planes and drones).
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Maybe the missile was too close to its target and not even a hypersonic anti-missile projectile would have saved the day
This. Look at the diagram of the flight path of the plane and the source of the missile www.npr.org [npr.org]. The plane was flying almost straight towards the launch site and just a little over five miles from the missile site the plane lost contact (most likely when the missile hit). The "slowest" land to air missile is about mach 2.5 or about 1900mph or about 0.53mps (miles per second). So even at 10 miles out it would have taken about 20 seconds for the missile to hit the plane. The closest location you cou
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The Iranians really are complete shit at PR. If they'd said "we've just had two of our major military leaders assassinated in US airstrikes, the US has a bunch of stealth stuff that's barely visible on our radar that we're worried about, and the guys manning the air defences around Tehran were tired and extremely nervous, sorry, we fscked up" it would have been, well, not OK but quite understandable. Instead they go through with this farce even though there's no way they can cover it up for more than a ve
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I'm sure the passengers had enough time to fire up their phones and record the trip to the ground. Granted the landing was pretty violent and some may have been destroyed, but certainly some were flung far enough at those velocities that they could be recovered. The people in the plane likely disintegrated on impact, but SD cards are compact and rigid and easily may have survived the detonation.
Posting to correct a down mod. Yes the logical place to look for eye witness accounts regardless of how tragic, is on the memory chips of any surviving digital devices. If the Iranians are not forth coming about examining that data then shame on them. If we do not accept that perhaps the efforts of Iran at transparency may be legitimate on this particular tragedy then shame on us. However the results however are then only sold to Rupert Murdock and Fox News then double the shame on US.
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I'm sure the passengers had enough time to fire up their phones and record the trip to the ground.
I wouldn't count on electronics that were turned on and have an intentional antenna functioning after the strike.
encrypted data (Score:5, Informative)
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Really? (Score:2, Interesting)
Bellingcat reposts what they saw on 4chan and takes credit for it?
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Pretty much. The story is complete bullshit anyway.
By mapping the location of the images, they’re able to use tools such as Google Street View to match up the buildings and landmarks they see in the video frame to what’s in front of them.
Good luck with that in Iran.
Re:Really? (Score:4, Informative)
Pretty much. The story is complete bullshit anyway.
By mapping the location of the images, they’re able to use tools such as Google Street View to match up the buildings and landmarks they see in the video frame to what’s in front of them.
Good luck with that in Iran.
This seems to be the story you're referring to https://www.bellingcat.com/new... [bellingcat.com] feel free to enlighten me what's wrong with it, because it looks legit to me?
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Bellingcat is made up of a bunch of shady characters who have gotten caught repeatedly falsifying evidence and forging documents for their "exposes". If the NYT is working with them it smells like Project Mockingbird has been dusted off and put back into operation.
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Bellingcat is made up of a bunch of shady characters who have gotten caught repeatedly falsifying evidence and forging documents for their "exposes". If the NYT is working with them it smells like Project Mockingbird has been dusted off and put back into operation.
It would really help your case if you could provide a link, they seem pretty open about what they are doing.
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Some people are mad they don't "like" the Lion Assad enough or aren't investigating the things they think they should be investigating. Some of the work might've been a bit sloppy but I've never seen any evidence that they falsified stuff. So, let's see.
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https://medium.com/@caityjohns... [medium.com]
They're really shady fucks. They were also the ones who pushed the big "syria did chemical weapons" and the dump from wikileaks [wikileaks.org] that came out recently show that was not likely the case, that on the ground inspectors found otherwise, and inspectors were threatened if they didn't fall in line.
Re: Really? (Score:2)
Thanks for the effort, but a blog post that starts with " The Imperialist propaganda firm Bellingcat", goes on to claim that they are involved with CIA psyops, that the chemical attacks in Syria didn't happen and that Tucker Carlson speaks the truth is a bit too far down the rabbit hole for me to follow.
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Why would I be referring to a different story than the one linked in the summary? I was referring to the Wired article which the above quote came from (the Bellingcat version doesn't mention Google Street View, which is not available for Iran).
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I also like the "unraveled the mystery" part. I'm imaging some dude with a man bun saying something like, "Well, it was a complete mystery to us, until we saw the video of the missile hitting the plane. At that point, we knew something wasn't quite right and we started googling stuff. It turns out that surface to air missile systems are a real thing, and were developed starting in the 1950s. From there, we grabbed a copy of Jane's and saw that Iran had some. It was quite a bit of effort, but our team of
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Bellingcat reposts what they saw on 4chan and takes credit for it?
What they mean is, they paid for the recent satellite photo that verified the ground features visible in the video, so that they could verify the location on the ground that the video was taken.
Verifying that the video was taken in the location claimed is more important to the evidence than just being able to watch the video, since it is dark and you can't see the plane clearly or any identifying marks.
It was not pressure, it was political infighting (Score:4, Insightful)
The pressure -- and the weight of public evidence -- compelled Iranian officials to admit overnight on January 10 that the country had shot down the plane "in error."
No it was not outside pressure. No it was not the weight of public evidence.
It was internal political infighting, the elected government trying to reduce the support for and influence of the Revolutionary Guard. The pressure and evidence merely being convenient tools to discredit the Revolutionary Guard, an organization that competes with the elected government for power.
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Exactly. The idea that some basement dwelling Reddit rejects influenced the Iran regime in revealing anything is rather comical.
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WE DID IT REDDIT!!
You have to go to 4chan / 8chan (8kun) for real influence.
And another mystery solved! (Score:4, Informative)
"Validify" isn't a real word (Score:3)
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Validifiy is a perfectly cromulent word.
yes it is (Score:2)
The English language is fluent living thing that is not limited by dictionaries. Dictionaries reflect that, they do not constrain it. Validify is perfectly valid word.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki... [wiktionary.org]
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We all also remember (Score:3)
What a good job those "digital sleuths" did on identifying the Boston Marathon bomber!
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I think it was Ollie North that said, inter alia, "no one believes the truth, but everyone believes a confession" ...
Did not take any sleuthing (Score:5, Insightful)
Almost immediately, we had video showing a missile hitting the plane. We knew it went down in Iran a few hours after Iran had launched the cruise missiles, with no American military response so we knew it was not an American missile.
We knew the plane went down violently, because the transponder was toast right at the time of the "event". That does not happen on modern planes no matter what kind of mechanical failure you have.
Basically everyone knew instantly an Iranian missile had hit a plane taking off from their own airport, when the FCC had banned aircraft from flying anywhere around the Middle East hours before...
Why in earth did they not shut down the airport? And the Iranian military, what kind of clowns do they have that they thought a giant jumbo jet was a cruise missile? It would have a massive difference in size on a radar signature.
And just recently we even have confirmation they shot TWO missiles at the plane, the second maybe 20 seconds later. So whoever shot the missile made the same mistake twice, or there were two idiots.
Re:Did not take any sleuthing (Score:5, Interesting)
Um... I mostly agree...
However, a 737 isn't anything close to a jumbo jet and would have a similar primary radar signature to many kinds of aircraft. It is REALLY hard to tell the difference between a cruse missile, and F18 and a 737 sized aircraft on radar using a primary paint signature (where the radar signal bounces off the airframe and back to the receiver). The amount of the return, the turbine blade signatures and other returned artifacts may not be all that deterministic and may not give you much assurance that your target identification is good. Apparently it was good enough to shoot it under the perceived conditions.
What amazes me is that this was NOT the first flight of the day from the airport. There had been like 10 other commercial aircraft departures from the airport which where NOT shot at. Something happened, a crew change, a communications outage, some misunderstood or inappropriate order, something that caused them to lose track of what was in their airspace and let them believe they should shoot a the target. This tells me there are some serious problems in Iran's air defenses, even though they have some of the best stuff you can buy from the Russians.
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I think you are being generous on allowing for any confusion. Even a 7th grade fool can draw a line from their international airport runway alignment to where the plane was shot down. At minimum it is manslaughter.
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Sounds like the stuff that happens when someone gets put in charge because of nepotism or toeing the right political line rather than actually knowing what they are doing. There was also probably very poor coordination through the chain of command.
I don't know much about radar, but wouldn't it be apparent that the object was climbing? What attacking plane or missile would just steadily climb?
No aspect of it says cruise missile (Score:2)
It is REALLY hard to tell the difference between a cruse missile, and F18 and a 737 sized aircraft on radar
Even if that were true from a radar signature standpoint, they would also have elevation data... would a U.S. cruise missile be coming from the direction of the airport, ascending at 8000 feet??????
And again, they made this terrible mistake not once but twice!!!
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The "serious problem" is that they were hacked. Russia has a history of giving away cracks to missile systems it sells to Iran. See my longer post further down, in the op comments thread for the article.
Re:Did not take any sleuthing (Score:4, Informative)
Um... I mostly agree...
However, a 737 isn't anything close to a jumbo jet and would have a similar primary radar signature to many kinds of aircraft. It is REALLY hard to tell the difference between a cruse missile, and F18 and a 737 sized aircraft on radar using a primary paint signature (where the radar signal bounces off the airframe and back to the receiver). The amount of the return, the turbine blade signatures and other returned artifacts may not be all that deterministic and may not give you much assurance that your target identification is good. Apparently it was good enough to shoot it under the perceived conditions.
What amazes me is that this was NOT the first flight of the day from the airport. There had been like 10 other commercial aircraft departures from the airport which where NOT shot at. Something happened, a crew change, a communications outage, some misunderstood or inappropriate order, something that caused them to lose track of what was in their airspace and let them believe they should shoot a the target. This tells me there are some serious problems in Iran's air defenses, even though they have some of the best stuff you can buy from the Russians.
IIRC, the Ukranian plane was 2 hours late taking off, my guess is that the SAM sites had a printed list of flights scheduled to depart and they did not get the message that that flight was departing 2 hours later than it was scheduled to.
Aaron Z
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when the FCC had banned aircraft from flying anywhere around the Middle East hours before...
When did the FCC get the power to regulate aircraft flying over foreign countries?
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Iran currently has an average IQ of 84, that has consequences on top of public policy that has for example crashed the country's fertility rate.
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... and who sourced those videos? ... who verified the authentic ones? ... who eliminated the many fakes? ... who identified the type of missile? ... who characterised the missile systems capabilities? ... who identified the sites the videos were shot from? ... who identified that (at least) two missiles were fired from different launch sites? ... who identified at least one of the probably launch site?
I've been following this on bellingcat and they were generally at least a day ahead of the mainstream news
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A US bomber...from their own airport, where several other planes took off before and after they shot down this one. With clear flight paths showing such. If it was US bomber, they wouldn't have seen the bomber until they were a smoking crater.
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A US bomber...from their own airport, where several other planes took off before and after they shot down this one. With clear flight paths showing such. If it was US bomber, they wouldn't have seen the bomber until they were a smoking crater.
Yes.
May I see it?
No.
SEYMOUR! THE TARGET IS A PASSENGER JET!
No, mother. It's just an American capitalist pigdog bomber.
Oh, I get it. (Score:2)
"Open source intelligence" is what we call conspiracy theories that the establishment supports.
I felt a great disturbance in the Force... (Score:2)
...as if hundreds of fitbits suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.
Ukraine and Iran: the new Bermuda Triangle (Score:4, Interesting)
I find it curious how Iran and Ukraine both were affected or involved in the last four high profile passenger airliner shotdowns:
The conclusion should be.. don't take any Iranian and Ukrainian airline flights. Also don't take any flights flying over or near those countries...
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Seems like somebody has been out there p0wning air defense systems. Probably a state-level actor. See my longer post 2 comments further down from the OP.
Re: Ukraine and Iran: the new Bermuda Triangle (Score:2)
Well, you also have Korean Air 007 and, possibly, TWA 800 that were shot down by Russia and (possibly) the US respectively.
Complete misdirection. (Score:2)
> In 2012 Wikileaks d0x'd Stratfor
> Including a 2009 intel report
> Citing "Our Mexican Source."
> Which states that Russia gave Israel the crack to Tor-13 air defense systems
> In exchange for access to Israeli-made drones sold to Georgia.
> Also reports that Israel and Turkey working together to crack S-300 air defense system codes.
> In 2009.
> In 2012, Jerusalem Post publishes info from the d0x to let people know that Israel has total control over current Iranian air defenses.
> In 2
Forgot the citation, sorry. (Score:2)
Here's a link to the JPost article:
https://www.jpost.com/Defense/... [jpost.com]
News for nerds and propaganda that matters (Score:2)
Since when is Bellingcat considered a thrustworthy news source by those who can still think for themselves?
It's just a psyops division of the British secret service.
Please keep the propaganda away from Slashdot.
WOW (Score:2)
You mean to tell me "DIGITAL SLEUTHS" saw fucking live video of the missile launch and impact and consider that "UNRAVELING" a great mystery?
You didn't even need to worry about whether or not the video was legit - Iran admitted it as soon as the video went public.
Ah, no (Score:2)
It may have sped things up a bit (and comes with a risk of misidentifying the cause), but the official investigation would have found this anyways. It is pretty hard to miss shrapnel-holes in a an airplane body.
Pretty Simple (Score:2)
The fact that the aircraft was observed to go down in flames; there was obvious shrapnel on parts of the plane wreckage that wouldn't normally have it from an uncontained engine failure; the fact that its data transponder cut out and the lack of communication from the crew pretty well pointed to either a catastrophic failure in the aircraft [highly unlikely nowadays] or a shootdown from an air-to-air or surface-to-air missile probably radar guided with a proximity fuse as the evidence didn't point to a heat
Bullshit (Score:3)
Utter shite - as soon as pictures appeared of the wreckage it started looking VERY likely that the aircraft was hit by a radar guided proximity fused missile with an expanding rod or shrapnel warhead [the pictures CLEARLY showed punctures on the aircraft skin which were pre-ground impact]. The similarities to Malaysia Flight 17 were instantly obvious.
After that it was just a question of when the Iranians would fess up.
The NYT and Bellingcat are trying to manufacture a scoop that was already very publicly aired and discussed.
Extremely unlikely (Score:2)
They were able to DOS some of the systems - send them a large amount of traffic or otherwise render them unavailable for time. That's 100,000X easier than taking control of them. I can easily DOS almost anyone who replies to an email I send them, using a technique that has been known for decades. Taking control of their system is a totally different thing.
Months after the DOS was demonstrated, you can be sure Iran disconnected the missile systems from the vulnerable internet connection or whatever.
Here, the
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Months after the DOS was demonstrated, you can be sure Iran disconnected the missile systems from the vulnerable internet connection or whatever.
It seems that they haven't solved it and left them disconnected.
And now they're understanding why they can't even use them if they're disconnected, unless they close their airspace first.
They need to pay the Russians for a firmware update, but they spent all their money on munitions because they're already involved in multiple wars, and they already told everybody that God was going to help them win.
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Just like Russia removed the Buk missile launcher [bellingcat.com] which downed the plane over Ukraine back to their country [youtube.com] so no one could do any forensic analysis.
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Tor is man-portable? Since when?
Since the first "photo" of Tor posted on the Internet by an "activist" ended up from Donbass and the others are guaranteed to be photoshopped.
I have preserved the first pic and its real origin on my blog: https://www.fagain.co.uk/node/... [fagain.co.uk]
The blog entry also has a detailed analysis why what was given to us to match the narrative was photoshopped. With sources and references. To put a long story short, Tor guidance heads have use/region specific colour and serial number markings. The one shown to us as ev
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I read that the AA missile system that brought down the plane was a mobile launch system. My sense is that a mobile launch system is gonna be many orders of magnitude harder to hack and control than a fixed missile system.
Not that there's not some possible way to do it, but my guess is mobile launchers are meant to be used independent of centralized command and control systems to avoid pre-emptive strikes and so that it can be totally mobile and used in remote locations.
And given the state of Russia genera
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It's even simpler.
Russia just gave secure access codes to the systems they sold Iran directly to another state power in exchange for some other 0dayz.
There is evidence they did this before, in 2009, giving Israel access to Tor-13, the old Iranian missile defense system, in exchange for 0dayz they could use against Israeli-built drones bought by Georgia.
Even if Russia didn't just hand over the new system (S-300)'s crypto keys, S-300 is only new to Iran (they first got it delivered in 2016.) Israel has been c
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Israel also claimed this capability. Please see my op comment post further down the main op comments thread.
Re:I wanna know who was controlling them at the ti (Score:5, Insightful)
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My guess is that you are part of the conspiracy. Or I am.
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Re:I wanna know who was controlling them at the ti (Score:5, Funny)
And we now return you to this week's episode of the X Files, where Mulder infiltrates 4chan and Storm Front and discovers they've been training a legion of Slashdot ACs, under the direct orders of the Cigarette Smoking Man and the Illuminati. Meanwhile, Scully defends Mulder against accusations that he's clinically insane and actually a former DJ from Connecticut with delusions he's an FBI agent after a severe blow on the head from a keg of beer thrown at him during a rave in the parking lot of a shuttered K Mart in 1982.
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It did wipe the assassination from the headlines and turn the people against the government.
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I'm pretty sure there's a conspiracy to keep making up conspiracies, to keep us off balance and further from grasping the REAL truth.
By making up stories, then throwing around the term "fake news" liberally, a government can convince people to doubt real facts and believe the made up stories.
It was the ancient aliens (Score:2)
Furthermore, the real controlling party here are the ancient aliens. I guess they're not so ancient if they are acting contemporaneously. In any case the History Channel will explain their involvement in this tragedy during the 2021 broadcast season.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
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I too smoke a lot of drugs.
"Look, I'ma be real honest with ya. I'm kind of retarded." - Alex Jones.
Re:I wanna know who was controlling them at the ti (Score:5, Interesting)
Why did both sides back off? Well darn, that's easy to answer.
1. Iran - They backed off because they had saved face and fired their 15 roman candles (even after telling the Iraqis who where sure to tell us) AND they know, beyond a doubt, what the outcome of a full on shooting war with the USA would be, they'd lose and badly. The Iranians are not stupid, they know this. There last provocation was wildly dangerous though...
2. Trump - He backed off because of his campaign promises. Believe it or not, he generally believes that being in a war in the middle east (or elsewhere for that matter) is a bad idea without some clear vested USA interest. Trump doesn't see any benefit to a shooting war with Iran and beyond their exporting of terror, poses little danger to the USA. That's why Trump has been backing down for the most part.
Finally - Both sides have trouble at home. Iran is battling riots and Trump is facing a reelection campaign and an impeachment trial. They both have bigger fish to fry domestically. Nobody has time for a war, as short as it would likely be, with their hands full at home.
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Iran will never enter into an open conflict because we would turn them into a parking lot overnight. It is that simple, they cannot win and they will not declare war because that would be an open invitation for our troops.
On the flip side, we don't really want to enter into a war because it is a costly exercise and we now consider the cost of war. It doesn't matter if we win if we lose 10 billion in the process. We could have bought them off for a 1/100th of that.
They will continue to use war by proxy and s
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This was even after the embassy attack and that was very nearly a complete wipe of the embassy.
Ok, that part is bullshiat. They have experience taking-down embassies. If they wanted the American embassy to fall, it would have fallen.
They were trying to provoke the United States into killing a bunch of people storming said embassy. Until the missile strike, the US through avoiding overraction won that exchange by basically all measures.
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It doesn't matter if we win if we lose 10 billion in the process. We could have bought them off for a 1/100th of that.
10 billion? That would be great. Meanwhile, the Iraq war (which was based on falsified evidence and never should have happened) has cost 1100 billion [wikipedia.org] and counting. War with Iran would be a lot more expensive, they have a better army and much more formidable terrain than Iraq. But I'm sure in Iran we would be greeted as liberators, right? "War" for the US is just a method for moving tax dollars into private bank accounts, in the case of the Iraq war it was into the bank accounts of the Vice President th
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We could have bought them off for a 1/100th of that.
Danegeld just gets more expensive each time though. And the precedent it would set is absolutely not what you want to do. It would encourage more bad actors to do something bad then offer to stop for a fee. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Trump backed off because of who he is (Score:3, Interesting)
1. Iran - They backed off because they had saved face and fired their 15 roman candles
Yes, exactly, though after more evidence has come out it was not as much of a symbolic gesture as thought [nytimes.com] - they were trying to kill some people and got unlucky.
Trump - He backed off because of his campaign promises.
It goes beyond campaign promises though, as you said Trump is fundamental against some arbitrary war.
If you think about it, even if he doesn't truly have an altruistic movie he had a core business interest not
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>also had a reason to back off - we no longer care about middle east oil, because we do not need it
It would certainly be a win in my book if we used the recent request by Iraq to leave to actually leave Iraq.
However, we may not directly use ME oil but our allies do which makes it of interest to the US.
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Trump - He backed off because of his campaign promises.
If you go back and see everything that Trump has promised during and since is campaign, you will probably find him promising both sides of any issue and completely contradicting any promise he made. I doubt even Trump knows what he has and hasn't promised outside of his wall.
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Trump - He backed off because of his campaign promises.
If you go back and see everything that Trump has promised during and since is campaign, you will probably find him promising both sides of any issue and completely contradicting any promise he made. I doubt even Trump knows what he has and hasn't promised outside of his wall.
Dude... Are you willingly ignorant of what the primary pillars of Trump's campaign where/are? He's been very clear on this issue, very clear. Also, of all the things Trump does, talk in focus group tested hard to parse rhetoric while speaking on both sides of an issue isn't one of them. Yea, he's changed his mind on a few things, but on this subject he's not wavered in the least since he rode the escalator down to the presser where he announced his candidacy for president more than 4 years ago (and if you
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they'd lose and badly.
Really? Goat herders armed with Kalashnikovs still control the vast majority of Afghanistan after 19 years, and we had to pull out of Iraq with our tail between our legs. The Pentagon isn't likely to actually want a war with a country that 1) is three times the size of Iraq with some really bad terrain, 2) has twice the population, 3) has a well armed and fairly well trained army of over 400,000, 4) still has an intact infrastructure, and 5) is almost all of one ethnicity, culture a
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They already don't have any ability to "work towards nuclear weapons", none of their equipment will enrich beyond the level required for power plant fuel.
Stop them from influencing the region? People have been trying that for over 5,000 years with a notable lack of success thus far. Why in the world would you imagine that a thoroughly reviled country on the opposite side of the planet would have any better luck? By attacking them we **GIVE** them validity in the eyes of the majority of the people in the
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Stop them from influencing the region? People have been trying that for over 5,000 years with a notable lack of success thus far.
Not entirely true. Genghis Khan and his descendants did a real number on Persia back in the day (13th century).
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Stop them from influencing the region? People have been trying that for over 5,000 years with a notable lack of success thus far.
Not entirely true. Genghis Khan and his descendants did a real number on Persia back in the day (13th century).
Not to mention Alexander the Great walking in and kicking their capital city into a pile of rubble around 330 BC. 5000 years is a bit of an exaggeration.
Re:I wanna know who was controlling them at the ti (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with this idea is that Iran wants to be taken seriously as a state power, not just a bunch of tribal guys with an independent streak, which means they need to maintain the structure and control of a state government.
You're right the Pentagon wants nothing to do with a ground invasion of Iraq -- too big, too complicated geographically.
But in the Pentagon's favor, disrupting Iran militarily and collapsing the regime is within their grasp. You can't bomb the Afghanis into the stone age because they're in the stone age, the Iranian state wouldn't hold up to it, just as the Iraqi one crumbled.
What's really hurt the Iranians in the whole incident:
* Exposed a complete lack of personal and operational security for one of their most important leaders. Suleimani shouldn't have been that easy to zap from a drone.
* Exposed a pretty weak and ineffective short range missile system. They lost two as duds and didn't do a ton of damage. "We didn't mean to" isn't compelling.
* Exposed their air defense network as possible totally incompetent and not a real deterrent to a serious US incursion. A lot of dependence on mobile systems due to the inability to defend fixed systems and a lack of money (the mobile systems can be moved around and used where needed).
* Exposed the regime's slipping control over their population. When your own people riot over an accidental shoot-down of an airliner, it shows they're tired of your military adventurism which has left them poor and in a security state.
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Suleimani was headed for an officially scheduled diplomatic meeting that had been covered in international newspapers. I'm not sure what they could have done in that case. Their mistake was thinking that the US was going to operate in an internationally acceptable manner, diplomats are **supposed** to be off-limits to military action even if the diplomat is a general. Even Israel didn't target Arafat when he was traveling on diplomatic missions.
Iran has shot down two US drones already, I wouldn't be so su
Re: (Score:3)
Suleimani's vulnerability was two parts. One was Iranian hubris that he was untouchable because the West is afraid of confronting Iran militarily generally and especially with nuclear weapons development still on the table.
The other is basic operational security -- it was what, a 3 car convoy? You tow the plane to a hanger and send out multiple three car convoys with variable delays between them and taking separate routes, in addition to making noise about how many Iraqi politicians are possibly in the co
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Not quite, he was coming back from a planning meeting with foreign miltia to target the US embassy in Iraq
Not quite.
https://consortiumnews.com/202... [consortiumnews.com]
"For the record, Adil Abdul–Mahdi said Sunday that he was scheduled to meet Soleimani on the day he was murdered. Topic: The Iraqi prime minister and the soldier the U.S. casts as a blood-soaked terrorist were acting as message-bearing go-betweens to advance the very tentative efforts of Iran and Saudi Arabia to reduce regional tensions and put the destructive Shi’a–Sunni rivalries of the past several years in the past."
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Ending their ability to attack? Attack who? The only military actions they've been involved in during the last century was defending themselves from Iraq's US-supported invasion.
And why do you care whether they can make nuclear power plant fuel or not, do you own GE stock?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Why did both countries posture so hard then back off so quickly?
Just like any country, Iran needs to show they are in control and that they can respond to any threat. So they needed some kind of retaliation or else risk an uprising (from within or from neighboring countries). Most likely they worked with the US to fire a bunch of rockets in a show of force. Which is most likely why the US did not retaliate or have active missile defenses on (they already admitted to seeing the launches and tracking them). However, there was still an outside chance that Iran was tak
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Trump assassinated an enemy target. Iran made a furor over their killed general, but isn't insane enough to want to go to war with the US. After all, that didn't turn out too well for their neighbor, with whom they fought a war for nearly a decade, but the US rolled up with seeming ease. So they rattle their sabers and fire off a few missiles in a face-saving gesture. And then, unfortunately, fearing a US airstrike in retaliation, some Revolutionary Guard peon controlling SAM systems he barely understan
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Exactly right. Either you can believe in conspiracy theories involving cadres of super-intelligent people moving levers of power behind the scenes, or you can believe in Hanlon's razor. The latter is always the safer bet.
Re: I wanna know who was controlling them at the t (Score:2)
The conspiracy is Iran's face-showing demonstration of force. Iran passed on the targets to the U.S. military through Iraqi intermediaries to help limit casualties.
Now, both the U.S. and Iran can go back to hating each other peacefully.
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And now the NYT is treating them as though they're actual journalists again. Do you hear a Mockingbird?
Re: Or it was super obvious (Score:2)
No one is blaming the regime. Not even the U.S. or Israel. You are the only one who thinks that.