[What follows is excerpted from an article by Ann Wright published yesterday in Consortium News:]
The Iranian military shot down a US spy drone last week, bringing the two countries to the brink of war.
Iran said the drone was over Iranian airspace (...)
The US says the drone, a $22 million RQ-4A Global Hawk, was in international airspace.
But why should one believe the US with its history of lying?
Remember back to 1988, during the Iran-Iraq war, when the USS Vincennes, a guided missile cruiser, shot down Iran Air Flight 655 with all 290 people on board including 66 children. The regularly scheduled passenger flight was over Iran’s territorial waters in the Persian Gulf on the routine flight path shortly after taking off from Bandar Abbas heading on the 28-minute flight to Dubai. Its transponder was signaling it was a civilian aircraft.
The US warship was in Iranian territorial waters after one of its helicopters drew warning shots from Iranian speedboats that were guarding Iranian waterways.
Yet, the US maintained that it was correct in shooting down a civilian aircraft that it said the crew thought was a military aircraft. It took years before the US offered recompense through the International Court of Justice.
When a group of us were on a citizens’ peace delegation to Iran in February we visited the Tehran Peace Museum. We knew from previous trips that the wound of the destruction of Iran Air Flight 655 was still raw. This time we presented the director of the peace museum with a book made by a member of our delegation with the names of all of those killed on Flight 655, along with our apologies.
In a 2000 BBC documentary titled The Other Lockerbie, and in an MIT study of the Flight 655 shoot-down, US government officials stated in a written answer that they believed the shoot down of Iran Air 655 may have been caused by a simultaneous psychological condition among the 18 bridge crew of Vincennes, called “scenario fulfillment,” which is said to occur when people are under pressure. US officials said that in such a situation, the crew will carry out a training scenario, believing it to be reality while ignoring sensory information that contradicts the scenario. In the case of this incident, the training scenario was an attack by a lone military aircraft when in fact, in reality, the aircraft was a civilian passenger plane on a regularly scheduled flight.
Let’s hope Bolton and Pompeo’s “scenario fulfillment” does not lead the White House to further military confrontation, much less an attack on Iran.
Ann Wright served 29 years in the US Army/Army Reserves and retired as a colonel. She was a US diplomat for 16 years and served in US Embassies in Nicaragua, Grenada, Somalia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Micronesia, Afghanistan and Mongolia. She resigned from the US government in March 2003 in opposition to President George W Bush’s war on Iraq. She is co-author of Dissent: Voices of Conscience.
The US military consistently lies, all the time. Don't blame them in particular, though. That is how military forces work.
ReplyDeleteLying has always been a powerful weapon. Some operations can't function without it.
We accept our friends lie when telling the truth would be a disadvantage.
Think of a poker game, where the players may inform their opponents of what cards they have, but may lie as much as they want. Truth is not in anyway a relevant parameter, it is all about what you can make your opponent believe.
Bright minds would still be able to extract probabilities from such statements from players who did not understand that their clever fabrications in fact could be used.
I think there was a drone shot down, and that it was shut down by the Iranians. Not because both sides say so, but because I can't see why they both would see an advantage in inventing that matter.
I think the drone would have been well within Iranian airspace, simply because I can't see any sufficient reason to shoot it down otherwise.
It is to that extent we can use the information from the military.
The Iranians did Not care about the flight. I can give you a source in Iran interior ministry who has a UK passport . They used it as an I told you so. The UK covered up for Iran so BP and SHELL is more important to them than Scotland
ReplyDelete