20 thoughts on “Iran admits they shot down the Ukrainian airliner”
Nope…from the Wikipedia entry: “Initially Pentagon officials denied any knowledge of the shootdown.“
And “President Ronald Reagan expressed sympathy for the “terrible human tragedy” but suggested that the plane had “failed to heed repeated warnings.” However, an investigation by the International Civil Aviation Organization, a U.N. agency, found that U.S. military ships in the region did not have the equipment necessary to monitor civilian air-traffic-control frequencies.”
What actually may have happened was that the Pentagon denied KNOWLEDGE of it at first (which was probably true, since it takes time for communication to happen), then called a press conference to announce it as soon as the facts were available, very shortly after the incident occurred. The Pentagon admitted it as soon as the facts were known. On July 3, the very day of the incident, at the first Pentagon press conference on the incident, Adm. William Crowe, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, admitted that the Vincennes had fired the missile.
But I’m not even sure that “denial of knowledge” is accurate. Wikipedia’s source for that claim is a 2020 article in the WaPo. I can find absolutely no contemporary sources which claimed that the Pentagon ever denied that the Vincennes fired the shots or even that they did not yet have knowledge of it. They lied about where the Vincennes was, and they seem to have lied about the alleged justification for the shots, but they took responsibility for firing the missiles immediately (as soon as they were informed by the ship, as far as I can tell). Unfortunately, they tried to justify it.
Ummm…the word “initially” doesn’t mean “instantaneously.” If you think the Pentagon didn’t know that the Vincennes had shot down an aircraft right after it happened, you’re naive. I expect with GPS deployed by that time, the Pentagon also knew that the Vincennes had trespassed on Iranian waters.
That doesn’t matter. It might matter if the Wikipedia sentence were accurate in the first place, but once more, and I’m tired of repeating this point, there is absolutely no evidence that any of that ever happened. That appears to be a misstatement by the WaPo reporter which was echoed by Wikipedia (because that’s what happens with Wikipedia). I can find absolutely no contemporaneous reports that the pentagon ever denied that the Vincennes fired the shots. None. Not one.
They pentagon did, however, issue all sorts of misleading statements about various subjects, although they apparently did not deny that the Vincennes fired the shots. At some point a spokesman may have said as a first blush response, “we’re don’t know yet; we’re still looking at the evidence, ” as any prudent person might do, but again, there is no evidence that even that ever happened.
If the incident happened today, details would be very clear much more quickly, but this was 1988 technology, and there was probably was plenty to sort out. I have not read anything about exactly how the ship communicated to the pentagon, but I assume the ship only knew that it had fired upon and hit an aircraft, and did not know it was a civilian aircraft, so the pentagon must have found that out from elsewhere, then had to sort out various reports and add the details up. I wouldn’t be surprised if the pentagon heard about the airliner being struck from network news, then matched that up with any report they had received from Vincennes, then said to each other, “Oh, shit, we did this.”
They may even have been telling the truth about thinking the Vincennes was in international waters. It’s not clear whether they were being dishonest or were just misinformed and confused. And maybe the Vincennes gave the pentagon bad info about many things. None of this seems very clear if you read the investigations.
They were having significant problems with internal naval communications in the area because various incidents had degraded their communications infrastructure and forced the naval vessels to use channels which they normally did not use. And those channels were overcrowded, making communications difficult. (See page 33 of the Navy’s internal investigation.) Seconds or minutes after the incident, naval brass knew that an aircraft had been downed, but they could not have known it was a civilian aircraft until they heard reports from other sources.
But the point is that they called a press conference and admitted the mistake very quickly. My guess was that they called the press conference about 15 seconds after they were sure of what had happened and all the appropriate brass and the White House had been informed, and I think that’s probably about right.
And Reagan did get right on it by apologizing and offering to discuss reparations.
The 1988 USA did, however, match Iran’s current machinations in one way. They did originally try to deflect blame on Iran (oh, the ship was in international waters, and the plane was approaching the ship at an attack altutude, etc) just as Iran originally tried to blame the USA for lying about this recent incident. But I’ve found no evidence that they ever tried to deny that Vincennes fired the shots.
Once more, the Wikipedia entry only says that initially they denied KNOWLEDGE of it. (Which is always true. You don’t know until you know.)
Moreover, even that seems false. Wikipedia’s citation is from a 2020 article in WaPo. I have found no contemporary source that claims anything of the sort. The pentagon held a press conference soon after the incident, and admitted that the Vincennes fired. Not a single July 4 story I could find on newspapers.com says there was ever a denial that Vincennes shot down the plane
It appears that the WaPo article, thence Wikipedia, is confused. The pentagon offered all sorts of bullshit explanations, trying to make the launch seem justified, denying that the ship was in Iranian waters, saying the plane was flying out of a proper flight path, etc. Much or all of that proved false, but WaPo and therefore Wikipedia do not seem to be correct if they are implying a denial that the Vincennes fired the shots.
And of course, Reagan apologized almost immediately and began discussions of compensation.
Contemporary accounts are the least accurate. See Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq. The truth eventually leaks out…Pentagon Papers, the WaPo expose on Afghanistan and no WMD. Americans are some of the most jingoistic people on the planet.
I have a feeling I know what happened.
They turned it on in automatic mode which is used when not in the vicinity of any aircraft or your own aircraft which send an IFF signal. It probably immediately scanned the airspace and locked on the airliner.
Considering how close it was, it was probably only a few seconds before it launched 2 missiles at the plane(also a redundancy setting in the automatic mode), which made a hard right turn to avoid them, which would explain the location of the wreckage, which was out of the flight path at about a 90 degree angle.
If they were farther away, they could have time to self-destructed the missles. before they impacted.
There – how damn hard was that?
Your turn next, Trump. Admit you killed that guy cos you’re getting impeached.
What’s your problem with killing the guy? Worked out perfectly for the US. And he already was impeached. Do you mean removed from office? There has never been a chance at that happening. Focus on the election.
My problem with killing the guy is that’s it’s murder. That opens up Our Troops to the same thing. Doesn’t mean I like or miss him. “Perfectly”? Really? Like a perfect phone call? They aimed to miss this time. They might not keep doing that.
I was just thinking that if the Iranians can admit to the whangingly obvious, we could at least do as much. It could be the start of something…
Unlike the Iranians, the USA never issued an initial denial that it had shot down the aircraft. The very first reports of the incident included the fact that it was shot down by the Vincennes.
The incident happened on July 3. On July 5, Reagan issued a formal apology and declared that the USA would be discussing reparations to the families of the victims.
Nature Mom – so you also object to killing bin Laden on Pakistani soil? If not, why the difference?
No, bin Laden actually attacked America. This guy was maybe eventually going to attack our men stationed in the Middle East. He may have done so, and died in combat.
We didn’t send assassins to bump off Rommel, we beat him on the battlefield.
Yeah, if you want to split hairs, we should have grabbed bin Laden and brought him back for trial. But in my gut, justice was done and seen to be done, no less than the trial and execution of Hussein.
Droning Soleimani just makes us look like back-shooters.
Apples to oranges. You’re justifying the bin Laden raid because of what he did in the past. If the past is to be a justification, Suleimani also attacked America in the past. His forces instigated attacks against our troops in Afghanistan, and he plotted a foiled bombing in Washington, D.C.
I think you can actually make a far better case for killing Suleimani than bin Laden. He was an active general on foreign soil plotting a military attack on neutral troops (ours). There’s no doubt of that (see the well-researched Reuters story that the US newspapers ignored – Reuters knew more than our own intelligence agencies). The only debate is nit-picking the word “imminent.” On the other hand, Bin Laden was an old civilian on dialysis, living in hiding, home in bed.
If you look at what they had done in the past to justify being hunted, bin Laden was worse, but Suleimani was also evil. And as for generating outrage – bin Laden was actually a more revered figure to a wider group of people, not just one country, so killing him presented a substantial risk of worldwide anti-American violence.
There’s really not much difference when you start to study the details. The biggest difference is that one mission was carried out by the press-beloved Obama and the other by the reviled Trump.
(Of course Trump is reviled for good reasons – but those are OTHER reasons unrelated to this.)
We have troops in about 7/8 of all the countries there are. That doesn’t make those countries America nor does it make our troops neutral. Now, I didn’t know about this DC terror attack either. That makes a difference. But I still see him mostly as an army general trying to push out an invader.
I think you are getting onto very shaky, Minority Report-style ground when you start punishing people for what you imagine you know they’re going to do. I see no reason to believe “imminent threat” talk from Trump.
The main goal here is to distract from Ukraine and his obstruction of justice.
As far as I can see, the only thing you can do is quibble about the word imminent, but the Reuters story makes it clear that one of the things he was in Iraq to do was to plan attacks against American forces. I’ll concede that we can’t establish whether those attacks were going to occur any time soon, but I don’t care.
He was not a general pushing out an invader. American troops were welcome there at the time (as opposed to now), and Suleimani himself was an invader. He was killed on Iraqi soil. He was a general killed in a country not his own. That’s pretty much an invitation to death. If our joint chief were assassinated on Saudi soil by an Irani drone while planning an attack on Iran, I would just assume that to be the fruit of war. Bitter fruit.
As far as I can see, the greatest difference between the two incidents is not the person killed, but the president ordering the killing.
Scoop stated, “American troops were welcome there at the time (as opposed to now)”
Here is how the vote went down in the Iraqi Parliament
“The Iraqi measure to expel foreign troops was backed by most Shiite members of parliament, who hold a majority of seats.
The request was put forward Sunday by the largest bloc in the legislature, known as Fatah. That bloc includes leaders associated with the Iran-backed paramilitary Popular Mobilization Units, which were a major force in the fight against IS.
Many Sunni and Kurdish legislators did not show up for the session, apparently because they oppose abolishing the deal. One Sunni member of parliament told Reuters that both groups feared that kicking out US-led coalition forces would leave Iraq vulnerable to an insurgency, undermine security and heighten the power of Iranian-backed Shiite militias.
The 168 lawmakers present for the vote were just three more than the quorum.”
The president ordering it hardly matters. Bin Laden and Soleimani are two very different worms – apples and oranges, as you say. I’d have been happy if Bush got bin Laden.
What you say about American troops being welcome is technically true. But if we want to go into Iraq, do you think Iraq wants to find out what comes next if they tell us No? We were more “welcome” than really actually welcome.
Still, Trump wanted everyone’s eyes off the ball. Mission Accomplished.
Nope…from the Wikipedia entry: “Initially Pentagon officials denied any knowledge of the shootdown.“
And “President Ronald Reagan expressed sympathy for the “terrible human tragedy” but suggested that the plane had “failed to heed repeated warnings.” However, an investigation by the International Civil Aviation Organization, a U.N. agency, found that U.S. military ships in the region did not have the equipment necessary to monitor civilian air-traffic-control frequencies.”
What actually may have happened was that the Pentagon denied KNOWLEDGE of it at first (which was probably true, since it takes time for communication to happen), then called a press conference to announce it as soon as the facts were available, very shortly after the incident occurred. The Pentagon admitted it as soon as the facts were known. On July 3, the very day of the incident, at the first Pentagon press conference on the incident, Adm. William Crowe, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, admitted that the Vincennes had fired the missile.
But I’m not even sure that “denial of knowledge” is accurate. Wikipedia’s source for that claim is a 2020 article in the WaPo. I can find absolutely no contemporary sources which claimed that the Pentagon ever denied that the Vincennes fired the shots or even that they did not yet have knowledge of it. They lied about where the Vincennes was, and they seem to have lied about the alleged justification for the shots, but they took responsibility for firing the missiles immediately (as soon as they were informed by the ship, as far as I can tell). Unfortunately, they tried to justify it.
Ummm…the word “initially” doesn’t mean “instantaneously.” If you think the Pentagon didn’t know that the Vincennes had shot down an aircraft right after it happened, you’re naive. I expect with GPS deployed by that time, the Pentagon also knew that the Vincennes had trespassed on Iranian waters.
That doesn’t matter. It might matter if the Wikipedia sentence were accurate in the first place, but once more, and I’m tired of repeating this point, there is absolutely no evidence that any of that ever happened. That appears to be a misstatement by the WaPo reporter which was echoed by Wikipedia (because that’s what happens with Wikipedia). I can find absolutely no contemporaneous reports that the pentagon ever denied that the Vincennes fired the shots. None. Not one.
They pentagon did, however, issue all sorts of misleading statements about various subjects, although they apparently did not deny that the Vincennes fired the shots. At some point a spokesman may have said as a first blush response, “we’re don’t know yet; we’re still looking at the evidence, ” as any prudent person might do, but again, there is no evidence that even that ever happened.
If the incident happened today, details would be very clear much more quickly, but this was 1988 technology, and there was probably was plenty to sort out. I have not read anything about exactly how the ship communicated to the pentagon, but I assume the ship only knew that it had fired upon and hit an aircraft, and did not know it was a civilian aircraft, so the pentagon must have found that out from elsewhere, then had to sort out various reports and add the details up. I wouldn’t be surprised if the pentagon heard about the airliner being struck from network news, then matched that up with any report they had received from Vincennes, then said to each other, “Oh, shit, we did this.”
They may even have been telling the truth about thinking the Vincennes was in international waters. It’s not clear whether they were being dishonest or were just misinformed and confused. And maybe the Vincennes gave the pentagon bad info about many things. None of this seems very clear if you read the investigations.
They were having significant problems with internal naval communications in the area because various incidents had degraded their communications infrastructure and forced the naval vessels to use channels which they normally did not use. And those channels were overcrowded, making communications difficult. (See page 33 of the Navy’s internal investigation.) Seconds or minutes after the incident, naval brass knew that an aircraft had been downed, but they could not have known it was a civilian aircraft until they heard reports from other sources.
But the point is that they called a press conference and admitted the mistake very quickly. My guess was that they called the press conference about 15 seconds after they were sure of what had happened and all the appropriate brass and the White House had been informed, and I think that’s probably about right.
And Reagan did get right on it by apologizing and offering to discuss reparations.
The 1988 USA did, however, match Iran’s current machinations in one way. They did originally try to deflect blame on Iran (oh, the ship was in international waters, and the plane was approaching the ship at an attack altutude, etc) just as Iran originally tried to blame the USA for lying about this recent incident. But I’ve found no evidence that they ever tried to deny that Vincennes fired the shots.
(There are many parts of the official investigation that seem to me disingenuous.)
Once more, the Wikipedia entry only says that initially they denied KNOWLEDGE of it. (Which is always true. You don’t know until you know.)
Moreover, even that seems false. Wikipedia’s citation is from a 2020 article in WaPo. I have found no contemporary source that claims anything of the sort. The pentagon held a press conference soon after the incident, and admitted that the Vincennes fired. Not a single July 4 story I could find on newspapers.com says there was ever a denial that Vincennes shot down the plane
It appears that the WaPo article, thence Wikipedia, is confused. The pentagon offered all sorts of bullshit explanations, trying to make the launch seem justified, denying that the ship was in Iranian waters, saying the plane was flying out of a proper flight path, etc. Much or all of that proved false, but WaPo and therefore Wikipedia do not seem to be correct if they are implying a denial that the Vincennes fired the shots.
And of course, Reagan apologized almost immediately and began discussions of compensation.
Contemporary accounts are the least accurate. See Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq. The truth eventually leaks out…Pentagon Papers, the WaPo expose on Afghanistan and no WMD. Americans are some of the most jingoistic people on the planet.
I have a feeling I know what happened.
They turned it on in automatic mode which is used when not in the vicinity of any aircraft or your own aircraft which send an IFF signal. It probably immediately scanned the airspace and locked on the airliner.
Considering how close it was, it was probably only a few seconds before it launched 2 missiles at the plane(also a redundancy setting in the automatic mode), which made a hard right turn to avoid them, which would explain the location of the wreckage, which was out of the flight path at about a 90 degree angle.
If they were farther away, they could have time to self-destructed the missles. before they impacted.
There – how damn hard was that?
Your turn next, Trump. Admit you killed that guy cos you’re getting impeached.
What’s your problem with killing the guy? Worked out perfectly for the US. And he already was impeached. Do you mean removed from office? There has never been a chance at that happening. Focus on the election.
My problem with killing the guy is that’s it’s murder. That opens up Our Troops to the same thing. Doesn’t mean I like or miss him. “Perfectly”? Really? Like a perfect phone call? They aimed to miss this time. They might not keep doing that.
I was just thinking that if the Iranians can admit to the whangingly obvious, we could at least do as much. It could be the start of something…
How long did it take the US to cop to the downing of the Iranian civilian airliner while the USS Vincennes was in Iranian waters? See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655
About 15 seconds.
Unlike the Iranians, the USA never issued an initial denial that it had shot down the aircraft. The very first reports of the incident included the fact that it was shot down by the Vincennes.
The incident happened on July 3. On July 5, Reagan issued a formal apology and declared that the USA would be discussing reparations to the families of the victims.
Nature Mom – so you also object to killing bin Laden on Pakistani soil? If not, why the difference?
No, bin Laden actually attacked America. This guy was maybe eventually going to attack our men stationed in the Middle East. He may have done so, and died in combat.
We didn’t send assassins to bump off Rommel, we beat him on the battlefield.
Yeah, if you want to split hairs, we should have grabbed bin Laden and brought him back for trial. But in my gut, justice was done and seen to be done, no less than the trial and execution of Hussein.
Droning Soleimani just makes us look like back-shooters.
Apples to oranges. You’re justifying the bin Laden raid because of what he did in the past. If the past is to be a justification, Suleimani also attacked America in the past. His forces instigated attacks against our troops in Afghanistan, and he plotted a foiled bombing in Washington, D.C.
I think you can actually make a far better case for killing Suleimani than bin Laden. He was an active general on foreign soil plotting a military attack on neutral troops (ours). There’s no doubt of that (see the well-researched Reuters story that the US newspapers ignored – Reuters knew more than our own intelligence agencies). The only debate is nit-picking the word “imminent.” On the other hand, Bin Laden was an old civilian on dialysis, living in hiding, home in bed.
If you look at what they had done in the past to justify being hunted, bin Laden was worse, but Suleimani was also evil. And as for generating outrage – bin Laden was actually a more revered figure to a wider group of people, not just one country, so killing him presented a substantial risk of worldwide anti-American violence.
There’s really not much difference when you start to study the details. The biggest difference is that one mission was carried out by the press-beloved Obama and the other by the reviled Trump.
(Of course Trump is reviled for good reasons – but those are OTHER reasons unrelated to this.)
We have troops in about 7/8 of all the countries there are. That doesn’t make those countries America nor does it make our troops neutral. Now, I didn’t know about this DC terror attack either. That makes a difference. But I still see him mostly as an army general trying to push out an invader.
I think you are getting onto very shaky, Minority Report-style ground when you start punishing people for what you imagine you know they’re going to do. I see no reason to believe “imminent threat” talk from Trump.
The main goal here is to distract from Ukraine and his obstruction of justice.
As far as I can see, the only thing you can do is quibble about the word imminent, but the Reuters story makes it clear that one of the things he was in Iraq to do was to plan attacks against American forces. I’ll concede that we can’t establish whether those attacks were going to occur any time soon, but I don’t care.
He was not a general pushing out an invader. American troops were welcome there at the time (as opposed to now), and Suleimani himself was an invader. He was killed on Iraqi soil. He was a general killed in a country not his own. That’s pretty much an invitation to death. If our joint chief were assassinated on Saudi soil by an Irani drone while planning an attack on Iran, I would just assume that to be the fruit of war. Bitter fruit.
As far as I can see, the greatest difference between the two incidents is not the person killed, but the president ordering the killing.
Scoop stated, “American troops were welcome there at the time (as opposed to now)”
Here is how the vote went down in the Iraqi Parliament
“The Iraqi measure to expel foreign troops was backed by most Shiite members of parliament, who hold a majority of seats.
The request was put forward Sunday by the largest bloc in the legislature, known as Fatah. That bloc includes leaders associated with the Iran-backed paramilitary Popular Mobilization Units, which were a major force in the fight against IS.
Many Sunni and Kurdish legislators did not show up for the session, apparently because they oppose abolishing the deal. One Sunni member of parliament told Reuters that both groups feared that kicking out US-led coalition forces would leave Iraq vulnerable to an insurgency, undermine security and heighten the power of Iranian-backed Shiite militias.
The 168 lawmakers present for the vote were just three more than the quorum.”
https://www.france24.com/en/20200105-iraq-parliament-passes-resolution-to-expel-us-led-coalition-troops-from-country
Fair point. Thanks.
The president ordering it hardly matters. Bin Laden and Soleimani are two very different worms – apples and oranges, as you say. I’d have been happy if Bush got bin Laden.
What you say about American troops being welcome is technically true. But if we want to go into Iraq, do you think Iraq wants to find out what comes next if they tell us No? We were more “welcome” than really actually welcome.
Still, Trump wanted everyone’s eyes off the ball. Mission Accomplished.