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Re: FLT 800: From the Rumor Mill...But It Makes Sense.. (fwd)
At 10:15 PM 9/1/96 -0400, Simon Spero wrote:
>On Sun, 1 Sep 1996, Alan Horowitz wrote:
>
>> The Aegis ship in the Gulf wzs not in an exercise. It was in a war zone.
>>
>> If my memory serves, the Iranian jetliner had its squawker turned off, or
>> broken. The officer in charge in the CIC had about ten seconds to decide
>> if he was about to be locked-on by a missle. And no real information to
>
>I think it was actually a combination of a design flaw in the user
>interface for the control system combined with a human error that led to
>the radar officer confusing the airbus with an (F4?) a hundred miles away
>that he'd previously clicked on.
Isn't there just the tiniest bit of a double-standard here? If the ship was
supposedly "justified" in firing on an airplane just because it
_could_become_ a threat, and _could_ fire a missile at any moment, then why
can't we turn this logic around and claim that an Iranian aircraft could
view an Aegis as a ship which "could become a threat" and "could fire a
missile at any moment."
Generally, I'm not sympathetic to the Iranians; far from it. But I can
smell hypocrisy a mile away and the US military's "logic" in this area is
unbelievable.
Jim Bell
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