Said reckless behavior is far more common than most people want to admit [0]
Interesting about that article; The, rather obscure, Itavia Flight 870 is the only US mention there, while the much more well known Iran Air Flight 655 [1] isn't mentioned at all.
Morbidly enough this incident appeared on the UK A-level physics paper one year as part of the module on nuclear physics. I think the task was to explain why alpha radiation is so dangerous if ingested.
I'm not sure I would the poisonings "reckless", they are deliberate, calculated and successful. Of course they could instead make it look like an accident or a drug overdose; or just take the target out by sniper. Instead the Russian government orchestrates obscure methods that make it much more interesting for the international press, as well as making it obvious for everyone that it was the FSB without completely destroying plausible deniability.
That's completely different from "people staffing an air defense system were reckless/undertrained/misinformed and accidentally shot down an airliner".
I’m not sure you know the full story regarding the Skripal poisoning. The target and his daughter actually survived. Two “civilians” were later poisoned after discovering a discarded purfume bottle which contained the novichok. One of those people died. So the targets survived, a British citizen was murdered, and the Russian’s faced little consequences.
It certainly it is not obscure in Italy. The Ustica disaster is very well known.
On the other hand while it is possible or even likely it was mistakenly downed by a NATO missile, the nation ultimately responsible is still unknown. It might have been US, France or even Italy itself.
Can you name another nation that has had such a global, and active, military presence as the US has had, particularly since the establishment of formal air-forces?
We are also talking about a military that does not only have a recent string of burrowing civilian casulties, like in Afghanistan or Syria, but has been doing so in plenty of other conflicts.
So yes, it's a bit difficult to believe that in decades of war the US ever only shot down two wrong planes, most likely that wikipedia list simply ain't anywhere to complete, like most of them.
> We are also talking about a military that does not only have a recent string of burrowing civilian casulties, like in Afghanistan or Syria, but has been doing so in plenty of other conflicts.
> So yes, it's a bit difficult to believe that in decades of war the US ever only shot down two wrong planes, most likely that wikipedia list simply ain't anywhere to complete, like most of them.
I think your starting with what you want to believe is true and then walking back from that to find evidence to fit a narrative. There’s no reason to think that because the U.S. has willingly or unwillingly killed people in, say, an Afghan village that they’d be likely to misidentify commercial aircraft which have technology that positively identifies the aircraft. And in one case I recall with Iran it was a tense situation and you can at least give some amount of plausible deniability to the US military. They did pay out to the victims too IIRC, certainly not something that Russia or others have done.
As you mentioned, the U.S. has a global military presence. That means that encountering commercial aircraft all over the world would be a common occurrence and positive identification of those aircraft comes from U.S. led or contributed technologies and processes for making sure that they aren’t misidentified. So I’m not really sure it’s difficult to believe that the U.S. just doesn’t make many mistakes here, whereas in Afghanistan, Iraq, or Syria the situation is not comparable, error-prone, and quite complicated.
> And in one case I recall with Iran it was a tense situation
Said tense situation was the result of the USS Vincennes sailing into Iranian territorial waters, while the Iran-Iraq war was waging. It wasn't something that was just randomly forced onto them.
Which has way more parallels to MH17 than most Americans would be comfortable admitting.
Hmmm I wonder if there is more to the story than "USS Vincennes sails into Iranian territorial waters"?
Vincennes had entered Iranian territory after one of its helicopters drew warning fire from Iranian speedboats operating within Iranian territorial limits. [1]
Totally random how the US ship found itself in Iranian waters. Like a complete roll of the dice even!
And before you say something about defending the U.S. or w/e. No. I'm defending honest and civil discussion, and asserting that there is nuance in the world. I don't know if you have the same intentions based on your comments, especially as you leave out seemingly important details to fit a narrative you want to portray.
"Why was the US ship near Iranian waters" -> because it can be.
"Why did the US ship enter Iranian waters if the speedboat shot from Iranian waters" -> Same reason you'd ignore a border if someone was shooting at you from across it and claiming you can't cross the border.
> This is all simply speculation until you find evidence of planes shot down by the US that aren't listed on Wikipedia.
Because English Wikipedia is the most conclusive and authoritative collection of such incidents?
> Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, provide it or quit this speculative bullshit.
So we know about two instances, one of them very well established, the other one being a "maybe", yet a third one would suddenly be "extraordinary"? In what context exactly?
While I understand the narrative and expect that to apply to civilian deaths caused by military action in general (indeed not just those caused by the American armed forces), airliners in particular are very well accounted for; all the world militaries’ combined civilian aircraft fatal mistakes are, I think, just a subset of those cases where we didn’t even find the black box.
Civilian deaths caused by Americans is often due to intentional acceptance of collateral fatalities, not due to incorrectly and negligently misidentifying aircraft.
> Without warning, an American F-15E attack jet… dropped a 500-pound bomb on the crowd, swallowing it in a shuddering blast. As the smoke cleared, a few people stumbled away in search of cover. Then a jet tracking them dropped one 2,000-pound bomb, then another, killing most of the survivors.
> The site of the bombing was bulldozed; the unit that conducted the strike vindicated itself; key evidence was buried; military logs were altered; and investigations were stalled and subverted. Although the Pentagon's independent inspector general managed to launch a probe, "the report containing its findings was stalled and stripped of any mention of the strike."
The last paragraph is some Karimov's Uzbekistan level shit.
What does an air strike in a war zone have to do with US missiles or fighter jets shooting down commercial airliners?
If you’re going to say “we don’t trust them” or something you’d have to then go and find all sorts of unaccounted for airliners that disappeared without cause and just decide to, without evidence, claim the U.S. secretly shot them down and is covering it up. It’s just a big conspiracy goose hunt. Oh and while you’re at it, we can toss in that airliners that crashed were just secret US cover-ups of shooting them down maliciously too because they “scrubbed the logs”.
Looking at the downvotes, lots think its usual in Russia for Citizens to just drive Tanks across the border to visit relatives. BUK Missiles, its just something every Russian farmer keeps in stock for personal defense...
There's a biased court working hard to accuse Russia and it already took them 7 years, yet to come to conclusions that they wish to arrive at.
So no.
Meanwhile, Ukraine shooting Russian S7's Tu, USA shooting Iran's airliner and, recently and ironically, Iran shooting down Ukraine's airliner are all accounted for.
Are you in all seriousness questioning the fact that a Buk SAM complex which crossed the border days earlier from Russia has shot down MH17? The evidence for this is clearer and presented in more excruciating detail than pretty much any other such crime, at least in the public domain. Phone calls, geolocated videos and photos, witness testimony...
I'm genuinely curious about the mental gymnastics one would need to resort to in order to deny that a Russian Buk shot down MH17.
I think that there was at least one Buk SAM complex coming from Russia at the time in this area, as well as multiple Ukrainian Buk complexes. I do not know who fired the shot which downed the airliner. Neither side has any motivation to do so in a good faith.
I don't think there exists a court whose sentence about this case I would accept, given that everybody has a skin in this game and everyone is very good at lying, but the court which does investigate this case did not come up with any sentence yet.
Are you seriously questioning me about my mental gymnastics in the absense of court ruling? What's with yours? How can you ever come up with something else than "we don't know yet"?
The launch site is geolocated to an area firmly under Russia proxies' control. The Buk's route from the Russian border via Donetsk to Snizhne is traced. There are hours of phone conversations with proxies and their Russian handlers, all discussing the event, then the coverup. We know the names of pretty much everyone important involved. "You don't know who fired the shot" - it's difficult to imagine that you don't know all this after so many years of report after report, phone call after phone call, detail after detail, so I can only conclude that you're not arguing in good faith.
It's not like I start my day by reading all new reports regarding the MH17. I've skimmed a few of these back in 2015, they were inconclusive. Maybe they got much better since then, but I'm not really into this thing. I just honestly didn't read them after that.
Before you suggest that I need to read some specific document which contains all the truths - obviously this is not how you do a personal investigation. I will have to read a lot, and it's not my job.
So I'm really waiting for the last season to air before I start watching this TV series.
He was actually a gun maker with a FFL license, which is how he got all those machine guns. He just got off probation for marijuana charges, and is heavily suspected in the mysterious shooting death of his business partner. He won’t be producing anything any time soon, because with that felony charge he won’t be able to get a FFL again.
Actually, FFA is what an individual needs to get a pre-1986 machine gun. It’s how you or I would buy a machine gun if we wanted one. A class III FFL is how you get a post 1986 sample.
Class III FFLs can get ahold of machine guns at MSRP, rather than paying the higher collectible rate for pre-1986 civilian legal examples. It’s also not an easy license to get, for fairly obvious reasons.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_17