Terror Op - yes Paks are itching to do something after 370.
Drama by Govt. - Could be. Could be a show of force for domestic audience.
LOC Flare up: Related news and Discussions
- Thread starter Parul
- Start date
Terror Op - yes Paks are itching to do something after 370.
Drama by Govt. - Could be. Could be a show of force for domestic audience.
Who says we want to snatch him. He is an old sick fat *censored* who knows too much. Bringing him out needlessly compounds the risk for the team. They will simply take him out and sneak away IF they actually do it.
Don't mind but humari wo aukaad nahi hai abhi. A country where tehsildaar to district colllector are corrupt you think India will have caliber to do such strike? Most of them fear death that ISI will retaliate by taking out some prominent leader in India.
That's only area where Pakistan dominates. Because there is only one master , thats army. If some one is doing corruption inform any army officer. Army itself is corrupt but does not let others do corruption.
Dawood is far fetched dream.
Pakistan other arms are not corrupt?
They don't have land reforms
The mullahs are paid to bring up non issues
The lawyers are shit
Every major company has corruption allegation
Their ex president was famous as mr 10%
Their other president was in the Panama papers
Army has factions against each other
If you are a common man, inform any army officer and get the job done without paying any bribe be it whatever. Army is highly corrupt there but their corruption is at different level. They loot from the taxes, or occupy land or big businesses, or FDI. And what is left they give back to politicians as a boti. And without army's cut politicians can't do business. That's how it works and that's why people support army and this is why Army owns the nation.
When Zardari signed the CPEC deal with Chinese, gen Kayani called Zardari and said, give this project to army to handle. And Zardari had to do that.
Former CIA: Cyberattack Brought Down Ukrainian Jet Over Iran | GreatGameIndia
Former CIA: Cyberattack Brought Down Ukrainian Jet Over Iran
By
GreatGameIndia
-
January 22, 2020
A former CIA counter-terrorism specialist and military intelligence officer has raised the possibility that a cyberattack brought down the Ukrainian jet over Iran.
Former CIA: Cyberattack brought down Ukrainian Jet over Iran
Philip M. Giraldi is a former CIA counter-terrorism specialist and military intelligence officer who served nineteen years overseas in Turkey, Italy, Germany, and Spain. He was the CIA Chief of Base for the Barcelona Olympics in 1992 and was one of the first Americans to enter Afghanistan in December 2001. Phil is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a Washington-based advocacy group that seeks to encourage and promote a U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East that is consistent with American values and interests.
Former CIA Chief Philip Giraldi
“What seems to have been a case of bad judgments and human error does, however, include some elements that have yet to be explained,” Philip Giraldi argued in a recent article published in Iran’s Press TV.
“The Iranian missile operator reportedly experienced considerable ‘jamming’ and the planes transponder switched off and stopped transmitting several minutes before the missiles were launched. There were also problems with the communication network of the air defense command, which may have been related,” the former CIA specialist said.
The Ukrainian passenger plane crashed minutes after take-off near Tehran on January 8, killing all the 176 people on board. Iran initially blamed the incident on technical failure but, as more information came to light, it announced that the plane was shot down by a missile due to “human error.”
At the time, Iran’s air defenses were on high alert after the country’s armed forces had launched a missile attack against two American bases in Iraq in retaliation for the US assassination in Baghdad of Lieutenant General Qassem Soleimani, commander of the IRGC’s Quds Force.
Giraldi contended that the Iranian air defense system was likely placed in the manual operation mode as a result of the possible electronic jamming coming from an unknown source.
Meanwhile, the shutdown of the plane’s transponder, which would have sent signals informing the operator that the plane was civilian, indicated that it was hostile. The operator, who must have been briefed on the possibility of intruding American cruise missiles, had to decide in only seconds whether to shoot down the plane approaching a sensitive military site.
“Given what happened on that morning in Tehran, it is plausible to assume that something or someone deliberately interfered with both the Iranian air defenses and with the transponder on the airplane, possibly as part of an attempt to create an aviation accident that would be attributed to the Iranian government,” Giraldi said.
A senior Iranian military officer did not rule out a possible disruption of Iran’s radar network by the United States, causing the operator to mistake the Ukrainian airliner for a hostile cruise missile.
“Interference in the [defense] systems by the United States is not unprecedented,” Ali Abdollahi Aliabadi, coordinator deputy of the General Staff of Iran’s Armed Forces, said this week on national TV. “The Iranian cyber systems have identified and recorded virtual objects manufactured by the US in the country’s airspace.”
Acting Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has said there is information that at least six American F-35 jets were “in the Iranian border area” at the time of the accident. “This information has yet to be verified, but I’d like to underline the edginess that always accompanies such situations,” Lavrov said on Friday.
In an interview with Azad News Agency (ANA), Secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council Ali Shamkhani said the Iranian Armed Forces are considering all details pertaining to the tragic crash of the Boeing jetliner near Tehran.
Shamkhani emphasized that the Armed Forces have launched a full-scale investigation into the crash, including a possible hacking attack, infiltration or a cyberwarfare operation.
Meanwhile the video evidence published by the New York Times showing the moment an Iranian missile hit a passenger jet has prompted much skepticism on whether the Iranian plane shootdown was a setup by western intelligence.
Questions arise about the improbable timing and circumstances of recording the precise moment when the plane was hit.
Turns out that Nariman Gharib, the guy who received the video and credited by the NY Times for submitting it, is a vociferous anti-Iranian government dissident who does not live in Iran. He ardently promotes regime change in his social media posts.
Also read: Were Russians Spying on Qassem Soleimani assassination discussions at Mar-a-Lago
Christiaan Triebert, the NY Times’ video expert, who collaborated closely with Gharib to get the story out within hours of the incident, previously worked as a senior investigator at Bellingcat. Bellingcat calls itself an independent online investigative journalism project, but numerous critics accuse it of being a media adjunct to Western military intelligence. Bellingcat has been a big proponent of media narratives smearing the Russian and Syrian governments over the MH17 shoot-down in Ukraine in 2014 (believed to be brought down by British Secret Service) and chemical weapons attacks.
Bellingcat’s open support for foreign military intervention and tendency to promote NATO/U.S. war propaganda are unsurprising when one considers how the group is funded and the groups with which it regularly collaborates.
In the latest shoot-down of the airliner above Tehran, the tight liaison between a suspiciously placed anonymous videographer on the ground and an expatriate Iranian dissident who then gets the prompt and generous technical attention of the NY Times suggests a level of orchestration, not, as we are led to believe, a random happenstance submission. More sinisterly, the fateful incident was a setup.
GreatGameIndia is a journal on Geopolitics and International Relations. Get to know the Geopolitical threats India is facing in our exclusive book India in Cognitive Dissonance. Past magazine issues can be accessed from the Archives section.
Send in your tips and submissions by filling out this form or write to us directly at the email provided. Join us on WhatsApp for more intel and updates.
We need your support to carry on our independent and investigative research based journalism on the external and internal threats facing India. Your contribution however small helps us keep afloat. Kindly consider donating to GreatGameIndia.
Was Iran Plane Shootdown A Setup By The Deep State? | GreatGameIndia
Was Iran Plane Shootdown A Setup By The Deep State?
By
GreatGameIndia
-
January 20, 2020| Last modified on January 22nd, 2020 at 8:35 am,
The 19-second video published by the New York Times last week showing the moment an Iranian missile hit a passenger jet has prompted much social media skepticism on whether the Iranian plane shootdown was a setup by western intelligence.
Was Iran Plane Shootdown A Setup
Questions arise about the improbable timing and circumstances of recording the precise moment when the plane was hit.
The newspaper ran the splash story on January 9, the day after a Ukrainian airliner was brought down near Tehran. It was headlined: ‘Video Shows Ukrainian Plane Being Hit Over Iran’. All 176 people onboard were killed. Two days later, the Iranian military admitted that one of its air defense units had fired at the plane in the mistaken belief that it was an incoming enemy cruise missile.
“A smoking gun” was how NY Times’ journalist Christiaan Triebert described the video in a tweet. Triebert works in the visual investigations team at the paper. In the same tweet, he thanked – “a very big shout out” – to an Iranian national by the name of Nariman Gharib “who provided it [the video] to the NY Times, and the videographer, who would like to remain anonymous”.
Nariman✔@NarimanGharib
The footage i've got from a source - the moment the missile hit the #Flight752. I can't verify the video yet! but please let me know if you find anything. I'm in contact with the person who send this video to see if I can get a version of video which has a meta data on it
3,40811:39 PM - Jan 9, 2020Twitter Ads info and privacy2,218 people are talking about this
Also read: Indian Ocean Island Naval Base of Diego Garcia – Launchpad to attack Iran
The anonymous videographer is the person who caught the 19-second clip which shows a missile striking Flight PS752 shortly after take-off from Tehran’s Imam Khomenei airport at around 6.15 am. This person, who remains silent during the filming while smoking a cigarette (the smoke briefly wafts over the screen), is standing in the suburb of Parand looking northwest. His location was verified by the NY Times using satellite data. The rapid way the newspaper’s technical resources were marshaled raises a curious question about how a seemingly random video submission was afforded such punctilious attention.
But the big question which many people on social media are asking is: why was this “videographer” standing in a derelict industrial area outside Tehran at around six o’clock in the morning with a mobile phone camera training on a fixed angle to the darkened sky? The airliner is barely visible, yet the sky-watching person has the camera pointed and ready to film a most dramatic event, seconds before it happened. That strongly suggests, foreknowledge.
Given that something awful has just been witnessed it is all the more strange that the person holding the camera remains calm and unshaken. There is no audible expression of shock or even the slightest disquiet.
Turns out that Nariman Gharib, the guy who received the video and credited by the NY Times for submitting it, is a vociferous anti-Iranian government dissident who does not live in Iran. He ardently promotes regime change in his social media posts.
Also read: Were Russians Spying on Qassem Soleimani assassination discussions at Mar-a-Lago
Christiaan Triebert, the NY Times’ video expert, who collaborated closely with Gharib to get the story out within hours of the incident, previously worked as a senior investigator at Bellingcat. Bellingcat calls itself an independent online investigative journalism project, but numerous critics accuse it of being a media adjunct to Western military intelligence. Bellingcat has been a big proponent of media narratives smearing the Russian and Syrian governments over the MH17 shoot-down in Ukraine in 2014 (believed to be brought down by British Secret Service) and chemical weapons attacks.
Rania Khalek✔@RaniaKhalek
Bellingcat gets funding from the US government’s regime change promotion outfit, the national endowment for democracy. So I am shocked that Bellingcat would publish smears against people opposed to US wars and regime change efforts.
31910:21 PM - Oct 1, 2019Twitter Ads info and privacy133 people are talking about this
Russia in RSA 
✔@EmbassyofRussia
Russian FM Sergey #Lavrov: As we know, and it’s not a secret for anyone, as even Western journalists openly write about this, @bellingcat is linked to special services. It is used to dump information that may have some influence on public opinion
23612:34 PM - Oct 17, 2018Twitter Ads info and privacy304 people are talking about this
Bellingcat’s open support for foreign military intervention and tendency to promote NATO/U.S. war propaganda are unsurprising when one considers how the group is funded and the groups with which it regularly collaborates.
For instance, Bellingcat regularly works with the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), which – according to the late journalist Robert Parry – “engages in ‘investigative journalism’ that usually goes after governments that have fallen into disfavor with the United States and then are singled out for accusations of corruption.” OCCRP is notably funded by USAID and the controversial George Soros-funded Open Society Foundations.
In addition, Bellingcat’s founder Eliot Higgins is employed by the Atlantic Council, which is partially funded by the U.S. State Department, NATO and U.S. weapons manufacturers. It should come as little surprise then that the results of Bellingcat’s “findings” often fit neatly with narratives promoted by NATO and the U.S. government despite their poor track record in terms of accuracy.
In the latest shoot-down of the airliner above Tehran, the tight liaison between a suspiciously placed anonymous videographer on the ground and an expatriate Iranian dissident who then gets the prompt and generous technical attention of the NY Times suggests a level of orchestration, not, as we are led to believe, a random happenstance submission. More sinisterly, the fateful incident was a setup.
It seems reasonable to speculate that in the early hours of January 8 a calamitous incident was contrived to happen. The shoot-down occurred only four hours after Iran attacked two US military bases in Iraq. Those attacks were in revenge for the American drone assassination on January 3 of Iran’s top military commander, Maj. General Qassem Soleimani.
Subsequently, Iranian air-defense systems were on high alert for a possible counter-strike by US forces. Several reports indicate that the Iranian defense radars were detecting warnings of incoming enemy warplanes and cruise missiles on the morning of 8 January. It does seem odd why the Iranian authorities did not cancel all commercial flights out of Tehran during that period. Perhaps because civilian airliners can normally be differentiated by radar and other signals from military objects.
However, with the electronic warfare (EW) technology that the United States has developed in recent years it is entirely feasible for enemy military radars to be “spoofed” by phantom objects. One such EW developed by the Pentagon is Miniature Air-Launched Decoy (MALD) which can create deceptive signals on enemy radar systems of incoming warheads.
What we contend therefore is this: the Americans exploited a brink-of-war scenario in which they anticipated Iranian air-defense systems to be on a hair-trigger. Add to this tension an assault by electronic warfare on Iranian military radars in which it would be technically feasible to distort a civilian airliner’s data as an offensive target. The Iranian military has claimed this was the nature of the shoot-down error. It seems plausible given the existing electronic warfare used by the Pentagon.
It’s a fair, albeit nefarious, bet that the flight paths out of Tehran were deliberately put in an extremely dangerous position by the malicious assault from American electronic warfare. A guy placed on the ground scoping the outward flight paths – times known by publicly available schedules – would be thus on hand to catch the provoked errant missile shot.
The shoot-down setup would explain why Western intelligence were so quick to confidently assert what happened, contradicting Iran’s initial claims of a technical onboard plane failure.
The disaster has gravely undermined the Iranian government, both at home and around the world. Protests have erupted in Iran denouncing the authorities and the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corp for “lying” about the crash. Most of the 176 victims were Iranian nationals. The anger on the streets is being fueled by the public comments of Western leaders like Donald Trump, who no doubt see the clamor and recriminations as an opportunity to push harder for regime change in Iran.
Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich and Finian Cunningham for Sputnik International with inputs from GreatGameIndia, a journal on Geopolitics and International Relations. Get to know the Geopolitical threats India is facing in our exclusive book India in Cognitive Dissonance.
Send in your tips and submissions by filling out this form or write to us directly at the email provided. Join us on WhatsApp for more intel and updates.
We need your support to carry on our independent and investigative research based journalism on the external and internal threats facing India. Your contribution however small helps us keep afloat. Kindly consider donating to GreatGameIndia.
Former CIA: Cyberattack Brought Down Ukrainian Jet Over Iran
By
GreatGameIndia
-
January 22, 2020
A former CIA counter-terrorism specialist and military intelligence officer has raised the possibility that a cyberattack brought down the Ukrainian jet over Iran.
Philip M. Giraldi is a former CIA counter-terrorism specialist and military intelligence officer who served nineteen years overseas in Turkey, Italy, Germany, and Spain. He was the CIA Chief of Base for the Barcelona Olympics in 1992 and was one of the first Americans to enter Afghanistan in December 2001. Phil is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a Washington-based advocacy group that seeks to encourage and promote a U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East that is consistent with American values and interests.
“What seems to have been a case of bad judgments and human error does, however, include some elements that have yet to be explained,” Philip Giraldi argued in a recent article published in Iran’s Press TV.
“The Iranian missile operator reportedly experienced considerable ‘jamming’ and the planes transponder switched off and stopped transmitting several minutes before the missiles were launched. There were also problems with the communication network of the air defense command, which may have been related,” the former CIA specialist said.
The Ukrainian passenger plane crashed minutes after take-off near Tehran on January 8, killing all the 176 people on board. Iran initially blamed the incident on technical failure but, as more information came to light, it announced that the plane was shot down by a missile due to “human error.”
At the time, Iran’s air defenses were on high alert after the country’s armed forces had launched a missile attack against two American bases in Iraq in retaliation for the US assassination in Baghdad of Lieutenant General Qassem Soleimani, commander of the IRGC’s Quds Force.
Giraldi contended that the Iranian air defense system was likely placed in the manual operation mode as a result of the possible electronic jamming coming from an unknown source.
Meanwhile, the shutdown of the plane’s transponder, which would have sent signals informing the operator that the plane was civilian, indicated that it was hostile. The operator, who must have been briefed on the possibility of intruding American cruise missiles, had to decide in only seconds whether to shoot down the plane approaching a sensitive military site.
“Given what happened on that morning in Tehran, it is plausible to assume that something or someone deliberately interfered with both the Iranian air defenses and with the transponder on the airplane, possibly as part of an attempt to create an aviation accident that would be attributed to the Iranian government,” Giraldi said.
A senior Iranian military officer did not rule out a possible disruption of Iran’s radar network by the United States, causing the operator to mistake the Ukrainian airliner for a hostile cruise missile.
“Interference in the [defense] systems by the United States is not unprecedented,” Ali Abdollahi Aliabadi, coordinator deputy of the General Staff of Iran’s Armed Forces, said this week on national TV. “The Iranian cyber systems have identified and recorded virtual objects manufactured by the US in the country’s airspace.”
Acting Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has said there is information that at least six American F-35 jets were “in the Iranian border area” at the time of the accident. “This information has yet to be verified, but I’d like to underline the edginess that always accompanies such situations,” Lavrov said on Friday.
In an interview with Azad News Agency (ANA), Secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council Ali Shamkhani said the Iranian Armed Forces are considering all details pertaining to the tragic crash of the Boeing jetliner near Tehran.
Shamkhani emphasized that the Armed Forces have launched a full-scale investigation into the crash, including a possible hacking attack, infiltration or a cyberwarfare operation.
Meanwhile the video evidence published by the New York Times showing the moment an Iranian missile hit a passenger jet has prompted much skepticism on whether the Iranian plane shootdown was a setup by western intelligence.
Questions arise about the improbable timing and circumstances of recording the precise moment when the plane was hit.
Turns out that Nariman Gharib, the guy who received the video and credited by the NY Times for submitting it, is a vociferous anti-Iranian government dissident who does not live in Iran. He ardently promotes regime change in his social media posts.
Also read: Were Russians Spying on Qassem Soleimani assassination discussions at Mar-a-Lago
Christiaan Triebert, the NY Times’ video expert, who collaborated closely with Gharib to get the story out within hours of the incident, previously worked as a senior investigator at Bellingcat. Bellingcat calls itself an independent online investigative journalism project, but numerous critics accuse it of being a media adjunct to Western military intelligence. Bellingcat has been a big proponent of media narratives smearing the Russian and Syrian governments over the MH17 shoot-down in Ukraine in 2014 (believed to be brought down by British Secret Service) and chemical weapons attacks.
Bellingcat’s open support for foreign military intervention and tendency to promote NATO/U.S. war propaganda are unsurprising when one considers how the group is funded and the groups with which it regularly collaborates.
In the latest shoot-down of the airliner above Tehran, the tight liaison between a suspiciously placed anonymous videographer on the ground and an expatriate Iranian dissident who then gets the prompt and generous technical attention of the NY Times suggests a level of orchestration, not, as we are led to believe, a random happenstance submission. More sinisterly, the fateful incident was a setup.
GreatGameIndia is a journal on Geopolitics and International Relations. Get to know the Geopolitical threats India is facing in our exclusive book India in Cognitive Dissonance. Past magazine issues can be accessed from the Archives section.
Send in your tips and submissions by filling out this form or write to us directly at the email provided. Join us on WhatsApp for more intel and updates.
We need your support to carry on our independent and investigative research based journalism on the external and internal threats facing India. Your contribution however small helps us keep afloat. Kindly consider donating to GreatGameIndia.
Was Iran Plane Shootdown A Setup By The Deep State? | GreatGameIndia
Was Iran Plane Shootdown A Setup By The Deep State?
By
GreatGameIndia
-
January 20, 2020| Last modified on January 22nd, 2020 at 8:35 am,
The 19-second video published by the New York Times last week showing the moment an Iranian missile hit a passenger jet has prompted much social media skepticism on whether the Iranian plane shootdown was a setup by western intelligence.
Questions arise about the improbable timing and circumstances of recording the precise moment when the plane was hit.
The newspaper ran the splash story on January 9, the day after a Ukrainian airliner was brought down near Tehran. It was headlined: ‘Video Shows Ukrainian Plane Being Hit Over Iran’. All 176 people onboard were killed. Two days later, the Iranian military admitted that one of its air defense units had fired at the plane in the mistaken belief that it was an incoming enemy cruise missile.
“A smoking gun” was how NY Times’ journalist Christiaan Triebert described the video in a tweet. Triebert works in the visual investigations team at the paper. In the same tweet, he thanked – “a very big shout out” – to an Iranian national by the name of Nariman Gharib “who provided it [the video] to the NY Times, and the videographer, who would like to remain anonymous”.
Nariman✔@NarimanGharibThe footage i've got from a source - the moment the missile hit the #Flight752. I can't verify the video yet! but please let me know if you find anything. I'm in contact with the person who send this video to see if I can get a version of video which has a meta data on it
3,40811:39 PM - Jan 9, 2020Twitter Ads info and privacyAlso read: Indian Ocean Island Naval Base of Diego Garcia – Launchpad to attack Iran
The anonymous videographer is the person who caught the 19-second clip which shows a missile striking Flight PS752 shortly after take-off from Tehran’s Imam Khomenei airport at around 6.15 am. This person, who remains silent during the filming while smoking a cigarette (the smoke briefly wafts over the screen), is standing in the suburb of Parand looking northwest. His location was verified by the NY Times using satellite data. The rapid way the newspaper’s technical resources were marshaled raises a curious question about how a seemingly random video submission was afforded such punctilious attention.
But the big question which many people on social media are asking is: why was this “videographer” standing in a derelict industrial area outside Tehran at around six o’clock in the morning with a mobile phone camera training on a fixed angle to the darkened sky? The airliner is barely visible, yet the sky-watching person has the camera pointed and ready to film a most dramatic event, seconds before it happened. That strongly suggests, foreknowledge.
Given that something awful has just been witnessed it is all the more strange that the person holding the camera remains calm and unshaken. There is no audible expression of shock or even the slightest disquiet.
Turns out that Nariman Gharib, the guy who received the video and credited by the NY Times for submitting it, is a vociferous anti-Iranian government dissident who does not live in Iran. He ardently promotes regime change in his social media posts.
Also read: Were Russians Spying on Qassem Soleimani assassination discussions at Mar-a-Lago
Christiaan Triebert, the NY Times’ video expert, who collaborated closely with Gharib to get the story out within hours of the incident, previously worked as a senior investigator at Bellingcat. Bellingcat calls itself an independent online investigative journalism project, but numerous critics accuse it of being a media adjunct to Western military intelligence. Bellingcat has been a big proponent of media narratives smearing the Russian and Syrian governments over the MH17 shoot-down in Ukraine in 2014 (believed to be brought down by British Secret Service) and chemical weapons attacks.
Rania Khalek✔@RaniaKhalekBellingcat gets funding from the US government’s regime change promotion outfit, the national endowment for democracy. So I am shocked that Bellingcat would publish smears against people opposed to US wars and regime change efforts.
31910:21 PM - Oct 1, 2019Twitter Ads info and privacy
Russia in RSA ✔@EmbassyofRussiaRussian FM Sergey #Lavrov: As we know, and it’s not a secret for anyone, as even Western journalists openly write about this, @bellingcat is linked to special services. It is used to dump information that may have some influence on public opinion
23612:34 PM - Oct 17, 2018Twitter Ads info and privacyBellingcat’s open support for foreign military intervention and tendency to promote NATO/U.S. war propaganda are unsurprising when one considers how the group is funded and the groups with which it regularly collaborates.
For instance, Bellingcat regularly works with the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), which – according to the late journalist Robert Parry – “engages in ‘investigative journalism’ that usually goes after governments that have fallen into disfavor with the United States and then are singled out for accusations of corruption.” OCCRP is notably funded by USAID and the controversial George Soros-funded Open Society Foundations.
In addition, Bellingcat’s founder Eliot Higgins is employed by the Atlantic Council, which is partially funded by the U.S. State Department, NATO and U.S. weapons manufacturers. It should come as little surprise then that the results of Bellingcat’s “findings” often fit neatly with narratives promoted by NATO and the U.S. government despite their poor track record in terms of accuracy.
In the latest shoot-down of the airliner above Tehran, the tight liaison between a suspiciously placed anonymous videographer on the ground and an expatriate Iranian dissident who then gets the prompt and generous technical attention of the NY Times suggests a level of orchestration, not, as we are led to believe, a random happenstance submission. More sinisterly, the fateful incident was a setup.
It seems reasonable to speculate that in the early hours of January 8 a calamitous incident was contrived to happen. The shoot-down occurred only four hours after Iran attacked two US military bases in Iraq. Those attacks were in revenge for the American drone assassination on January 3 of Iran’s top military commander, Maj. General Qassem Soleimani.
Subsequently, Iranian air-defense systems were on high alert for a possible counter-strike by US forces. Several reports indicate that the Iranian defense radars were detecting warnings of incoming enemy warplanes and cruise missiles on the morning of 8 January. It does seem odd why the Iranian authorities did not cancel all commercial flights out of Tehran during that period. Perhaps because civilian airliners can normally be differentiated by radar and other signals from military objects.
However, with the electronic warfare (EW) technology that the United States has developed in recent years it is entirely feasible for enemy military radars to be “spoofed” by phantom objects. One such EW developed by the Pentagon is Miniature Air-Launched Decoy (MALD) which can create deceptive signals on enemy radar systems of incoming warheads.
What we contend therefore is this: the Americans exploited a brink-of-war scenario in which they anticipated Iranian air-defense systems to be on a hair-trigger. Add to this tension an assault by electronic warfare on Iranian military radars in which it would be technically feasible to distort a civilian airliner’s data as an offensive target. The Iranian military has claimed this was the nature of the shoot-down error. It seems plausible given the existing electronic warfare used by the Pentagon.
It’s a fair, albeit nefarious, bet that the flight paths out of Tehran were deliberately put in an extremely dangerous position by the malicious assault from American electronic warfare. A guy placed on the ground scoping the outward flight paths – times known by publicly available schedules – would be thus on hand to catch the provoked errant missile shot.
The shoot-down setup would explain why Western intelligence were so quick to confidently assert what happened, contradicting Iran’s initial claims of a technical onboard plane failure.
The disaster has gravely undermined the Iranian government, both at home and around the world. Protests have erupted in Iran denouncing the authorities and the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corp for “lying” about the crash. Most of the 176 victims were Iranian nationals. The anger on the streets is being fueled by the public comments of Western leaders like Donald Trump, who no doubt see the clamor and recriminations as an opportunity to push harder for regime change in Iran.
Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich and Finian Cunningham for Sputnik International with inputs from GreatGameIndia, a journal on Geopolitics and International Relations. Get to know the Geopolitical threats India is facing in our exclusive book India in Cognitive Dissonance.
Send in your tips and submissions by filling out this form or write to us directly at the email provided. Join us on WhatsApp for more intel and updates.
We need your support to carry on our independent and investigative research based journalism on the external and internal threats facing India. Your contribution however small helps us keep afloat. Kindly consider donating to GreatGameIndia.
Former CIA: Cyberattack Brought Down Ukrainian Jet Over Iran | GreatGameIndia
Former CIA: Cyberattack Brought Down Ukrainian Jet Over Iran
By
GreatGameIndia
-
January 22, 2020
A former CIA counter-terrorism specialist and military intelligence officer has raised the possibility that a cyberattack brought down the Ukrainian jet over Iran.
Former CIA: Cyberattack brought down Ukrainian Jet over Iran
Philip M. Giraldi is a former CIA counter-terrorism specialist and military intelligence officer who served nineteen years overseas in Turkey, Italy, Germany, and Spain. He was the CIA Chief of Base for the Barcelona Olympics in 1992 and was one of the first Americans to enter Afghanistan in December 2001. Phil is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a Washington-based advocacy group that seeks to encourage and promote a U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East that is consistent with American values and interests.
Former CIA Chief Philip Giraldi
“What seems to have been a case of bad judgments and human error does, however, include some elements that have yet to be explained,” Philip Giraldi argued in a recent article published in Iran’s Press TV.
“The Iranian missile operator reportedly experienced considerable ‘jamming’ and the planes transponder switched off and stopped transmitting several minutes before the missiles were launched. There were also problems with the communication network of the air defense command, which may have been related,” the former CIA specialist said.
The Ukrainian passenger plane crashed minutes after take-off near Tehran on January 8, killing all the 176 people on board. Iran initially blamed the incident on technical failure but, as more information came to light, it announced that the plane was shot down by a missile due to “human error.”
At the time, Iran’s air defenses were on high alert after the country’s armed forces had launched a missile attack against two American bases in Iraq in retaliation for the US assassination in Baghdad of Lieutenant General Qassem Soleimani, commander of the IRGC’s Quds Force.
Giraldi contended that the Iranian air defense system was likely placed in the manual operation mode as a result of the possible electronic jamming coming from an unknown source.
Meanwhile, the shutdown of the plane’s transponder, which would have sent signals informing the operator that the plane was civilian, indicated that it was hostile. The operator, who must have been briefed on the possibility of intruding American cruise missiles, had to decide in only seconds whether to shoot down the plane approaching a sensitive military site.
“Given what happened on that morning in Tehran, it is plausible to assume that something or someone deliberately interfered with both the Iranian air defenses and with the transponder on the airplane, possibly as part of an attempt to create an aviation accident that would be attributed to the Iranian government,” Giraldi said.
A senior Iranian military officer did not rule out a possible disruption of Iran’s radar network by the United States, causing the operator to mistake the Ukrainian airliner for a hostile cruise missile.
“Interference in the [defense] systems by the United States is not unprecedented,” Ali Abdollahi Aliabadi, coordinator deputy of the General Staff of Iran’s Armed Forces, said this week on national TV. “The Iranian cyber systems have identified and recorded virtual objects manufactured by the US in the country’s airspace.”
Acting Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has said there is information that at least six American F-35 jets were “in the Iranian border area” at the time of the accident. “This information has yet to be verified, but I’d like to underline the edginess that always accompanies such situations,” Lavrov said on Friday.
In an interview with Azad News Agency (ANA), Secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council Ali Shamkhani said the Iranian Armed Forces are considering all details pertaining to the tragic crash of the Boeing jetliner near Tehran.
Shamkhani emphasized that the Armed Forces have launched a full-scale investigation into the crash, including a possible hacking attack, infiltration or a cyberwarfare operation.
Meanwhile the video evidence published by the New York Times showing the moment an Iranian missile hit a passenger jet has prompted much skepticism on whether the Iranian plane shootdown was a setup by western intelligence.
Questions arise about the improbable timing and circumstances of recording the precise moment when the plane was hit.
Turns out that Nariman Gharib, the guy who received the video and credited by the NY Times for submitting it, is a vociferous anti-Iranian government dissident who does not live in Iran. He ardently promotes regime change in his social media posts.
Also read: Were Russians Spying on Qassem Soleimani assassination discussions at Mar-a-Lago
Christiaan Triebert, the NY Times’ video expert, who collaborated closely with Gharib to get the story out within hours of the incident, previously worked as a senior investigator at Bellingcat. Bellingcat calls itself an independent online investigative journalism project, but numerous critics accuse it of being a media adjunct to Western military intelligence. Bellingcat has been a big proponent of media narratives smearing the Russian and Syrian governments over the MH17 shoot-down in Ukraine in 2014 (believed to be brought down by British Secret Service) and chemical weapons attacks.
Bellingcat’s open support for foreign military intervention and tendency to promote NATO/U.S. war propaganda are unsurprising when one considers how the group is funded and the groups with which it regularly collaborates.
In the latest shoot-down of the airliner above Tehran, the tight liaison between a suspiciously placed anonymous videographer on the ground and an expatriate Iranian dissident who then gets the prompt and generous technical attention of the NY Times suggests a level of orchestration, not, as we are led to believe, a random happenstance submission. More sinisterly, the fateful incident was a setup.
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Was Iran Plane Shootdown A Setup By The Deep State? | GreatGameIndia
Was Iran Plane Shootdown A Setup By The Deep State?
By
GreatGameIndia
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January 20, 2020| Last modified on January 22nd, 2020 at 8:35 am,
The 19-second video published by the New York Times last week showing the moment an Iranian missile hit a passenger jet has prompted much social media skepticism on whether the Iranian plane shootdown was a setup by western intelligence.
Was Iran Plane Shootdown A Setup
Questions arise about the improbable timing and circumstances of recording the precise moment when the plane was hit.
The newspaper ran the splash story on January 9, the day after a Ukrainian airliner was brought down near Tehran. It was headlined: ‘Video Shows Ukrainian Plane Being Hit Over Iran’. All 176 people onboard were killed. Two days later, the Iranian military admitted that one of its air defense units had fired at the plane in the mistaken belief that it was an incoming enemy cruise missile.
“A smoking gun” was how NY Times’ journalist Christiaan Triebert described the video in a tweet. Triebert works in the visual investigations team at the paper. In the same tweet, he thanked – “a very big shout out” – to an Iranian national by the name of Nariman Gharib “who provided it [the video] to the NY Times, and the videographer, who would like to remain anonymous”.
The footage i've got from a source - the moment the missile hit the #Flight752. I can't verify the video yet! but please let me know if you find anything. I'm in contact with the person who send this video to see if I can get a version of video which has a meta data on it
2,218 people are talking about this
Also read: Indian Ocean Island Naval Base of Diego Garcia – Launchpad to attack Iran
The anonymous videographer is the person who caught the 19-second clip which shows a missile striking Flight PS752 shortly after take-off from Tehran’s Imam Khomenei airport at around 6.15 am. This person, who remains silent during the filming while smoking a cigarette (the smoke briefly wafts over the screen), is standing in the suburb of Parand looking northwest. His location was verified by the NY Times using satellite data. The rapid way the newspaper’s technical resources were marshaled raises a curious question about how a seemingly random video submission was afforded such punctilious attention.
But the big question which many people on social media are asking is: why was this “videographer” standing in a derelict industrial area outside Tehran at around six o’clock in the morning with a mobile phone camera training on a fixed angle to the darkened sky? The airliner is barely visible, yet the sky-watching person has the camera pointed and ready to film a most dramatic event, seconds before it happened. That strongly suggests, foreknowledge.
Given that something awful has just been witnessed it is all the more strange that the person holding the camera remains calm and unshaken. There is no audible expression of shock or even the slightest disquiet.
Turns out that Nariman Gharib, the guy who received the video and credited by the NY Times for submitting it, is a vociferous anti-Iranian government dissident who does not live in Iran. He ardently promotes regime change in his social media posts.
Also read: Were Russians Spying on Qassem Soleimani assassination discussions at Mar-a-Lago
Christiaan Triebert, the NY Times’ video expert, who collaborated closely with Gharib to get the story out within hours of the incident, previously worked as a senior investigator at Bellingcat. Bellingcat calls itself an independent online investigative journalism project, but numerous critics accuse it of being a media adjunct to Western military intelligence. Bellingcat has been a big proponent of media narratives smearing the Russian and Syrian governments over the MH17 shoot-down in Ukraine in 2014 (believed to be brought down by British Secret Service) and chemical weapons attacks.
Bellingcat gets funding from the US government’s regime change promotion outfit, the national endowment for democracy. So I am shocked that Bellingcat would publish smears against people opposed to US wars and regime change efforts.
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Russian FM Sergey #Lavrov: As we know, and it’s not a secret for anyone, as even Western journalists openly write about this, @bellingcat is linked to special services. It is used to dump information that may have some influence on public opinion
304 people are talking about this
Bellingcat’s open support for foreign military intervention and tendency to promote NATO/U.S. war propaganda are unsurprising when one considers how the group is funded and the groups with which it regularly collaborates.
For instance, Bellingcat regularly works with the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), which –according to the late journalist Robert Parry – “engages in ‘investigative journalism’ that usually goes after governments that have fallen into disfavor with the United States and then are singled out for accusations of corruption.” OCCRP is notably funded by USAID and the controversial George Soros-funded Open Society Foundations.
In addition, Bellingcat’s founder Eliot Higgins isemployed by the Atlantic Council, which is partially funded by the U.S. State Department, NATO and U.S. weapons manufacturers. It should come as little surprise then that the results of Bellingcat’s “findings” often fit neatly with narratives promoted by NATO and the U.S. government despite theirpoor track record in terms of accuracy.
In the latest shoot-down of the airliner above Tehran, the tight liaison between a suspiciously placed anonymous videographer on the ground and an expatriate Iranian dissident who then gets the prompt and generous technical attention of the NY Times suggests a level of orchestration, not, as we are led to believe, a random happenstance submission. More sinisterly, the fateful incident was a setup.
It seems reasonable to speculate that in the early hours of January 8 a calamitous incident was contrived to happen. The shoot-down occurred only four hours after Iran attacked two US military bases in Iraq. Those attacks were in revenge for the American drone assassination on January 3 of Iran’s top military commander, Maj. General Qassem Soleimani.
Subsequently, Iranian air-defense systems were on high alert for a possible counter-strike by US forces. Several reports indicate that the Iranian defense radars were detecting warnings of incoming enemy warplanes and cruise missiles on the morning of 8 January. It does seem odd why the Iranian authorities did not cancel all commercial flights out of Tehran during that period. Perhaps because civilian airliners can normally be differentiated by radar and other signals from military objects.
However, with the electronic warfare (EW) technology that the United States has developed in recent years it is entirely feasible for enemy military radars to be “spoofed” by phantom objects. One such EW developed by the Pentagon is Miniature Air-Launched Decoy (MALD) which can create deceptive signals on enemy radar systems of incoming warheads.
What we contend therefore is this: the Americans exploited a brink-of-war scenario in which they anticipated Iranian air-defense systems to be on a hair-trigger. Add to this tension an assault by electronic warfare on Iranian military radars in which it would be technically feasible to distort a civilian airliner’s data as an offensive target. The Iranian military has claimed this was the nature of the shoot-down error. It seems plausible given the existing electronic warfare used by the Pentagon.
It’s a fair, albeit nefarious, bet that the flight paths out of Tehran were deliberately put in an extremely dangerous position by the malicious assault from American electronic warfare. A guy placed on the ground scoping the outward flight paths – times known by publicly available schedules – would be thus on hand to catch the provoked errant missile shot.
The shoot-down setup would explain why Western intelligence were so quick to confidently assert what happened, contradicting Iran’s initial claims of a technical onboard plane failure.
The disaster has gravely undermined the Iranian government, both at home and around the world. Protests have erupted in Iran denouncing the authorities and the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corp for “lying” about the crash. Most of the 176 victims were Iranian nationals. The anger on the streets is being fueled by the public comments of Western leaders like Donald Trump, who no doubt see the clamor and recriminations as an opportunity to push harder for regime change in Iran.
Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich and Finian Cunningham for Sputnik International with inputs from GreatGameIndia, a journal on Geopolitics and International Relations. Get to know the Geopolitical threats India is facing in our exclusive book India in Cognitive Dissonance.
Send in your tips and submissions by filling out this form or write to us directly at the email provided. Join us on WhatsApp for more intel and updates.
We need your support to carry on our independent and investigative research based journalism on the external and internal threats facing India. Your contribution however small helps us keep afloat. Kindly consider donating to GreatGameIndia.
Can any one throw some light on the alleged EW setup discussed in the above post?
What kind of hardware (pods) are available right now which are capable of doing this - if publicly known.
If it's possible to paint a civilian jet as hostile to a radar, this is a huge problem -
imagine this being used in case of a war, the ground radars will be clueless on whom to target and there will be shitload of friendly fires.
Is there any way to prove this hypothesis, viz. the blackbox data - will the blackbox have any related information?
Russian minister Lavrov disclosed that their radars detected 6 F-3 around Iranian airspace during the incident. It is assumed that the electronic warefare was done by the EW suite in F-35 that supressed the ground based radars and the airplane communication suite, which led to the airplane not being able to be identified by the ground radars as a plane, which led them to shoot it down thinking it was a missile.
Really dirty if this has happened. Slaughtering innocents to gain a political advantage over Iran was the worst thing that USA could have done.
This is the norm. I 100% believe this. Because it is also pointing in that direction since it was rather odd that the journalist who captured it was awake at a rather odd hour in the morning and pointing his camera at the exact spot even before the missiles hit the airplane, almost like he knew it would happen. Turns out he was also an anti-regime journalist by his social media posts.
Doosra pilot REDUX on BAT team terrorists.
@Arsalan123 Apne Hi Pyjama chaap army ke logon ko pel Diya pok ke gaon walon ne Dar ke maare....
@Arsalan123 Apne Hi Pyjama chaap army ke logon ko pel Diya pok ke gaon walon ne Dar ke maare....
It was a fratricide made to look like a AccidentGafoora had an accident. Or was it an attack on his life...
Gafoora is in critical condition after that accident...
Now who will spill the beans for us....
Bones of chest? Someone ought to slap this chap for murdering the English language.
Gafoora is in critical condition after that accident...
Now who will spill the beans for us....
should have said ribs.. but he wanted to include the word "broken bones" I guess..
