Iran captures US Drone
puremagic
Posts: 1,907
I might have to go with Iran’s version as this plane doesn’t seem to show any signs of a damaged plane subjected to a crash.
Iran shows film of captured US drone
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-16098562
Iranian TV has shown the first video footage of an advanced US drone aircraft that Tehran says it downed near the Afghan border.
Images show Iranian military officials inspecting the RQ-170 Sentinel stealth aircraft which appears to be undamaged.
US officials have acknowledged the loss of the unmanned plane, saying it had malfunctioned.
However, Iranian officials say its forces electronically hijacked the drone and steered it to the ground.
Iran shows film of captured US drone
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-16098562
Iranian TV has shown the first video footage of an advanced US drone aircraft that Tehran says it downed near the Afghan border.
Images show Iranian military officials inspecting the RQ-170 Sentinel stealth aircraft which appears to be undamaged.
US officials have acknowledged the loss of the unmanned plane, saying it had malfunctioned.
However, Iranian officials say its forces electronically hijacked the drone and steered it to the ground.
SIN EATERS--We take the moral excrement we find in this equation and we bury it down deep inside of us so that the rest of our case can stay pure. That is the job. We are morally indefensible and absolutely necessary.
Post edited by Unknown User on
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Iran will give the drone to China...
You will be able to buy a drone from Wal-Mart next Christmas.
Hail, Hail!!!
The aircraft shown on Iranian television today was not the American stealth drone that crashed in Iran last week, as the Iranian government claimed, but was likely just a model, U.S. officials told ABC News.
Minutes after a Pentagon spokesperson said that military personnel and others were examining the footage broadcast today of what appeared to be an undamaged stealth RQ-170 Sentinel, multiple U.S. officials said that based on inconsistencies with the design of the drone, along with clues from imagery of the actual drone's crash site, the drone shown was not the Sentinel. U.S. officials previously confirmed that an RQ-170 did, in fact, crash land somewhere in Iran.
For nearly an hour, Iran's Press TV played and replayed footage of two uniformed military men examining the pristine-looking cream-colored frame of what was supposedly the RQ-170.
The Iranian military had claimed it was able to bring down the drone with little damage through a cyber attack as it was flying through Iranian airspace last week. U.S. military officials said the drone was not flying over Iran, but rather in western Afghanistan, and suffered an innocent malfunction before gliding into Iranian airspace. Today U.S. officials said the drone did not land intact.
Pentagon spokesperson Capt. John Kirby told reporters Monday there was no indication the drone was brought down by "hostile activity of any kind."
U.S. officials told ABC News Tuesday the drone had been on a secret surveillance mission for the Central Intelligence Agency when its operators lost control. The CIA declined to comment both when Iran claimed to have the drone and after video surfaced today. Iran's semi-official Fars News Agency reported that the drone was designed to automatically destroy sensitive data in the case of a malfunction, but in this case it "failed to do so."
The RQ-170, known as the Beast of Kandahar, is one of America's most advanced unarmed surveillance drones -- so sensitive that the Air Force did not even acknowledge its existence until late 2009. It was reportedly used to keep tabs on the man believed to be Osama bin Laden during the Navy SEAL mission that took out the terror leader in Pakistan in May.
take a good look
this could be the day
hold my hand
lie beside me
i just need to say
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
not an RQ-170.
...
Paint should be non-reflective grey and marked with U.S. markings and maintenence nomenclature. The leading edge should show some moderate to significant damage due to a gear up landing in the desert. and the Iranians have gone through a lot of work to mask the undercarriage.
An RQ-170 may or may not have been lost over Iran... but, this ain't it.
The Air Force needs to send in an F-22 to hit the crash site with a couple of 2,000lb AG ordinances
Hail, Hail!!!
Hehehe
----
Anyone catch the Daily Show last night?
http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/wed-d ... -of-drones
Do you have evidence to support that comment?
Nope?
Thought not.
Anyone could be mistaken for thinking that the build up to the invasion of Iraq and the lies spewed by our governments never happened. Then again, 9 years is a very long time in some people's minds. Almost qualifies as ancient history.
Honestly, B, it's impressive just how stubborn you can be in ignoring reality. They're building a bomb. The whole world knows it. It's just kinda ridiculous that you haven't caught on by now. Embarrassing even.
And from a purely logical perspective, there's a pretty glaring flaw in an argument that essentially says that if something is not true about A then it must also not be true about B. You know, cause A and B aren't the same.
FIXED
Edit: although I think I read it wrong and that is your meaning.
Whoa! Impressed with your post Cosmo- not that that will win you any friends around here...
Also, do you have any evidence that reports on Iran's nuclear program are untrue?
Nope?
Thought not.
Actually... many people here know I'm a well worn gear in massive machinery of the Military-Industrial Complex. I'm not anti-corporation, anti-military, anti-America... I am, anti-War. I believe in a DEFENSE of our nation and the principles of our Constitution... not our CHOOSING to use force for socio-economic expansion into other people's nations for our benefit, not theirs.
I'm okay if some call me hypocrite. I also work on the planes that take those same people from airport to airport to visit their loved one... so, they can suck my bunghole.
Hail, Hail!!!
Wouldn't that be a war-like provocation?...and a choice to go down a path that would, according to the hawks, result in socio-economic expansion? Or were you being facetious?
IAI embarks on drone-manufacturing venture with Russia
By YAAKOV KATZ
12/23/2010 02:25
http://www.jpost.com/Defense/Article.aspx?id=200639
Russia to independently manufacture advanced Israeli drones, after Israel delivers 12 unmanned aerial vehicles in a $53 million deal.
Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) has completed the delivery of a dozen unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) to Russia, paving the way for the implementation of a joint venture under which Russia will independently manufacture advanced Israeli drones.
In a $53 million deal signed last year, Israel completed the delivery of 12 UAVs, including the Bird-Eye 400 and the I-View Mk 150, both used for close-range tactical missions, as well as the Searcher II UAV, used for long-range missions.
As part of the deal, IAI trained about 50 Russian pilots at its headquarters near Ben- Gurion Airport. Russia became interested in Israeli-made drones following its 2008 war with Georgia, which used Israeli drones at the time.
Defense officials confirmed that Israel has also decided to allow the Russians to independently manufacture the Heron 1, one of Israel’s most advanced reconnaissance drones. The Heron 1 is used for strategic missions and can carry a wide-range of sensors.
The production line in Russia is being established under a $400 million joint venture signed between IAI and Russian defense group OPK Oboronprom in October.
Ummmm... Noooooo...
If the Iranian Army loads up their ships and planes and comes over here... then yes, bomb the heck out of their military for trying to invade us.
For us to go over there as a proxy spy for Israel, for example... not so much.
Defense of the nation means defense. It does not mean unilateral first strikes... or military occupation... or gunship diplomacy.
...
I re-read my comment and still can't figure out how you got that of of what I wrote.
Hail, Hail!!!
I agree with your last post, of course.
There's no evidence.
Although I understand that the Israeli's are chomping at the bit to start another war. It's what they love.
What reports are you referring to?
Even the latest report cited zero evidence of Iran's building a nuclear bomb.
Not that I'd blame them for trying to build a bomb. It's the logical thing to do when faces by constant threats from Israel and the U.S.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree ... NTCMP=SRCH
If you lived in Iran, wouldn't you want the nuclear bomb?
The best way for the US to stop Iran developing nuclear weapons is to dial down the rhetoric and adopt some diplomacy
Mehdi Hasan
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 17 November 201
Imagine, for a moment, that you are an Iranian mullah. Sitting crosslegged on your Persian rug in Tehran, sipping a cup of chai, you glance up at the map of the Middle East on the wall. It is a disturbing image: your country, the Islamic Republic of Iran, is surrounded on all sides by virulent enemies and regional rivals, both nuclear and non-nuclear.
On your eastern border, the United States has 100,000 troops serving in Afghanistan. On your western border, the US has been occupying Iraq since 2003 and plans to retain a small force of military contractors and CIA operatives even after its official withdrawal next month. Pakistan, a nuclear-armed nation, is to the south-east; Turkey, America's Nato ally, to the north-west; Turkmenistan, which has acted as a refuelling base for US military transport planes since 2002, to the north-east. To the south, across the Persian Gulf, you see a cluster of US client states: Bahrain, home to the US Fifth Fleet; Qatar, host to a forward headquarters of US Central Command; Saudi Arabia, whose king has exhorted America to "attack Iran" and "cut off the head of the snake".
Then, of course, less than a thousand miles to the west, there is Israel, your mortal enemy, in possession of over a hundred nuclear warheads and with a history of pre-emptive aggression against its opponents.
The map makes it clear: Iran is, literally, encircled by the United States and its allies.
If that wasn't worrying enough, your country seems to be under (covert) attack. Several nuclear scientists have been mysteriously assassinated and, late last year, a sophisticated computer virus succeeded in shutting down roughly a fifth of Iran's nuclear centrifuges. Only last weekend, the "pioneer" of the Islamic Republic's missile programme, Major General Hassan Moghaddam, was killed – with 16 others – in a huge explosion at a Revolutionary Guards base 25 miles outside Tehran. You go online to discover western journalists reporting that the Mossad is believed to have been behind the blast.
And then you pause to remind yourself of the fundamental geopolitical lesson that you and your countrymen learned over the last decade: the US and its allies opted for war with non-nuclear Iraq, but diplomacy with nuclear-armed North Korea.
If you were our mullah in Tehran, wouldn't you want Iran to have the bomb – or at the very minimum, "nuclear latency" (that is, the capability and technology to quickly build a nuclear weapon if threatened with attack)?
Let's be clear: there is still no concrete evidence Iran is building a bomb. The latest report from the IAEA, despite its much discussed reference to "possible military dimensions to Iran's nuclear programme", also admits that its inspectors continue "to verify the non-diversion of declared nuclear material at [Iran's] nuclear facilities". The leaders of the Islamic Republic – from Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei to bombastic President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad – maintain their goal is only to develop a civilian nuclear programme, not atomic bombs.
Nonetheless, wouldn't it be rational for Iran – geographically encircled, politically isolated, feeling threatened – to want its own arsenal of nukes, for defensive and deterrent purposes? The US government's Nuclear Posture Review admits such weapons play an "essential role in deterring potential adversaries" and maintaining "strategic stability" with other nuclear powers. In 2006, the UK's Ministry of Defence claimed our own strategic nuclear deterrent was designed to "deter and prevent nuclear blackmail and acts of aggression against our vital interests that cannot be countered by other means".
Apparently, what is sauce for the Anglo-American goose is not sauce for the Iranian gander. Empathy is in short supply. As leading US nuclear policy analyst George Perkovich has observed: "The US government never has publicly and objectively assessed Iranian leaders' motivations for seeking nuclear weapons and what the US and others could do to remove those motivations." Instead, the Islamic Republic is dismissed as irrational and megalomaniacal.
But it isn't just Iran's leaders who are unwilling to back down on the nuclear issue. On Tuesday, around 1,000 Iranian students formed a human chain around the uranium conversion facility in Isfahan, chanting "Death to America" and "Death to Israel". Their protest may have been organised by the authorities but even the leaders and members of the opposition Green Movement tend to support Iran's uranium enrichment programme. According to a 2010 University of Maryland survey, 55% of Iranians back their country's pursuit of nuclear power and, remarkably, 38% support the building of a nuclear bomb.
So what is to be done? Sanctions haven't worked and won't work. Iranians refuse to compromise on what they believe to be their "inalienable" right to nuclear power under the Non-proliferation treaty. Military action, as the US defence secretary Leon Panetta admitted last week, could have "unintended consequences", including a backlash against "US forces in the region". The threat of attack will only harden the resolve for a nuclear deterrent; belligerence breeds belligerence.
The simple fact is there is no alternative to diplomacy, no matter how truculent or paranoid the leaders of Iran might seem to western eyes. If a nuclear-armed Iran is to be avoided, US politicians have to dial down their threatening rhetoric and tackle the very real and rational perception, on the streets of Tehran and Isfahan, of America and Israel as military threats to the Islamic Republic. Iranians are fearful, nervous, defensive – and, as the Middle East map shows, perhaps with good reason. As the old adage goes, just because you're paranoid, it doesn't mean they're not out to get you.
hmmm what treaties or agreement. even inspections has isreal agreed to in regard to nuclear weapons.
None. They deny having any. But everyone knows they have plenty. It seems that these criminals will remain unacountable as long a A.I.P.A.C controls the U.S congress.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree ... NTCMP=SRCH
War on Iran has already begun. Act before it threatens all of us
Escalation of the covert US-Israeli campaign against Tehran risks a global storm. Opposition has to get more serious
طالع المقال بالعربية
Seumas Milne
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 7 December 2011
They don't give up. After a decade of blood-drenched failure in Afghanistan and Iraq, violent destabilisation of Pakistan and Yemen, the devastation of Lebanon and slaughter in Libya, you might hope the US and its friends had had their fill of invasion and intervention in the Muslim world.
It seems not. For months the evidence has been growing that a US-Israeli stealth war against Iran has already begun, backed by Britain and France. Covert support for armed opposition groups has spread into a campaign of assassinations of Iranian scientists, cyber warfare, attacks on military and missile installations, and the killing of an Iranian general, among others.
The attacks are not directly acknowledged, but accompanied by intelligence-steered nods and winks as the media are fed a stream of hostile tales – the most outlandish so far being an alleged Iranian plot to kill the Saudi ambassador to the US – and the western powers ratchet up pressure for yet more sanctions over Iran's nuclear programme.
The British government's decision to take the lead in imposing sanctions on all Iranian banks and pressing for an EU boycott of Iranian oil triggered the trashing of its embassy in Tehran by demonstrators last week and subsequent expulsion of Iranian diplomats from London.
It's a taste of how the conflict can quickly escalate, as was the downing of a US spyplane over Iranian territory at the weekend. What one Israeli official has called a "new kind of war" has the potential to become a much more old-fashioned one that would threaten us all.
Last month the Guardian was told by British defence ministry officials that if the US brought forward plans to attack Iran (as they believed it might), it would "seek, and receive, UK military help", including sea and air support and permission to use the ethnically cleansed British island colony of Diego Garcia.
Whether the officials' motive was to soften up public opinion for war or warn against it, this was an extraordinary admission: the Britain military establishment fully expects to take part in an unprovoked US attack on Iran – just as it did against Iraq eight years ago.
What was dismissed by the former foreign secretary Jack Straw as "unthinkable", and for David Cameron became an option not to be taken "off the table", now turns out to be as good as a done deal if the US decides to launch a war that no one can seriously doubt would have disastrous consequences. But there has been no debate in parliament and no mainstream political challenge to what Straw's successor, David Miliband, this week called the danger of "sleepwalking into a war with Iran". That's all the more shocking because the case against Iran is so spectacularly flimsy.
There is in fact no reliable evidence that Iran is engaged in a nuclear weapons programme. The latest International Atomic Energy Agency report once again failed to produce a smoking gun, despite the best efforts of its new director general, Yukiya Amano – described in a WikiLeaks cable as "solidly in the US court on every strategic decision".
As in the runup to the invasion of Iraq, the strongest allegations are based on "secret intelligence" from western governments. But even the US national intelligence director, James Clapper, has accepted that the evidence suggests Iran suspended any weapons programme in 2003 and has not reactivated it.
The whole campaign has an Alice in Wonderland quality about it. Iran, which says it doesn't want nuclear weapons, is surrounded by nuclear-weapon states: the US – which also has forces in neighbouring Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as military bases across the region – Israel, Russia, Pakistan and India.
Iran is of course an authoritarian state, though not as repressive as western allies such as Saudi Arabia. But it has invaded no one in 200 years. It was itself invaded by Iraq with western support in the 1980s, while the US and Israel have attacked 10 countries or territories between them in the past decade. Britain exploited, occupied and overthrew governments in Iran for over a century. So who threatens who exactly?
As Israel's defence minister, Ehud Barak, said recently, if he were an Iranian leader he would "probably" want nuclear weapons. Claims that Iran poses an "existential threat" to Israel because President Ahmadinejad said the state "must vanish from the page of time" bear no relation to reality. Even if Iran were to achieve a nuclear threshold, as some suspect is its real ambition, it would be in no position to attack a state with upwards of 300 nuclear warheads, backed to the hilt by the world's most powerful military force.
The real challenge posed by Iran to the US and Israel has been as an independent regional power, allied to Syria and the Lebanese Hezbollah and Palestinian Hamas movements. As US troops withdraw from Iraq, Saudi Arabia fans sectarianism, and Syrian opposition leaders promise a break with Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas, the threat of proxy wars is growing across the region.
A US or Israeli attack on Iran would turn that regional maelstrom into a global firestorm. Iran would certainly retaliate directly and through allies against Israel, the US and US Gulf client states, and block the 20% of global oil supplies shipped through the Strait of Hormuz. Quite apart from death and destruction, the global economic impact would be incalculable.
All reason and common sense militate against such an act of aggression. Meir Dagan, the former head of Israel's Mossad, said last week it would be a "catastrophe". Leon Panetta, the US defence secretary, warned that it could "consume the Middle East in confrontation and conflict that we would regret".
There seems little doubt that the US administration is deeply wary of a direct attack on Iran. But in Israel, Barak has spoken of having less than a year to act; Binyamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, has talked about making the "right decision at the right moment"; and the prospects of drawing the US in behind an Israeli attack have been widely debated in the media.
Maybe it won't happen. Maybe the war talk is more about destabilisation than a full-scale attack. But there are undoubtedly those in the US, Israel and Britain who think otherwise. And the threat of miscalculation and the logic of escalation could tip the balance decisively. Unless opposition to an attack on Iran gets serious, this could become the most devastating Middle East war of all.
Right next to the American flag
(made in china)
We want our drone back!
"If you were Iran, and Pres O asked you to return our drone, what would you say??" Ari Fleischer, GOP public relations strategist and former spokesman for the George W. Bush White House, asked on Twitter.
"'O: I asked Iran 2 return drone & we'll see how they respond," Fleischer wrote in another Twitter post mocking the request. Ronald Reagan "didn't ask Iran 2 return hostages. Iran feared him, so they were freed."
http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/envoy/obama ... 35747.html