The Iranian confession that their military shot down the Ukraine International Airlines plane near Tehran is the end of the matter as far as international diplomacy and the media is concerned. The official story then about what happened is this:

It’s 2am on January 8th 2020 and our guy is sitting in a Tor-M1 air-defense missile system about 10kms north-west of Imam Khomeini international airport, west of Tehran.

General Soleimani had been buried the day before, and in the last half-hour or so a couple dozen Iranian ballistic missiles had been fired from western Iran at two US bases in Iraq.

The entire Iranian military is on alert and stress levels are particularly high. There’s been a lot of chatter about a likely US response to the Iranian missiles and our guy is one of several teams positioned around Tehran tasked with shooting down anything on his radar screen that fits the profile. But as the hours pass without incident, he starts to doubt he’ll see any action – at least, not tonight.

By 6am the only thing he can report having seen on his radar screen are each of the 9 scheduled flights that departed the nearby airport that night. He watched them take normal flight paths off the northwest runway, climb into the clear night sky and then veer north or northeast. Since the Tor-M1 system he is operating is fitted with IFF (Identification Friend or Foe) functionality, he could even see their call signs. The second-to-last one was Qatar Airways Flight QR8408 heading for Hong Kong.

© flightradar24.com
Click to enlarge – Flight paths of the 10 flights that left Khomeini Airport that night (before, during and after the Iranian airstrikes)

Click to enlarge – Flight paths of the 10 flights that left Khomeini Airport that night (before, during and after the Iranian airstrikes)

The last flight that night would be Ukraine International Airlines Flight PS752 heading for Kiev. It departed one hour late at 6.12am, but followed the exact same initial flight path as the previous flights. As it climbed and reached 4,600ft above ground level, the plane’s transponder suddenly stopped working at about 6.14am, 2 minutes or so after take off. The plane then made a sharp right turn heading east and turning back around towards Tehran city, traveling another 15-20kms over 4 minutes before crashing into an area near a football field and exploding on impact.

For some as yet unknown reason, our guy had suddenly become convinced that the Boeing 737 was an ‘enemy target’. As per protocol, he had requested authorization to launch, but his superiors could not be reached because of ‘some problem with the communication network‘. Again according to protocol, he had a 10-second window in which to decide whether to launch or not. Still convinced the 737 was a cruise missile or enemy aircraft, he launched the two missiles that sealed the fate of the 178 people on board.

The Iranian government and military has taken full responsibility for the shooting down of Flight 752, but no one has yet explained why a presumably well-trained missile system operator, having watched 9 commercial airliners fly past him that night, was so convinced that the 10th one was an enemy target that he made a decision – by himself – to shoot it down.

Iran purchased 29 Tor-M1 air-defense systems from Russia in late 2005. In 2012, Wikileaks revealed that they may have quickly become compromised:

Unluckily for Iran, two years after their large purchase of M1s, the Russians rolled out Tor-M2E which, significantly upgraded, included “protection against spoofing.” As it relates to general internet usage, spoofing means:

“when a hacker or malicious individual impersonates another user or device on a network, duping users or systems into believing they are communicating or interacting with a different person or website.”

In military terms however, spoofing usually refers to radar-spoofing and involves capturing enemy radar signals and sending them back in an altered format in order to confuse the radar operator about what he is seeing.

A few years ago, US weapons manufacturers began rolling out these EW units for operational use by the US Navy and Air Force:

Note specifically what this technology is for:

“U.S. Navy airborne electronic warfare (EW) experts are continuing their support of radar-spoofing electronic warfare (EW) technology from Mercury Systems Inc. that can fool enemy radar systems with false and deceptively moving targets.”

That the anti-spoofing upgrade was added to the later version exposes a vulnerability in the Tor-M1 system that shot down the Ukrainian plane – a vulnerability which allowed an enemy to potentially “impersonate another [target] on a network, duping [operators] into believing they are communicating or interacting with a different [aircraft].”

Another way that the Tor-M1 system (and operator) could have been ‘spoofed’ that night is through alteration of the identifying signals sent by the transponder on the Ukrainian airliner. The newer ADS-B transponder systems that are today on most airliners are known to be vulnerable to hacking. Of most concern to transport authorities is the potential for hackers to inject ‘ghost aircraft’ into the ATC system, but it is equally possible for a hacker to inject data directly into the aircraft’s ADS-B so that it transmits false data about its identity, location, speed and direction.

In 2012, researchers from the Air Force Institute of Technology showed that a variety of “false injection” attacks can be readily coded on a commercial software-defined radio platform and launched from the ground or air with a cheap antenna. Attacks could cause aircraft to believe a collision is imminent, flood the airspace with hundreds of false transmissions, or prevent reception of legitimate messages.

Rich Kids of Tehran

Another curious part of the official story of the shoot-down of the Ukrainian plane involves a clique of Iranians who were responsible for documenting and distributing video footage of the missile launch and its impact with the plane, the crash, and photographs of what are allegedly the remains of the Tor-M1 missile.

On January 9th, an Instagram account called ‘Rich Kids of Tehran‘ – described as “a popular social media account showcasing Iran’s young and wealthy as they flaunt their wealth and jet around the world” – posted a video showing what was apparently a mid-air explosion. That same day, the New York Times contacted the administrator of the ‘Rich Kids of Tehran’ account and received the video in high resolution, and later confirmed its authenticity.

Additional footage subsequently released by unknown sources included CCTV camera footage from the vicinity of the crash site and which captured the moment of impact. A day later someone released alleged images of the missile that struck the plane.

Bellingcat analyzed the video footage and concluded that both videos were taken from a residential area in Parand, a suburb to the west of Imam Khomeini International Airport. Parand is a ‘planned city’ development outside Tehran that was built to house low-income families. Bellingcat also claims that the images of the missile are likely from the same Parand area.

Why one or more people associated with the ‘Rich Kids of Tehran’ – whose claim to fame in Iran is to be seen “brazenly driving Porsches and Maseratis through Tehran before the eyes of the poor” – happened to be in a low-income housing estate on the city’s outskirts at 6am on the morning of January 8th with cameras pointed at the right part of the sky in time to capture a missile hitting a Ukrainian passenger plane, is anyone’s guess. Although it is rather suspicious.

Who Would Induce Iran To Do This?

To have any chance of correctly understanding the shoot-down of the Ukrainian civilian airliner, it must be seen as a political rather than a military incident. A few days beforehand, the US had killed General Soleimani, an egregious attack on Iranian national pride. When Iran responded with pin-point accurate missile strikes on two US bases in Iraq, the score was – more or less – equal, as far as both parties were concerned.

You could argue, in fact, that Iran came out of the affair looking stronger and with more respect than when it entered. But all of that was undone with the shoot-down of the Ukrainian plane. Iran now appeared militarily inept, was forced to apologize to the world and protests groups in the country have used the tragedy to increase their calls for ‘regime change’.

The bottom line is that the claim that “panic and poor training” led the operator of the missile system to fire on a civilian airliner is not reasonable, particularly when a more reasonable explanation exists. The problem, however, is that the methods which were likely used to fool the operator left no trace or evidence that could be presented after the fact. Over the course of perhaps a couple of minutes, temporary and convincing data was presented to the operator and he acted on it.

So while Iran shot down the Ukrainian plane, it was not responsible for doing so. If you’re looking for those responsible, it would make sense to look to those who have been most vocal about the Iranian threat over a long period of time, have the most to gain from making Iran ‘look bad’, and who have a track record – a motto even – of waging war, or achieving their geopolitical goals, by deception.

Or we could look back 19 years at a report produced by the School for Advanced Military Studies at Fort Leavenworth that details a plan for enforcing a major Israeli-Palestinian peace accord which would require about 20,000 well-armed troops stationed throughout Israel and a newly-created Palestinian state.

The day after two US drones fired missiles that killed Iranian general Qassem Soleimani, President Trump gave a press conference where he explained his action by saying: “We took action last night to stop a war. We do not take action to start a war.”

To what war was Trump referring?

In the run-up to the 2016 US presidential election, Trump’s ‘America First’ policy spooked the Israelis because it reeked of isolationism and possible divestment from the Middle East. As everyone (or at least everyone in Israel) ‘knows’, if the US left the Middle East, Israel would soon be ‘overrun by Muslim hordes’ and left with little option but to use its ‘Samson Option‘ and take as many of its Arab ‘enemies’ down with it.

These fears were assuaged, to some extent, by Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Iranian nuclear deal, turn the sanction screws on Tehran, and move the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. Of course, these favors to Israel were, to a large extent, purchased in advance by way of a $25 million Trump campaign donation (the largest donor to any campaign in 2016) by Jewish casino mogul Sheldon Adelson. After Trump’s election win, Adelson gave another $5 million to his inauguration, the largest single presidential inaugural donation ever made. According to US politician Newt Gingrich, Adelson’s “central value” is Israel, and given that in 2013 Adelson said that the US “should drop a nuclear bomb on Iran”, I’m inclined to believe Gingrich.

But Israeli pathological fears of abandonment by the goyim are deeply entrenched and impossible to dispel, and no doubt were reawakened by a November 2018 interview that Trump gave to the Washington Post. When Trump was asked about whether sanctions should be imposed on Saudi Arabia for the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, he responded: [emphasis mine]

“I just feel that it’s very, very important to maintain that relationship [with Riyadh]. It’s very important to have Saudi Arabia as an ally, if we’re going to stay in that part of the world. Now, are we going to stay in that part of the world?**One reason to is Israel. Oil is becoming less and less of a reason, because we’re producing more oil now than we’ve ever produced. So, you know, all of a sudden it gets to a point where you don’t have to stay there.”**

The 2003 invasion and destruction of Iraq and removal of Saddam Hussein was a plot hatched by US/Israeli Neocons to do away, once and for all, with (among other things) Ba’athism, an ideology that sought to unite several Middle Eastern nations under [nominally] secular, socialist pan-Arabism (a serious threat to Israel). While the chaos spread by the US invasion and occupation achieved that goal, it also opened the way for Iran to increase its influence among Iraq’s Shia Muslims – who constitute 65% of that country’s population – and who had been held in check by Saddam, a Sunni Muslim (Iran is 90% Shia). Over the last 10 years, this growing Iranian influence has led to increasingly strident calls from Israel for ‘something to be done’ about Iran.

In the last year we have seen repeated Israeli airstrikes on what are labeled ‘Iranian military targets’ across the Levant, including several Israeli airstrikes on Syria, Iraq and Lebanon, multiple coordinated attacks on oil tankers in the Persian Gulf – which, though initially blamed on Iran, did not provoke a war because regional investigations ‘proved inconclusive’ – and what was likely an Israeli false-flag operation targeting major Saudi oil refineries (also tepidly blamed on Iran).

The primary reason for Israel’s increasing anxiety about Iran is the significant progress that Iran has made in forming political and military alliances inside Iraq (a direct result of the Israel-inspired destruction of the country by the US) and across the wider region, and the fact that it is today the only country in the region with the human and military resources (and intent) to pose a threat to the Jewish state’s desire for regional hegemony.

Recently released diplomatic cables dating from 2014-15 detail the extent of Iran’s influence inside the Iraqi government, showing how Iranian intelligence officers have co-opted much of the Iraqi government’s cabinet, infiltrated its military leadership, and even tapped into a network of sources once run by the CIA. In the 4-5 years since then, Iranian influence has only grown and, from an Israeli perspective, reached a ‘red line’ point where Iraq could be used as a staging ground for attacks on Israel.

Given this, and Trump’s talk of there being “less and less reason” for the US to remain in the Middle East combined with the upcoming Iraqi parliament vote to officially demand the removal of US forces from the country, it’s likely that the killing of Soleimani was a negotiated (by Trump) alternative to a relatively imminent, large-scale Israeli attack on Iranian assets in Iraq, and possibly Iran itself. Such an attack would have sparked a real war between Israel and Iran, which would inevitably have drawn in the US. This is, I propose, what Trump meant when he said that “we took action last night to stop a war.”

In this scenario, public statements made by Trump administration officials that killing Soleimani was necessary to stop “significant strikes against Americans” in the region can be understood as necessary lies to cover up the truth: that rather than protecting its own immediate interests, the US government was acting to prevent Israel from doing something dangerously irrational that would threaten the lives of millions in the Middle East and beyond.

What US officials privately told their Iranian counterparts soon after the assassination fits this scenario. Rear-Admiral Ali Fadavi, deputy commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, told Iranian state television that “the Americans resorted to diplomatic measures” the very next morning. Fadavi said Washington asked Tehran to respond “in proportion.” They “even said that,**if you want to get revenge, get revenge in proportion to what we did”** which makes the entire situation seem like something of a sordid geopolitical game. This evening, rockets were fired at the US ‘green zone’ in Baghdad. Perhaps that is Tehran’s proportionate response.

Then again, it’s possible that there is more than mere geopolitical pragmatism motivating certain members of the Trump administration…

Stay tuned…z

Brexit blather is back in the news again. To listen to politicians and media talking heads, you’d think it’s all rather complicated and ‘beyond the ken of mere mortals’. In reality, however, ‘Brexit’ is quite simple: for the last two and a half years, the British establishment is trying to make Brexit go away.

Don’t believe me? Explain why, then, that of the 650 UK Members of Parliament, about 70% come from constituencies where the majority of people voted for Brexit while among all Members of Parliament, about 70% have made it clear that they favor remaining in the EU.

In addition, the Conservative government which approved the referendum in 2015 was lead by David Cameron, who has always been against leaving the EU. His successor, Theresa May, who negotiated the pseudo-Brexit deal that would effectively keep the UK in the EU, and which was voted down yesterday by a massive majority in Parliament, is also against Brexit.

So the obvious reason why the last 2.5 years of British politics has been an utter farce, and why the British people find themselves in this current mess, is that while a majority of British citizens voted to leave the EU,a large majority of their MPs on both sides of the aisle (and the British ‘establishment’ itself) do not want to leave the EU and are determined to make sure it never happens. To claim otherwise would be to suggest that British politicians were as clueless about the nature of the UK’s relationship with the EU as British public. But that’s not the full story.

The decision that Brexit would not happen was taken immediately after the ‘yes’ vote in the referendum in 2016, and that fact was evident to anyone with eyes to see. The politiking of the last 2.5 years had little to do with Brexit and everything to do with internal UK political power games, i.e. British political party mandarins and individual politicians feathering their own nests with an eye on their future positions within the British political system, which they are sure will remain an integral part of the EU. The Conservative strategy so far has been to hold on to power by attempting to convince their voter base (who want Brexit) that Theresa May’s ‘deal’ is actually Brexit, when it clearly isn’t at all. The EU has been on exactly the same page as Theresa May all along.

At the same time, the main opposition Labour party has correctly seen ‘Brexit’ as their best chance to force both a no-confidence vote in May’s government and another snap general election to take power themselves. The no-confidence vote happened this evening and, as expected, the Conservatives survived given their slim majority in Parliament and the support of Northern Ireland’s ‘more British than the Queen’ Democratic Unionist Party (which has its own agenda to prevent the breakup of the United Kingdom and the reunification of Ireland. Basically, when Conservative politicians are asked if they have confidence in themselves, they’ll always answer ‘yes’.

It should be remembered that the only motivation for then Conservative Party leader David Cameron to ‘green light’ the Brexit referendum was these same internal political power considerations. At the time, the Conservative party was concerned that the ‘far-right’ UKIP party – which had been leading a decades-long campaign for the UK to leave the EU – would steal most of the country’s traditional Conservative voters (the majority of whom wanted to leave the EU) and effectively replace the Conservative party. That is why Cameron, even though he was an ardent ‘Remainer’, assented to the referendum. At the time, the bi-partisan British political establishment was convinced that – when it came down to it – the majority of voters would vote to remain in the EU. When a majority voted for Brexit, they were more than a little shocked.

But an important question that has been mostly overlooked throughout the Brexit face is, what, exactly, galvanized so many British people to vote to leave the EU definitively?

Given that most people have already taken a position on the topic, it seems a bit late in the day to be pointing this out, but there is now clear evidence to suggest that the ‘Russia hacked our election’ claim is not only entirely false. But the people who made the claim in the first place – members of the US intelligence, political and corporate establishment (as well as other ideologues) – were and are themselves the creators of the only “Russian troll” social media accounts that have actually been shown to have done any ‘hacking’.

A December 19th 2018 NY Times article reveals that a group of “Democratic tech experts” decided to use “similarly deceptive tactics” (as those imputed to Russian trolls) in the Alabama Senate race contested by Roy Moore in December 2017. An internal report on what is called the ‘Alabama effort’, obtained by The Times, says explicitly that it “experimented with many of the tactics now understood to have influenced the 2016 elections.” The project’s operators created a Facebook page on which they posed as conservative Alabamians, using it to try to divide Republicans and even to endorse a write-in candidate to draw votes from Mr. Moore. And how was the division sown?

“We orchestrated an elaborate ‘false flag’ operation that planted the idea that the Moore campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet,” the report says.

⋮

What is clear at this point is that, as soon as Trump was elected president (if not before), a cabal of former and serving intelligence and government operatives, along with some ideologically-possessed dupes like Jonathon Morgan, decided to launch a campaign to undermine Trump’s election win by smearing him as Russia agent (the now infamous Clinton/Steele Dossier) and accusing Russia of ‘subverting American democracy’ directly by both hacking the DNC emails and running a social media disinformation campaign on social media.

Over the two years since Trump’s election, the campaign has been expanded to include efforts to do precisely what the Washington establishment falsely accuses Russian of doing: subverting American democracy. It seems reasonable at this point to suggest that this was the plan all along. After all, increasing control over the thoughts and beliefs of the US population has always been the ‘bread and butter’ of the US ‘deep state’.

At the end of last month, someone working on the ASD’s ‘Alabama project’ leaked a copy of the project’s after-action report. It details that ASD:

• Used a strategy to “radicalize Democrats, suppress persuadable Republicans and faction moderate Republicans”, the operation sought to “move 50,000 votes”. That’s more than double the winning margin of 22,819 votes of Roy Moore’s opponent, Doug Jones.
• Over a 5-month period, the operation used a carefully crafted strategy including deploying non-attributable memes “targeting white, African-American and women voters”
• Targeted 650,000 Alabama voters with a combination of persona accounts, astroturfing, automated social media amplification and targeted advertising.
• Manufactured approximately 45,000 twitter followers, 350,000 retweets, 370,000 tweet favorites, 6,000 FB comments, 10,000 FB reactions, 300,000 Imgur upvotes and 10,000 Reddit upvotes.
• The report concludes: “In spite of its impact in the press and in voting outcomes, not a single story about our activities appeared in the any press outlet, including far-right internet conspiracy sites like infowars and Breitbart, prone to speculation about liberal interference in Republican politics.”

The project’s ‘Strategic Overview‘ states:

Our strategy was anchored on 3 goals:

• Enrage and energize Democrats using targeted messaging to likely voters in left-leaning districts across Alabama. Make sure they believe a victory in Alabama is possible.
• Suppress die-hard Republicans using relentless memes intended to provoke disgust and apathy coupled with targeted promotion of stories claiming a safe Republican victory. Either way, encourage them not to vote.
• Divide or persuade moderate Republicans by tackling Roy Moore’s extremism head on and promoting write-in candidates as principled alternative candidates

The report concludes with this:

Our sustained targeting of these likely voters had enormous effect on R[epublican] turnout in these countries. The R[epublican] depression in these countries was measurably higher compared to the rest of the State.

On 12 October 2000, while sitting in the port of Aden, Yemen, the USS Cole was allegedly attacked by some guy called al-Badawi and his accomplices. A small boat was allegedly loaded it with approximately 500lbs of explosives and some ready-made suicide bombers who then drove it alongside the Cole and…Kaboom. Below is a photo of the damage to the ship.

Media reports initially claimed that “conventional explosives” were used. That was generally understood to mean something like a ‘fertilizer bomb’ sufficiently unsophisticated for non-state actors and in keeping with attacks by others groups. Here’s an image of the damage caused by a typical 500lb ‘fertilizer bomb’. The bomb explodes outwards and upwards in all directions and the damage is widespread. As you have probably realized already, the damage to the Cole didn’t fit the profile of such a bomb, so soon after the attack the narrative changed:

Officials said examination of the Cole indicated that the explosive used was even more sophisticated than initially thought. The penetrating force and the damage deep in the interior strongly suggested that the bomb was a “shaped charge,” designed to focus the explosion rather than allow it to spread in all directions, as with a typical truck bomb, officials said.

“With every piece of information, it becomes a more sophisticated operation,” one official said.

The officials have not disclosed the specific type of device used, though the use of a directed explosive led to speculation that the device operated like an warhead. Such a device is a more sophisticated weapon than those used by most terrorist organizations, and possibly came from a military stockpile.

”I can’t think of a major terrorist operation that has involved, essentially, hardware of that magnitude,” said Daniel Benjamin, a former terrorism analyst on the National Security Council and now a senior fellow at the United States Institute of Peace in Washington.

At the time, the BBC reported that: “the [Yemeni] president said samples of explosives taken from the destroyer had been identified by US investigators as of a type available only in Israel, the USA, and two Arab countries” (two Arab countries that get it from the US or Israel). He further stated: “we believe Israel might be involved in such incidents.”

It’s all too easy for Western governments, their media and ‘NGOs’ to jerk the emotional chains of Western populations. A humanitarian crisis can be ongoing for years, but if Western governments have nothing to gain from it (or are partly responsible for it), the Western media says little about it and the populations of Western nations remain oblivious. If, on the other hand, Western governments decide that some beleaguered group of people should become the next humanitarian cause célèbre in service to some geopolitical intrigue, the Western press is activated and suddenly everyone is ‘up in arms’ with calls to ‘do something’ to help the poor [insert name of ethnic or religious group in specific geopolitical hotspot]. You could call it ‘humanitarian imperialism’.

The whole world has had several masterclasses in this kind of manipulation, from babies in incubators in Kuwait in 1991 to helping the poor Bosnian and Kosovar Muslims in Yugoslavia in 1999 to ’45 minutes to Iraqi WMD destruction’ in 2003, to the more recent and unsophisticated ploy of claiming that a given leader of a given nation is a ‘dictator killing his own people’. Despite these opportunities to inform themselves about how the world really works, like Pavlov’s dogs, the global population can still be relied on to react in the wrong way at the sounding of the ‘humanitarian’ bell.

Such is the case with the recent ‘humanitarian’ crisis in Myanmar where we’re told that the ‘Rohingya people’ are being persecuted by the Myanmar military, and in response a ‘formerly unknown group’, the ‘Rohingya Salvation Army’, began attacking Myanmar military posts on the border with Bangladesh in October 2016, killing policemen and provoking reprisals from Myanmar security forces that have continued this year, provoking the ‘humanitarian’ crisis that everyone in the West should be angry about. The source of the modern version of the crisis can be traced back to 2012 when riots broke out in Rakhine State when a Rakhine Buddhist woman was allegedly raped and murdered by Rohingya. Ten Rohingya were killed by Rakhine Buddhists in reprisal attacks. By August that year 57 Muslims and 31 Buddhists had been killed and an estimated 90,000 people were displaced by the violence. About 2,528 houses were also burned, 1,336 belonging to Rohingya Muslims and 1,192 to Rakhine Buddhists

While the Western media seems determined to present the situation in Rakhine State in the simplistic terms of a stateless people persecuted by the Myanmar authorities, the problem can only be understood in the context of the past and current geopolitical games that are being played by major world powers, most notably the USA.