Timothy C. May) wrote:
At 1:03 AM 9/2/96, Alan Horowitz wrote:
The Aegis ship in the Gulf wzs not in an exercise. It was in a war zone.
If my memory serves, the Iranian jetliner had its squawker turned off, or broken. The officer in charge in the CIC had about ten seconds to decide if he was about to be locked-on by a missle. And no real information to make the decision with.
The U.S.S. Vincennes shot down an Iranian commercial airliner that was in its normal and well-known flight path out of Bandar Abbas. <...>
As to the "squawker" being turned off, this is not my recollection of the case (though it was nearly a decade ago, so memories fade...).
If memory serves, the disinfo campaign following the Airbus incident put much emphasis on the plane's (allegedly) erratic, seemingly hostile behavior: it was said to be menacing a specific US ship in the convoy. It later turned out, I think, that the ship being menaced was a radar ghost fabricated by the Vincennes's AEGIS system. \t