SOURCE | here
America’s Flight 17
The time the United States blew up a passenger plane—and tried to cover it up.
By Fred Kaplan
Secretary of Defense Frank Carlucci answers questions from the press regarding the downing of Iran Air Flight 655 at the Pentagon on Aug. 19, 1988.
Photo by Josn Oscar Sosa/U.S. Federal Government
SELECTED EXTRACTS ONLY
[... ] ... it’s worth looking back at another doomed passenger plane—Iran Air Flight 655—shot down on July 3, 1988, not by some scruffy rebel on contested soil but by a U.S. Navy captain in command of an Aegis-class cruiser called the Vincennes.
[...] ... and one of the Pentagon’s most inexcusable disgraces.
[...] ... the Iranian Airbus A300 wandered into a naval skirmish—one of many clashes in the ongoing “Tanker War” (another forgotten conflict)—in the Strait of Hormuz.
[...] ... the U.S. Navy captain, Will Rogers III, mistook the Airbus for an F-14 fighter jet.
[...] ... the American SM-2 surface-to-air missile that downed the Iranian plane killed 290 passengers, including 66 children.
[...] after the 1988 incident, American officials told various lies and blamed the Iranian pilot. Not until eight years later did the U.S. government compensate the victims’ families, and even then expressed “deep regret,” not an apology.
The USS Vincennes returns from deployment on Oct. 24, 1988, just months after shooting down Iran Air Flight 655 over the Strait of Hormuz.
Photo by Ronald W. Erdrich/U.S. Navy
As the Boston Globe’s defense correspondent at the time, I reported on the Vincennes shoot-down, and I have gone back over my clips, chronicling the official lies and misstatements as they unraveled.
Here’s the truly dismaying part of the story. On Aug. 19, 1988, nearly seven weeks after the event, the Pentagon issued a 53-page report on the incident. Though the text didn’t say so directly, it found that nearly all the initial details about the shoot-down—the “facts” that senior officials cited to put all the blame on Iran Air’s pilot—were wrong. And yet the August report still concluded that the captain and all the other Vincennes officers acted properly.
For example, on July 3, at the first Pentagon press conference on the incident, Adm. William Crowe, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that the Iranian plane had been flying at 9,000 feet and descending at a “high speed” of 450 knots, “headed directly” for the Vincennes. In fact, however, the Aug. 19 report—written by Rear Adm. William Fogarty of U.S. Central Command—concluded (from computer tapes found inside the ship’s combat information center) that the plane was “ascending through 12,000 feet” at the much slower speed of 380 knots. “At no time” did the Airbus “actually descend in altitude,” the report stated.
When I pointed out this discrepancy at the press conference where the report was handed out, Secretary of Defense Frank Carlucci waved me away and said, “It’s really questionable whether a different reading would have affected the judgment” to shoot down the plane. (I still find this astonishing.)
There were other equally disturbing discrepancies between Crowe’s July 3 press conference (which struck me as suspicious even at the time) and Fogarty’s Aug. 19 report. Crowe had said the plane was flying “outside the prescribed commercial air route”; the report said it was flying “within the established air route.” Crowe had said the plane’s transponder was “squawking” a code over the “Mode 2” military channel; the report stated that it was squawking over the “Mode 3” civilian channel. Crowe had said the Vincennes issued several warnings; the report confirmed this, but noted, “Due to heavy pilot workload during take-off and climb-out, and the requirement to communicate with” two air traffic control centers, the pilot “probably was not monitoring” the international air-distress channel.
Adm. George B. Crist, head of U.S. Central Command, issued a “non-punitive letter of censure” to the ship’s anti–air warfare officer, but Secretary of Defense Carlucci withdrew the letter. Not only that, but two years later, Capt. Rogers was issued the Legion of Merit “for exceptionally meritorious conduct in the performance of outstanding service” as the Vincennes’ commander “from April 1987 to May 1989.”
One more shocking bit, which I didn’t know until just now: In 1992, four years after the event (and shortly after I moved on to a different beat), Adm. Crowe admitted on ABC’s Nightline that the Vincennes was in Iranian waters at the time it shot down the plane. Back in 1988, he and others had said that the ship was in international waters. It also came out that some other Navy officers had regarded Rogers as “aggressive” and found it strange that he was moving his Aegis cruiser into those waters to pursue Iranian patrol boats—overkill at best, asking for trouble in any case. The distractions of the chase, possibly combined with the fact that the Aegis radar-guided missile system was new at the time, may have led to his fatal misjudgment.
Not long after the shoot-down, Iran asked the United Nations Security Council to censure the United States for its “criminal act” against Iran Air Flight 655. Vice President George H.W. Bush, who was running to succeed Ronald Reagan as president, said on the campaign trail, “I will never apologize for the United States—I don’t care what the facts are.”
Finally, in 1996, President Bill Clinton’s administration expressed “deep regret” and paid the Iranian government $131.8 million in compensation, of which $61.8 million would go to the victims’ families. In exchange, Tehran agreed to drop its case against the United States in the International Court of Justice.
Many Iranians continued to believe, for many years, that the shoot-down was deliberate. They found it hard to believe that the United States Navy, with its polish and dazzle, could have committed such a ghastly deed by mistake. And they were ready to believe that America—“the Great Satan,” after all—was capable of such evil.
[ ... ]
First, things like this happen when the zones of war and normal life intersect. Best to avoid mingling the two or, if it can’t be helped, to hold the reins tight, as they slip out of control too easily.
More than this, it’s best to own up to horrible mistakes. America might have come away with a better image, at a crucial moment in Middle East conflicts, if President Reagan or George H.W. Bush had quickly acknowledged what was clear to several senior officers, admitted blame, and compensated the victims.
[...]
SOURCE | here
COMMENT
That was very interesting.
I would have read about this some time ago, but I have poor recall of the details. It was good revisiting.
The dishonesty, the cover-ups, and the arrogance shouldn't be surprising ... but I'm always shocked.
Iran Revolution 1979:
" ... royal reign collapsed shortly after on February 11 when guerrillas and rebel troops overwhelmed troops loyal to the Shah in armed street fighting, bringing Khomeini to official power."
"Iran voted by national referendum to become an Islamic Republic on April 1, 1979, and to approve a new theocratic-republican constitution whereby Khomeini became Supreme Leader of the country, in December 1979." [source | here ]
So the present Iran authorities (in power since 1979 revolution) accepted compensation 1996.
No use complaining that the US does not get prosecuted if governments are willing to accept compensation in exchange for dropping law suits.
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