Iran airs footage of US drone intact

Amazing news,  Moon of Alabama has the story:

To bring down the most sophisticated U.S. stealth drone known nearly completely intact is something very few other countries would be able to achieve. A real technical feat.

............

Press TV

Iran has announced that it intends to carry out reverse engineering on the captured RQ-170 Sentinel stealth aircraft, which is also known as the Beast of Kandahar, and is similar in design to a US Air Force B-2 stealth bomber.

The most interesting part to reverse engineer is probably not the drone itself but the sensor package and communication equipment it carries. Any decent engineer would love to get her hands on that. Reverse engineering it will save a ton of money one would otherwise have to be spend in research and development costs to achieve that knowledge.

There's much more where that came from at the link. Thanks b.

For background check out: US loses stealth drone over Iran – accident or mobile jamming?

About Annie Robbins

Annie Robbins is Writer-at-Large for Mondoweiss. She is a mother, a human rights activist and a ceramic artist. She lives in the SF bay area.
Posted in Iran, Israel/Palestine, US Policy in the Middle East

{ 84 comments... read them below or add one }

  1. so exciting HUGE news! incredible video

    • Theo says:

      Annie, I am curious, how old is that picture of you above?

      It seems most everyone uses pictures 20-30 years old and that is not honest.
      Be proud of your age, it usually bring positive changes in intelligence.

      • Taxi says:

        Theo,

        OBVIOUSLY you’re jealous cuz some people age better than others.

      • theo, the photo above was taken the same day adam emailed me to send in a picture, a week or two before the format changed. i went to my friends house around the corner and asked her to take a pic of me. however this photo was taken on my 50th birthday.

        i attended a protest at the same aipac conference allison wrote a report about, the protest was on monday night. in the comment section i posted some photos my friend rae abileah took that night. i commented that i was the person holding the pink banner. so you can search for the thread by clicking on the bottom of any of allison’s articles and take all the time you need comparing the two photos at your hearts content.

        ciao

        • LeaNder says:

          Annie, you mentioned an encounter with a woman from the opposite camp at the Aipac conference that seems to have left a vivid impression. You were still in the process of meditating, if you should write about it. Already the little you wrote about it sounded interesting.

        • yes leander, i have thought about it many times. perhaps i will write something. it was short but with meaning for me. thanks for remembering.

        • Theo says:

          Annie, if that picture is as recent as you say, then congratulations for staying so young, you look about 25 or so.
          I was just wondering, because Phillip Weiss has also a picture where he looks about 18 years old, however I know from videos how he really looks now.
          I though you all tried to be young again.

          Since I did not insult you there is no need for appology.

  2. Dan Crowther says:

    Wow, you gotta assume the bottom is a lil messed up, but no doubt they hacked into that things controls….. if Im the Israeli’s and the US, im thinking real hard about going after the Iranians

    • lobewyper says:

      Maybe they reverse-engineered the Stuxnet virus and now can control ALL of our drones!

    • Charon says:

      No kidding. Only bigots boast of having superior intelligence. For example:

      link to en.wikipedia.org

      Anybody who can compromise controls over an advanced US drone is obviously quite intelligent. I wouldn’t mess with Iran, they aren’t messing around. Especially considering their silence on the explosions which they claim were accidents. I don’t personally agree with their cultural ideologies, but they aren’t effing around.

      • dahoit says:

        What,that they acknowledge Allah as the guiding force in this world instead of Mammon?
        The Persian mind is as capable as any mind,as we are all humans,and the expressions of some as to the superiority of the western mind are laughable.

  3. ToivoS says:

    b. at Moonatalabama certainly called this one. Amazing, the damn thing doesn’t look damaged one bit. The Iranians really must have taken over control and landed it. I can’t imagine how they could have done this. Maybe it’s landing software was purchased from one of those companies that sell flight emulators. Imagine some aerospace contractors buying the software for a few hundred bucks and billing the DOD in 7 figure range.

    • . I can’t imagine how they could have done this.

      toivo, i imagine we’ve been flying over long enough they just collected lots of data til the broke a code or something. check ‘background’ link @ base of thread. the info was out there the russian sold them …

      While officials still refute the Iranian claims that they took the drone down electronically, Tehran did receive this mobile Russian jamming device six-weeks prior to the incident.

      there’s another link in there on the original, follow it. if they can jam our radar and figure out the code they can recode it and bring it in. i think, but i’m not a techie. that’s what i meant when i wrote Implications abound.

    • Duscany says:

      Maybe it wasn’t the Iranians who took control of the drone and landed it in their country. In situations like this, one always has to ask who profits. With a super-secret drone now in Iranian hands the US is now far more likely to attack Iran than previously. And who profits most from that? Israel.

      • no i don’t agree with that duscany. if there was evidence the iranians provoked the US possibly, but they have every right to eliminate a spy plane over their own country. iow, it was not an agressive act. it was deterring an aggression towards them.

        • Duscany says:

          I think you may have misread my post. I’m suggesting that the Iranians may have had nothing to do with the downing of the drone one way or the other. I’m wondering if perhaps this was a false flag operation by someone which wants us to attack Iran.

  4. seafoid says:

    American drone captured by vested interests

    link to youtube.com

  5. RE: “Iran airs footage of US drone intact”

    MY COMMENT: Dayum, that thing is haute! I want one! No, I want a
    whole fleet!

    P.S. Nice presentation, too! Those banners underneath the wings were gnarly. Decent production standards, but English subtitles would have been appreciated.

  6. lobewyper says:

    I think it would be splendid if the Iranian government offered to return that drone intact to President Obama, but only during a “friendship” visit to Tehran.

    • Hamishe_Sabz says:

      speaking of heads in clouds…

      On the flag behind the drone it says
      Death to USA
      Death to Israel
      Death to England.

      and another one says “We will put USA under our boot” or something like it.

      • Woody Tanaka says:

        “On the flag behind the drone it says
        Death to USA
        Death to Israel
        Death to England.”

        LOL. Given the history of these three countries, in their attacks against Iran and the Iranian people since at least 1953, can you blame them for this attitude?

        Because, you know, no American would do something similar, like, oh, I don’t know, faux singing “bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran” or anything like that. Only THEY are barbaric. WE are innocent fucking lambs.

        • Hamishe_Sabz says:

          i spent good part of my life there..are we barabaric ? i was tested for it and it came out negative…off course im just kidding. but just b/c you dont like your govt doesnt mean its enemy is a good guy….ppl here are so obssesed with anti israel US rhetoric that anything against them is good and pure…..
          you wear the special Occupation Glasses, through which the entire world can be seen refracted correctly where “occupation” is the central theme of everything you look at.

        • Woody Tanaka says:

          I do not believe that the Iranians are good guys. But I do understand that Americans, Israelis and the British are not innocents regarding Iran. I simply and saying that I cannot rightly condemn their rhetoric, given the history and give our rhetoric.

      • really Hamishe, fascinating.

    • I think it would be splendid if the Iranian government offered to return that drone intact to President Obama, but only during a “friendship” visit to Tehran.

      absolutely! but it isn’t loosing the drone that concerns the US, it is loosing the technology. and you can bet your bottom dollar they’ve already inspected it with a fine tooth comb and recorded everything.

  7. dimadok says:

    So Annie-you post and comment your own post? How cool is that!

    • lobewyper says:

      Not half so cool as your new nickname, “Hawkeye!”

    • Charon says:

      I don’t understand the purpose of your comment, dimadok. Doesn’t ‘your people’ love to not only mention but boast of their ‘accomplishments?’

      CHERRY TOMATOES! I LOVE CHERRY TOMATOES! THEY ARE SO MINIATURE! ISRAEL IS GREAT AND OUR HUMMUS TASTES BETTER AND ALSO SODA STREAM! AND INTEL! MY CAPS LOCK IS LOUD!

    • dimadok, i’ve been participating in the comments on my own posts for as long as i have been writing them (if you click the ‘View all posts by’) at the end of the post you can check them out and verify that.

      plus, i was so excited when i wrote this i was shaking, literally. i thought it was so exciting. but expressions like that are sometimes better shared in the comments. but yes, i almost always comment in the threads. glad you think it’s ‘cool’.

    • split says:

      Have a problem ” I don’t and expect to defend her point of view ,…
      ————————————————
      So Annie-you post and comment your own post? How cool is that!

  8. RoHa says:

    Ooops!

    I see a dent in one wing, and from the way the banners are arranged it looks as though they had to do a belly landing, but most of it looks intact.

    I can see a queue of military types from a bunch of countries lining up in Tehran to ask,
    (a) How did you do it?
    (b) What have you learned from it?

    And a lot of sick faces at the Pentagon.

    • i see them lined up waiting to buy the plans. from b @ the background link:

      Having acquired an only slightly damaged state of the art stealth drone Iran will be able to copy a lot of its technology as well as to find new measures against such drones. There will also bee a lot of interests from other sides into this technology. We can bet that the military attaches from the Russian, Chinese, Indian, Pakistani and other embassies are already queuing up in the Iranian Defense Ministry and ready to make some very lucrative offers.

      • RoHa says:

        “ready to make some very lucrative offers.”

        As others have suggested, those offers will not just be suitcases full of money [ pause for RoHa to drool at the thought ] but truckloads of S300 missiles and similar hardware, mutual defence pacts, strategically important trade deals, co-operation on setting up a gold-backed currency and oil bourse, etc.

        And political pressure on you-know-who.

        • offers will not just be suitcases full of money

          exactly roha. especially one might imagine for countries like pakistan whose citizens are victims of this technology. figuring out how they operate could be very valuable wrt defending oneself against them.

      • lobewyper says:

        The Chinese have lots of atomic weapons. They should trade one for the drone and that will be the end of the drumbeats for an attack on Iran…

        • RoHa says:

          I can’t see the Chinese handing over a nuclear weapon to another country. They will want to keep tight control over their nukes.

          Indeed, I have never heard of a country handing nuclear weaposn to a non-nuclear power. The closest case I know of is the co-operation between Britain and the US, but Britain was a nuclear power when that started.

          British and US scientists developed the first nuclear weapons in the US. The US then refused to share them with the UK. The UK developed its own, and subsequently the US began the current co-operation in respect of Polaris and Trident.

        • Memphis says:

          Canadian planes carried U.S nuclear weapons during the cold war. And also had nukes on Canadian soil

        • straightline says:

          Roha, the defense minister of one country (you know which) has, at least, negotiated about the sale of its nuclear weapons to another country – the latter being Apartheid South Africa.

          link to guardian.co.uk

        • Theo says:

          RoHa

          “British and US scientists developed….”.

          You are mistaken there, at the top only Oppenheimer was american, who was an adminiatrator of the Manhattan project.

          Teller and Szilárd was hungarian, Klaus Fuchs german, Marconi italian, etc.
          Without those european scientists the USA would not had a A-bomb in 1945 as no american physicist was capable to build one, they only assisted.

        • Theo says:

          To add to above:

          The same european scientists made the H-bomb for us, put us on the moon and earn for us a great percentage of Nobel Prizes.
          Praise should be where it belongs.

        • Woody Tanaka says:

          “The same european scientists made the H-bomb for us, put us on the moon…”

          Actually different European scientists. The ones who got us to the moon were on the Axis side during the war.

        • straightline says:

          Marconi? Do you mean Fermi? And there were Peierls (German born but naturalized Briton), Frisch (Austrian/British Jew), Ulam (Polish Jew), von Neumann (Hungarian), Oliphant and Titterton (Australian), Lawrence (American), Bethe (German/American), Bohr (Danish), Segre (Italian/American), Loomis (American), Compton (American), Chadwick (British), Einstein (German/American), Feynman (American), Penney (British), WIgner (Hungarian), Wilson (American), Wheeler (American) and many more.

          link to mphpa.org

          By the way, Oppenheimer was not an “administrator”, he was the Scientific Director.

        • RoHa says:

          “Canadian planes carried U.S nuclear weapons during the cold war”

          I didn’t know that.

          “And also had nukes on Canadian soil”

          In Canadian military bases, or US military bases in Canada?

          (But Canada is just a branch office of the USA, isn’t it?)

        • RoHa says:

          “Bohr (Danish), ”

          Bohr was smuggled out of Denmark to Sweden by the Danish resistance, along with nearly all of Denmark’s Jews. (No-one lifted a finger to help Jews, remember.) He was then flown to Britain in the bomb bay of an RAF Mosquito bomber. He neglected his oxygen equipment, and lost consciousness. The pilot guessed this, and descended to a low enough altitude to keep him alive.

          If I had to travel in the bomb rack of a Mosquito, I’d prefer to be unconscious.

        • Theo says:

          straightline

          You just confirmed my points.

          Mostly europeans who studied in european universities and brough technical knowhow to the US. Becoming american citizens did not change a bit of their scientific status, only their passports.

          Yes, I ment Fermi.

        • Theo says:

          Edward Teller was one of the scientists who worked on the A-bomb and he contructed the H-bomb with others from the Manhattan Project. Also the same.
          What I ment to say, european scientists did the same by putting us on the moon. Von Braun and the rest were germans.
          The USA grew and trived on brain imports from Europe and lately from Asia.
          It would be better to educate our own scientists and not crooked investment bankers.

        • straightline says:

          The situation has changed significantly since the Second World War. Now the best of US universities are, by and large, the best in the world, but in science and engineering they are relying increasingly on India, China, and the Middle East (including Iran) to supply them with graduate students:

          link to ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

          And increasingly these students are leaving after they graduate:

          link to businessweek.com

        • Theo says:

          Exactly what I said!

          In business administration, medicine, jura, etc. (Harvard, MIT), we are great, but those all belong to the “service industries”.
          The future lies in creating new things, that means physics, chemistry, engineering, etc., and there , as you say, we still rely on foreign brain.

          European companies train/educate their workers for three years to qualify, US companies avoid these expences and steal workers and professionals from other companies, mostly foreign.
          This worked as long as Europe, and now Asia, was poor and there was a financial incentive to stay or go to the USA.
          That is vanished in Europe and will in a few years in Asia.
          What will we do at that time, you cannot train top notch scientists in a few years, when there are no professors who are top.

        • MRW says:

          The US brought in the Nazi-era scientists (many Jews) and gave them new names and identities, buried their pasts. They installed them in Texas. There was a great expose about this recently. The 50-year statute of limitations was up in the first part of the aughts, and the story could be told. Our forces discovered things the Nazis were working on before and during the war that went far beyond anything we were familiar with. (Harper’s wrote a story in 1946 detailing it.)

    • Charon says:

      The imaginative part of my brain says that the good PTB gave this as-is to Iran in order to deter an attack. I’m probably wrong, but even if I’m wrong it proves that Iran is not at all ‘primitive’ as Israel would have the West believe. They possess the tech to hijack not only the drone’s signal but ‘land’ it relatively in tact for the most part. That is quite impressive. I think Iran is very safe regarding a third party attack on their nuclear sites. Unless Israel unilaterally decides to take action… which will be selfish and suicidal for all Israelis (and Palestinians).

      • re Iran as primitive —

        you mean the Iran that invented Zero, and algebra — that Iran?

        Joseph Campbell, the mythologist, nearly lost his mind when US landed on the moon and the best an astronaut could come up with was to recite a bible passage about god creating space er somthin’ . Campbell’s sanity was saved, however, when Houston ground control asked the crew aboard a space mission “Who is guiding the ship?” and the answer that came back was, “Newton, sir.”

        The Iranian mental construct is a hybrid– foundation is Zoroastrian, overlay is Islam. The troublesome aspects of the Hebrew & Christian scriptures — those that Ayn Rand, for example would have such a hard time with, like original sin and self abnegation — are NOT part of the unique Iranian mental set. Literature and rationality — observation of nature and extrapolation therefrom — ARE the essence of the Persian gestalt. Recall, the Magi — Persians — followed the star.

        You don’t hear Iranians crowing about how many Nobels they’ve won because they feel no compulsion to compensate for inadequacies. They are smart people in part because their world view has never been cluttered with self-destructive ideologies.

    • Kathleen says:

      unless it is a trojan drone.

      And if China wants drone technology they will or all ready have bought Us technology from Israel

      • Kathleen, it has taken about twenty minutes to finally figure out that “trojan drone” means ie. trojan horse, not trojan condom. I could NOT figure out why US would have sent a planeload of condoms over Iran.

        But on another topic — really conspiracy theory stuff so use your own discretion; I’m not sure WHAT to think:
        the drone was equipped with aerosol jets to spray viruses.
        the jigsaw puzzle pieces:

        [1]Russian Ambassador Vladimir Titorenko and two of his aides retuning from Syria were brutally assaulted and put in hospital by Qatar security forces aided by CIA and British MI6 agents attempting to gain access to diplomatic pouches containing information from Syrian intelligence that the
        [2] United States was flooding Syria and Iran with the same US-backed al Qaida mercenaries who toppled the Libyan government.

        Further evidence in these diplomatic pouches, this bulletin says, reveals that the [3] [if nuclear war broke out, US would] attack Syria and Iran with lethal biological agents intended to kill tens of millions of innocent civilians.

        [4]The discovery of the biological agent to be used by the West was revealed a fortnight ago by Dutch virologist Ron Fouchier of the Erasmus Medical Centre in the Netherlands who lead a team of scientists that discovered that a mere five mutations to the avian flu virus was sufficient to make it spread far more easily and would make it the most lethal killer of mankind ever invented.

        [5] [the bulletin claimed the] most likely method of delivery would be via RQ-170 Sentinel Drone . . .

        [6] [it is claimed that Russian analysts discovered that the Sentinel is] equipped with a sophisticated aerosol delivery system.

        Now most of that sounds bogus, hyperbolic, but wait maybe it has a grain of truth, after all US HAS used biological weapons before — against Native Americans, in World War I, and facilitated use of gas against Iran in 1980-88. So who knows?

        Then there’s jigsaw puzzle piece #7. At the Republican Jewish Committee candidate fest the other day, a pediatrician from Chicago, IL asked Michele Bachman to explain her stand on vaccines.

        Does anyone else find it curious that the use of vaccines should be a decisive issue for a candidate for president? Unless, of course, the pediatrician from Chicago knows something about what the US has in store for its enemies, and the goal of HIS profession is to ensure that the angel of the lord passes over those whose lintels are properly marked.

  9. kalithea says:

    If they really want to twist the knife, they should make another video of the drone with a Russian and Chinese counterpart analyzing and pointing with the VOLUME OFF!….lol! That would set teeth a gnashing at the Pentagon!

  10. Les says:

    Add from Moon of Alabama, that having used these for years over Iran to find evidence of atomic weapons research, the US has failed to find evidence that Iran is doing so. Why not make that information public?

    • Kathleen says:

      because Israel wants to take Iran down..balance of power issue. Does not matter what they find Israel will keep saying that Iran is or all ready has a nuclear weapons program.

      Libby and team took Plame out. She was allegedly .
      following WMD plans etc having to do with Iran

      they had to do an assessment of damage done to US national security via her outing. Will the public ever know what damage was done by Libby and team?

  11. chocopie says:

    Hope this is a wake-up call for some war-mongers in Israel and the US. Iran’s defense spending is used for actual defense and they haven’t frittered away their resources on occupation or multiple wars in distant lands. They are not exactly sitting ducks.

  12. Bumblebye says:

    On a news bulletin a couple hours ago, unnamed “defense analysts” quoted as saying the lack of damage meant it couldn’t possibly be real, must be some kind of hoax.
    Oh yes!! Of course!! NOT.

  13. hughsansom says:

    I look forward to the day when an Iranian drone goes down over some sensitive area in the US, and American media, politicians, and ‘academics’ scream and rave that the sky is falling, that Iran is committing an act of war by spying on the US, and on and on.

  14. irena says:

    After reverse-engineering, they should return it to Pentagon, that would be AMAZING.
    “Hey, we don’t need it anymore. If you don’t want it, we can play pass the drone with China, Russia, India, Pakistan and anybody else interested”

  15. Daniel Rich says:

    I see sunlight. Time to hide it deep inside a mountain. Expect unnamed US Pentagon sources to declare this is in fact a ‘Trojan horse’ meant to spy on Iran any day soon now.

  16. Taxi says:

    Whoah we’re losing the tec edge to Iran – and China and Russia are taking note.

    I blame it all on Apartheid israel: the brain-drain, purse-drain, moral-drain and power-drain on our American superpower.

    You can be sure that all the hi-tec drone info will be shared with hizbollah first and foremost.

    • dahoit says:

      Hope so.About the sharing.

    • You can be sure that all the hi-tec drone info will be shared with hizbollah first and foremost.

      taxi, i am wondering if that hasn’t already happened.

      The drone vanished from the radar screen. There are several possible explanations for this. The drone might have come down but there also could have been electronic countermeasures against radar observation, a malfunction of the radar or whatever one may think of. The search found no debris and no sign of a crash.

      The Israelis have said nothing. Neither has Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group and arch foe of Israel. The peacekeeping force is now abuzz with speculation that Hezbollah may have found a way of electronically disabling drones.

      A drone vanished form the radar for unexplained reasons and now there are speculations within the UNIFIL forces of why that might have happened. There are no facts other than that a drone vanished for radar and no drone was found, just pure speculations.

      iow, the ‘missing’ drone in lebanon might very well have been the first successful highjacking, israel just didn’t want to admit it the same way the US wasn’t initially admitting it either.

      • Walid says:

        “You can be sure that all the hi-tec drone info will be shared with hizbollah first and foremost.”

        Taxi, maybe it’s the other way around with Hizbullah providing technical assistance to the Iranians in exchange for the hardware stuff.

        From Defence Tech Org., June 2009

        Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah claimed Israel was behind the 2005 bombing that killed Lebanese prime minister, Rafiq Al Hariri. Part of the evidence for that claim, produced by Nasrallah for reporters, were still photos and video feed taken in 1997 from Israeli aerial drones hovering above Hariri’s home. While that might not be sufficient evidence to implicate Israel, it does show that Hezbollah was able to intercept Israeli drone feeds as far back as 1996.

        Nasrallah said intercepts from Israeli UAV’s helped Hezbollah fighters ambush and kill 16 12 Israeli commandos on a mission in southern Lebanon in 1997. He said following that ambush, all Israeli drone feeds were encrypted; so it’s unknown whether Hezbollah is still able to hack the transmissions.

        Last year, the Wall Street Journal reported that Iraqi insurgent groups had intercepted U.S. drone transmissions using commercially available software via an unsecured communications link. Interestingly, the U.S. military discovered the vulnerability when they captured a Shiite militant whose laptop contained hours of intercepted video. Military and intelligence officials have said that Hezbollah agents provided bomb-making and other guerrilla know-how to Shiite insurgent groups in Iraq.

        Hezbollah is considered the hybrid threat archetype: a non-state group armed with weapons and technology that has heretofore been the exclusive preserve of advanced militaries. During the war in south Lebanon in 2006, Hezbollah was able to listen into Israeli troop communications; although these were largely intercepts of cell phone conversations rather than hacking into encrypted radio communications.

        Updated: This story on the Ynet news site provides more information on Nasrallah’s claims about Hezbollah’s 1997 ambush of Israeli commandos. The incident, known as the “Shayetet catastrophe,” resulted in the deaths of 12 commandos when Israeli troops walked into an ambush prepared with an assist from intercepted Israeli drone footage.

        “We succeeded in analyzing these pictures, and assumed Israel was planning on operating there,” Nasrallah said. “Our men waited there for a few weeks, and on one of the nights the commando soldiers walked into the ambush we prepared.”

        – Greg Grant

        Read more: link to defensetech.org
        Defense.org

      • RoHa says:

        It just isn’t fair for Israel to have to face enemies who are both intelligent and well-equipped.

  17. split says:

    Ooops !!! If they can detect and take down this plane, that means that they can do that to our ‘stealth’ bombers – This should make the warmongers think twice before attacking Iran ,…

    • RoHa says:

      “If they can detect and take down this plane, that means that they can do that to our ‘stealth’ bombers”

      Not necessarily. If this was brought down by the Iranians hacking into the remote control system, that would not make the stealth bombers vulnerable because they are controlled by an on-board crew. Only if the bombers have a remote control system that can be used to override the crew’s manual controls would it be possible.

      However, if it was brought down by simply scrambling the electronics, the same method might work on the bombers. A lot of modern war planes are inherently unstable (for greater maneuverability) and require constant computer correction to keep them in flight. If the computer stops working, the planes become unflyable, and will crash.

  18. lobewyper says:

    Look, the obvious answer to this puzzle is, one of those drone pilots was feeling sorry for the poor, downtrodden and threatened Iranians, deliberately landed it on their territory to help balance the electronic edge of the US and Israel. :)

  19. check this out

    @GarethPorter GarethPorter
    Blogger Moon of Alabama again shows up big media, calling Iranian drone takedown accurately 3 days ago. #Iran #drone moonofalabama.org/2011/12/how-ir…

  20. Clif Brown says:

    Ok – here’s the scoop. It turns out that the drone was being run under Windows, there was an unexplained error and the message “DronePilot has encountered a problem and needs to close. Send error report to Microsoft?” appeared. Unfortunately, the operator panicked and hit “no” or we would have a full report from MS on what happened. ALWAYS send error reports to Microsoft – it’s a patriotic duty!

    Seriously, I think we need to wait for further info before jumping to conclusions about how it happened. Drones are designed to fly slowly and with great stability. This may be a very lucky event in that the thing came to rest in an area without obstacles such as trees. If communications failed, it’s possible the thing slowly lost altitude until it reached the ground, though you would think there would be an auto-destruct method to prevent that.

    If we see a video of the Iranians flying the thing, then I will be impressed!

  21. piotr says:

    On related note, Chinese press reported an extremely strongly worded warning: “According to NDTV, a Chinese news station based outside the country, in regard to recent speculation that Iran would be the target of a US-Israeli military assault, Major General Zhang Zhaozhong commented that, “China will not hesitate to protect Iran even with a third world war,” remarks described as “puzzling to some”.

    I was quite puzzled by lack of google news hit to a source that would be both English language and mainstream, but press of Communist parties in East/Central Europe reported it etc., so it is more than a rumor.

    China is 800 lb gorilla in the equation. If attacked Iran may block the traffic in Strait of Hormuz and precipitate world economic crisis and in the aftermath there would be a huge bruhahah. Because once it is over Iran has to trade with SOMEONE, it cannot ignore what China finds acceptable and what not. Russia, of course, would just profit enormously but China would be on the receiving end (or non-receiving, to be precise). However, Chinese would shed no tears if American military presence in Asia would be either gone totally, or at least substantially (e.g. from Afghanistan and Pakistan) etc., and if USA would be thoroughly humiliated.

  22. Kathleen says:

    As far as the military industrial complex in the US, Israel elsewhere. Will never forget watching a 60 minutes special 30 years ago on those who make millions/billions on selling weapons. The individuals interviewed did not give a rats ass about who what where when they sold these weapons to…just focused on the $$$$. That money game is still the same

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