dinsdag 14 januari 2020

Reza Kartosen-Wong en Zijn Stelligheid

In zijn column in Het Parool van maandag 13 januari 2020 beweert Reza Kartosen-Wong over 'vlucht 752,' die werd 'getroffen door een Iraanse raket' dat 'Iran nu in ieder geval [heeft] toegegeven verantwoordelijk te zijn. Dat kan niet worden gezegd van Rusland inzake MH17.'  

Ik ken Reza niet, maar ik lees op internet dat hij een academische graad heeft en werkzaam is bij de Faculteit Geesteswetenschappen Capaciteit Media & Cultuur van de UvA, dezelfde faculteit waar de Atlanticus dr. Ruud van Dijk met grote stelligheid volhoudt dat ‘de Verenigde Staten de onmisbare ordeningsmogendheid in het internationale systeem’ blijft.

De jeugdige wetenschapper Dr. Reza weet, nog voordat er een rechtelijke uitspraak ligt, met grote zekerheid te verkondigen dat Rusland de MH17 heeft neergeschoten. Daarentegen ben ik al meer dan een halve eeuw een journalist die beroepshalve een zekere scepsis heb bewaard. Geschoold in de jaren zestig tijdens de Vietnam Oorlog weet ik hoe vaak Washington en Wall Street de internationale politiek heeft gemanipuleerd met politieke leugens en 'C.I.A.’s Fake News' campagnes zoals zelfs The New York Times dit kwalificeert. 

Wat voor dr. Reza al onomstotelijk is bewezen, is voor mij nog steeds geen vaststaand feit. En zelfs wanneer dit wel het geval is dan nog blijft voor mij de vraag: is hier geen sprake geweest van wat de liberal opiniemaker Ian Buruma 'dirty work' noemt, waarover hij van oordeel is dat Europa een deel van dit 'smerige werk' van de VS moet overnemen? In de postmoderne tijd met zijn virtuele werkelijkheid is bijna niets meer wat de mainstream-media melden grondig te verifiëren en zou dan ook niet klakkeloos geloofd moeten worden. Het is vandaag de dag nagenoeg onmogelijk om een onderscheid te maken tussen leugen en waarheid, tussen de realiteit en de 'false flag operations,' aangezien overal geheime diensten met hun geheime activiteiten een eigen werkelijkheid scheppen. Lees bijvoorbeeld deze informatie van  Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich en de gezaghebbende journalist Finian Cunningham:

The 19-second video published by the New York Times last week showing the moment an Iranian missile hit a passenger jet has prompted much social media skepticism.
Questions arise about the improbable timing and circumstances of recording the precise moment when the plane was hit.
The newspaper ran the splash story on January 9, the day after a Ukrainian airliner was brought down near Tehran. It was headlined: ‘Video Shows Ukrainian Plane Being Hit Over Iran’. All 176 people onboard were killed. Two days later, the Iranian military admitted that one of its air defense units had fired at the plane in the mistaken belief that it was an incoming enemy cruise missile.
“A smoking gun” was how NY Times’ journalist Christiaan Triebert described the video in a tweet. Triebert works in the visual investigations team at the paper. In the same tweet, he thanked – “a very big shout out” – to an Iranian national by the name of Nariman Gharib “who provided it [the video] to the NY Times, and the videographer, who would like to remain anonymous”.
​The anonymous videographer is the person who caught the 19-second clip which shows a missile striking Flight PS752 shortly after take-off from Tehran’s Imam Khomenei airport at around 6.15 am. This person, who remains silent during the filming while smoking a cigarette (the smoke briefly wafts over the screen), is standing in the suburb of Parand looking northwest. His location was verified by the NY Times using satellite data. The rapid way the newspaper’s technical resources were marshaled raises a curious question about how a seemingly random video submission was afforded such punctilious attention.
But the big question which many people on social media are asking is: why was this “videographer” standing in a derelict industrial area outside Tehran at around six o’clock in the morning with a mobile phone camera training on a fixed angle to the darkened sky? The airliner is barely visible, yet the sky-watching person has the camera pointed and ready to film a most dramatic event, seconds before it happened. That strongly suggests, foreknowledge.
Given that something awful has just been witnessed it is all the more strange that the person holding the camera remains calm and unshaken. There is no audible expression of shock or even the slightest disquiet.
Turns out that Nariman Gharib, the guy who received the video and credited by the NY Times for submitting it, is a vociferous anti-Iranian government dissident who does not live in Iran. He ardently promotes regime change in his social media posts.
Christiaan Triebert, the NY Times’ video expert, who collaborated closely with Gharib to get the story out within hours of the incident, previously worked as a senior investigator at Bellingcat. Bellingcat calls itself an independent online investigative journalism project, but numerous critics accuse it of being a media adjunct to Western military intelligence. Bellingcat has been a big proponent of media narratives smearing the Russian and Syrian governments over the MH17 shoot-down in Ukraine in 2014 and chemical weapons attacks.
In the latest shoot-down of the airliner above Tehran, the tight liaison between a suspiciously placed anonymous videographer on the ground and an expatriate Iranian dissident who then gets the prompt and generous technical attention of the NY Times suggests a level of orchestration, not, as we are led to believe, a random happenstance submission. More sinisterly, the fateful incident was a setup.
It seems reasonable to speculate that in the early hours of January 8 a calamitous incident was contrived to happen. The shoot-down occurred only four hours after Iran attacked two US military bases in Iraq. Those attacks were in revenge for the American drone assassination on January 3 of Iran’s top military commander, Maj. General Qassem Soleimani.
Subsequently, Iranian air-defense systems were on high alert for a possible counter-strike by US forces. Several reports indicate that the Iranian defense radars were detecting warnings of incoming enemy warplanes and cruise missiles on the morning of 8 January. It does seem odd why the Iranian authorities did not cancel all commercial flights out of Tehran during that period. Perhaps because civilian airliners can normally be differentiated by radar and other signals from military objects.
However, with the electronic warfare (EW) technology that the United States has developed in recent years it is entirely feasible for enemy military radars to be “spoofed” by phantom objects. One such EW developed by the Pentagon is Miniature Air-Launched Decoy (MALD) which can create deceptive signals on enemy radar systems of incoming warheads.

What we contend therefore is this: the Americans exploited a brink-of-war scenario in which they anticipated Iranian air-defense systems to be on a hair-trigger. Add to this tension an assault by electronic warfare on Iranian military radars in which it would be technically feasible to distort a civilian airliner’s data as an offensive target. The Iranian military has claimed this was the nature of the shoot-down error. It seems plausible given the existing electronic warfare used by the Pentagon.
It’s a fair, albeit nefarious, bet that the flight paths out of Tehran were deliberately put in an extremely dangerous position by the malicious assault from American electronic warfare. A guy placed on the ground scoping the outward flight paths – times known by publicly available schedules – would be thus on hand to catch the provoked errant missile shot.
The shoot-down setup would explain why Western intelligence were so quick to confidently assert what happened, contradicting Iran’s initial claims of a technical onboard plane failure.
The disaster has gravely undermined the Iranian government, both at home and around the world. Protests have erupted in Iran denouncing the authorities and the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corp for “lying” about the crash. Most of the 176 victims were Iranian nationals. The anger on the streets is being fueled by the public comments of Western leaders like Donald Trump, who no doubt see the clamor and recriminations as an opportunity to push harder for regime change in Iran.

Of lees dit:




Was Iranian Missile Operator Tricked Into Shooting Down The Ukrainian Airlines Plane Over Tehran?

Joe Quinn
Sott.net
Mon, 13 Jan 2020 15:41 UTC

ukraine airlines plane crash tehran site 

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.
Flights Tehran Ukrainian Airlines
© flightradar24.com

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:
Jerusalem Post TOR-M1 codes Russia IranUnluckily 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:
US Navy EW spoofingNote 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.


Tor missile 1
Tor missile 2Bellingcat 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 protest 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.


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Joe Quinn (Profile)
An established web-based essayist and print author, Quinn is the co-host of the 'News Real' radio show on the Sott Radio Network and has been writing incisive editorials for Sott.net for over 10 years. His articles have appeared on many news sites and he has been interviewed numerous times by Sputnik News and Press TV. His articles can also be found on his personal blog JoeQuinn.net.




Op zijn minst roept dit vragen op over de ware toedracht van dit ongeluk.

Nu de vraag aan de universitaire docent dr. Reza Kartosen-Wong:

Reza, hoe verklaar jij jouw stellige uitspraken? Berust die op een wetenschappelijk verantwoord onderzoek of is deze stelligheid gebaseerd op de informatie van de 'corporate press'? In afwachting van jouw antwoord,

stan van houcke,
journalist/schrijver
Amsterdam.   







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