By Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich, Finian Cunningham
January 13, 2020 "Information
Clearing House" -
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.
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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.
This article was originally published by "Sputnik"
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