Word: shootdown
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Council because of its alleged anti-Tehran bias, attacking neutral shipping in the Persian Gulf. Last week it paid the price for its self-imposed isolation. Twice it sought an international condemnation of the U.S. on an issue on which Washington would otherwise have been vulnerable, the July 3 shootdown of Iran Air Flight 655 over the gulf. But twice it came away with nothing...
Simultaneously, Ali Akbar Velayati, Iran's Foreign Minister, was trying to convince the Security Council that the shootdown was deliberate. He read a transcript of conversations between the pilot of the doomed Airbus and Iranian flight controllers that seemed to indicate that Flight 655 had been proceeding at a normal altitude, speed and flight path. However, on one crucial point -- whether the U.S.S. Vincennes had tried to warn the Airbus -- the transcript was inconclusive. Flight 655 received no warnings, but the pilot may have been too busy chattering to his ground controllers to listen to an emergency channel over which...
...Iran Air Airbus carrying 290 civilians on a regularly scheduled flight to Dubai on the other side of the gulf. As a horrified world last week watched the pictures of torn bodies displayed by Iran on TV screens, questions mounted. Outside Iran, hardly anyone seemed to doubt that the shootdown had been a genuine mistake. But how could so sophisticated and costly ($600 million a copy ) an intelligence-and-weapons system, and the highly trained men who operate it, have gone so terribly wrong...
...have to wait several weeks until experts finish analyzing tapes from the Vincennes and other U.S. Navy vessels in the gulf. And some questions about the affair may never be resolved. Why, for example, did the Airbus pilot not answer the warnings issued in the last minutes before the shootdown? But enough has become known in the week since the tragedy to suggest a terrible conclusion, one with dismaying implications for a nuclear-armed world: the U.S., and by extension other countries using high-tech weapons, may have become prisoners of a technology so speedy and complex that it forces...
Like the Kennedy assassination, the KAL incident has created a cottage industry of conspiracy theorists. R.W. Johnson, a politics don at Oxford University, has written Shootdown, which offers the hypothesis that the flight was a surveillance mission designed by the CIA to test Soviet radar capabilities. But Johnson provides no direct evidence for this theory other than that it "fits -- or can be made to fit -- just about all the known facts about the 007 tragedy." David Pearson, a doctoral candidate at Yale, has argued in the Nation magazine that top U.S. officials must have known at the time that...