Tweet
In a press conference with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, President Obama calmly explained that his Administration asked Iran nicely for their drone back. “We’ve asked for it back. We’ll see how the Iranians respond,” Obama said. He added that the matter was classified, but the acknowledgement that someone wrote a note to the Iranian Lost & Found seeking one RQ-170 Sentinel stealth plane basically confirms the capture of the drone, which appeared on Iranian TV last week.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton backed this up through a spokesman, saying that “We submitted a formal request for the return of our lost equipment…we do not expect them to comply.”
Iran also did some appeals about the drone in the past few days: they went to the UN Security Council.
Iran said Friday that it had formally complained to the United Nations Security Council about what it called the hostile and aggressive behavior of the United States in sending a sophisticated radar-evading spy drone over Iranian territory, one that Iran’s military said it had intercepted and captured last weekend.
The complaint, which appeared to have been made more for its propaganda value than for any Iranian hope of Security Council action, was announced a day after Iran showcased what it described as the captured drone on national television, as if it were a war trophy. Members of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps were shown displaying a bat-winged aircraft on a platform bedecked with anti-American slogans and a mock American flag with skulls instead of stars.
The US is in a real bind here. The existence of the drone, now confirmed by the President, proves that they have engaged in at least covert intelligence operations inside Iranian air space. Given all of the other incidents alleged over the past several months, it’s simply unlikely that this ends with the drone. This includes the deployment of the Stuxnet worm to disable Iranian ballistic technology, the explosions at several missile sites and the assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists on the streets of Tehran.
In this country, the argument over the drone focuses on whether Iran will be able to reverse engineer the technology and sell it to China and Russia, or if they sought the help of those regional powers in order to bring down the drone in a cyber attack. Less discussed is how the existence of the drone confirmed the shadow war over Iran, and by extension the numerous shadow wars in which the US is engaged all over the world.
96 Comments
Support this site!
Subscribe to the newsletter
Advertise on Firedoglake
Send
us your tips
Make us your homepage
About FDL News Desk
The chutzpah of Obillary has no bounds.
Maybe Santa will deliver it to the WH lawn – or not.
It is also possible that it was purposely allowed to be downed and contains a bunch of garbage technology embedded in the chips. Remember how we got Hitachi for reverse engineering our proprietary technology? The Pentagon seems awfully loose lipped about this incident.
I don’t want to be “unpatriotic”, but I love it.
The quicker we take these deadly toys away from the military the better for all of us. Killing people by remote control is not a good power to give to anyone. With the emergence of the US military as a new political force in this country, we don’t need to give our new political generals a way to isolate the murderer from the act. I think the only barrier to domestic assassinations by the military in the future is how hard it would be to get a soldier to murder one of the people they thought they were employed to protect.
I have been argued down here and elsewhere (mostly by IT oriented experts), but I don’t think it was that hard to take control of it and steal it. All the other scenarios don’t back up what we see.
You sorta beat me to it. I thought that, since it is stealth (LOL), the Iranians could use it over teh White House to spy on the prez.
Why bother? Anything they want to know, they can just wait for Obastard to blurt out in a press conference.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1960_U-2_incident
In July 1957, U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower requested permission from
“Pakistani Prime Minister Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy for the U.S. to establish a secret intelligence facility in Pakistan and for the U-2 spyplane to fly from Pakistan. A facility established in Badaber (Peshawar Air Station), 10 miles (16 km) from Peshawar, was a cover for a major communications intercept operation run by the United States National Security Agency (NSA). Badaber was an excellent location because of its proximity to Soviet central Asia. This enabled the monitoring of missile test sites, key infrastructure and communications. The U-2 “spy-in-the-sky” was allowed to use the Pakistan Air Force portion of Peshawar Airport to gain vital photo intelligence in an era before satellite observation.[2]”
At least this time it is just a drone? No humans involved….
Good interview on consequences of remote control killing.
The great thing about DDay’s reporting is not only the quality of the information, but the consistently exemplary level of his snark.
Man, that’s good stuff, esp. for a Monday morning.
Powers died in a helo crash in 1977.
LOL, rough night last night or do you live in Hawaii?
It’s not the info that’s important, it’s the symbolism.
No, not a rough night, and I’m near the beach in So Cal, not the Islands.
But still, didn’t you find the Monday morning transition to work a little rocky in your working days? Isn’t Monday why Wednesday is considered “Over The Hump Day”?
Does the rapist get to ask to have his sperm returned? I’m not aware of that precedent lol.
In my working days, we called it Sunday night angst. Worried about all the baddies the night before so resigned to work when morning came.
As these drones have no self destuct or destruct capability, they must have been developed by Tenet and the Clintons
Great analogy.
Hey, weren’t the Israelis suspected of having written the Stuxnet virus for us to transmit to Iranian infrastructure?
Wonder how quickly the Iranian IT folks will find evidence thereof, should it exist?
Countdown to Netanyahu demanding the US nuke Teheran in 5…4…3…2…
Drones are equipped with WMDs (i.e., all the nukes and biolabs in Iraq), courtesy of W.
You wouldn’t want o to sit down with his daughters at dinner with blood on his hands , would you.
Oh yawn.
Not dissing you, PW, but the PR campaign designed to make us yawn about the possibility of war with Iran.
Can’t wait (yes I can) to see how PR campaign develops in the next week or so. My major reason for believing that drone downing is not a false flag (jjjj take notice), besides CIA incompetence, is that there was no rehearsed PR talking points, and O’s first attempt is about as lame as I’ve seen him, and he’s been excessively lame so plumbing new depths is a genuine talent.
I’ve been castigated on FDL for opining on what O’s daughters might be like on far less incendiary topics (their weddings) before, so not gonna go there.
The Iranians also need to return the Operation Merlin plans for a nuclear bomb. The CIA gave the Iranians, these plans. But maybe Russia wants those blueprints back because it belongs to them. So the CIA should then give the Nuke plans back to Russia.
Also, Iran needs to return the nuclear technology sold to them by Halliburton. Halliburton is Darth Cheney’s company that accidentally sold “dual use” technology to Iran.
Iran also should return the Oil that belongs to British Petroleum and the United States. That is because the CIA replaced the Iran Democracy with a Dictatorship that gave Britain and the US all its Oil. We want our Oil!
Well, they wanted their Shah returned to them, and we wouldn’t comply with the request. And you know what happened: they gave us Ted Koppel.
Iran to o we’ll trade you the drone for just one little nuke Israel has, Deal ?
And Israel and Palestinians (fabricated people though they might be according to Gingrich Gangrene) should do a prisoner exchange. /s
If I’m not castigated once a day i’m losing my game.
Whachoo? Masochist?
Masochist sez to sadist: Hit me.
Sadist: No.
This is my fave story for months.
I’m in the 6th or 7th stage of grief over U.S. foreign policy, which is the stage when one develops uncontrollable giggles. This story fits right in.
As if it were a war trophy?
What else would one call it? And how was this note to the Iranian Lost & Found passed? Aren’t the Swiss a little squeamish for this sort of thing?
beez you’re funny
Yes, indeed.
It’s especially delightful since no human life hangs in the immediate balance. Recall that Americans were told there was a real possibility that U2 pilot Francis “Gary” Powers would be publicly executed by that godless commie Nikita Kruschev at the end of the presidency of our last rational taxer, Ike.
Of course, there are the lives snuffed out daily by drones, but they aren’t American so “don’t really count”™.
Fascism comes wrapped in a Flag of patriotism. Patriot Act… Military Commissions Act. OT but worth considering every day.
Less discussed is..
Also, can I get my fcuking money back from Lockheed Martin?
Stealth? Really? And did we leave all the ports wide open too? How do you spell h@xx0r in Farsi?
Assuming this whole thing wasn’t intentional, of course.
Like he hit a baseball into their back yard…
It was a shadow war trophy, Teddy. Gotta be precise about these things.
Do not ask for whom the drone trolls it trolls for thee
Coming soon: A note from the Native Americans asking if they could have America back. OK, maybe it’ll be a smoke signal lol.
You’re on a roll lately. (Be careful about the crumbs.)
‘Cause your not Native so go with the Eucalyptus. S)
Seems like a pretext to war to me, but I’m not a very trusting fellow these days.
Just wait. Soon they will be Americans, and they won’t really count either.
Wouldn’t it be funny as hell if the Iranians were able to tweak the Stuxnet virus to castrate our drones. Yuk, yuk, yuk
Eucalyptus? Isn’t that what the chiefs said after they only got $24 for Manhattan?
Thank you!
I love it.
And it can be blamed on Iran plausibly?
No harm done. No broken windows.
I’ve been wondering if all these events are related –
The DARPA hyper-drone crashes:
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2011/0811/Will-crash-of-hypersonic-Falcon-HTV-2-set-back-Pentagon-s-ambitious-plans (even before the Iran drone thing, I thought the hyper-drone crashes were due to foreign tampering…note the hyper-drone was built by Lockheed)
The Sentinel drone in Iran:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_RQ-170_Sentinel (also Lockheed)
The major defense contractor data breach:
http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Security/Pentagon-Admits-Major-Data-Breach-as-It-Unveils-Defensive-CyberStrategy-869009/
The Creech AFB virus:
http://www.stripes.com/blogs/stripes-central/stripes-central-1.8040/creech-drone-virus-infection-accidental-stratcom-commander-says-1.158091
I think the US is far less secure than the US government thinks it is.
nope, americans are too stupid to “think ahead” These are illegal coverts. The world is america’s to do as see fit. But listen to the whining / crying when they get caught. Criminal activities on behalf of Israel.
How many of these drones are over canada?
David wrote: “The existence of the drone, now confirmed by the President, proves that they have engaged in at least covert intelligence operations inside Iranian air space.”
————-
From what I have read, I think this action was somewhat LESS than “covert”. That is to say, if it was covert, they wouldn’t have the damn thing.
To pass the note, just take a cue from Reagan’s legacy: write your prayer request on the inside cover of a Bible and submit it along with a frosted cake. And, if you promise some spare parts or missiles, the request moves up to the top of the pile, so our spy drone will probably be back in the US keeping an eye on those nasty Occupy folks before year’s end.
How many of them are flying over the US/Mexico border?
Plausibly? What a quaint notion, BSBB. We don’t need no stinking plausibility. Where ya been?
If I remember correctly it was a chocolate cake not White.
who knows how many are flying over canada / Mexico.
The ultimate irony is “what are they trying to protect”? America is a dead country that attacks all, starves it’s own people, makes nothing but bombs, steals resources from all. has nothing but a belly full of robber-barons.
Don’t worry. All we have to do is crouch under our school desks, and we’ll be fine. /s
Should have been baklava. Would have changed the course of history lol.
If a load cost as much as an RQ-170 they would.
(But then think of the vast cash value of Americans’ colons full of Obamajism – enough to pay off all those underwater mortgages!)
AND, we could all have a better option than selling our plasma. EV, I never knew you had an MBA lol.
Yes. A very interesting caller on this subject for the Diane Rehm Show on NPR, a seasoned pilot with extensive technical knowledge etc., made this case exactly and rather convincingly (to me, who knows nothing on the subject).
Wondering if giving a woman a gift certificate to one’s sperm bank could be construed as sexual harassment.
Just got back. It DOES seem “odd” that the Pentagon is blabbing a lot about this; and for the poster above (saying that Americans aren’t smart enough to do this) and the other one claiming that President Obama is doing a “false flag operation”., I call BS.
Obama doesn’t play Bush-league games like that. For all you Obama haters, just Google what happened to Hitachi and (to a smaller part, Toshiba).
Weirdness (i the form of useless loops) was purposely implanted into computer chips so the US could track intellectual property theft by Japanese companies. (A law that was written by Al Gore, BTW. Good thing HE invented the innertubes).
I think this is the same thing. If not, the suddenly open mouthed Pentagon is trying to fool the Irani military into “thinking” it is.
Graduated cum laude! But it’s sticky problem trying to calculate the NPV of something like that, the market’s highly illiquid and susceptible to bubbles. Then you get everyone selling their assets at the same time and the bottom drops out in the flood. But this kind of exotic derivative and its swaps is exactly what Wall Street lives for. Let’s see…carry the two…
Alternasnark: “The Iranians have captured Rachel Maddow?”
Wikileaks, revealing US official documents, is consistent. The US Government always publicly lies about US Foreign Policy. Actual US foreign policy is made by some top secret and highly incompetent cabal of neo-cons.
To carry this theme further, if the Government says its assassin drone was brought down, then there is some other falsehood or secret motive being protected.
Reverse engineering the hardware will be useful to them, because UAVs are inherently more valuable to them than to us. UAVs are the only sort of air force they could maintian that has any chance of surviving the first day of war with the US.
But perhaps more important to them, will be to observe what we do in response to prevent future hijacks by them. This kind of weapon system promises to be quite useful to them, but they would be far more useful if the Iranians can address their main point of vulnerability, the ground-UAV comm link. How we respond, how we beef up the weakness they have exposed in this drone’s comm link, will help them with this same problem in the future.
Good idea. Try it. Let me know how that works out for you. ;-)
“carry the two” What a man! Most of us aren’t lucky enough to have to consider that as a separate task lol.
yup, i said it. If america is so “smart”, please explain it’s track record for , oh, the last 100 years. explain the state of your country to me and how “smart” it is .
America has always been about “knee-jerk” reactions when ever it got caught fcking other peoples lives/ resources / politics .Explain again how Pearl Harbour went down. Maybe the Cole / Bay of Pigs / JFK / JFK jr. / Iraq / Iran before and now / The fact that you nuke people / robber baron lair / destroyer of worlds to me
See! We all thought that Obama had no cojones. Clearly, he does. To be asking the Iranians to return the high-tech spy plane that we were using on them takes more balls than King Kong. Too bad his ands shrink to the size of BB’s when he’s dealing with the republicans.
In related news, the pentagon’s insistence:
That the Iranians neither shot the thing down, nor hacked it down, is pretty brassy, itself, in that they seem to think that americans are complete idiots who won’t wonder why the thing is in such great shape, if it crashed.
Did it shit it’s electronic trousers when a couple of Iranian fighters pulled up alongside it and gestured :
“Down. NOW!” at which point it complied with a gentle landing at the nearest wog airbase?
Something surely brought it it down in a controlled fashion, for it to be in Smithsonian-presentation condition.
JJ’s on to it. Bush III and the pentagon just lovvve having to admit to the world that one of their primo toys, in great shape, is in the hands of the Iranians.
That they did this intentionally gets this month’s gilded-foil-hat award.
But it may not be an “assassin drone” it could be just a “peek-a-boo” camera carrier. Remember, we are now in the process of exiting Iraq. If this wasn’t planned, they would say “It was just a weather balloon”.
I want to know what we are hauling out of Iraq while everybody is diverted with this obvious “new shiny object”.
Maybe President Obama found W’s missing $18 Billion?
If the drone was brought down by rigged model aircraft controllers or garage door openers, then I hope the Iranians publish the information for we in the police surveillance state to utilize. NPR reports that drones are being used in North Dakota by “Law Enforcement” for surveillance. And so continues the militarization of the police, because the true terrorists that need watching are we, the American people.
Yup. Every piece of that thing probably has a tracking ping, so even if it is disassembled, all the parts will be “calling home”. So now we know the location of Iran’s secret facilities; and if pieces go to either China or Russia, we will know that, too.
That’s because we told you that they are too young to marry……
I knew a guy who worked in somewhat secret military software who said that the so-called stealth bomber that was shot down over Serbia during that Clinton adventure was tracked by their radar for eight minutes, which kind of freaked out the US military.
Turns out the Serbs had spotters near the NATO air bases in Italy and they would just call in on their cell phones when they saw fighters/bombers taking off for runs. Pretty low tech, and effective.
Well, according to NPR today, they are flying over North Dakota doing surveillance for “local law enforcement.”
Remember, the enemy is US.
The virus works on Seimens industrial controllers. I thought what the Israelis/CIA did was damn clever.
A war zone is anyplace the President alleges evil-doers are located.
Iran should just offer to return the drone if Obama offers to return the peace prize.
Maybe it is a trojan drone and it is sending video and audio of all the scientists who inspect it to a satellite. That way they find out who Iran’s top scientists are and they can find out whether they will sell it to China and who China’s top people are. And maybe it can assassinate people who touch it. And maybe it has inside a bunch of false or deceptive drone technology designed to mislead. And by asking for it back, Obama is just trying to convince them how valuable it is. How advanced in drone technology anyway? Some cameras on a hobby plane. What else is there?
First Obama wanted the 1967 borders.
Then Mexico wanted their 1840 borders.
Soon Iran will be requesting their 400 BC borders.
It happened before. Remember Korean Airlines flight #007? Reagan spent months bragging that the first shuttle flight was going to be carrying a “secret military payload” (and if it was so Goddamned secret why was he always talking about it?)
KAL 007 was diverted off course over Soviet airspace at Sakelin Island, in a lame attempt to steal their radar frequency signals. The only problem with that plan was that the radar base was inoperative for several months, and the replacement parts from Russia weren’t going to be getting there any time soon. They were relying on what we call AWAC airborne radar platforms.
When KAL 007 refused to alter its course on the USSR’s demand (because it was being directed by NORAD) it was blown out of the air by a couple of MIGs.
It’s all fun and games until someone gets hurt.
President Obama NEVER wanted the 1967 borders; he was just reiterating THE UNITED STATES POSITION since 1967. Which is “The ’67 map WITH LAND SWAPS”. The same thing that has ALWAYS been our policy.
I really haven’t followed it. But it would be rather funny to see Ahmadinajadh call for a border return of Xerxean proportions!
maineindependent, if you’re interested, the LA Times Dec. 10, ran an article on the use of a Predator by local law enforcement in North Dakota. IMO we’ve probably been using surveillance drones domestically for a number of years, which certainly raises a number of legal issues. How soon will we learn that Sheriff Joe, the Toughest Sheriff in the Universe, has his own fleet of drones in Maricopa County in AZ?
I want my youth back. Which of you fuckers has it?
Right. The parts are imbedded with tracking devices, and the Iranians are too stupid to check for that.
And anyway, they don’t really HAVE those Russian torpedoes that can run at 200 mph, and they can’t close the Hormuz Straits, and after two bloody, practically useless clusterfucks, we’re all going to eat ice cream and pie and live happily ever after because George Bush and Barack Obama are real gung-ho prez’s who won’t take shit from the rag heads.
I’ll sleep better tonight just thinking about it.
BTW, pings or no pings, you can bet the tech is going to wind up in Russia AND China. There will be some nice war-toy knowledge flowing to Teheran, in exchange.
Too late, long gone, but the party was awesome. Hookers, blow, and rock n’ ro’.
Don’t blame me only one of us was willing to spend it properly.
Thou presumeth without reason, EV. I sure didn’t spend all my youth time making my mama proud. Never had a hooker, though . . . (OTOH, old guys can still get a hooker if they want one. Maybe when my charm fades.) Still, I wouldn’t mind a rerun. Can I have my youth back now?
Uh, OK…but I’m not sure you want what’s left. It’s kinda sticky.
But that you can blame on Obama.
Amen. They landed the drone, or it would have been severely damaged. They showed the drone to show us that they can land them, which means they can control them. And why would they not do this, any nation will do what it has to do to protect itself, and why should they put up with US drone attacks on their countries? The problem our government continues to make is underestimation of other nations and their capabilities. The direct result of the frat boy mentality among our ruling class that is elitist and racist, thinking little brown people can’t possibly be intelligent and capable of technical sophistication. Guess again, fascist morons. It’s the same mentality that justifies wars of aggression using the British colonial theory that we are civilizing savages.
How much integrity does the Peace Prize have anyway, they almost gave it to Hitler.
The US government is a bunch of frat boy morons whose idea of history and foreign policy is dictated by classic comic books. They sold our economy out to China, thinking that the Chinese were a bunch of slanty eyed savages they could easily pull one over on, meanwhile China has our industry, jobs and many of our technical secrets. They have pursued a foreign policy that could be described as a continuation of the British Empire, and how well did that work out for everyone…of course if you listen to Nail Ferguson, chief apologist for the global fascist empire, we really did them all a favor, the little brown folks, civilizing them and all that and what ingrates they’ve turned out to be! What ingrates we all are not to worship this civilization. Anyway I diverge. Let me describe the most ignorant, arrogant aspect of all, murdering legitimate leaders all over the world who defied our intention to colonize their countries, a policy still very alive and well today, causing insurgencies that have kicked our butt, although our frat boys haven’t noticed that yet. I mean really, the stupidity and arrogance is legendary.
All you need is your two feet to get over the Mexican border, after all the USA has to keep that border open so the drugs can flow and the arms, since the war on drugs is a major industry, not to mention arms manufacturing.
Oh I think that’s already happened, Israel demanding that we nuke Iran. But Obama had to find a czar, set up a committee to study the problem and they can’t decide what to do. Meanwhile Obama goes on TV, tells Israel to go back to it’s 1967 borders and negotiate with the Palestinians like he does so successfully with the republicans, you know offer the farm and then beg for some chickens back. And Netty tells him to blow it out his ass. Wow, what leadership skills. Then later, Obama is all for Israel. You can see how much trouble this committee is having trying to figure out what the pres wants them to do. Ineptitude does have it’s value, while they dither we avoid WWIII, for a while anyway.