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UK and US Suspect That ISIS Bomb Took Down Flight 9268 (cnn.com)
An anonymous reader writes with a report from CNN that U.S. and UK intelligence agencies believe it is more likely than not that the destruction on October 31st of a Russian A321 jetliner in Sinai "was most likely caused by a bomb on the plane planted by ISIS or an affiliate of the group." Kogalymavia Flight 9268 fell apart in flight, killing all aboard. From CNN's article:
The British government announced Wednesday that it had "become concerned that the plane may well have been brought down by an explosive device." A formal conclusion has not been reached by the intelligence communities of either country. An UK aviation team is travelling to inspect the Sharm airport to look at whether there were proper security measures at the airport and the various scenarios by which an explosive device could have made it to the Russian airliner "including a person or in cargo," according to the British transport minister.
Both Russian and Egyptian officials discount the claim, but detecting bombs is hard.
Don't discount the possibility of an accident. Something very similar happened to China Airlines flight 611
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
A tail section badly repaired after a minor accident came off in mid-air. The airplane spun out of control and disintegrated before crashing into the ground. That fits this accident very well.
Without conclusive evidence of a bomb, I would be very careful to scream terrorism. Terrorists claiming responsibility doesn't mean a thing without evidence.
So although the experts don't know what caused the crash, it seems that the British PM David Cameron does know, and it's ISIS.
In other news, Cameron wants British airstrikes on ISIS but can't get the support of parliament.
No matter how much I tell myself that correlation is not causation, this just looks like too much of a coincidence.
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I would. I hate Putin, I think he's at least as evil as some of the worst leaders through history, but he's also not stupid.
Putin can get away with what he's doing becaus the Russian people support it. The Russians are however weak when it comes to standing firm when reality hits them in the face. Putin got away with what he did in Ukraine because he was able to keep the deaths of hundreds of Russian soldiers largely out of the press, and dismiss those who did tell their stories as full of shit.
He's able to get away with what he's doing in Syria because there are no boots on the ground and so hardly any risk to Russian soldiers. The chance of a shoot down at the altitude Russian sorties are being flown at is pretty negligible.
But if reality comes to bite Russians by way of a terrorist attack against them due to Putin's actions in Syria then that will be a massive blow to Putin's ability to keep up the tempo.
Russians are still raw from Afghanistan in the 80s, because whilst they were defeated largely as the Americans were in Vietnam, the defeat was felt much more greatly for the Russians because it was really the turning point at which the Soviet Union begin to see it's collapse, and that was followed by a decade (the 90s) of severe economic problems. They didn't just lose a war with Afghanistan, they lost their empire including both what little wealth they did have, and what influence in the world they had also.
The Russians want another Afganistan even less than the Americans want another Afghanistan or Iraq right now. When Russians, civilian or military, start coming home in body bags and Putin can't hide it, then Putin will come under immense pressure to reconsider his support for Assad and the Syrian regime. That's precisely why Putin and his regime are so desperate to declare this not a bomb.
But all this said, I'm not convinced it's ISIS either. If it was ISIS why now, why against Russia when British and American tourists could presumably have been just as easily targeted at the exact same airport all this time and ISIS hates the British and Americans as much as the Russians? Why on a plane so perfectly full of Russians bar the 3 Ukrainians on board? Why weren't ISIS able to say how they destroyed the plane if it was them, only claiming they shot it down, which has been dismissed as a possibility and the likely method was a bomb? I don't think any conspiracy theory involving the Americans or British is likely, it'd just be way too risky for them to get involved blowing up Russian civilians. I don't even think it's a play they'd want to make. If I had to guess I'd wager it's more likely to be anyone from Israel, to Qatar, to the Saudis - none of these countries particularly give a shit about Russia's feelings because Russia has sided with their arch enemies - Iran and Syria, and both don't want to see Assad propped up.
But who knows, I'm just guessing as much as the next guy there's a lot that's a little weird about this case though. The other possibility being of course that it simply isn't a bomb and the tail half of the plane genuinely just ripped away somehow, that too would explain why ISIS claim of blame doesn't really make any kind of sense, but then why are the British and Americans so certain of evidence of a bomb declaring they detected a heat flash and cancelling flights and so forth?
Not after the fact. If there was an explosion inside the cabin or luggage compartment, there will be internal paneling, structural members, etc., blackened and bent and peppered with explosive ejecta littering the deserts of the Sinai. That debris will look radically different from a structural failure due to metal fatigue, composite fairlures, bad repairs, etc., and will be in the wrong place to be the result of a fuel tank explosion. (And, an internal bomb will bend things out, while a missile strike will bend things in.) Making this determination in a case like this (where all of the debris should be easy to find) should be a straightforward case of air crash forensics.
Are these the same intelligence agencies that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction? Trillions of dollars and millions of deaths later, I am not so fast to accept this convenient accusation.
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Maybe, but there's similarly a risk for the US and UK in this case. If they insist it's a bomb it harms Egyptian tourism which is a major source of income for them, and they're already facing a fairly strong degree of risk in isolating Egypt. As soon as the Americans distanced themselves from Sisi when he seized power by stalling the further AH-64 Apache sales, he went wandering straight over to Russia. The last thing they want is to push Egypt into the arms of Russia when Syria, Iraq, and Iran have already moved that way. It would give Putin an axis of control right from Africa to Asia, and would provider further access to everything from the Med to the Indian Ocean to the Caspian and give Putin influence over the Suez.
Couple this with the fact that Putin wants nothing more than to put egg in the face of America and Britain and if his (and even 3rd party such as the involved French) investigators come out and say there was no bomb, then the British and American governments are only going to end up hurting that particular cause and face even more complaints of crying wolf than they already do.
I know the British and Americans are keen on their fear mongering to push anti-terrorism legislation, but I'm not convinced it's a meme that holds every single time such a thing happens. There's way too much for them to risk losing in being wrong in this particular case, it's not something where it's a domestic incident and the results have no impact outside their borders. The result of being wrong in this particular case has geopolitical consequences and that makes it a much more awkward game to play.
I think there are a couple things going on here. First off, Russia (as in Putin and the government) desperately wants this to be an accident or something they can at least claim to be an accident (and by accident I mean some massive mechanical failure of the plane where it spontaneously broke into pieces during the safest part of flight when cruising). A successful attack by ISIS is the last thing they want, because up to this point Russia appears strong and unassailable in their air campaign in Syria. If this was an attack by ISIS it shows that Russian people have been directly attacked and are vulnerable. So I would imagine Russia would drags its feet as much as possible in admitting it if this is indeed an attack by ISIS, although the direct involvement of so many other countries in the investigation may make that difficult.
The other thing going on is US intelligence. This crash happened in one of the most intensely watched areas of the world. Sinai is the buffer area that lies between Israel and Egypt. In addition to the US's spy satellites, drones, etc, Israel certainly has its own close surveillance of the region as well. It has already been leaked that US satellites detected a "heat flash" while the plane was at altitude. More than likely the US or Israel has direct evidence that a bomb went off in flight, but the information is too sensitive (for example, betraying just how good the US's surveillance technology is) that no one can officially and unequivocally state that it was a bomb.
That pretty much leaves one other semi-realistic scenario, which is that a repair made a long time ago has failed. Again, that is very unlikely, because a structural failure of that kind would happen when the plane is under maximum stress - during the take off and climb. Not when the plane is at altitude and cruising along with very, very little stress on the airframe. Further, pictures of the tail after the crash show the tail is still attached to the fuselage. The type of tail failures in the past with the Airbus (like flight 587) were the rudder, not the entire tail. With the Russian plane, the entire tail section was intact and attached to the rear fuselage, but separate from the plane. That is a gross failure of the entire fuselage itself, not the tail failing.
It's very likely that both the US and Russia already knows for certain what happened - if it was a bomb it would be extremely obvious from examining the wreckage.
Better known as 318230.
6 Vostok (0 fatalities) [0%]
2 Voskhod (0 fatalities) [0%]
127 Soyuz (4 fatalities - 2 missions) [1.575%]
135 missions - 2 incidents [1.481%]
6 Mercury (0 fatalities) [0%]
10 Gemini (0 fatalities) [0%]
11 Apollo (0 fatalities) [0%]
135 Shuttle (14 fatalities - 2 missions) [1.481%]
162 missions - 2 incidents [1.235%]
Apollo 1 falls under the test/training mission and was never a flight.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork