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Comment by cmdshiftf4 | Hacker News Reader

What an absolute tragedy. Well done to Iran for coming forward, admitting it and expressing their regrets over it. It's a stark cry from the utter denial others have expressed when similar accidents have happened, and astronomically further than when George H. W. Bush proclaimed "I will never apologize for the United States — I don't care what the facts are... I'm not an apologize-for-America kind of guy." when the Navy shot down Iran Air flight 655 in '88.

This coming forward will save the families and nations involved time and effort, and hopefully bring closure all the more quickly for them.

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No this isn't well done.

It took them three days to say this. How did it take them three days to realize they shot a missile? Especially since they had a denial campaign going on for three goddamn days.

This was just external pressure on Iran forcing them to do this. If this flight wasn't an international one it would've been swept under the rug.

Even if it was external pressure, we’re still waiting for Russia to say the same. Iran actually did.

Meanwhile Iran also killed 1500 people a few weeks ago and there's been no news about that.

Iran was pushed to do this by the international community. Russia doesn't give a shit. Europe depends on Russia, so the consequences for Russia weren't a big deal.

> Iran actually did.

No, Iran was _forced_ to do so, they don't two shits otherwise.

Not so much preasure on Russia in case of MH17

Even if forced, it could deny it to high heaven. It is already isolated on the world stage, it is already under sanctions.

It chose not to deny. However, I would suspect it did so, just to demonstrate the crazy things a world on the brink of war can bring about.

Perhaps it's leaders calculated its to their benefit to own up and then say see what happens when nations are teetering on the edge of armed conflict.

OTOH, in case of MH17, even if there was no video, there were a lot of signs directly pointing to Russia. Russia was also forced, but it didn't give a shit.

>Russia was also forced

In my book forced means the result is achieved. Russia did not take responsibility == it wasn't forced to.

Pressed? Yes. But not forced to. And unline Russia Iran didn't have any room to deny it, really. In MH17 case you might have all kind of info that points toward Russia, but still not enough to force it to admit responsibility.

In Iran's case - it was their system (owned by them), operated by their gus, stationed on their territory etc. There is really nothing to deny here. And yet they only confirmed their mistake only after being forced to do so.

PS: also - yes, they calculated this would be better for them in perspective. (again, unlike MH17 case)

It didn't. I assume it took them three days to decide whether or not they could establish plausible deniability.

Then the cell phone video of the second missile hitting the plane came out. It's easy to own up to mistakes when your hand is forced.

Does Russia have plausible deniability in the case of MH17?

Russia was never allowed to be part of investigation and offered to help with some data and was rejected.

Why would investigators reject possibly relevant data? It’s like if new evidence was brought up in court, but the judge would say “nah, thank you. We got enough. We know anyway who did it.”

Malaysia, who’s airline was shot, was also not allowed to participate in the investigation. I wonder why.

Because they could spread misinformation or selectively disclose some information while withholding information that could harm them. It makes a ton of sense to not let the suspected parties join the investigation.

Well, you could make the same argument in court. Why allow defence to present their side of story? What if they lie and spread misinformation. Better not listen to them and just make a judgement without them.

By not allowing Russia to present their story because “what if” you are preemptively saying that they are guilty.

Why was Ukraine allowed to participate?

A possible explanation might be that the guys who actually fired the missile have spent three days trying to avoid blame, and that it's taken that long for the truth t make it's way up the leadership ladder.

I suspect if I was an army grunt who'd fired of a shoulder launched missile only to realise just too late that it was a civilian airliner, I'd be AWOL and in hiding for _way_ longer than three days...

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-iran-crash-missiles-expla...

The Iranian military would undoubtedly have known which missile systems would have been deployed in the area as well as the launch and impact characteristics of such systems. It would also be fairly unbelievable if one of the launchers came back two missiles short without any follow up.

While the thought-making process leading up to launch may take time to deceiper, I doubt they had any doubt as to what caused the crash.

Do you doubt there are lies between different layers of governance? And do you also doubt there's heavy cognitive dissonance required already in such theocratic nations?

It was a large vehicle launched missile. That ordinance is individually tracked and multiple soldiers would know about any firing.

Possibly multiple soldiers all decided to lie to keep it secret. Maybe their commander ordered them to keep it secret so he wouldn't get in trouble.

We're trying to find excuses when Iran has a history of sweeping things under the rug.

Name a country which does not try to sweep things under the rug constantly.

We don’t need to. The point is that these elaborate theories are unnecessary. The government likely knew they were at fault, tried to avoid blame, and eventually fessed up. End of story.

Maybe in the US. But don’t forget this is a different country.

Three days is insanely fast for a nation

Think of how many level of people are there.

There are the guys that shot the missile. The ones that command those guys, the ones that command those and commanders above those.

In the chaos of the tragedy, no body wants to open their mouth, in case they are executed for saying something that is against the direction which the nations top leaders want to take.

Then come the top leaders. With the escalating tensions with the US, having recently sent a barrage of missiles to Iraq, they are holding on to the horses of the country, on the edge of a cliff.

They have to discuss and deliberate a myriad of issues that are consequential to their every word.

They cannot be too rushed to say that they shot the plane down. It might create a chance for the US to spin this as a deliberate murder.

And all these are humans. Humans that run nations, whose millions of peoples lives are at stake.

Three days is perfectly OK.

I am glad Iran is honest enough to admit it's mistake, unlike Russia, for example.

> Three days is perfectly OK.

Three days of silence? Yes. Three days of active denial? Hell no.

The Head of Iran’s Civil Aviation Organization had this to say: «The version that the plane was shot down by a rocket cannot be true under any circumstances … it is impossible from the scientific point of view.»

If they really wanted to tell the truth after some days then why wouldn't he just shut up in the meantime?

In this context, remaining silent would be tantamount to acceptung fault.

However, they could have said even they were not sure, and that they are investigating.

It’s not okay at all. They were furiously denying all claims that it was shot down by them. Saying it was scientifically impossible and that it was a sneer campaign by the states. ONLY AFTER the video of it being shot down appeared did they admit to it. But only after several countries publicly said that Iran shot down the plane.

So no they didn’t do a good job. Stop giving them props for shooting down a plane and lying about it until they were exposed by the media.

Iranian officials did deny shooting the plane initially. They were indirectly compelled to accept their mistakes by several foreign agencies and by videos that surfaced on social media. They might be better than Russia but that not cannot cover up their lies over this issue.

They knew they shot down the plane just a few minutes after they did it. Yet, they lied about it 3 days straight. Admitting it after 3 days is surely more honest than Russia still not admitting they shot down MH17 5 years ago, but I wouldn't say it's "well done".

That’s a commonly repeated bit of fake news. Bush did say that, but it unrelated to Iran Air 655. Here’s the actual context:

https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4763550/user-clip-george-h-w-...

quote is near the end, and context is all about a visit to Poland

And according to Wikipedia, it was a phrase he commonly said, including months before the shootdown.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655#Aftermath

That quote you gave is awfully misleading, as Bush was not speaking about flight 655.

Ronald Reagan, the actual president at the time, did apologize a few days after the event.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1988/07/06/r...

If you really want to compare the two events, note that after ~4 hours after the event the US did acknowledge it had shot down the airline. While it did to continue to maintain it wasn't in the wrong, there's a stark difference between that & the multi-day denial of Iran.

Well done indeed. How long until they execute the ones responsible and court-martial their direct in command?

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