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Comment by mardifoufs | Hacker News Reader

I love stories about America violating sovreign airspace, especially when they use such a cool plane. The entire world is truly their own backyard!

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What a ridiculous thing to say. Do you think the Libyan intelligence service gets to bomb dance clubs and then cry sovereignty when someone bombs some military targets in Libya? I don't know if you are ignorant of the situation or if you truly believe a country cannot retaliate against an attack against their citizens and allies. (This story and the bombing campaigned being photographed by the SR71 was a direct response to the West Berlin discotheque bombing in 1986).

>The entire world is truly their own backyard!

Yes..? If you are a state actor like Libya and you attack other nations civilians to cause terror then they have the right to attack you back. The US bombing Gaddafi's compounds and some other military targets in Libya was 100% justified. To act like a country can't retaliate in such a situation is honestly childish.

So there would be absolutely no problem if afghans or cubans bombed the US, right? Is it just the US that is allowed to basically do whatever it wants to a country based on whatever conclusion their spook agencies come up with?

Plus, as the other comment says there has been no proof that libya was involved. Going by a "hunch" or "secret info from our intelligence agencies" isn't evidence either. You should probably read up on the events, it was super controversial at the time so claiming it was just a cut and dry self-defense move from the US is laughable.

Well, nobody presented evidence that Libya was behind the La Belle bombing.

If you think that some shady arm of US intelligence isn't capable of such a heinous false flag operation, I urge you to read more history. Now I'm not saying it was one, I'm saying we have no idea who was behind it.

Because real life isn't a TV show. That isn't how national security agencies work. They don't dump raw intelligence to the public. The US knew it was Libya obviously, and the data released since then has proved that. Hell even the Stasi & the soviets knew it was Libya.

Again this isn't a TV show. No country needs permission to react to an attack against them by another state like Libya.

Oh, so your advice is to blindly trust whatever they shovel into the public's mouths ?

I totally trust US three letter organisations, and cannot see what could possibly go wrong as they have never shown signs of incompetence and malice in the past.

The fact that the stasi thought it was the Libyans could very well mean that it was a very successful false flag operation. This is the problem with the intelligence apparatus. It is war against the truth.

>Oh, so your advice is to blindly trust whatever they shovel into the public's mouths ?

Are you being serious? By this time in history Libya had already established a history for terror attacks and targeting civilians. So yeah I wouldn't have any issue believing it.

Just like when the UK blamed Russia for poising people Salisbury with chemical weapons. I believed them because they had intelligence about it & Russia has a history with this type of attack. Just like Libya already had a proven history of terror attacks in the 80s.

It is beyond silly to think a false flag bombing (injuring 250+ friendly nationals) is more likely than LIBYA, a know rouge state and user of terrorism, bombing a civilian dance club.

You and others are more than happy to bury your heads in the sand and pretend like the world is a TV show where countries post all their intelligence to twitter or in the paper lol.

Again I'm not sure why you're ignoring this but it was only the US that came up with that conclusion, and super quickly too. The other european intelligence agencies, including the German one, didn't agree with the libyan connection. But I'm sure the US knows more, and more quickly than everyone else in Europe (which at the time, had a very strong intelligence apparatus since each country was more independent than it is now).

It's especially convenient that the US did not wait for the results of any investigation before launching an attack. This is just pure american chauvinism, where the US can do no wrong as long as we just believe that their intelligence agencies are always right. I guess it works for americans but to the rest of the world, it just doesn't cut it.

I guess we should just trust when the Chinese or Russian agencies come up with their conclusions too, then.

And yes, the US is a democracy and russia/china aren't. But that doesn't seem to have made the US any more trust worthy when it comes to not being prone to baseless war mongering. And the US population seem to be pretty excited to vote over and over again for (or at least, it used to be) war hawks or even outright war criminals. Bush was re-elected in 2004 after outright lying about an incredibly destructive war, so it seems like democracy isn't an argument for trusting the US more on these matters. I guess Americans and westerners in general (mostly) don't live with the consequences of those wars so it's very easy to handwave demands of actual proof by saying that life isn't a movie, or that it was all done with good faith(tm).

But for muslims and the MENA region in general, those arguments just don't resonate well with us at all.

The SR-71s were over Libya in 1986 because the Libyan secret service detonated a bomb in a Berlin nightclub, killing 3 and wounding hundreds, ten days prior.

"oh yeah well what abou.."

With all due respect, stop.

Ah yes, the US said so. You should probably look into the actual investigations and events before telling other people to stop. Almost no european country agrees with the conclusion of the US government (that bombed libya in a matter of days, before any investigation started to begin with).

A government that was back then almost frothing at the mouth at any occasion to blame everything on the libyans, to a comical degree. Which was well known, and also the reason why most european countries did not agree with the intervention that we are discussing

I mean, Germany said so too and the bombing happened in their country. They even convinced other European countries to extradite the suspects who were later convicted

The days of America violating sovereign airspace are drawing to a close, thankfully.

“The United States-initiated aerial bombing of targets inside the borders of the Libyan Arab Jamahiriyah which took place on April 15, 1986, was met with substantial and immediate criticism by the world community. The positive reaction from the U.S. congress and the American public was not shared by much of the world. Arab nations denounced the American action, as did the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. In meetings of the UN Security Council, countries denouncing the raid outnumbered those which supported it.

Good article: “American Bombing of Libya: An International Legal Analysis” (1987)

https://scholarlycommons.law.case.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?ar...

I wouldn't hold my breath... The US launched an airstrike in an illegally-occupied (Syria) nation less than a week ago.

https://news.antiwar.com/2023/03/25/us-carries-out-airstrike...

Illegally occupied according to who?

mmm... to anyone who could read?

I mean, could you say why us troops are in Syrian oil fields stealing oil?

Under the laws of what group is American presence in Syria illegal? Is it American laws? The UN? Syrian laws?

Both international law (the US has no UN mandate) and national/domestic Syrian law.

“End America’s Illegal Occupation of Syria Now: Our presence there is a violation of domestic and international law that’s made a horrible civil war even worse.”

https://www.cato.org/commentary/end-americas-illegal-occupat...

the un

Ah yes, because surely when the US stops patrolling the seas and skies of this planet, nobody else will try. We will finally have our peaceful utopia once that pesky United States is out of the way!

Yes because the US has to patrol the skies of libya, otherwise the entire world will collapse.

See? Strawmaning an argument is very easy to do, I can do it too!

> The days of America violating sovereign airspace are drawing to a close, thankfully.

They're still overflying Afghanistan and who knows where else.

The world hates that the US is the world police, but then constantly demands the US be the world police.

There is a huge difference between patrolling international tradeways or helping nato allies, and invading or violating foreign countries on a whim with absolutely 0 consequences.

I hate to be cynical, but if they don't do the other stuff as well, what's in it for them?

Well for one thing the US genuinely seems to be a lot less imperialistic these days. I mean, not militarily at least, I'm sure they are still involved in all kinds of meddling but with less military muscle flexing. It started with Trump but Biden seem to thankfully have kept the same less-interventionist policy. So I guess they have found a way to not do the other stuff, thankfully.

I guess it could just be a return back to the mean from the absolutely, unashamed military imperialism of the 1980s- early 2010s.

>but then constantly demands the US be the world police

Que?

Europe isn't even willing to fund their own militaries.

That's right, so you'd had to think outside the box and create demand

There is no international law (or agreement) defining the vertical boundary of a nation’s sovereign territory/airspace, but I guarantee no Libyans were up at 80,000'.

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