Re: KAL007 Coldwar Mystery

Casper H.S. Dik <Casper.Dik@Sun.COM> wrote:

:Fred J. McCall <fmccall@earthlink.net> writes:
:
:>The difference being, of course, that the Russians ID'd the thing,
:>followed it for a while, and THEN shot it down, while in the case of
:>Robocruiser they screwed up and thought it was something else.
:
:There's no proof there was mistaken identity in the case of the Vincennes;

For some rather slipshod definition of "no proof". The Vincennes had
identified that contact as an Iranian F-14.

:certainly the other commanders in the Navy believed that the
:commander of the Vincennes was "gung-ho" and went chasing after
:gun boats with his billion dollar boat.

Yep, but irrelevant.

:All low tech ships
:who tracked it at the time correctly identified it as an aeroplane
:in a common air corridor following a normal take-off path.

Yep. First screw up by Robocruiser.

:When it was shot down, it was flying away from the Vincennes,
:not towards it.

Yep. Second screwup by Robocruiser, as they misread their displays
and saw the contact as closing and diving rather than opening and
climbing.

:The Vincennes was three miles inside Iranian territorial waters
:when it attacked the gun boats (so it was not shooting at them in self
:defense, it was attacking them as agressor)

Irrelevant, as is all the further detail that I snipped.

Or is it your contention that 'gunboats' equate to 'airliner'?

-- 
"Ignorance is preferable to error, and he is less remote from the
 truth who believes nothing than he who believes what is wrong."
                               -- Thomas Jefferson