IS in Egypt claimed to have shot down the Russian plane that crashed in the Sinai

What's being unsaid is that Putin had it coming.

a reply to: FlyingFox

I was surprised the thread had stayed on topic so long until someone......

Exclusive: Investigators '90 percent sure' bomb downed Russian plane

Investigators of the Russian plane crash in Egypt are "90 percent sure" the noise heard in the final second of a cockpit recording was an explosion caused by a bomb, a member of the investigation team told Reuters on Sunday.

As is so often the case, the article cites an unnamed source, but in this case the source is claimed to be a member of the Egyptian team investigating the crash.

The Egyptian government would probably rather not have lax airport security directly implicated as facilitating the death of 224 people, so if the source is as Reuters claims, it's probably credible.

Whether sounds heard on the cockpit voice recorder can reliably identify a bomb remains an open question, but there are quite a few ways sound can be analyzed, and high explosives can yield a distinct acoustic signature due to the supsersonic speeds of their shock waves.

It still looks like speculation at this point, so skepticism is (as always) good to maintain, but as evidence from different sources continues to mount, it's looking more likely a bomb is what destroyed this plane.

The Washington Post had a run down of the last ten bomb destructions of airliners and it amazed me how many continued with varying degrees of success to fly, sometimes to successful landings or partially successful crash landings.

www.washingtonpost.com...

I think in only three of the ten cases did the plane lose all contact with ground control, including squawks, after the bombs went off, as happened in the case we are discussing. A handful of the planes were able to land, even.

A similar case to the recent Sinai incident was the downing, on June 23, 1985 of Air India Flight 182, by Sikh separatists. This was another high altitude bombing where the plane simply disappeared into the ocean without a sign from the cockpit that anything was wrong.

I'm convinced this Sinai event was a bombing. I think a structural failure would have left more recorded technical evidence and possibly vocal reactions on the tapes. The fact that we haven't seen any photos of large pieces of the mid section, from the wings to the start of the tail, of the airplane, suggests an event more destructive than an explosive decompression to me.

Politically, this is a big mess, particularly in Egypt where a very large number of people would like to be rid of Sisi, the usurper who overthrew Morsi, the legitimately elected Islamist. In effect, the jihadis have, by this bombing, made a huge withdrawal from Sisi's financial and political bank accounts in Egypt. I think things in Egypt are going to get worse before they get better.

originally posted by: gfad
a reply to: FlyingFox

I was surprised the thread had stayed on topic so long until someone......

It goes to the thought of who committed the act, and who equals how.

btw- your post added zero value.

I was looking at Pravda and came across this little tidbit. It might explain, in addition to already stated reasons, why Russia is not in a hurry to abandon the possibility that a technical fault might be the cause of the Sinai crash.

www.pravdareport.com...

The Airbus A321 had been in service for 18 years. Kogalymavia leased the aircraft from a daughter of the US-based International Lease Finance Corporation (ILFC) in Ireland, the Irish Times wrote. The deal was made in 2002, the newspaper said.

Ireland undertook to sell "serviceable" aircraft to Russia, and Russia undertook to maintain them. It turns out, though, that the Irish company is not responsible for rented and leased aircraft. The US-based owner (about 8,000 aircraft in leasing) has a bad reputation. According to The Irish Times, there were more 300 claims against the ILFC regarding the technical condition of aircraft.

It is interesting that this story, linking defective aircraft to a US based company first appeared in the Irish Times. Ireland, usually thought of as the home of shamrocks, faeries and the politically agile rock band U2, and of course . . . unpleasantness of an explosive kind, has become a Cayman Islands style home for a lot of shy money that just can't face an introduction to people from the Internal Revenue Service of any country, except Ireland of course.

I tried to find the original story on the Irish Times website, referred to in the Pravda report, but came across this story first:

www.irishtimes.com...

Aircraft lessor Aercap moves €39bn in assets to Republic

The aircraft finance giant formed last year by the $7 billion takeover of International Lease Finance Corporation (ILFC) by Irish-based Aercap has moved the bulk of its near €40 billion in assets to the Republic, according to its chief executive, Aengus Kelly.

Aercap agreed to buy ILFC from US insurer AIG in late 2013 in a $7 billion cash and shares deal to form the world’s biggest aircraft leasing company, which had a fleet of 1,130 planes and another 391 on order at the end of last September.

The company has moved its commercial base to the Republic, where it has offices in Dublin and Shannon, which means that it has shifted ownership of the bulk of its €39.1 million (should be billion) in assets here.

The group had a target of transferring its assets here by the end of 2015 and achieved this ahead of that deadline. Irish rules on withholding tax meant that the move saved it €200 million.

Aercap is headquartered in the Netherlands.

This is probably something of a side track, since the Russians had been leasing the Airbus A321 involved in the Flt. 9268 crash since 2002 and would have been, presumably, taking care of servicing and monitoring the condition of the aircraft. There is an element of grasping at straws on the Russian side in referring to the history of International Lease Finance Corporation.

Pravda:

Final conclusion: One should establish order in the field of aircraft leasing. One should toughen the rules and eradicate corruption. In this case, Russia would bid farewell to most of 130 air carriers.

"We have been talking about this security for 25 years. Yet, no one has ever paid any attention to it - either at the Transport Ministry or at the government. I am 100 percent sure that on December 1 we will all forget about the disaster, and everything will remain the way it is now. Nothing will be reorganized, no conclusions will be made, no suggestions whatsoever," Victor Gorbachev, CEO of the Association of Civil Aviation Airports told Pravda.Ru.

Ireland has become a very big player in the aircraft leasing business. I still think this aircraft was bombed by Islamic militants, but the background of the aircraft itself and the companies who owned it are not insignificant in assessing the environment of civil aviation in which this event occurred.

If you lease a car or buy a used car from a leasing company, you might not necessarily learn about everything that ever happened to that vehicle that might actually be relevant to your own experience with it.

Kremlin chief of staff, Sergei Ivanov has made a statement that effectively eliminates any possibility that Russia will accept either of the two main competing theories of the Sinai air disaster, prior to the completion of the formal accident investigation.

tass.ru...

This process, which will, according to him, include the complete reassembly of the aircraft, probably in a hangar in Cairo, to determine the exact origin of the process which destroyed the aircraft, is expected to take a significant period of time.

He recalled that the downing of the American plane over Scotland [On December 21, 1988, Pan Am Flight 103 exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing all 259 people on board and 11 on the ground] was investigated during four years, and only after that the verdict was announced. "The layout of the aircraft fragments in hangar is at least needed to establish precisely and not theoretically the reasons for the airliner’s crash. This means that the plane’s wreckage should be transported from the crash site to a hangar in Cairo, laid out there and examined for several weeks and maybe several months. The chemical study of the scrapes made from the fragments may also continue for months. So now it’s absolutely premature to unambiguously declare the verdict. The terror act is just one of the versions. But even an explosion on board the aircraft may occur for very different reasons," Ivanov said. He added that "only the fragments’ layout will finally show where the explosion occurred."
Ivanov said that it is clear "that everyone wants the results as quickly as possible, but this never happens in reality, so it is necessary to be patient and wait for the actual findings of the probe commission."

In the mean time Russia has suspended all civilian flights to Egypt, a policy which would never happen if the government really believed that a technical problem had brought down Flt. 9268. Of course, even if it turns out, despite claims by the local ISIS affiliate to the contrary, that the craft was brought down by a technical fault, the political climate in Egypt does merit action by the Russians to protect their tourists in that country.

A very hard message is being sent to Egypt. "Put your house in order if you want our tourist rubles."

Imagine if the Morsi government were still in power. Morsi, who wanted to send Egyptian troops to Syria to fight Assad, alongside the jihadi mercenaries. Imagine what that would have done for Egyptian tourism.

It reminds me a little of A.J.P. Taylor's notions about trends in history, i.e., that they move along blindly, pushed by forces that are difficult to discern and vector and less dependent on personalities than we might think.

The force that seems to be most forceful at the moment is Islamism. It is a big bonfire in the world that warms some and that burns others and that is being used by some to burn others. Like fire, it has principles and it has chaos. Every flame burns the same fuel but independently, each in its own direction. Firefighters know how to handle fires of all kinds, but maybe politicians are apt to become confused by what they see as people rather than flames.

The Russians are saying that a bomb, equivalent to 1.5 kilos of TNT, brought down Flt. 7K9268 over the Sinai peninsula.



They are offering a $50,000,000 reward for information about the perpetrators of the attack.

www.nytimes.com... ckage-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0

The bomb contained up to one kilogram — or 2.2 pounds — of TNT, Mr. Bortnikov said, adding that “foreign made” explosive material was found on parts of the plane and other objects that were examined.

Russia has offered $50 million for any information leading to the capture of those who carried out the attack, and Mr. Putin vowed to track them down. “We will search for them everywhere, no matter where they are hiding,” he said at a meeting with his security council that was broadcast on national television. “We will find them in any place on the planet and will punish them.”

I did some internet assisted calculations related to C-4 vs TNT and I believe that this blast (1 1/4 lbs of C-4 plus 1/2 lbs of TNT) is the rough equivalent of the blast that the Russians say brought down the airliner over Sinai. (Apologies for the hi-jinks from our military schoolboys in this context.)



I think this is the same blast from a different angle, including craters.

Here is a link to a photo of the "device" with which the Islamic State jihadis claim to have brought down the airliner.

www.lefigaro.fr...

I don't know anything about building or detonating bombs but they say it involved using a can of soda to contain the explosive. Of course this could be disinformation.

Here is a link to .pdf files of the on line magazine Dabiq, which is a publication of the Islamic State, where the photo first appeared.

jihadology.net...

This magazine is professionally produced. I was surprised by the quality of the production. Be warned that there are numerous photos of bodies of victims of war and executions in the magazine.

It is obvious to me from looking at this publication that the Islamic State is a serious entity with some breadth and depth of support. It is not just a group of malcontents let out of jail by the Saudis and cynically used by the United States to attack inconvenient political entities like Syria, Libya or Iraq.

That may have been the Americans' view of them when the CIA was training their leaders, but the formations created by ex jailbirds from Guantanamo and elsewhere have obviously evolved.

Dabiq magazine, at a glance, is for "true believers" in the classical sense defined by Eric Hoffer, i.e., zealots with tunnel vision and, in the case of the salafists, a taste for summary executions and procrustean punishments, Sharia style.

I deplore all of this but I acknowledge that you can walk into any bar in any place in the world and find lots of people with the same level of crude brutality built into their world view.

To be fair, I haven't read the magazine in detail, but I intend to. This group is serious and seriously funded by someone. We need to take them much more seriously that we, hitherto, have.

Here are some quotes from Hoffer. I think he has the modern young jihadi well understood, for the most part, excepting possibly the element of genuine political outrage at the machinations of foreign powers in the Arab world.

www.goodreads.com...

“People with a sense of fulfillment think it is a good world and would like to conserve it as it is, while the frustrated favor radical change.”

“The act of self-denial seems to confer on us the right to be harsh and merciless toward others.”

“The permanent misfits can find salvation only in a complete separation from the self; and they usually find it by losing themselves in the compact collectivity of a mass movement.”

“There is no doubt that in exchanging a self-centered for a selfless life we gain enormously in self-esteem. The vanity of the selfless, even those who practice utmost humility, is boundless.”

“The quality of ideas seems to play a minor role in mass movement leadership. What counts is the arrogant gesture, the complete disregard of the opinion of others, the singlehanded defiance of the world.”

“Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive of all the unifying agents. Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a god, but never without a belief in a devil.”

― Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements