http://www.rt.com/news/turkish-plane-erdogan-statement-543/
This Russian Times story unfortunately has a vague title at a time that ambiguity is not a good thing.
“Syria downed Turkish fighter jet over its territorial waters”
The plane believed to be shot down was an F-4 – an American made plane widely used in third world countries. It’s old, slow, and easy to shoot down – it is a Vietnam War aircraft. Turkey has many state of the art military aircraft, including planes it make itself. Sending in an F-4 could be bait to provoke a shoot down and a justification for war. It’s also possible it was watching the natural gas drilling boat off the coast of Cyprus (or both).
The “its” in the headline is Syria. The Russian view (at least currently) is the military jet from Turkey was flying in Syrian territory without permission. Time for a map.
Where boundaries are between countries in places like this is very messy. Syria claims about a 40 mile airspace into the Mediterranean, which is roughly the shaded area. I believe the general approach is you draw a line from the two end points and draw a line at 90 degrees outward to define the boundary – but irregular bodies of water (like Libya’s Gulf of Sidra) are a great example of a way to start wars over this type of dispute.
I hope nothing begins, the USA needs
to stay out of it, let these idiots kill themselves off.
Ron Paul looks less looney every day.
Later reports say the plane was shot down about a mile off the coast of Syria, well on their side of the border and flying fast and at low altitude. Contrary to what Fox “News” made up, Syria has not “apologized” and Turkey mostly is behaving consistent with knowing their plane was violating Syrian air space and got caught in the act.
Maybe Fox News should dredge up that old story that Saddam’s Hussein’s Weapons of Mass Destruction are hiding in a cave in the deserts of Syria. Maybe Rupert Murdoch can get to run the newspapers and TV stations of Syria after the CIA overthrows Assad.
Meanwhile on the other side of Turkey…bombs are once again falling on the Kurds inside Northern Iraq…
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-18570036
I think before we are done, US involvement sending war materials and fomenting Civil War in Syria will make Fast and Furious look like chump change. When it comes time to wield the budget axe and hack out big parts of the US Federal budget, active wars would help to protect the DoD and other intelligence agencies from being cut.
So where are the reporters asking the Nobel Peace Prize committee if they are having second thoughts about awarding it to Barack Obama based only on Hope? I don’t doubt the CIA knows where and when Barack Obama was born… I just wonder if our activities in Libya and Syria are being done at the direction of Barack Obama, being done because nobody is paying attention at the White House, or he is being blackmailed into going along.
The one thing I’m pretty sure is most of the people who voted for Barsck Ibama in 2008 didn’t vote for him to use military force to overthrow governments of other countries.
Connecting Google and Syria is this detected outage about a year ago:
http://www.renesys.com/blog/2011/06/syrian-internet-shutdown.shtml
It’s often in tangential details that I find more interesting stuff. The account mentions that an overland cable was being built between Syria and Turkey so Syria isn’t dependent on a submarine cable from Cyprus.
The state of the Internet at the moment is that the United States is very much at the center of it. There is only one Internet path between Asia and Europe, and its routing is very tenuous and subject to natural or political disruption. Asia talks to Europe by traversing the United States. The only way that changes is if Russia were to build a fiber optic line connecting China to Eastern Europe. I’m not sure if people would want to become dependent on such a cable.
Actually, I see now there is another route
http://www.renesys.com/tech/reports/Renesys-Bahrain-July2010.pdf
You can see how tenuous it is as well – this cable went out a few days ago, cut over near Singapore where it interconnects with all the Pacific Ocean cables, forcing traffic to Asia to come from Europe instead of the Western Hemisphere.
A name you should be paying attention (it’s in the list of Companies that Run the World) is the TATA Group. Tata is an Indian company. They first came on my radar maybe 20 years ago as they aggressively approached US companies to outsource programming to people in India. They also make automobiles, and run important parts of the world’s Internet, which is key to things like outsourcing customer support for US companies to India.