Official War With Iran Thread

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www.foxnews.com

Iran official admits country’s role in terror bombing that killed 241 US military members: report

After years of silence about its reported role in the massacres of U.S. Marines, diplomats and personnel in 1983, a senior Iran official publicly acknowledged Iranian regime terrorism.
www.foxnews.com www.foxnews.com

Iran official admits country’s role in terror bombing that killed 241 US military members: report
220 Marines, 18 sailors, 3 soldiers, 17 US civilians, 58 French troops killed in 1983 terror attack in Beirut

October 1, 2023 6:00pm EDT
Haley: Biden's Iran deal is 'incredibly reckless, irresponsible'

2024 presidential candidate Nikki Haley offers her foreign policy expertise after the Biden administration's $6 billion prisoner swap deal with Iran on "The Story with Martha MacCallum."

The Islamic Republic of Iran’s representative in Lebanon issued the first public announcement of the Iranian regime’s role in the mass murder of American military and diplomatic personnel in the early 1980s in Beirut.

The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) first located and translated the bombshell interview with Sayyed Issa Tabatabai, who serves as the representative of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in Lebanon.

The state-controlled Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA) quickly scrubbed the damning disclosure that Tabatabai made about Iran’s role in the suicide bombings of Americans, but MEMRI preserved a copy.

Iran and its chief strategic ally, the U.S.-designated terrorist movement Hezbollah, in Lebanon have been blamed for bombing the U.S. Embassy in Beirut in 1983 in which 63 people, including 17 Americans, were murdered, and dual suicide truck bombers blew up the barracks of American and French members of a multinational force in Lebanon in 1983, in which 220 U.S. Marines, 18 U.S. Navy sailors and 3 U.S. Army soldiers lost their lives. Fifty-eight French troops were also murdered in the terrorist attack.

1983 Marine Barracks bombing.
U.S. Marines search for survivors and bodies in the ruins of their barracks in Beirut, Lebanon, Oct. 24, 1983, the day after a terrorist suicide truck bomb killed 241 U.S. servicemen. (Peter Charlesworth / LightRocket via Getty Images)
OUTRAGE AS IRAN PRESIDENT PREPARES TO ADDRESS UN: 'WANTS TO KILL AMERICAN CITIZENS'

According to the MEMRI translation of Tabatabai’s interview with the IRNA, Tabatabai said, "I quickly went to Lebanon and provided what was needed in order to [carry out] martyrdom operations in the place where the Americans and Israelis were." He added, "The efforts to establish [Hezbollah] started in [Lebanon's] Baalbek area, where members of [Iran's] Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) arrived. I had no part in establishing the [political] party [Hezbollah], but God made it possible for me to continue the military activity with the group that had cooperated with us prior to the [Islamic] Revolution's victory."

The MEMRI report continued, "It is noteworthy that the part of the interview in which Tabatabai acknowledged receiving Khomeini's fatwa ordering attacks on American and Israeli targets in Lebanon was removed by IRNA from its website shortly after publication. This is apparently because no official representative of [Ayatollah Ruhollah] Khomeini, the father of the Islamic Republic, or of Khamenei, Iran's Supreme Leader, had ever said that Iran had any involvement in ordering, planning and carrying out the massive bombings in Lebanon against U.S.," wrote MEMRI.

Sayyed Issa Tabatabai
Sayyed Issa Tabatabai in an interview boasted of Iran's involvement in the 1983 terror bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon. The interview has since been erased from Iranian media. (Anwar Amro / AFP via Getty Images / File)
Tabatabai also said during the interview, "With the victory of the Islamic Revolution [in Iran], Hezbollah was established [in the summer of 1982]. For two years, [Hezbollah's] military base was located in my home. 'The group' [supporters of the Islamic Revolution] signed a contract declaring their willingness to become martyrs. Perhaps more than 70 [of them] signed this contract in my home."

The significance of Tabatabai for the highest echelons of Iran’s regime was recently on display on the English language website of Iran’s Foreign Affairs Ministry. An entry shows Tabatabai meeting with Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian.

Amir-Abdollahian "highlighted [Sayyed] Issa Tabatabai's significant support and contributions to enhancing 'the resistance's' position in Lebanon, the region, and the Islamic world," according to the Iranian Foreign Ministry text.

FBI SAYS CHINA, IRAN USING NEW TACTICS TO TARGET CRITICS IN US

Marine Barracks bombing
Volunteer rescue workers carry the body of a U.S. Marine on Oct. 24, 1983, the day after a terrorist truck bomb exploded at the Marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon. (Peter Charlesworth / LightRocket via Getty Images)
Michael Rubin, an Iran expert for the American Enterprise Institute, told Fox News Digital, "Americans have astonished both Iranians and the victims of Iranian terrorism with the diplomatic contortions undertaken to avoid holding Iran to account. Now that the supreme leader's representative has confessed, the questions are: (1) Will Americans who carried water for Iranian terrorism apologize? (2) Will Iran pay compensation to the victims of their terror? If [President] Biden prices five Americans at $6 billion, the U.S. should demand no less than $289.2 billion from Iran today."

Rubin’s reference to Americans who allegedly aided Iranian terrorism covers the allegations that Iranian Americans, one of whom works for the Defense Department, were involved in foreign lobbying for the Islamic Republic. The U.S. State Department has classified Iran’s regime as the worst international state sponsor of terrorism.

The MEMRI revelation could lead to new lawsuits against Iran’s regime for its role in the murder of American military and diplomatic personnel. According to MEMRI, "Iran has always vehemently denied any role in the bombings. It submitted no defense in response to the 2001 U.S. lawsuits filed against it by families of the hundreds of Americans killed or wounded in the barracks bombings."

Fox News Digital reported in 2016 that a U.S. Supreme Court decision allowed families of victims of the 1983 bombing in Lebanon and other Iran regime-linked attacks to collect almost $2 billion of frozen funds from Iran.

Hezbollah fighters hold flags
Hezbollah fighters hold flags as they attend the memorial of their slain leader, Sheik Abbas al-Mousawi, who was killed by an Israeli airstrike in 1992 in Tefahta, Lebanon, on Feb. 13, 2016. (AP Photo / Mohammed Zaatari)
UN NUCLEAR WATCHDOG SAYS ‘NO PROGRESS’ HAS BEEN MADE IN MONITORING IRANIAN NUCLEAR PROGRAM: REPORT

Banafsheh Zand, an Iranian-American expert on the Iranian regime, told Fox News Digital, "Issa Tabatabai's admission is a sign of serious divisions among the regime's top brass. No one within the ranks of either the clergy or the Revolutionary Guards would confess to such an action unless the infighting among the leadership of the Shia Mafia was escalating. For Tabatabai to acknowledge and take responsibility for that hideous act of terror, he must be sure that his superiors would not or could not punish him, otherwise he would have self-censored and skipped over major details."

She continued, "But he didn’t. He has laid it all out – before the editors cut out swaths of his interview. So, it's either that, or he feels he has nothing to lose. Either way, given the Biden [and French President Emmanuel Macron] administrations' desperation for any facsimile of a deal with the Khomeinist regime, they will likely sweep this under the rug."

MEMRI wrote that Tabatabai noted the "utter confidence placed in him by both Khomeini and his successor Khamenei, and underlined that he is Khamenei's trusted representative in Lebanon in all things having to do with finance and the spread of the Shi'a."

Beirut Barracks bombing
Edwin Marian Johnston holds a photo of her son, Marine Cpl. Edward Johnston, who died in the 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon, outside federal court on Sept. 7, 2007, in Washington, D.C. (Brendan Smialowski / Getty Images)
CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP

A Pentagon spokesperson referred questions from Fox News Digital to the State Department. Neither the State Department nor the National Security Council responded to those questions.

Potkin Azarmehr, a British-Iranian expert on Iran, told Fox News Digital, "It seems no matter how many times the Western leaders see the consequences of their appeasement with terrorists they are still resigned to continue the same doomed path they have in the last four decades."

Numerous Fox News Digital press queries were sent to the Iranian Foreign Affairs Ministry and its U.N. mission for comment.


@voiture @Creflo ½ Dollar @invalid @Pressure @wire28 @ADevilYouKhow @88m3 @MeachTheMonster @Wargames @Tair @Da_Eggman
 
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theconversation.com

How Iran controls a network of armed groups to pursue its regional strategy

Iran funds a large network of armed groups across the Middle East as part of its ambition to replace the US as regional power.
theconversation.com theconversation.com


Graphic showing Middle East and the varioujs armed groups operating there on behalf of Iran
 
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apnews.com

Sweden has thwarted Iranian attack plots, counterintelligence police say

A senior member of the Swedish security police says that Iran “has been preparing and conducted activities aimed at carrying out a so-called physical attack against someone or something in Sweden.”
apnews.com apnews.com



Sweden has thwarted Iranian attack plots, counterintelligence police say​

STOCKHOLM (AP) — A senior member of the Swedish security police said Thursday that Iran has planned attacks on the country, days after local media reported that two Iranians were deported for a plot to kill three Swedish Jews several years ago.

Earlier this week, Swedish broadcast SR reported that two Iranians had been suspected of planning to kill members of the Swedish Jewish community. They were arrested in 2021 and were expelled from Sweden in 2022 without charges, according to Swedish radio.

Daniel Stenling, counterespionage head at Sweden’s domestic security agency, told SR on Thursday that Iran “has been preparing and conducted activities aimed at carrying out a so-called physical attack against someone or something in Sweden.”

He added, “we have worked on a number of such cases where we have, as we gauge it, thwarted such preparations.” He declined to give specifics.

READ MORE
The two deported Iranians sought asylum in the Scandinavian country in 2015, claiming to be Afghans, and eventually got shelter in Sweden, according to SR. The report identified them as Mahdi Ramezani and Fereshteh Sanaeifarid, and said they have links to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard.

A Swedish prosecutor earlier confirmed to The Associated Press that the two, a man and woman, were suspected of planning to carry out an attack “deemed to be terror” and that they have been expelled from Sweden. Prosecutor Hans Ihrman did not say when.

Ihrman told the AP that the prosecution “failed to get the necessary evidence that had been a prerequisite to be able to bring charges.” He also declined to give further details.

SR said the Iranians arrived in Sweden in 2015 as hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers sought to Europe. Sweden, with a population of 10 million, took in a record 163,000 migrants in 2015 — the highest per capita of any European country. :mindblown:

Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson said Wednesday the report was “very serious.”

“We have had too many people in Sweden entering on the wrong grounds and who were not stopped at the border,” Kristersson said. “It is extremely important that dangerous people are stopped if they try to enter.”

The security agency earlier has said that Iran was active in Sweden and has been described as one of the countries that pose the greatest intelligence threat to Sweden.

“But I can’t go into detail about what it’s about, because then I’d reveal what we’re doing,” Stenling told SR.
 
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topsecretumbra.substack.com

Rethinking the Screaming Eagles’ Deadliest Day

Do we really know what killed 248 American soldiers in a largely forgotten disaster nearly four decades ago?
topsecretumbra.substack.com topsecretumbra.substack.com

​

Rethinking the Screaming Eagles’ Deadliest Day​

Do we really know what killed 248 American soldiers in a largely forgotten disaster nearly four decades ago?​

John Schindler
There’s no better-known division in the U.S. Army than the 101st Airborne, the famed Screaming Eagles. That outfit has been legendary since its exploits in the Second World War: the Normandy jump on D-Day, the jump north of Eindhoven two months later, then its heroic stand at Bastogne in the Battle of the Bulge. The 101st fought in Vietnam, then converted to an air assault division (i.e. it goes into battle with helicopters, not parachutes), and as such participated in the 1991 Gulf War plus our post-9/11 campaigns against terrorism.

It became famous to a new generation thanks to a 1992 book about one of its rifle companies in WW2, authored by Stephen Ambrose (or somebody), which was turned into a superlative TV miniseries by HBO in 2001. This was perfectly timed with the Greatest Generation craze of the era. Thanks to that Band of Brothers, more Americans have heard of the 101st than any other division in the U.S. military.

It's therefore sadly ironic that the 101st Airborne Division’s deadliest day is scarcely remembered outside Fort Campbell in Kentucky, its home base, and a small town in Newfoundland. That town is Gander, where on December 12, 1985, a heavily laden DC-8 four-engine jetliner crashed just after takeoff, killing all 256 aboard: eight crew and 248 U.S. Army soldiers, of which 236 belonged to the 101st, nearly all of them from its 3d Battalion, 502d Infantry Regiment. More Screaming Eagles died that day in Newfoundland than were killed in action on D-Day.*

While the disaster got a lot of press coverage at the time, including an emotional speech by President Ronald Reagan to the families of the fallen at Ft. Campbell, the story faded from the headlines, in part because it happened in a remote region of Canada. There are memorials to the crash at Ft. Campbell and Gander, major anniversaries are commemorated by the U.S. Army, it remains the deadliest plane crash ever in Canada, as well as the U.S. Army’s worst peacetime disaster, but the Gander tragedy has faded from broader public consciousness.

Which is regrettable, not just for all the young lives lost, but because serious questions linger about what killed 248 American soldiers. They were headed home for Christmas after a tour with the United Nations peacekeeping force in the Sinai, founded in 1981 and still active today (there remains a U.S. battalion serving on rotation with that force). They were flying home from Cairo to Ft. Campbell with fueling stops in Cologne and Gander. Their ride home was with Arrow Air, a contract carrier for the Pentagon, and Flight 1285 carried the first contingent of Screaming Eagles home for Christmas. Tragically, soldiers with families were given priority for the first flight home, so many children lost their father at Gander.

The doomed DC-8 was built in 1969 and was showing its age, plus Arrow Air’s inattention to maintenance. Several gauges were prone to malfunction and one of its four engines was temperamental. What is not in dispute is that Flight 1285 landed at Gander at 0534L, having crossed the Atlantic in the night. Conditions at Gander were chilly with some light icy drizzle. There was just enough time for some soldiers to phone their families at Ft. Campbell, telling them they would be home in just a few hours. The DC-8’s crew didn’t opt for de-icing, visual inspection having detected no significant ice buildup on the airplane, and therefore taxied to the runway, its fuel tanks full, headed for Kentucky, at 0645L.

It didn’t get far. Horrified onlookers observed the DC-8 lift off, barely, then fail to attain altitude. It limped over the Trans-Canada Highway and impacted the earth on a forested downward slope facing Gander Lake. Flight 1285 hit trees and broke apart upon collision with the rocky earth. An enormous fireball erupted, visible for miles around. There were no survivors.

Thanks to the vicissitudes of timing and bureaucracy, the investigation into the crash of Flight 1285 became notorious as one of the most chaotic and controversial in aviation history. Several agencies were involved – the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board because it was a U.S. airplane and carrier, while the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, with help from U.S. Army investigators and the FBI, assisted the inquiry – but the lead was taken by the recently established Canadian Aviation Safety Board. This was an unfortunate, if inevitable, choice since the newborn CASB was short on experience while being plagued by politics and bureaucratic infighting. The agency’s first big investigation was the deadliest plane crash in Canadian history, a massive case which taxed the CASB beyond its abilities.

Simply put, the CASB, still finding its feet as an organization, made an embarrassing hash of the Flight 1285 inquiry. Before long, its nine (later ten) investigators split into two factions which despised and mistrusted each other. This resulted in the strange outcome of two separate reports on the cause of the disaster. The majority report was released in late 1988 and concluded that the crash was triggered by an unfortunate confluence of events. Although that report did not take a firm position as to exactly what brought down Flight 1285 and how, it posited with impressive detail a plausible scenario in which a combination of excessive weight (soldiers carry more luggage and gear than civilians do) and unnoticed icing on the wings, with possible loss of thrust from the troubled number four engine, brought down the jetliner, which was unable to generate sufficient lift to avoid crashing.

A few weeks later, four dissenting investigators released their minority report, which scathingly rejected the majority’s take. Instead, the much shorter and less detailed minority assessment asserted that icing was not the cause of the crash, while claiming that Flight 1285 was on fire before it hit the earth, therefore some sort of explosion caused the disaster. The minority did not determine whether this alleged explosion was caused by unlisted military ordnance carried on the airplane or some sort of terrorism.

This ignited a political firestorm in Ottawa and beyond. In fairness to the minority take, soldiers sometimes do take unauthorized ordnance with them, several eyewitnesses claimed to see flames on the underside of Flight 1285 before it crashed, and terrorism, often of Middle Eastern origin, was alarmingly common in the mid-1980s, including against Western airliners. Indeed, there was even a claim of responsibility made by a known jihadist group (more on that shortly). In other words, it was hardly outlandish to suggest that something unnatural brought down Flight 1285.

That said, the minority report offered nothing amounting to hard evidence for its claims, which read more like a litany of possibilities, some of which contradict each other. Analytically, their case was much weaker than the majority’s assessment. Nevertheless, the surrounding controversy grew so serious that Ottawa disbanded the ill-starred CASB, replacing it in 1990 with the Transportation Safety Board of Canada, which became a more professional and less politicized agency than its predecessor. The Arrow Air debacle has not been repeated, and the TSB has investigated several major disasters successfully, meeting international standards.

That didn’t stop the minority investigators, led by the self-promoting member Les Filotas, from taking their case to the public. Flight 1285 blew up, they insisted, with Filotas giving interviews all over the place advocating his views. He published a book in 1991 which asserted that the majority report was a sham and powerful forces in Ottawa and Washington wanted the investigation shut down. Filotas got the attention of Congress, where he shared his theories surrounding the explosion which he believed killed 248 American soldiers. Some Congressmembers found the apparent lack of interest in the crash by American investigators from the FBI, the NTSB, and even the U.S. Army to be suspect.

That doesn’t prove anything, of course. Les Filotas is the last minority member of the board still living, and he’s never abandoned his crusade for the bomb hypothesis. As recently as 2015 he appeared in a major CBC News investigationlooking into the Gander crash, employing his customary talking points. Online you can find postings proffering various theories about what “really” happened to Flight 1285, of varying degrees of imagination.

Over time, however, the majority’s case has gotten stronger, particularly as our understanding has grown regarding just how little ice is needed to compromise the lift of an aircraft’s wing, especially if other factors are at play. Along comes an aviation blogger who goes by the handle Admiral Cloudberg with a fresh look at Flight 1285. I’m a fan of the Medium blog, which offers detailed examinations of airplane crashes, great and small, with an impressive amount of technical analysis and investigative rigor.

AC, as I’ll call the author for short, is firmly in the camp of the majority regarding the Gander disaster. The analysis is essentially an updated version of the majority report, including details about wing icing that were less understood in the 1980s. Particularly impressive is AC’s elucidation of how the politically compromised CASB mishandled the inquiry. Filotas and his fellow minoritarians are convincingly presented as excitable amateurs who were better at hooking the media than conducting any bona fide air crash investigation.

If you want a concise case for the majority assessment, backed by quality graphics, AC’s take is for you. You will walk away convinced, or nearly so, that Flight 1285 was too heavy when it lifted off from Gander, and icing on the wings made a rapid stall inevitable.
 
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Part 2:


I was convinced, too…almost. However, I still have a few questions. Top Secret Umbra has offered analysis of several mysterious air crashes with a possible terrorism component, e.g. the 1980 Ustica disaster, the 1988 destruction of Pan Am 103, and the 2010 Smolensk crash. My interest in plane crashes is as a hobbyist: I’m neither a physicist nor an aviation engineer. However, terrorism is very much my wheelhouse, I’ve got real-world experience there, and that’s where Admiral Cloudberg missteps.

A curious fact regarding Flight 1285 is that, only hours after the crash, an unidentified caller speaking Arabic told a Western news agency in Beirut that the Islamic Jihad Organization had blown up the DC-8. The Canadian and American governments were quick to dismiss this as a false claim of responsibility. The minority report considered this claim to be a big deal, while providing no evidence of any bomb on Flight 1285. :ohhh:

Admiral Cloudberg is dismissive of that Islamic Jihad call, seemingly viewing anything Les Filotas says as suspect. This is problematic. As AC states:

The [minority] report also points to the claim of responsibility by Islamic Jihad, despite the fact that this organization has a history of claiming attacks that they didn’t commit. The dissenters appear unaware of this, citing the 1983 Beirut barracks bombing as evidence of Islamic Jihad’s capabilities, even though a court inquiry concluded that the group wasn’t responsible for that attack either.

Where to start here? Most terrorist groups at some point have claimed responsibility for attacks which they didn’t commit, but in the 1980s there was a quite active and blood-drenched terrorist group that went by the handle of the Islamic Jihad Organization. However, AC is right for the wrong reason here. IJO indeed didn’t perpetrate the October 1983 Beirut barracks bombing, which killed 241 U.S. military members, because the Islamic Jihad Organization never actually existed. :ohhh:

That term was a cover employed by Iranian intelligence in the 1980s to mask its terrorist activities abroad. Specifically, beginning in the early 1980s, Tehran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps recruited, trained, and equipped Lebanese Shia extremists to conduct terrorist attacks on Western interests in the Middle East and beyond. Groomed and led by the IRGC’s elite Qods Force (Qods means Jerusalem: the QF is the Guards’ special operations wing), these terrorists used the moniker of the “Islamic Jihad Organization” to give Tehran plausible deniability in its secret war against the West. Today’s headlines are filled with the nefarious activities of Iran’s proxies in the Middle East, attacking Israel and U.S. targets all over the place, but the “IJO” was the IRGC’s first such proxy.

And highly active they were. The list of claimed “IJO” attacks is long, these are just the big ones:

· Apr. 18, 1983 bombing of U.S. Embassy Beirut (63 dead, 17 of them Americans)

· Oct. 23, 1983 bombings of peacekeepers in Beirut (241 U.S. and 58 French dead)

· Dec. 12, 1983 bombings of multiple targets in Kuwait (six dead)

· Jan. 18, 1984 assassination of the president of the American University in Beirut

· Sep. 20, 1984 bombing of U.S. Embassy Beirut Annex (14 dead, two of them U.S.)

· Apr. 10, 1985 bombing of a Madrid restaurant frequented by U.S. military (18 dead)

· July 22, 1985 bombings of Jewish targets in Copenhagen (one dead)

Then came the Arrow Air claim, which was something of a last hurrah for the “IJO.” It was best known for its kidnappings of dozens of Westerners in Lebanon, including Bill Buckley, the CIA’s Beirut station chief, who died in “IJO” custody under murky circumstances. The shadowy terrorist group made a serious error in 1986 when they kidnapped four Soviet diplomats in Beirut, three of whom were actually KGB officers. Moscow retaliated in their special Chekist way, reputedly kidnapping “IJO” members and sending back various body parts until the jihadists released the three surviving Soviets unharmed (KGB veterans tell this story with unconcealed glee). After that the “IJO” adopted a lower profile. Their last claimed terrorist attack was the suicide bombing of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires on Mar. 17, 1992, which killed 29 people plus the bomber.

By the latter half of the 1980s, with its cover blown, the “IJO” simply rebranded as the armed wing of Hezbollah, as they remain today, tightly linked to the IRGC-QF. The leader of this shadowy terrorist group from its foundation until his death in early 2008 was Imad Mughniyeh, a Lebanese Shia leader who was the world’s top terrorist for decades. Mughniyeh was a far more accomplished terrorist than Osama bin Laden, and he probably killed more people too. Mughniyeh wasn’t just close with Tehran, he was an actual IRGC general. After years of trying, U.S. and Israeli intelligence finally caught up with him, killing Mughniyeh with a car bomb in Damascus.

Western intelligence knew from nearly the start that the “IJO” was merely a front for Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. On Sep. 26, 1983, the National Security Agency intercepted an encrypted message sent by Iranian intelligence headquarters in Tehran to their ambassador in Damascus, a known terrorist, to “take spectacular action against the American Marines” in Beirut. Unfortunately this Top Secret intelligence wasn’t shared with those Marines, and less than a month later the “IJO” blew up their Beirut barracks, delivering the U.S. Marine Corps its deadliest day since Iwo Jima in early 1945.

Over the decades, the reality that the “IJO” was no more than a cover for Iran’s terrorist proxies has spread beyond spook circles. In his 2002 memoir, former CIA officer Bob Baer, who was on the ground in Lebanon in the 1980s, revealed that the Intelligence Community knew at the time that the “IJO” handle was simply what the IRGC-QF called its lethal operations when it wanted deniability. Tehran was always calling the shots.

None of this means that Tehran, or any terrorists, took down Flight 1285. The majority assessment is still the most persuasive explanation of why 248 American soldiers died on their way home for Christmas. All the same, the IRGC and its proxies have enormous amounts of blood on their hands, all over the world, going back over four decades. Tehran’s terrorists are capable of executing sophisticated attacks globally. Was the “IJO” Beirut call claiming responsibility for Gander just a crank or a head-fake? Quite possibly. Yet nobody who understands the IRGC and its well-honed modus operandi should be too quick to dismiss the possibility that Gander was no accident.

Flight 1285 originated in Cairo, and Egyptian airports have long had serious security problems. As recently as late 2015, the Islamic State placed a concealed bomb on a Russian A321 airliner departing Sharm El Sheikh, filled with holidaymakers returning home. Its explosion over the Sinai killed all 224 aboard. This doesn’t mean that terrorists took down Flight 1285, particularly in the absence of evidence of explosives aboard the doomed DC-8 (the minority report’s claims in this area are weak and unsubstantiated). Nevertheless, that possibility should be reconsidered. At a minimum, it’s difficult to understand how the U.S. and Canadian governments declared that terrorism was not involved in the Gander crash just one day after the disaster. They determined that in 24 hours? How? As someone who’s worked terrorism investigations, which in the real world are complex and slow-moving things with lots of moving parts, that’s an astonishing claim. It reeks of a cover-up. Therefore, my counterspy-flavored questions remain.

That said, as of now, I feel confident stating that the CASB majority report was probably correct after all.

Probably.

*According to the Army’s official history, the 101st calculated in August 1944 that the division’s D-Day deaths included 156 killed plus 756 missing (presumed captured or killed).
 
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