Newsgroup: it.cultura.linguistica.giapponese
Titolo: AmeriKani!

L'ex comandante del sottomarino USS Greeneville che affondo' l'anno
scorso la Ehime Maru in visita di rispetto alla scuola e al monumento
dei caduti ad Uwajima, Giappone: emozioni contrastanti ...
http://asia.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/asiapcf/east/12/15/japan.sub.ap/index.html
bye
p.s.: oltre ai gia' citati incidenti aggiungerei anche l'abbattimanto
nel 1988  nel Golfo Persico di un Airbus iraniano accidentalmente
colpito da un missile partito dall USS Vincennes
http://www.airdisaster.com/cgi_bin/view_details.cgi?date=07031988&reg=EP-IBU&airline=Iran+Air

 dei caduti ad Uwajima, Giappone: emozioni contrastanti ...
INteressante a parte il fatto che ripetono la versione ufficiale dei fatti: 
cioè che era lui al timone, mentre da più parti sembra che al timone ci 
fossero dei civili VIP, pare dirigenti della Enron in visita al 
sottomarino.
C'e' anche un video mostrante questi civili mentre sbarcano in fretta dal 
sottomarino in fretta e furia.
Spero questo sia interessante.
Saluti,
Piergiorgo.
P.s. Va bene cosi' il post, senza troppi strali contro i cattivi amerikani ? 
:P

 Vengo in trasferta con nove bergamaschi nel Ducato ...
... al massimo tu puoi andare in posti come questo :
http://hitech_4.tripod.com/ICO/JAPAN/INAX.htm
... e comunque vedi di andare a rompere da un'altra parte !!!

 famosa, senno' sai che casino doppio scrivevano ...)
Ho visto l' articolo. Molto interessante. anche perche' mi fa venire dubbi 
sull' effettivo addestramento di quest' equipaggio. SEdici civili a bordo 
(tra cui anche donne, va bene) non dovrebbero distrarre cosi' tanto il 
sonarista, che, se ho capito bene (ho letto abbastanza di fretta 
l'articolo) dava dati sballati delle letture del sonar più volte.
Saluti,
Piergiorgio.

Newsweek - US edition
July 13, 1992
SEA OF LIES
BY JOHN BARRY AND ROGER CHARLES; John Barry is NEWSWEEK'S national-
security
correspondent. Roger Charles is a retired Marine colonel and
military-intelligence officer who is now a freelance writer in
Washington. Also reporting were Daniel Pedersen in London, Christopher
Dickey in Paris, Theresa Waldrop in Bonn, Donna Foote in Los Angeles,
Tony
Clifton in New York and Peter Annin in Houston.
HIGHLIGHT:
THE INSIDE STORY OF HOW AN AMERICAN NAVAL VESSEL BLUNDERED INTO AN
ATTACK ON IRAN AIR FLIGHT 655 AT THE HEIGHT OF TENSIONS DURING THE
IRAN- IRAQ
WAR -- AND HOW THE PENTAGON TRIED TO COVER ITS TRACKS AFTER 290
INNOCENT
CIVILIANS DIED
BODY:
  The modern navy has many ladders.  Its officers can earn their
stripes at sea or in the air.  They can prosper by navigating the
shoals of
technocracy.  But the one sure path to glory is the same as in Roman
times: victory at sea. Sailing in harm's way is a matter of vocation.
  Capt. Will Rogers III, USN, spent his career preparing for combat.
Winning his commission in December 1965 at the age of 27, Rogers came
late to
the navy, but he made up for lost time with a gung-ho attitude and --
after
a spell on the staff of the chief of naval operations -- friends in
high
places.  In 1987, Rogers won command of the navy's most prized
high-tech
warship, an Aegis cruiser.  The billion-dollar
Vincennes seemed a sure ticket to flag rank.  Bur Rogers, who, like
many
peacetime naval officers had never been under fire, longed to see
action.
  On July 3, 1988, Captain Rogers got his wish.  He sought out and
engaged the enemy in a sea battle in the Persian Gulf.  From the
captain's
chair of a warship's combat information center, he made life-
and-death
decisions in the heat of conflict.  It was the moment he had yearned
and trained
for, and it should have been the apex of his life in the service.
  Only it wasn't much of a battle.  Rogers had blundered into a murky,
half-secret confrontation between the United States and Iran that the
politicians did not want to declare and the top brass was not eager to
wage. The enemy was not a disciplined naval force but ragtag
irregulars in
lightly armed speedboats.  Fighting them with an Aegis cruiser was
like
shooting at rabbits with a radar-guided missile.  And when it was
over, the only
confirmed casualties were innocent civilians: 290 passengers and crew
in an Iranian Airbus that Captain Roger's men mistook for an enemy
warplane.
  The destruction of Iran Air Flight 655 was an appalling human
tragedy.  It damaged America's world standing.  It almost surely
caused
Iran to delay the release of the American hostages in Lebanon.  It may
also
have given the mullahs a motive for revenge -- and provoked Teheran
into
playing a role in the December 1988 bombing of Pan Am 103.  For the
navy, it
was a professional disgrace.  The navy's most expensive surface
warship,
designed to track and shoot down as many as 200 incoming missiles at
once, had
blown apart an innocent civilian airliner in its first time in combat.
 What's
more, NEWSWEEK has learned, the Vincennes was inside Iranian
territorial
waters at the time of the shoot-down -- in clear violation of
international law.  The top Pentagon brass understood from the
beginning that if the whole truth about the Vincennes came out, it
would mean months of humiliating headlines.  So the U.S. Navy did what
all navies do after terrible
blunders at sea: it told lies and handed out medals.
  This is the story of a naval fiasco, of an overeager captain,
panicked crewmen, and the cover-up that followed.  A NEWSWEEK
investigation, joined by ABC News's "Nightline," encountered months of
stonewalling by senior naval officers.  Some of the evasions were
products of simple denial; a number of the seamen and officers aboard
the
Vincennes that morning in July 1988 are still in therapy today,
wrestling with
guilt.  But the Pentagon's official investigation into the incident,
the Fogarty
Report, is a pastiche of omissions, half- truths and outright
deceptions. It was a cover-up approved at the top, by Adm. William
Crowe, then
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
  Captain Rogers insisted to "Nightline" last week that he had made
the
"proper decision." He opened fire only to protect his ship and crew,
he
said.  But drawing on declassified documents, video- and audiotape
from
the ships involved in the incident, and well over 100 interviews,
NEWSWEEK
has pieced together an account that belies the skipper's stoic
defense.  It
is almost a parable for an era of "limited" warfare, with its blurry
rules of engagement and its lethal technology in frightened young
hands.  It is as well an age-old story of hubris, of a warrior who
wanted war too much.
 
A MURKY MORNING
  At 6:33 local time on the Vincennes, on the morning of July 3, the
phone buzzed in Will Roger's cramped sleeping quarters.  The captain
was
shaving. Already, just two hours after sunrise, the 100-degree heat of
the sun
was overwhelming the ship's air-conditioning system.  Fine- grained
sand
whipped across the gulf from the Arabian Desert, creating a yellowish
haze.
Rogers picked up the phone.  It was the duty officer in the ship's
combat
information center, the nerve center two decks below Rogers's sea
cabin:
"Skipper, you better come down.  It sounds like the Montgomery has her
nose in a beehive."
  Some 50 miles to the northeast, the U.S. Navy frigate Montgomery was
coming through the western entrance of the Strait of Hormuz.  Every
day,
tankers bearing half the world's imported oil end their way through
the
strait, only 32 miles wide at its choke point.  The Iran- Iraq War had
turned the strait into a gantlet.  Gunboats of the Iranian
Revolutionary
Guard, based on the islands of Hengam and Abu Musa, had been attacking
tankers and merchantmen bound to and from Kuwait, Iraq's main ally in
the war.  Anxious to keep Kuwait's oil flowing, the United States had
agreed to provide escort to Kuwaiti tankers registered under the U.S.
flag.
  On this July morning, the Montgomery spotted a half-dozen
Revolutionary Guard launches venturing out from their island hideouts.
On his own, Rogers decided to enter the fray.  At 6:33, the Vincennes
log
records, he ordered "all ahead flank." The cruiser's four massive 
gas-turbine engines cranked up 80,000 horsepower and sent the warship
smashing through the waves at 30 knots.
  By 6:50 -- according to the official version of events later offered
by the navy -- the Montgomery had spotted 13 Iranian gunboats in the
strait. Several were said to be milling about near a Liberian tanker
called the
Stoval.  At 7:11, the Montgomery reported hearing "five to seven" 
explosions coming from the vicinity of the tanker.  It was only when
the radio
crackled with the report of these mysterious explosions that fleet
headquarters
in Bahrain thought to call the Vincennes.  Rear Adm. Anthony Less, the
commander of the Joint Task Force-Middle East, ordered the cruiser
northeast to support the Montgomery.  The Bahrain command wasn't
interested in
drawing the Vincennes into action, however. Admiral Less merely wanted
to dispatch the Vincennes's helicopter on a reconnaissance mission. 
So Capt. Richard McKenna, Less's chief of surface warfare, relayed
what he thought were clear orders to Rogers: send your helo north to
investigate, but keep your ship farther south, in case more boats
emerge from the Revolutionary Guard base on
Abu Musa.
  At 7:22, the Vincennes's SH-60B Seahawk helicopter lifted off and
sped
north; within 20 minutes it was circling over the Iranian
gunboats.  The pilot of Ocean Lord 25, Lt. Mark Collier, found the
gunboats hovering around a German cargo vessel, the Dhaulagiri.  They
weren't
shooting.  It was a common harassment tactic.
  In Bahrain, as he listened to the radio traffic, Capt. Richard
Watkins, Admiral Less's chief of staff, decided that the situation
was, as he
later put it, "defusing." He left the flag plot to do some paperwork. 
But
aboard the Vincennes, things were just heating up. With a blast of the
klaxon,
Rogers sent his crew to battle stations and ordered the small-arms 
stations along the sides of his ship into readiness against
small-craft attack.
  The Vincennes had a dubious reputation inside the U.S. fleet in the
gulf. Officers on other ships sarcastically referred to the ship
as "Robocruiser." In deskbound war games in San Diego, just before the
Vincennes left for the gulf, Rogers consistently pushed beyond the
exercise's rules of engagement, according to another participant.  At
a Subic Bay, Philippines, briefing on the rules of engagement in the
Persian Gulf, the most senior officer attending from the Vincennes was
a lieutenant.  In early June, Rogers infuriated Capt. Robert Hattan,
the commander of the frigate USS Sides,
by ordering him to close in on an Iranian warship in a way he deemed
provocative.  Hattan refused -- and fleet headquarters in Bahrain
backed him up.  By early July, Rogers was widely regarded as "trigger
happy,"
according to several high- ranking officers.
  He was unquestionably eager to get at the gunboats trailing after
the
Montgomery.  Onward the Vincennes charged, past the German
merchantman (which nonchalantly flashed an "A-OK" signal) until it
drew
abreast of the Montgomery at 8:38.  By now, Oman's coast guard was on
the radio, ordering the Revolutionary Guard boats to head home.  The
Omanis
wanted the Vincennes to leave, too.  "U.S. Navy warship," an Omani
officer
intoned over the radio, "maneuvers at speeds up to 30 knots are not in
accordance with innocent passage. Please leave Omani waters." By
chance, a navy cameraman named Rudy Pahoyo was aboard the Vincennes
that day,
shooting videotape on the bridge.  His video captures the officers'
response to
the Omani request.  They smirked at each other, and did not bother to
reply.
  The Omanis weren't the only ones who wanted the Vincennes out of the
area. At 8:40, Captain McKenna in Bahrain returned to his command
center and
was startled to see that Vincennes was off the top of the Omani
peninsula --
about 40 miles north from where he believed he had ordered Rogers to
remain. In some irritation McKenna called Rogers and asked him what he
was
doing. Rogers replied that he was supporting his helo, and that he'd
been
having communications problems.  Unimpressed, McKenna told him to head
back
toward Abu Musa.  "You want me to do what?" Rogers bristled.  Over the
circuit,
McKenna could hear chortles of laughter from the Vincennes combat
information center. Now angry, McKenna delivered a flat order: the
Vincennes must come south -- and the Montgomery, too.  He was furious
at the
attitude of the captain and officers of the hotshot billion-dollar
cruiser.  "Aegis arrogance," he muttered to himself.  Rogers
grudgingly obeyed the order -- but he left his helo behind to watch
the Iranian boats.  It was to be a fatal mistake.
  In the cockpit of Ocean Lord 25, pilot mark Collier could not resist
the temptation to follow the gunboats north, as they retreated twoard
their
island lair.  He later explained that he wanted to drop down and see
how
many men were aboard the launches, and how they were armed.  He almost
found out the hard way. As he banked around them, Collier saw what he
later
described as "eight to 10 bursts of light" and "sparks . . . just a
big
spark" in the sky 100 yards from his helo.  He thought for a moment it
was the sun glinting off a boat, but then he saw puffs of smoke.  "Did
you
see that?" Collier called out to Petty Officer Scott Zilge.  "Yeah,"
Zilge
replied.  "Let's get out of here.  That was an airburst --
antiaircraft
fire." As Collier dropped the helo to the safety of 100 feet, the
aircraft's commander, Lt. Roger Huff, sitting in the copilot's seat,
radioed the
Vincennes: "Trinity Sword.  This is Ocean Lord 25.  We're taking fire.
Executing evasion." 
  In the combat information center, this was all Rogers needed.  At
last the gunboats had committed a hostile act.  Under the navy's rules
of
engagement in the gulf, Rogers could order hot pursuit.  "General
Quarters," he
snapped. "Full power." Once again, the Vincennes forged north at 30
knots. 
  Meanwhile, some 200 miles to the southeast, on station just inside
the
mouth of the Gulf of Oman, lay the aircraft carrier USS Forrestal. In
his flag plot, Rear Adm. Leighton (Snuffy) Smith, commander of Carrier
Battle Group 6, heard the Vincennes's breathless news that its helo
had been
fired upon, and that the cruiser was pursuing the
attacker.  At 9:14, Smith ordered the launch of two F-14 fighters and
two A-7 attack planes.  By 9:28, they had blasted off from the carrier
deck.
The planes were not to jump into the fight: that was a sure recipe
for "blue on blue," as the navy terms U.S. warships shooting down U.S.
aircraft.
Rather the warplanes headed for Point Alpha, a rendezvous point 50
miles
outside the Strait of Hormuz.  Once there, they would be less than 80
miles -- seven minutes flying time -- from the Vincennes.
  But Rogers was not thinking about air support at that moment.  He
was
intent on the Iranian gunboats swirling ahead.  The task was not easy.
Aegis cruisers are not designed for small-craft battles.  They were
built to
take on the Soviet Navy in the North Atlantic.  The Aegis's
ultra-high-tech
radar system is designed to track scores of incoming missiles and
aircraft in
a major sea battle.  The Iranian launches were so small that as they
bobbed on the swell, they flicked in and out of the Vincennes's
surface search
radar, showing up not as separate targets but as a single symbol on
the radar
screen. Impatiently, Rogers turned to his tactical action officer, Lt.
Cmdr.
Victor Guillory.  "Can the bridge see anything?" he demanded.  The
bridge
reported that it could occasionally glimpse the wakes of a few boats
as flashes
through the haze. 
  At 9:39, still lacking a clear target, Rogers radioed fleet
headquarters and announced his intention to open fire.  In Bahrain,
Admiral Less's staff was uneasy.  Captain Watkins quizzed Rogers on
his
position and the bearing of the gunboats.  Finally, he asked, "Are the
contacts
clearing the area?" The question could have been a show stopper. 
Judging from
later testimony, few in the Vincennes CIC that day believed that the
ship was
under attack.  In fact, the gunboats were just slowly milling about --
evidently under the impression that they were safe in their own
territorial waters.  Through the haze, it is doubtful that the
low-slung launches could have seen the Vincennes. Rogers, however,
continued to argue for
permission to shoot.  On the bridge, the lookouts reported that
through their giant binoculars -- called "Big Eyes" -- they could see
the launches' wakes
more clearly now, turning randomly this way and that.  A couple seemed
to be
heading in the direction of the Vincennes.
  For Rogers, that was enough.  He reported to Bahrain that the
gunboats were gathering speed and showing hostile intent.  Again, he
announced his intention to open fire.  Aboard his command ship, Less
finally concurred.  The time was 9:41.  On the bridge, the chief
quartermaster
had just called out that the Vincennes had now crossed the 12-mile
limit
off the coast -- into Iranian waters.  The Vincennes was operating in
violation
of international law, but Rogers was not paying attention to juridical
niceties.  Commander Guillory ordered the Vincennes's guns to fire
when
ready.  Two minutes later the ship's forward five-inch gun opened up
on
its first target, a launch 8,000 yards away.
  Some 25 miles to the east, aboard the frigate USS Sides, Capt. David
Carlson listened and watched Rogers's maneuvering with mounting
incredulity.  "Why doesn't he just push his rudder over and get his
ass
out of there?" muttered one of the frigate's officers.  When Carlson
heard
Less assent to Rogers's request to open fire, Carlson turned to his
number
two, Lt. Cmdr. Gary Erickson, and gave two thumbs down. Carlson
thought
there was going to be a massacre.  He had no idea.
FLIGHT OF THE INTRUDER
  Some 55 miles to the northeast, at precisely 9:45:30, Iran Air Capt.
Mohsen Rezaian announced to the tower at Bandar Abbas airport that his
A300B2 Airbus was ready for takeoff.  A minute later he throttled up
his two General Electric CF6 engines and lifted the airliner into the
haze.  His
course would take the plane and its human cargo southwest to Dubai, in
the United Arab Emirates. Though Rezaian could not know it, his flight
path
would also go almost directly over the USS Vincennes.
  At that moment Captain Rogers was sitting in his own cockpit -- the
darkened, windowless combat information center of the Vincennes,
directing a sea battle by remote control.  To the uninitiated, the CIC
of an Aegis cruiser looks like a luxury video arcade.  Rows of
operators hunch over radio consoles, each monitoring one element of
the
battle.  All the information from their screens is then integrated by
the mighty Aegis computer into, literally, the "big picture" -- thrown
up as
symbols on maps displayed on four giant 42-inch-by-42-inch screens at
the head of the room where the captain and his two "battle managers"
sit.
The $ 400 million Aegis system can track every aircraft within 300
miles. Its
computers tag each contact with the symbol for "friendly," "hostile"
or
"unidentified" (chart, page 32).  In war at sea, Aegis is expected to
seek and identify all airborne threats to an entire carrier battle
group, to
display the speed and direction of each, and to rank them by the
danger
they present.  Aegis is so powerful that it can not only track up to
200 incoming enemy aircraft or missiles, but also command missiles to
shoot them down.  In the full-scale war against the Soviet Union for
which Aegis was designed, the captain and crew would have had little
choice but to switch the system to automatic -- and duck.
  In the cramped and ambiguous combat environment of the Persian Gulf,
however, Rogers chose to rely on his own judgment and the combat
skills
of his crew. Those skills had never been tested.  Indeed, some experts
question whether even the best-trained crew could handle, under
stress, the
torrent of data that Aegis would pour on them.  A 1988 Government
Accounting
Office report accused the navy of rigging Aegis sea trials by tipping
the
crews off to the precise nature of the "threats" they were to face. 
The navy
could not afford to risk failure in the trials for fear that Congress
would
stop funding the Aegis program.
  Some of the Vincennes's most senior officers were less than adept at
computerized warfare.  under normal procedures, Captain Rogers rarely
touched his console.  He would have delegated the battle against the
launches to Guillory, his tactical officer for surface warfare.  But
Rogers didn't entirely trust Guillory, a former personnel officer who
was
uncomfortable with computers. (His fellow officers in personnel 
snickered because, on said, instead of plotting job changes by
computer
spreadsheet, he used his screen as a surface for "self-stick" notes.)
In essence, the skipper pushed Guillory aside and ran the battle
himself.  Rogers set the range on the "big picture" display screen in
front of him to 16 miles,
to focus on the gunboats.  He was oblivious to anything beyond.
  At 9:47, the Vincennes's powerful Spy radar picked up a distant blip
-
 - a plane lifting off from the airport at Bandar Abbas.  The blip was
in
fact Iran Air's Flight 655 on its twice-a-week milk run to Dubai. But
since
Bandar Abbas is a military as well as a civilian aiport, any flight
out
over the gulf was automatically "tagged" by the navy ships as "assumed
hostile." At his computer console in Vincennes's CIC, Petty Officer
Andrew
Anderson saw the blip for an incoming bogey go up on one of the big
blue screens. Anderson's job in "Air Alley," the row of operators who
handled air
warfare, was to identify any air traffic within range of the ship.  He
told the
Aegis system to query the incoming plane: Identify, Friend or Foe?  By
standard practice, all planes carry a transponder that automatically
answers the
IFF query with Mode 1 or 2 (military), or Mode 3 (civilian).  Anderson
got a
Mode 3.  "Commair" (commercial airliner), he figured.  He reached
beside his
console for the navy's listing of commercial flights over the gulf.
But
as he scanned the schedule, he missed Flight 655.  Apparently, in the
darkness of the CIC, its arc lights flickering every time the
Vincennes's five-inch gun fired off another round at the hapless
Iranian
gunboats, he was confused by the gulf's four different time zones.
  Anderson turned to the petty officer next to him in Air Alley, John
Leach, and wondered aloud if the blip could be an Iranian warplane --
an F-4 or
F-14 perhaps?  Their boss in Air Alley, Lt. Clay Zocher, overheard the
two enlisted men talking.  Zocher was already nervous. He had stood
this
watch only twice before during General Quarters, and he had never
mastered the
computer routines for his console.  He was worrying at the moment
about
an Iranian P-3 patrol plane that was making its way down the Iranian
coastline. Could the P-3 be coordinating an attack on the Vincennes
with the unidentified bogey? Zocher decided to pass the chatter in Air
Alley up the chain of command to his boss, Lt. Cmdr. Scott Lustig, the
Vincennes's tactical commander for air warfare.
  Lustig ordered Zocher to flash the incoming plane a
warning: "Unidentified aircraft . . .  You are approaching a United
States naval warship in international waters." It was the standard
challenge,
broadcast over the international distress frequencies routinely 
monitored by military and commercial aircraft.  Briefly, Lustig
considered another option.  On the display screen in front of him,
Lustig could see that
the Forrestal's F-14s were circling just five minutes away.  There was
enough time -- barely -- to call them in to check out the bogey.
  The Forrestal, too, had seen the blip pop on its radar screens.  In
the air, the F-14 pilots were itching to close in; a bogey out of Iran
heading for an American warship, was a rare opportunity for combat-
hungry
aviators.  Aboard the carrier, Admiral Smith held them off.  His staff
was telling him that the blip was most likely a commercial airliner. 
But Smith stuck to the navy rule that the captain on the spot makes
the decisions.  He decided to let Rogers fight his own battle.
  Aboard the Vincennes, it was now 9:49.  Rogers was totally consumed
with his fire fight against the gunboats.  He was shouting for the
five-
inch-gun crew to load faster, and ordering hard-right rudder to bring
his stern
gun to bear.  The ship shuddered and heeled to starboard.
 
  Military theorists write about "friction," the inevitability of
error,
accident and miscalculation in the stress of combat.  The architects
of
modern warfare have tried to use technology to minimize battlefield
blindness.  But the electronic babble of a combat
information center can be just as confusing. Officers and men
communicate by headphones over several channels, with left and right
ears
usually listening to different circuits.  Rogers and his key officers
in the
CIC were all on the same circuit -- but so was half the ship. 
Ingenious
crewmen had discovered they could tap into
the "command net" to hear the action over their Sony Walkmans.  But in
so
doing, they drained power and the volume faded.  Whenever it got too
low,
Lustig had to yell "Switch!" so everyone could turn to an alternate
command
circuit.  Then the hackers would switch to that channel, too.
  Over this erratic "net," a few seconds after 9:50, someone called
out
that
the incoming plane was a "possible Astro" -- the code word for an F-
14.  No
one was ever able to find out who.  In Air Alley, the
operators thought the word came from the technicians in the ship's
electronic-warfare suite.  The technicians thought the warning came
from Air
Alley.  Galvanized by this warning, Petty Officer Anderson again
beamed
out
an IFF query.  Ominously, the response he now got back was different.
Upon
his console flashed a Mode 2: military aircraft. Only much later did
investigators figure out that Anderson had
forgotten to reset the range on his IFF device.  The Mode 2 did not
come
from the Airbus, climbing peacefully above the gulf, but from an
Iranian
plane, probably a military transport, still on the runway back in
Bandar
Abbas.
  "Possible Astro!" Anderson sang out, at a moment of near chaos in
the
CIC.
It was 9:51.  Having swung full circle, Rogers was now
bringing his reloaded forward gun to bear on the Iranian launches. 
The
gun
fired off 11 rounds -- and jammed.  The skipper again ordered the
rudder
hard over.  The stern swung around, and in the CIC, papers and books
toppled
off consoles as the ship
heeled over.  At his station to Rogers's left, Lustig looked at his
screen.
The incoming plane was 32 miles away.  What do we do? he asked Rogers.
  His commanding officer was not too overwhelmed by the Iranian
speedboats to forget the woeful example of Capt. Glenn Brindel, the
skipper
of the USS Stark. A year earlier, the luckless Brindel had been in the
head
when his ship was struck and almost sunk by a pair of anti- ship
missiles
fired by the pilot of a lone Iraqi Mirage F-1.  Rogers had decided
that
the
Vincennes's fire-control radar would "paint" any possibly hostile
plane
that
got within 30 miles.  At 20 miles, the Vincennes would shoot it down.
  Rogers was not absolutely sure that his ship did face an enemy
warplane.
The plane seemed too high -- some 7,000 feet -- for an attack
approach.  At
his rear, another officer, Lt. William Mountford, warned "possible
commair."
Three more times, the warnings went out: "Iranian fighter . . . you
are
steering into danger and are subject to United States naval defensive
measures."
  Then something happened that psychologists call "scenario
fulfillment" --
you see what you expect.  Petty Officers Anderson and Leach both began
singing out that the aircraft, now definitively tagged on the big
screen as
an F-14, was descending and picking up speed.  The tapes of the CIC's
data
later showed no such thing.  Anderson's screen showed that the plane
was
traveling 380 knots at 12,000 feet and climbing.  Yet Anderson was
shouting
out that the speed was 455 knots, the altitude 7,800 feet and
descending.
  Rogers had to make a decision.  An F-14 could do little damage to
the
Vincennes.  The version that Washington sold its ally the Shah of Iran
in
the early 1970s was purely a fighter plane, not configured to strike
surface
targets.  Still, if Rogers meant to attack it with a missile, he had
to
fire
before the aircraft closed much within 10 miles.  At 9:54:05, with the
plane
11 miles away, Rogers reached up and switched the firing key to "free"
the
ship's SM-2 antiaircraft missiles.  In Air Alley, Zocher had been
given
the
green light to fire.  The young lieutenant was so undone, however,
that
he
pressed the wrong keys on his console 23 times.  A veteran petty
officer had
to lean over and hit the right ones.  With a whoosh, two SM-2s
launched
into
the haze.  In the CIC, the lights dimmed momentarily, like a prison's
during
an electrocution.
  Some 10 miles away, Captain Rezaian of Iran Air was calmly reporting
to
Bandar Abba that he had reached his first checkpoint crossing the
gulf.  He
heard none of the Vincennes's warnings.  His four radio bands were
taken up
with air-control chatter.  "Have a nice day," the tower radioed. 
"Thank
you, good day," replied the pilot.  Thirty seconds later, the first
missile
blew the left wing off his aircraft.
  On the Vincennes's bridge, cameraman Rudy Pahoyo was still filming.
His
audio captured a babble of voices: "Oh, dead!" "Coming down!" "We had
him
dead on!" One voice commanded: "Hold the noise down, knock it off!"
Another
shouted, "Direct hit!" Then a lookout came in from the wing of the
bridge.
The target couldn't have been an F-14, he said. The wreckage falling
from
the sky, he murmured to the Vincennes's executive officer, Cmdr.
Richard
Foster, is "bigger than that."
  A few miles away, on the bridge of the Montgomery, crewmen gaped as
a
large wing of a commercial airliner, with an engine pod still
attached, plummeted into the sea.  Aboard the USS Sides, 19 miles
away,
Captain Carlson was told that his top radar man reckoned the plane had
been
a commercial airliner.  Carlson almost vomited, he said later.
  On the Vincennes, there was an eerie silence.  The five-inch guns
ceased
their pounding.  None of the Revolutionary Guard boats had come within
5,000
yards of the cruiser.  No one was sure how many had been hit; perhaps
one,
perhaps more.  Rogers gave the order to head south, out of Iranian
waters.
ANATOMY OF A COVER-UP
  In Washington almost 11 hours later, at 1:30 p.m. EDT, Adm. William
Crowe,
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, stepped to the podium in the
Pentagon
press room.  Formal in his summer whites, the admiral told reporters
there
had been a terrible accident.  Stressing that the information was
incomplete, relying on what he had been told by Captain Rogers, Crowe
said
that the Iranian airliner was flying outside the commercial air
corridor and
had failed to respond to repeated
warnings.  The plane had been descending and picking up speed when it
close
in on the Vincennes.  Rogers had only been protecting his ship. A
large
map
showed the position of the Vincennes at the time of the shoot- down.
it was
well within international waters.
  At the United Nations, the Iranians compared the tragedy to the
Soviet
shoot-down of Korean Air Lines 007 in 1983.  The White House decided
that
Vice President George Bush should defend the United States before the
U.N.
Security Council.  The job of preparing the cast fell to Richard
Williamson,
the assistant secretary of state for
international organizations.  He found it exceedingly difficult to get
answers out of Crowe's staff, who were handling the affair at the
Pentagon.
Suspicious, he warned the vice president's chief of staff, Craig
Fuller, to
be very careful about committing Bush to any facts. Fuller's reaction
was
that he never trusted the Pentagon anyway. Bush's speech focused on
the
need
to end the Iran-Iraq War.  But what facts it did include were wrong.
The
vice president claimed that the Vincennes had rushed to defend a
merchantman
under attack by Iran.
  By July 14, the day of Bush's speech, the Pentagon knew the truth
but
failed to share it with the vice president.  The tapes of the
Vincennes's Aegis system, with its combat and navigational data,
reached the
United States on July 5 and what they showed was reported to the
Pentagon on
July 10.  The Vincennes had been in territorial waters.  The Iranian
airliner was well within the commercial air corridor and had been
ascending,
not descending.  There was no
beleaguered merchant vessel.
  The cover-up was compounded by the official report on the incident.
On
July 3, Crowe chose Rear Adm. William Fogarty, a senior officer on the
staff
of Central Command, which controls military operations in the Middle
East,
to investigate.  Crowe sent his own legal adviser, Capt. Richard
DeBobes, to
sit at Fogarty's side at CentCom headquarters in Tampa as he prepared
his
report.
  The investigation was notable for the questions it failed to ask.
The
commanders on the carrier Forrestal were never interviewed; nor was
Captain
McKenna, the surface-warfare commander in Bahrain whose order Rogers
ignored. McKenna's staff mailed a tape of his tense exchange with
Rogers
before the sea battle, but never received a response.  The report
release to
the public did not include any chart or navigational data to show the
Vincennes's position at the time of the shoot-down.
  The map displayed by Fogarty when he briefed Congress in September
placed
the Vincennes and its helicopter well clear of Iranian waters and
erroneously reported the position of the Montgomery.  Fogarty produced
stills from the Aegis-generated map of events displayed in the
Vincennes's
CIC.  According to three sources on board the Vincennes that day, the
real
map had shown Hengam Island, Iranian territory less than nine miles
from the
Vincennes at the time of the shoot-down.  On the frames shown by
Fogarty,
the island was simply deleted --
miraculously placing the Vincennes safely in international waters once
more.
Asked about the Forrestal's aircraft by inquiring lawmakers, Fogarty
put
them 180 miles then 250 miles away -- even though those same Aegis
stills
show them clearly tagged only 75 miles from the Vincennes.
  Most mysteriously, Fogarty told the Senate Armed Services Committee
that
the Vincennes had been racing to rescue a Liberian tanker, the Stoval,
that
morning. There is no such tanker reported in any ship registry.
According
to two sources, including a naval officer involved in the
investigation, the
Stoval was a decoy, a phantom conjured up by fake radio messages to
lure out
the Iranian gunboats.  According to these sources, the Iranian
aggression
that Vice President Bush so vigorously decried at the United Nations
had in
fact been the trial run for an American sting operation.
  The navy might have gotten away with all these deceptions had it not
been
for the slow grinding of international law.  A lawsuit by the Iranian
government has now forced Washington to admit, grudgingly, that the
Vincennes was actually in Iranian waters -- although Justice
Department
pleadings still claim the cruiser was forced there in self- defense.
The
admission is contained in fine print in legal briefs; it has never
received
public attention until Crowe, confronted with the evidence, conceded
the
truth last week on "Nightline." Crowe denies any cover-up; if mistakes
were
made, he told NEWSWEEK, they were "below my pay grade." Rogers
continues to
insist that his ship was in international waters.
  In the end, of course, Will Rogers did not get an admiral's two-inch
gold
stripe.  He instructed navy captains in San Diego for two years before
retiring honorably in August 1991.  The men of the Vincennes were all
awarded combat-action ribbons.  Commander Lustig, the air- warfare
coordinator, even won the navy's Commendation Medal for "heroic
achievement," his "ability to maintain his poise and confidence under
fire,"
enabling him to "quickly and precisely complete the firing procedure."
Given
the target he was firing at, the commendation seems rather surreal.
But so
was the atmosphere in the Vincennes CIC that July morning, and the
attempt,
in the months and years that followed, to cover up what happened
there.
GRAPHIC: Picture 1, no caption, AP; Picture 2, The Vincennes fired two
missiles and knocked the Airbus into the water, D.O.D.; Pictures 3 and
4,
The combat information center is the nerve center of the Vincennes,
capable
of tracking scores of incoming missiles and aircraft at a time, but
Rogers
and his jittery crew misread the complex system's signals, JOHN GAPS
III --
AP, IDI; Maps 1 and 2, COUNTDOWN TO DISASTER, On the hot and hazy
morning of
July 3, 1988, an unforeseeable but avoidable chain of events led to
the
deaths of 290 innocent civilians. It began as a reconnaissance of a
minor skirmish involving Iranian gunboats. It ended with one of
America's most
sophisticated battle systems deployed against a commercial airliner
that
chose the wrong moment to stray into harm's way. DIXON ROHR --
NEWSWEEK;
Picture 5, THE FATAL SEQUENCE, These radar screens, recorded from the
Aegis system on board the USS Vincennes, provide vital clues to the
untold
story behind the shooting down of Iran Air Flight 655.; Picture 6,
9:47 a.m.
The USS Vincennes is already inside Iranian waters. Dotted red line,
drawn
by Newsweek, indicates 12-mile limit. Later, in congressional
testimony,
the navy disguised proximity to Iran by deleting southernmost Iranian
island; Picture 7, 9:48, the Airbus, though flying down a commercial
air route
(white line), is already tagged as a 'hostile' aircraft. But a U.S. F-
14 is already on station, waiting to be called in. Never explained by
the
navy: two mysterious aircraft west of the Vincennes.; Picture 8, 9:51,
Blunde s in the Vincennes's control room cause the Airbus to be
misidentified as an F-14. Two F-14s from the American carrier
Forrestal are now just minutes
away, but they are told to stay out.; Picture 9, 9:54:42, Two missiles
from Vincennes streak out toward the Airbus. To focus on their flight,
the
screen's range has been narrowed. The first missile explodes one
second
after this frame. The USS Montgomery is clearly seen to the west.;
Picture 10, One U.S. mission was to drive off the high-speed Iranian
gunboats as
they ventured out of their island lairs, ESLAMI RAD -- GAMMA-LIAISON;
Photograph, Some sailors in the gulf dubbed the Vincennes
'Robocruiser'
BY 
D.O.D.; Maps 3 and 4 THE MECHANICS OF A COVER-UP, The navy produced
two
maps of what it alleged had happened. The first has errors to be
expected
from reports only hours after the tragedy. But the errors were
repeated and
enlarged in the map later shown to Congress with the navy's official
findings.; Picture 11, JULY 3: ADMIRAL CROWE BRIEFING; Picture 12,
SEPT.
8-9: FOGARTY CONGRESSIONAL BRIEFING; Picture 13, By the time of the
mass
Teheran funeral, it was an article of faith in Iran that the Americans
deliberately attacked the plane, MORADABADI -- REFLEX-PICTURE GROUP
S A T O R I <satori...@chan.co.jp.invalid> wrote in message news:<3DFC7C46...@chan.co.jp.invalid>...


 SEA OF LIES ...
Many Thanks, 
Sir