{"id":4222,"date":"2011-12-12T20:28:47","date_gmt":"2011-12-13T03:28:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/?p=4222"},"modified":"2011-12-12T20:28:47","modified_gmt":"2011-12-13T03:28:47","slug":"military-wants-iran-to-return-downed-drone-pretty-please","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/?p=4222","title":{"rendered":"Military wants Iran to return downed drone – pretty please."},"content":{"rendered":"

Military wants Iran to return downed drone<\/strong>
\nBy Dave Majumdar – Staff writer – Marine Corp Times – Dec 12, 2011<\/p>\n

The government is asking Iran to return the Lockheed Martin-built RQ-170 Sentinel UAV that was recently downed over that country.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve asked for it back. We\u2019ll see how the Iranians respond,\u201d President Obama said Monday during a news conference at the White House with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.<\/p>\n

Obama\u2019s statement is the first official confirmation that the stealthy high-altitude spy plane had been captured by Iran. Earlier, the Pentagon had only officially acknowledged that an unmanned aircraft of an unspecified type was missing over western Afghanistan.<\/p>\n

Iranian officials have already stated that they will not return the captured aircraft and have promised to reverse-engineer the jet\u2019s technology.<\/p>\n

\u201cI hope he said please,\u201d said analyst Dan Goure of the Lexington Institute in Arlington, Va., referring to Obama\u2019s statement. \u201cI can\u2019t quite see that happening.\u201d<\/p>\n

Richard Aboulafia, vice president of analysis at Teal Group, mirrored those comments.<\/p>\n

\u201cGood luck with that,\u201d he said. \u201cI think I read this really bad plot line in a cheap novel a few years ago. Life imitating art, or something like that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Goure said that there is no chance that Iran will return the Sentinel to the U.S. Nor does Obama have any legal grounds to ask for such a return.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m a little puzzled as to why he even bothered,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Goure said the U.S. had a right to complain when the technical research ship Pueblo was captured by North Korea in 1968 or when a Chinese fighter collided with a Navy EP-3 Aries spy plane in international airspace in 2001. But the more recent episode is different.<\/p>\n

\u201cNobody has argued that it didn\u2019t go down inside their airspace,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Jack Rives, a former judge advocate general, said that the U.S. was within its rights to ask for the return of the RQ-170 if the aircraft accidentally strayed into Iranian territory.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re not at war with the Iranians,\u201d Rives said. \u201cWhen we\u2019re in our current conditions with them, this was an accident, it was a malfunction, the plane went down, it was our plane, there is no question over that. So it\u2019s just a common sense request under international law.\u201d<\/p>\n

He said Iran has an obligation to return the aircraft, assuming it was operating in either international airspace or western Afghanistan with the consent of that nation\u2019s leadership. …more<\/a><\/p>\n

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Military wants Iran to return downed drone By Dave Majumdar – Staff writer – Marine Corp Times – Dec 12, 2011 The government is asking Iran to return the Lockheed Martin-built RQ-170 Sentinel UAV that was recently downed over that country. \u201cWe\u2019ve asked for it back. We\u2019ll see how the Iranians respond,\u201d President Obama said more \u00bb<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":27,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[247],"tags":[2181],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4222"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/27"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4222"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4222\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4223,"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4222\/revisions\/4223"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4222"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4222"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4222"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}