Report: Assad regrets shooting down Turkish jet

[al bupp]

Source: Associated Press

BEIRUT (AP) - Syrian President Bashar Assad said he regrets the shooting down of a Turkish jet by his forces, and that he will not allow tensions between the two neighbors to deteriorate into an "armed conflict," a Turkish newspaper reported Tuesday.

Syria downed the RF-4E warplane on June 22. Syria says it hit the aircraft after flew very low inside its airspace, while Turkey says the jet was hit in international airspace after it briefly strayed into Syria.

In an interview with the Cumhuriyet daily, Assad offered no apology, insisting that the plane was shot down over Syria and that his forces acted in self-defense.

He said that the plane was flying in a corridor inside Syrian airspace that had been used by Israeli planes in 2007, when they bombed a building under construction in northern Syria. The UN nuclear agency has said that the building was a nearly finished reactor meant to produce plutonium, which can be used to arm nuclear warheads.

Read more: http://apnews.myway.com/article/20120703/D9VPDO6O1.html

[leveymg]

1. That jet circled in and out of Syrian airspace four times before it was finally shot down.

There was no "straying." The RF-4E was well inside Syrian territory, and had violated the border several times, when it was intercepted.

The Syrian state news agency, SANA, reported that according to a Syrian military spokesman, an unidentified aerial object violated the country's airspace and was shot down by anti-aircraft artillery. The aircraft crashed into Syrian territorial waters west of Om al-Tuyour village in Lattakia province, 10 kilometers from the beach. http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/327217#ixzz1yjgYtRGQ

BBC: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-18584872


NOTE 1: Latakia, the northernmost coastal city in Syria, is about 70kms south from the Turkish border. Om al-Tuyour is approx. midway.



Geography of Syria - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geography_of_Syria
Latakia along with Tartus are Syria's main ports on the Mediterranean sea. ...

NOTE 2: Syria claims a territorial limit of 35 nautical miles (64.8 km; 40.3 mi) off its coast.

[al bupp]

2. Interesting, thanks for the added context

BTW, buried at the bottom of the article there's this additional allegation from HRW:

An international human rights watchdog, meanwhile, says it has identified the location of 27 torture centers run by Syrian intelligence agencies based on testimony from former detainees and defectors. Human Rights Watch said the systematic patterns of torture documented points to a state policy of torture and constitute a crime against humanity.

[leveymg]

3. Fine. Then, indict the Bush Administration for renditioning GWOT detainees to Syria for torture

Syria has been notorious for torture of political opponents for decades. Why, all of a sudden, are the US and western media finally taking notice?

If you indict one for such things, you have to go after them all, or you're just rewarding the "winners" of war crimes.

[al bupp]

4. We are, sir, mostly in agreement on these points

I suppose that you mean by use of "you" and "you're" not myself in particular, but people and organizations, in general. For I have neither indicted nor rewarded anyone for such things, but rather merely pointed-out the accusation the article reports was (recently?) made by Human Right Watch w/ regards to Syria.

If it's true that they only recently have made such allegations about Syria, or if not that only recently has the media picked-up on them, then perhaps it's better late than never on both counts.

[leveymg]

5. Crimes in Syria are noted selectively.

I've prepared hundreds of asylum applications, and am intimately familiar with HRW and the State Department Country Reports on human rights conditions around the world. In fact, I used to do pro bono asylum cases for HRW. My outrage isn't so selective, and I have a long memory of many governments that have persecuted their citizens, and the US Government either didn't want to know about it or was actively complicit.

And, no I didn't mean to imply that you, personally, or I could hand down an indictment. Those decisions are invariably political, and made by the parties that "win" at the game of war crimes. I prefer not to be party to such crimes, before or after the fact.