05.07.11
The Empire’s Dog Feces: The stealth helicopter story
As one might have expected, the US media lost its mind over the Osama bin Laden hit. It quickly dipped into fantasies clinging to thin reeds of evidence.
There’s been the special forces dog in his “doggles.”
There’s been the magic face recognition software, probably made by the same crap company that screwed up my CA driver license.
“Tech nailed Osama’s ID,” brag the witless.
Ignore all the stuff where the people left alive in the place, Osama’s wife or kids or helpers, said something like:”Yeah, that’s him. You got him. Now please don’t shoot me.”
Or any of the commandos: “Yes, that sure looks like him and it’s what all these papers and letters say.”
However, for bragging, invention and exaggeration nothing has topped the stealth helicopter stories, started by a fragment image passing for a photograph and Aviation Week magazine.
So maybe there was a non-stock helicopter in operation.
Here’s what the NY Times had to say on the 5th, one pretty standard example:
The assault team that killed Osama bin Laden sneaked up on his compound in radar-evading helicopters that had never been discussed publicly by the United States government, aviation analysts said Thursday.
The commandos blew up one of the helicopters after it was damaged in a hard landing, but news photographs of the surviving tail section reveal modifications to muffle noise and reduce the chances of detection by radar.
The stealth features, similar to those used on advanced fighter jets and bombers, help explain how two of the helicopters sped undetected through Pakistani air defenses before reaching the Bin Laden compound in Abbottabad.
[The non-standard tail rotor] could have allowed operators to slow the rotor speed and reduce the familiar chop-chop sound that most helicopters make.
Now, let’s review the first news of the raid, from the Pakistani Twitter user in Abbottabad:
1. “Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1AM (is a rare event).”
2. “Go away helicopter – before I take out my giant swatter :-/”
3. “A huge window shaking bang here in Abbottabad Cantt. I hope its not the start of something nasty :-S”
4. “Since taliban (probably) don’t have helicpoters, and since they’re saying it was not “ours???, so must be a complicated situation #abbottabad”
Didn’t read muffled or particularly stealthy.
Instead of stealth, one could easily argue for a certain lack of capability in the Pakistani military. Predator drones violate Pakistani airspace daily. Do they track all of them? Can they? And if radar sees drone or helicopters with similar radar signatures and/or flying the same speed, how — in Pakistan — do they distinguish between the two?
Anyway, the genes for myth-making are strong in the US.
They’re inextricably bound up with the American talent for fabrication and reflexive bragging, further embroidered by the reality that the US government is in the habit of not giving accurate accounts of anything in the last decade.
You can’t clear that up overnight.