Michael R. Gordon, who together with Judith Miller promoted the war on Iraq with false stories about Iraqi nuclear weapons, comes up with new fairytale:
The Iranian military was so apprehensive about the threat of an Israeli airstrike on its nuclear installations in 2007 and 2008 that it mistakenly fired on civilian airliners and, in one instance, on one of its own military aircraft, according to classified American intelligence reports.
Iran does not fear an Israeli strike:
"Fundamentally we do not take seriously the threats of the Zionists…. We have all the defensive means at our disposal and we are ready to defend ourselves," Ahmadinejad told reporters.
This is the situation now just as it was the situation in 2007 and 2008.
Gordon continues:
In June 2007, the report noted, a Revolutionary Guards air defense unit fired a TOR-M1 surface-to-air missile at a civilian airliner. In May 2008, an antiaircraft battery fired on an Iranian reconnaissance drone and a civilian airliner. That same month, an antiaircraft battery fired on an Iranian F-14 fighter jet.
If Iran fired a TOR-M1 missile at a civilian airliner the chance is about 100% that the plane, without defensive measures, would have been hit:
The system's high lethality (aircraft kill probability of 0.92-0.95) is maintained at altitude of 10 – 6,000 m'. The vertically launched, single-stage solid rocket propelled missile is capable of maneuvering at loads up to 30gs. It is equipped with a 15kg high-explosive fragmentation warhead activated by a proximity fuse.
There is no report of any civilian airliner going down at that time.
Gordon makes another silly claim:
Less than two weeks after Israeli warplanes practiced over the Mediterranean in June 2008, a classified Pentagon report noted, the commander of the Iranian Air Force ordered fighter units to “conduct daily air-to-ground attack training (GAT) at firing ranges resembling the Israeli city of Haifa and the Israeli nuclear facility at Dimona,” according to a classified 2008 report by the Defense Intelligence Agency.
Iran does not have any fighter jet that could fly from Iran to Haifa and Dimona and come back home. While it has some in-air refueling capacity any such refueling would have to be done over Turkey, Iraq or Saudi Arabia. In 2008 the U.S. Air Force was still flying over Iraq. There was zero chance that Iran could successfully launch fighters against Israel. Why then should it have trained for such an impossible mission?
The whole story and whatever report it might be based on is bunk. Having kept Gordon after the false Iraq reporting and letting him continue to write such nonsense is showing the New York Times' contempt for its readers.