A year ago Iran managed to take down a U.S. stealthy RQ-170 drone that violated its airspace without much damage.

Persian cats taking down made in Iran RQ-170 training drones
Photo via Thomas Erdbrink – bigger

Today Iran took down another, smaller U.S. drone. A Boeing Scan Eagle which might have been launched from a ship in the Persian Gulf. The video, below the fold, shows that the Iranians caught this one, like the other one, without any obvious damage. All that cat training was obviously quite successful.

While some believe that GPS spoofing, overriding the original GPS signal with a deceiving one, is the way Iran could have done this, I doubt that and I still find my old explanation the more plausible one:

When the drone is in the air it is controlled via a satellite link from a remote operating station. But during start and landing the drone is piloted via line-of-sight radio by an operator near the start or landing field. This is necessary because the remote satellite link has a delay of several hundred milliseconds which is just too much latency to correct wind sheer and other problems during takeoff and landing.

What the Iranians seem to have done is to take over the drone's line-of-sight control. This after electronically disrupting its satellite link. Disrupting the satellite link alone would not be enough as the drone would then have followed some preprogrammed action like simply flying back to where it came from. With the line-of-sight control active a satellite link disruption would not lead to a preprogrammed abort.

We can reasonably assume that the Iranians have some station near Kandahar Airport that is listening to all military radio traffic there. They had four years to analyze the radio signaling between the ground operator and such drones. Even if that control signal is encrypted pattern recognition during many flights over four years would have given them enough information to break the code.

The U.S. (and Israel) are routinely violating other countries airspace. This might one day come back to haunt them. The technological development of drones is no longer a hurdle and soon other countries will also have many of them. Hizbullah flying a drone above Israels Dimona reactor is just a sign of things to come.

We also must again emphasize that despite five years of continued illegal drone espionage over Iran the U.S. has found not one bit of evidence of any existence of an Iranian nuclear weapons program.

One wonders if future officials will resent their forerunner's dumb idea of creating a customary law of air violations for the senseless quest for proof of an Iranian program that does not exist.

Cont. reading: The Persian Cats Take Down Another Drone

Wired's Danger Room has a weird Exclusive story on alleged Syrian chemical weapons:

Engineers working for the Assad regime in Syria have begun combining the two chemical precursors needed to weaponize sarin gas, an American official with knowledge of the situation tells Danger Room. International observers are now more worried than they’ve even been that the Damascus government could use its nerve agent stockpile to slaughter its own people.

…
Sarin gas has two main chemical components — isopropanol, popularly known as rubbing alcohol, and methylphosphonyl difluoride. The Assad government has more than 500 metric tons of these precursors, which it ordinarily stores separately, in so-called “binary” form, in order to prevent an accidental release of nerve gas.

Last week, that changed. The Syrian military began combining some of the binaries. “They didn’t do it on the whole arsenal, just a modest quantity,” the official says. “We’re not sure what’s the intent.”

Seemingly for lack of knowledge the Danger Room folks are falling for very stupid "Arab country will soon use WMD" propaganda. Do we need to remind anyone that the same claims were made by "American officials" 10 years ago and turned out to be false?

In this case we cane be quite sure that the claims are indeed false. No one in Syria is combining binaries.

Just think of how binary chemical weapons actually work:

Binary chemical weapons or munitions are chemical weapons wherein the toxic agent is not contained within the weapon in its active state, but in the form of two chemical precursors, physically separated within the weapon. The precursors are designed to be significantly less toxic than the agent they make when mixed, and this allows the weapon to be transported and stored more safely than otherwise. The safety provided by binary chemical weapons is especially important for people who live near ammunition dumps.

The chemical reaction takes place while the weapon is in flight. Firing the munition ruptures the capsules. The munition spins rapidly in flight, which thoroughly mixes the two precursors, so they can react with one another. Finally, a bursting charge aerosolizes and distributes the chemical agent.

There is no need for the Syrian army to combine stuff and fill it up because the precursors are already stored in the ammunition when that artillery ammunition or aerial bomb is distributed to the units that are  supposed to use them. They precursors are stored in two separate chambers and the ammunition is safe for transport and storage. Only firing the ammunition or dropping the bomb will combine the binaries.

What the anonymous American official claims is not happening in Syria. If the Wired writers Noah Shachtman and Spencer Ackerman, (an avid defender of Israel firsters some might note), had even some basic knowledge about ammunition engineering they would not fall for such a stupid claim some anonymous official makes.

The claim that "the Assad regime in Syria have begun combining the two chemical precursors" is definitely wrong. Whatever the Syrian army is doing or not doing with its strategic weapons, it is not what that anonymous "American official" claims.

News & views …

To continue the excellent comments on the recent Egypt thread some links to further developments.

The complete translation of the proposed new constitution. In my view it is a convoluted mess.

Here are some of the many controversial issues with this proposed constitution. Many details, especially with regards the personal freedom, unclear and open to dangerous interpretations and manipulation. The balance of power between the executive and the parliament is tilted towards the executive. Other points include the role of Al Azahr, freedoms of trade unions and many issues of social justice. The military and its budget is kept secret and under the military's control. This leaves the military open to  manipulation by foreign interests.

Some imam at a mosque where Morsi was praying ignited protests from worshipers when he compared Morsi with the prophet:

“Prophet Mohamed and the Caliphs used to dismiss and appoint judges, and there is no problem with Morsy doing that,” the imam said, according to an eyewitness.

Muslim Brotherhood followers blocked the high judges from entering their court building. The High Constitutional Court responded by freezing all further sessions.

It is unclear how the voting about this proposed constitution will be done. According to Egyptian law the judges have the task of supervising such votes but the judges are on strike to protests Morsi's powergrab.

The grievances against Morsi are certainly not only over these constitutional issues. What many Egyptians seem to be upset about is the continued reliance of Morsi on the Mubarak repression apparatus and its leading personalities as detailed here:

The president is disposed to neither the revolution nor social justice, and I cannot be convinced that he has immunized his decrees to protect the revolution when he has not once stood up to the repressive and security apparatus. Do we still need to teach people that absolute power corrupts absolutely?

The way Morsi, elected with little more than 25% of the eligible votes, is pushing to get this half baked constitution into place does not bode well for the future of Egypt.

The Associated Press reporter in Vienna, George Jahn, wrote a rather stupid story about a Graph suggests Iran working on bomb.

The graph in that story suggest nothing like what Jahn's (Israeli) sources suggest.

It is a showing two plots. A bell-curve shaped energy release and the integral of the release that sums up the total. During my university studies I once plotted a similar looking graph for the theoretical energy release in a small laser pulse. When someone tweeted the story my response was therefore "1st semester physics". But the case is even worse. It is "failed 1st semester physics".

As real nuclear scientists pointed out:

The image released to the Associated Press shows two curves: one that plots the energy versus time, and another that plots the power output versus time, presumably from a fission device. But these two curves do not correspond: If the energy curve is correct, then the peak power should be much lower — around 300 million ( 3×108) kt per second, instead of the currently stated 17 trillion (1.7 x1013) kt per second. As is, the diagram features a nearly million-fold error.

This diagram does nothing more than indicate either slipshod analysis or an amateurish hoax.

Gareth Porter provides a good write up of the above and other debunking of the graph.

Caught spreading obvious propaganda with fake documents George Jahn today doubled down:

A senior diplomat familiar with the probe of Iran by the IAEA told the AP on Friday that the agency suspects that Iranian scientists calculating a nuclear yield intentionally simplified the diagram to make it comprehensible to Iranian government officials to whom they were presenting it. He said that when the right data are plugged in, the yield is indeed 50 kilotons.

So if one corrects the errors in the graph than the graph has no errors. That's obvious. But how would have miscalculating the graph "simplified" it? Simply changing the dimensions does not simplify or complicate anything in it.

Jahn's sources are just spouting stupid nonsense and that Jahn is eating it up is just showing that he is in no way a serious reporter. AP should fire him immediately.

Aside from that, people looking at the graph often miss the bigger picture. A few points on that.

• Even if the charts and alleged other simulations were correct, which they are not,
• even if they were from Iran, which is in serious doubt,
• even if they were at a more sophisticated level than 1st semester physics, which they again are not,
• even if they showed high level bomb research, which they do not,
• they would be perfectly legal and sensible to make if one wants to learn about proliferation issues and the effects of nuclear weapons.

There is nothing, like zero, in Iran's or any other country's obligation towards the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, that forbids theoretical research into nuclear physics or nuclear weapons.

It makes perfect sense for any state to do such nuclear weapon research. If there is even the smallest chance that you might get hit with some weapon you will want to know how it works and what it does. Besides that, anyone studying general nuclear physics will at some point learn enough about how nuclear weapons work and will be able to create a numerical and graphical simulation of their functioning. There is nothing nefarious in doing that.

The AP's Jahn will, of course, not tell you such. His mission is to transport Israeli anti-Iran propaganda into the international media. As his second piece on this hoax graph proves, defying logic and common sense is no hindrance to him doing that. But that probably was the really important requirement when he was chosen for his job.