JonesySeems unlikely that a conventional sub could have trailed a battlegroup for thousands of km’s.
Not the first hull I would have picked for the job to be fair Yama, but, they have the reach for it. The carrier group did anchor up after getting round the Iberian peninsula for a while also. Wouldn’t have been difficult to get ahead of the group and let it catch up.
The detect at 20k yards is an interesting snippet as well. That’s a very long way in not very deep water where they are…bit far for a ship set. Sounds like someone has tried to breach a buoy line and gotten caught red handed!. As I said the Dutch seem to be playing some games….wonder why the Russians showed their hand like this?.
Usual practise here, if you have a track, is to act like you don’t!. Better that the opposition doesn’t know what you can really do if they ever want to try it for real.
JonesyIndeed. The media suggestion was that the Walrus picked up the trail just south of the English Channel. Sounds like the Dutch have been playing games a little.
JonesyIts known as a ‘launch transient’.
A tube ejecting a weapon sounds, surprisingly, a lot like a very large toilet being flushed!. For many years NATO navies have tried to work out an acoustic decoy that simulates the noise of a toilet roll being pulled….so as to fool opposing sonar operators as to the real nature of the flushing sound.
JonesyNot quite Jonesy! It’s a bit much to suggest we’ve become a dictatorship (the complete opposite in fact; someone who became a dictator through a referendum was Hitler….that’s why the Germans don’t have referendums anymore! You have to do everything through Parliament (their Reichstag)).
Just to be clear there is nothing dodgy going on here….no one has fiddled the law because the law hasn’t changed since 1649! It was from then that the principal of the supreme sovereignty of Parliament was established…..Theresa May cannot subvert that basic principle of law and that is why the High Court re-affirmed the ultimate supremacy of the UK Parliament…..I am sure even you can see the irony in the leavers complaining about the British Parliament being supreme!
The irony isnt lost on me of the utilisation of sovereign powers being used, potentially, to stop the supposed restoration of sovereign powers. In another context I’d laugh myself giddy at the incongruity.
I accept what you say about the strict legality of the situation as well. In technical terms I’m sure the high court has acted within the letter of the law.
Using the law though to defeat a democratically settled decision, as is a possibility now, is unethical to say the very least though. It is also going to stoke the anti-establishment sentiment. The same mugs who thought they were ‘sticking it to the man’ voting Leave are now going to see this as the work of the ‘London elite’ and, sagely, determine its all their fault that they didnt see the 350 million quid going into their local NHS trust and that the Somali family at no.43 arent getting packed off on the next available flight.
This is what I was referring to earlier with metaphorical guns and heads. It cant be a good day for parliamentary deomcracy as, topically given the date, this has a clear potential for putting a bomb under it!.
JonesySorry Jonesy, but with all due respect under UK law that is a load of tosh!
I’ll explain why:
You are assuming that referendums supersede Parliament…..this can never be because laws can only be enacted through Parliament….referendums are advisory only and that was made clear from the outset….we’ve never even had a referendum until 1975 and there have only ever been three! Not exactly part and parcel of how laws are made here!
I take your point we could get to a situation where people who have not fully understood or even thought about the actual legal processes and how Theresa May by herself cannot set into motion Clause 50 without a vote in Parliament (because she is acting outwith her constitutional powers), and who think they have been done out or diddled of what they think is the winner’s lot will start to moan….hopefully it won’t come to armed militias like the Georgia Three Percenters (named after the claim that the historical American Revolution military in armed resistance against the British in the American Revolution constituted three per cent of the population).
Instead of referendums, the sovereign will of the people is manifested through Parliament and the members elected are representatives of the people that elected them, they are not delegates of their constituents. As such, they don’t have to go along with their constituents saying for example we don’t want a third runway at Heathrow if they believe it is better for the greater good of the nation to have the runway…..the fact they can be booted out by their constituents in the next election is another matter….
The next possible general election date is May 2017 (for many reasons)…..Theresa May thought she could get to 2020 without an election but having one sooner might legitimatise her own position and with Labour in the disarray it’s in at the moment, and with new constituency boundary changes benefitting the conservatives, might even mean she’ll get a majority of around 100!
Quite so Tony….I expected something along those lines though perhaps not quite so erudite….the problem is though that that uses the letter of the law to defeat the will of the people for whom the laws were written to protect. It is as Boyle suggests the act of a tin pot dictatorship.
JonesyJohn, it isn’t about changing the result. It’s about parliament approving the terms under which we leave the EU. In my opinion, this is a decision that strengthens our democracy. I don’t expect it to stop the process.
Bruce the problem is that it CAN stop the process….however much to our benefit that may be financially….it would be a mess constitutionally. Right now, as this is typed, a majority of those who voted and expressed a political opinion, outside the structure of normal party politics, may not see their choice become policy. Its a simplistic take on the situation but its the crucial one and for a nation that prides itself as the cradle of modern democracy it is beyond astounding.
Tony,
“…it is parliament that has supreme sovereignty in the UK and it is not the Prime Minister who has sovereignty over parliament….”
Parliament stands on the foundation that the elected members represent majority will of their constituencies. If the will of those constituencies has already been determined in a legally valid manner Parliament is redundant and serves no function. There is no need for an MP to assume a proxy stance for their constituency as the wishes of that constituency are already a matter of record. The prime ministers function is solely to direct the actioning of the vote outcome. Either that or the referendum serves no function.
If a referendum, pure democracy, serves no function then we are saying that parliamentary democracy is void as the will of the people is no longer necessarily the dominant factor in the course our country takes. A referendum, by its nature, must supersede the will of parliament as the more legitimate measure of the political will of the electorate.
JonesyAn excellent day if you believe in parliamentary democracy
The decision has just aimed a metaphorical loaded gun at the equally metaphorical head of parliamentary democracy. How is that good?. If the Commons does anything but ratify the vote it undermines the core foundation of the system. Do we need a constitutional crisis at the same time the value of our currency is dropping faster than a UKIP politician in Brussels?.
Clearly I think the Leave vote was a triumph of stupidity over sense but to have a referendum and then suggest, afterwards, that parliament has primacy over the actually quantified will of the people is an utter absurdity.
JonesyIf you cant ID then you dont XXXX fire!. Where the XXXX does Kh58 fit in to this when, if memory serves, that system needed to be preset for a certain target radar type before takeoff and no-one admits to knowledge of a Buk threat in the first place. A DEAD mission against a non-existent radar SAM threat with a weapon preset against what threat system?!. XXXXXXXXXXXX
Admitted its an accident???. I said I thought it was an accident days ago when this started getting absurd!. What I cant abide is the recklessness of the TELAR being provided in the first place. That is culpable behaviour any way around.
Zero threat conditions….as in when you think you are shooting at an unarmed transport 33k feet up!.
JonesyAndraxxus no one and nothing forced them to fire that missile at the MH17 track. There wasn’t an Su25 bearing down on them that moment that forced their hands and there was no extant threat from a contact on a civ profile at 33k ft. If you believe the COMINT they even thought they were shooting an unarmed aircraft (albeit a legitimate military one)….so yes zero-threat most definitely applies!.
We’ve been over the overflight thing before. Airliners fly over hotspots sometimes even in complete ignorance all the time. No-one has a right to shoot them down. If airspace is blocked out officially for certain kinds of traffic then that is a different story. That wasnt the case here though was it….as no-one knew about the Buk at the time. After all who’d be mad enough to give the cavemen a Buk TELAR and risk them shooting at god knows what……oh wait!.
JonesyJohn,
He asked you a direct question. I know you prefer to hide behind the tedious little nitpicks about spelling, punctuation and semantics when you’ve been caught out, but, when asked a direct question it is considered protocol to at least try and answer it?.
JonesyIf the UK did this Starfish damn right I’d want to see someone jailed and, if necessary, in the Hague for it. As I’ve detailed already our forces have been in that shoot/no shoot situation and, despite operational pressures, didn’t fire!. We’ve further taken the steps of removing certain weapons systems from service that could give rise to RoE complexities. We have demonstrated, to my satisfaction, in thought and deed that we don’t do this sort of thing. That is my concern….that we are, and remain, professional enough to not be worried about such prosecutions because we get it right. Not that we ‘get off with them’ if they happen.
Your analogy is getting ever more tortured and obscure. There was no-one else immediately in the area on a threat profile. MH17 wasnt on a threat profile. Going by the COMINT intercepts cited by others there was absolutely no claim that the rebels believed they were about to come under air attack from the MH17 track. They fired because they thought they were hitting a target previously out of reach. They very deliberately established a lock and fired a missile at a target they didnt have the tools to identify. Bluster, obfuscate, whine about unfairness, point fingers at the Americans all you like. Its all meaningless. You dont shoot a missile, under zero threat conditions, at something that you dont have an ID on.
JonesySaid this weeks ago
“The problem of course is, you can’t borrow forever,”said Paul Johnson from the IFS.
“So we’ll have a few more years of more borrowing, but my guess is this is not the end of austerity, actually this means austerity will just go on for longer because we’ll probably have the spending cuts and tax rises right through the 2020s to pay for this.”
Deep bloody joy!. Dont worry though lads we’ll have our sovereignty back….that’ll make all the difference.
JonesyActually it does. In legal jargon it’s referred to as a precedent. The reason precedents are important is because they ensure the law is fair an impartial. Without adhering to precedents you have a corrupt and unbalanced system of law.
Now read Hopsalots winningly concise and accurate outline on the limits of the laws of precedent….then stop trying to obfuscate and divert away from the core point.
That point being if the missile system was never put in the hands of those who, demonstrably, couldn’t use it safely then it matters not one whit what other events occurred or didn’t occur…..that airliner makes it to its destination safely.
This incident was more akin to a home invasion, where someone fires a rifle at an aggressive intruder but it flies through the window and hits an innocent bystander across the street.
Of course it isnt. There was no ‘intruder’ there when the shot was fired for starters. Using your analogy the homeowner, with poor eyesight, saw someone over the street, decided that it could be a potential home invader, and decided to kill him on the off-chance….took careful aim and fired. I’m no lawyer but that sounds fairly well thought through to me….which makes it murder.
JonesyThere were 290 dead on Iran Air Flight 655, that’s the only thing which matters.. Was it deliberate, accidental or negligence, who gives damn, no one was prosecuted.. Why should the MH17 case be suddenly treated any differently is beyond me..
No MSphere just because an American wrongly gets away with something does not balance a Russian making the same kind of mistake. Stop being absurdly childish. Following your schoolyard logic then I assume the Vincennes CO was ok to commit his atrocity because of KAL007?. The Russians did that one first so….so….so there.
Don’t be so damned ridiculous!. This is a very clear case, going by the report, of a weapons system being provided out of the parameters of its normal deployment. Nothing else has a bearing here other than that single fact. No attempt to divert or obfuscate with idiot commentary on airspace control – RoEs exist for a reason and no formation without RoE currency should HAVE this class of weapons period!.
Falcondude,
Clearly someone in the rebel team wished to engage high value targets at a higher altitude than could be reached by their MANPADS and Strela10s.
The request was fulfilled by someone who you’d hope didn’t understand the correct operation of a system like Buk. The alternative is that the person supplying didn’t care if the unit engaged random tracks. Essentially ignorance or callous disregard.
JonesyEver heard of something called precedent? The anglo-saxon law system knows this term very well..
How many perpertrators of the Vincennes shootdown were criminally prosecuted?
So, please, do not call this irrelevancy.. Ever..
MSphere,
This is relevant solely if the Iranian Airbus shootdown exhonerates the wilful negligence of pushing an incomplete BVR SAM system into an operational environment in which proper C3I wasn’t going to be present.
Do you believe the USN allowing a reckless CO to command Vincennes means that it was fine for the Russians to put a Buk TELAR in the hands of people who could not employ it properly?.
Sign In
