They got it for the end for "meritorious conduct" - shooting down airliners is meritorious! - and "efficiently conducting the firing procedure" (or something like that) - efficiently shooting down a civillian airliner!
The "meritorious" aspect was in reference to the crews' procedures and how they responded to various technical faults, not the act of bringing down the airliner in and of itself. Similar to how the crew of the K-19 submarine was awarded for honorable conduct despite having caused one of the biggest naval accidents in history.
So if this was supposedly a mistake, why was it rewarded instead of punished? Maybe because rewarding it was politically beneficial.
Read my above reply to AmirPatriot.
Am I to assume that Iranian officials have investigated the wreckage, had access to US Navy logs, and have conducted their own investigation?
I take it, judging by your hasty reply, you did not read the Newsweek article. Do that then tell me about "aggressive" gunboats.
Have you yourself? As per your own source:
"He sought out and engaged the enemy in a sea battle in the Persian Gulf. From the captain's chair of a warship's combat information center, he made life-and-death decisions in the heat of conflict."
"At the United Nations, the Iranians compared the tragedy to the Soviet shoot-down of Korean Air Lines 007 in 1983."
Not only was the captain engaged in a sea battle at the time of the shootdown, but Iranians themselves likened the incident to the KAL-007 shootdown, which had been concluded to be an
accident as well.
I'm the one who is outraged at the shootdown, yet you are an apologist for it! So who's being insulting? Not me, and don't accuse me of such.
I'm not "apologizing" for anything. I'm merely refuting your personal stance that Iran Air 655 was a deliberate, unprovoked act, a topic we somehow involved ourselves in after discussing whether Mr. Mattis was responsible for "war crimes" in Iraq or not.
That's like asking a murderer to choose his own sentence. In this case, and if you had read my article you would know, the reports lied, twisted and covered up information. And still fail to admit wrongdoing.
A murderer implies that the individual carried out the deed with malice aforethought. That was not the case of Iran Air 655.
