Nope, I'm not. What I'm saying is that I believe there are multiple scenarios where such orders might be given, AND if they were, they would be obeyed. First, because of the professionalism and integrity of naval personnel. Second, because they would not be ordered in a vacuum, but be given a plausible reason involving national security, and therefore they'd take it to their graves. They might not feel good about it, but they'd be told it was a matter of preventing an enormously important defense system from being scuttled from public outrage - a system they understood as vital due to their own experience with it. And, they'd be told the problem would be fixed.
They wouldn't talk.
And polio vaccines don’t cut into the rate of polio cases.
(OK, even tin foil finds something every now and then, but it also makes nice shiny distracting objects.)
I frankly don’t know about heat seeking missiles, would they necessarily deliver their payload right at the thing that they homed in on? Don’t they detonate some small distance from it?
Still, this is where the argument goes awry. They’ll argue it couldn’t have been the Navy, therefor it wasn’t a missile. Then, it wasn’t a manpad... therefor it wasn’t a missile.
They hope people will bog down and not notice the logical sleight of hand.
Its good to keep it simple. I don’t know who fired what kind of missile. Well over a hundred people saw a missile, including people whose experience and background was such that they would know what they saw. That’s it. What kind, and who fired it, we may never know because no one wanted to know.
Since the Navy was there scouring the area, its probably that some key people knew what they were looking for, but its also pretty sure that they were not interviewed by FBI. I assume they were there because there was information that something was going to happen, but even to make that assumption is to get off onto a tangent. Witnesses didn’t see who fired the missile, or identify what kind of missile. But they agreed it was a missile.
Talisker wrote: “Nope, I’m not. What I’m saying is that I believe there are multiple scenarios where such orders might be given, AND if they were, they would be obeyed.”
You can hypothesize all sorts of Tom Clancy scenarios which are irrelevant to the question of whether:
1. An order to cover up the launch of a Navy missile resulting in a shootdown of a civilian airline would be Constitutional.
2. Whether such an order would be obeyed.
Such an order would not be Constitutional and obeying such an order would not be professional. In addition, that order would be unenforceable even if given because there is no way you could prosecute anyone who disobeyed that order.