WASHINGTON: The US has been flying surveillance drones over Iran since last year to look for evidence of nuclear weapons programs and examine air defences.

Citing three US officials with knowledge of the effort, The Washington Post newspaper said yesterday that the small, pilotless planes used radar, video, still photography and air filters designed to pick up traces of nuclear activity to gather details not accessible by satellites.

The paper quoted unidentified Iranian, European and US officials as saying the Iranian Government, using Swiss channels in the absence of diplomatic relations with Washington, had formally protested against the incursions.

It reported that one US official acknowledged drones were being used, but said the Iranian complaint focused on manned military aircraft overflights, which the US denied.


From the article:

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,12236390%5E2703,00.html



My question is should this be legal? Suppose a country was doing this to America or Brittian would this be considered an Act of War?The US says this is legal because the Iranian complaint focused on manned military aircraft overflights not unmanned ones but whats the difference?(besides the obvious)


Thanks for your response :m:

really it don't mater if you send plains into enemy airspace you also have to be willing to have them shot down. The russians did it to us we did it to them. We shot down there spy plains they shot down ours. Act of war is only considered that if the plains carry a warload not camaras

Not an act of war.

Some is overt like the drones over Iran gathering information on potential targets, some is covert like the muslims gathering information for the attacks on the WTC and the Pentagon.

Spying is spying, always has been, always will be.

Marv please try and grow up this isnt about Muslims or anything like that(as much as you would like it to be) I was asking a question because I was curious about this sort of thing :rolleyes:

i wonder how the US will react when iran shoots them down

i wonder how the US will react when iran shoots them downI doubt there would be much reaction at all. There's nothing stopping Iran from locking down it's airspace by force... especially in the case of a drone.

think about the cuban missile crisis. How did the US react when one of there planes was shoot down over cuba? the idiocy is that they should never have been there in the first place but the US went off the handle. "how dare they shoot down our brave pilots" and wanted to go after the SAM site that shot it. why? the plane was illegally in cuban air space and if a plane was illegally in US air space THEY would shoot it down.

No i think that if iran started shooting the US would try to use it as an exscuse to got to war

Marv please try and grow up this isnt about Muslims or anything like that(as much as you would like it to be) I was asking a question because I was curious about this sort of thing :rolleyes:And I simply posited an example. You are the thin-skinned one about Islam. i wonder how the US will react when iran shoots them down...The drones take pictures and observe in real-time response activities. That's only one purpose. The Iranians first turn on their radar, and 'clicky', we know where their radar is. Or maybe the Iranians decide to shoot blind. 'Clicky', and we know areas they want to protect, even if the drone is knocked down. Even if they launch interceptors, we learn their defense capabilities.

See thats my point I can still here Bush & Co. talking about how Iraqi ground defenses were shooting at American pilots in the "No Fly Zone" yet that was still "Iraqi Airspace"

See thats my point I can still here Bush & Co. talking about how Iraqi ground defenses were shooting at American pilots in the "No Fly Zone" yet that was still "Iraqi Airspace"
Under UN resolutions the USA was entitled to send aircraft in there, though. There is no entitlement to send aircraft into Iran.

Students and many others in Iran are sick of the Mullahs. Not out of the realm of possibilty Iran might do something to someone to put down the revolt brewing within.

If they did, I can hear Ted Kennedy now, "This admistration was told Iran was working on/planning (fill in the blank) how difficult would it have been to send unmanned drones over Iran to assess the danger? Thousands of lives in (fill in the blank) could have been saved if this admistration had been on the job."

Under UN resolutions the USA was entitled to send aircraft in there, though. There is no entitlement to send aircraft into Iran.






Please show me the resoulution that supported "no fly zones".............look hard because you wont find one

Not a resolution from the Useless Nations, but as part of the cease-fire ending the 1991 Gulf War......http://www.historyguy.com/no-fly_zone_war.html

From the BBC:
The two no-fly zones over Iraq were imposed by the US, Britain and France after the Gulf War, in what was described as a humanitarian effort to protect Shi'a Muslims in the south and Kurds in the north.

The justification was that an acute humanitarian crisis made it necessary to infringe the sovereignty of Iraq in this way.

However, unlike the military campaign to expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait, the no-fly zones were not authorised by the UN and they are not specifically sanctioned by any Security Council resolution........
.....Many UK ministers say that under international law, there is a right to intervene to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe.

They point out that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein has hurt his people before - when he used chemical weapons to kill 5,000 Kurdish villagers in the 1980s.

But French Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine has called on Washington to redefine its policy on Iraq and criticised the recent US-British airstrikes on Baghdad as having no legal basis in international law.

"We have believed for a long time that there is no basis in international law for this type of bombing," Mr Vedrine has said.

Other countries, notably China and Russia, have condemned the no-fly zones as a violation of Iraqi sovereignty, and they insist there is no backing for the policy under international law or UN resolutions.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/1175950.stm

But the circular logic of Bush supporters is that the U.S. did it, and the U.S. doesn't break international law, therefore it was legal.

Not a resolution from the Useless Nations, but as part of the cease-fire ending the 1991 Gulf War......http://www.historyguy.com/no-fly_zone_war.html




Wasnt one of the main reasons that Iraq was invaded by Bush because they(Iraq) were breaking Resolutions from the "Useless Nations"? You cant have it both ways Marv....they cant be Useless when you disagree with them but use them as an excuse to launch a premptive invasion

***whatever***

Nothing will happen if they are shot down because there is no pilot to put at risk.

That's the beauty of UAV's and cruise missiles. If you're rich, you can get robots to do your dirty work for you. :cool:

***whatever***





checkmate?