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CBS says US satellite tracked speeding Italian hostage car in Baghdad - huh?!?!
JimO asks -- what can this report mean? What technical capability is being referred to, and in how garbled a form? As of now, I have no reason to believe this CBS/AFP story has any credibility. Can anybody enlighten me? US satellite recorded checkpoint shooting, shows speed of Italian car: CBS Fri Apr 29,12:28 PM ET WASHINGTON (AFP) - A US satellite reportedly recorded a checkpoint shooting in Iraq last month, enabling investigators to reconstruct how fast a car carrying a top Italian intelligence official and a freed hostage was traveling when US troops opened fire. The report, which aired Thursday on CBS News, said US investigators concluded from the recording that the car was traveling at a speed of more than 60 miles (96 km) per hour. Giuliana Sgrena has said the car was traveling at a normal speed of about 30 miles an hour when the soldiers opened fired, wounding her and killing Nicola Calipari, the Italian agent who had just secured her release from a month's captivity. US soldiers said at the time of the March 4 incident that the car approached at a high rate of speed and that they fired only after it failed to respond to hand signals, flashing bright lights and warning shots. The conflicting accounts were among a number of differences that have prevented US and Italian authorities from reaching agreement on what happened. CBS, citing Pentagon officials, said the satellite recording enabled investigators to reconstruct the event without having to rely on the eyewitness accounts. It said the soldiers manning the checkpoint first spotted the Italian car when it was 137 yards (meters) away. By the time they opened fire and brought the car to a halt, it was 46 yards (meters) away. CBS said that happened in less than three seconds, which meant the car had to be going over 60 miles an hour. CBS said Italian investigators refused to accept that the Americans were justified in shooting so quickly, arguing among other things that the checkpoint was not properly marked. |
#2
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Jim Oberg wrote:
JimO asks -- what can this report mean? What technical capability is being referred to, and in how garbled a form? As of now, I have no reason to believe this CBS/AFP story has any credibility. Can anybody enlighten me? US satellite recorded checkpoint shooting, shows speed of Italian car: CBS Fri ... I can only guess that this is a mangled report. Maybe the Italian guards had a GPS receiver in their car from which a log was retrieved post- incident? (Thus the "satellite" part of the story?) Even a cheap GPS receiver typically stores a position log and calculates speed. - Ed Kyle |
#3
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"Jim Oberg" wrote in message
... JimO asks -- what can this report mean? What technical capability is being referred to, and in how garbled a form? As of now, I have no reason to believe this CBS/AFP story has any credibility. Can anybody enlighten me? The article seems pretty straight forward. Indicating a US spy satellite caught the incident on tape. If I can pan and zoom any intersection in Baghdad for free with enough resolution to count cars, I bet the NRO can do much better. With all the car bombings is it surprising at all that we're closely watching Baghdad with satellites? Free Trial http://www.keyhole.com/ |
#4
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"jonathon" wrote in message ... "Jim Oberg" wrote in message ... JimO asks -- what can this report mean? What technical capability is being referred to, and in how garbled a form? As of now, I have no reason to believe this CBS/AFP story has any credibility. Can anybody enlighten me? The article seems pretty straight forward. Indicating a US spy satellite caught the incident on tape. If I can pan and zoom any intersection in Baghdad for free with enough resolution to count cars, I bet the NRO can do much better. Really? You can can do this for moving images? Or just static shots? Keep in mind unless you have tech I don't those are all snapshots (and many actually airborne, not space borne at that.) In order to get better shots, the optical recon sats tend to be in lower orbits, so their dwell time isn't all that impressive. Remember, Enemy of the State is fiction. With all the car bombings is it surprising at all that we're closely watching Baghdad with satellites? Free Trial http://www.keyhole.com/ |
#5
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"jonathon" wrote The article seems pretty straight forward. Indicating a US spy satellite caught the incident on tape. If I can pan and zoom any intersection in Bagdad for free with enough resolution to count cars, I bet the NRO can do much better. With all the car bombings is it surprising at all that we're watching Bagdad with satellites rather closely? How much you wanna bet? We're not talking a view of some daytime corner sometime during a period of a few months -- we're talking two views at night, within a few seconds of each other. See the difference? |
#6
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"jonathon" wrote Well, if the US doesn't have the capability now for such intelligence gathering, we certainly are working on it. http://www.fas.org/spp/military/prog...int/whelan.pdf Is this an admission you've lost the bet you offered in the top post? grin Now pay up. One week's embarrassed, contrite silence. |
#7
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"Jim Oberg" wrote in message ... "jonathon" wrote Well, if the US doesn't have the capability now for such intelligence gathering, we certainly are working on it. http://www.fas.org/spp/military/prog...int/whelan.pdf Is this an admission you've lost the bet you offered in the top post? grin It was a sure bet! All those ufo sightings in Iran are prolly just our uavs stacked up in a holding pattern. Now pay up. One week's embarrassed, contrite silence. Never, never and never. I have a vacation on the way in a week and was planning an onslaught. I get two weeks to finally try out my stock trading system based on the concepts I ceaselessly spout. And it'll be a public demonstration as I'll post each buy and sell as it happens. Since complexity science is the inverse of all things classical, any trading system built from it...from nature... will have the quality of working better the more that know. heh... got it all ciphered out now~ singin' Money, it's a gas Grab that cash with both hands and make a stash ...new car...caviar...four-star...day-dream... think I'll go and overthrow Bei-jing s |
#8
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Jim Oberg wrote:
JimO asks -- what can this report mean? What technical capability is being referred to, and in how garbled a form? As of now, I have no reason to believe this CBS/AFP story has any credibility. Can anybody enlighten me? A likely alternative here is that a Predator (or other UAV) was in the air and captured the incident on video. Reports today say that the checkpoint was put in place to support travel by Negroponte, and I can imagine we'd want to keep an eye on him. The reports also suggest the highway was lightly traveled (referring to only 15 vehicles being turned away at the checkpoint prior to the Italians' car). This would make it much simpler to isolate and analyze any video or photographic info, since they certainly know the position of the surveillance platform and the location of the incident. Finally, the reports give the interval between the pictures of the incident as "3 seconds", suggesting that either there were obstructed views of an incident area that was under constant surveillance, or that the area was being surveilled by a device that was scanning over the incident area at that frequency. The "spy satellite" info may just be unintentional media confusion, or possibly some deliberate "fuzzing up" of the source to protect intelligent assets/techniques. -- Reed Snellenberger GPG KeyID: 5A978843 rsnellenberger-at-houston.rr.com |
#9
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There are currently at least 8 and possibly as many as a dozen
satellites "watching" Bahgdad with multiple cameras each yielding nearly continuous coverage. Imaging capability includes visual, IR, and radar images with computer merging of the multiple techniques. It provides real time framed capability, not merely static images. It can deliver this image information under clear sky conditions as well as at night and through cloud cover. Even at night under cloud cover resolution is perfectly adequate for detecting and tracking vehicles. Vehicles may be identified and tracked by either headlights or their thermal image from engine heat. The exact position of any particular object in an image relative to ground can easily be determined and tracked across successive frames. Rumor has it that daytime resolution is sufficient that NSA has been forced to deem even "inadvertant" targeting and observation of a nude beach as a career limiting offense. Additionally, Predator aircraft may or may not be in the air. |
#10
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Very imaginative, but I find not the slightest
indication in this text that you know what you are talking about, or that anything you typed is worthy of belief. Please provide checkable factual assertions and citations. "penultimate" wrote There are currently at least 8 and possibly as many as a dozen satellites "watching" Bahgdad with multiple cameras each yielding nearly continuous coverage. Imaging capability includes visual, IR, and radar images with computer merging of the multiple techniques. It provides real time framed capability, not merely static images. It can deliver this image information under clear sky conditions as well as at night and through cloud cover. Even at night under cloud cover resolution is perfectly adequate for detecting and tracking vehicles. Vehicles may be identified and tracked by either headlights or their thermal image from engine heat. The exact position of any particular object in an image relative to ground can easily be determined and tracked across successive frames. Rumor has it that daytime resolution is sufficient that NSA has been forced to deem even "inadvertant" targeting and observation of a nude beach as a career limiting offense. Additionally, Predator aircraft may or may not be in the air. |
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