Donald Trump wants to know who leaked details about the missing U.S. airman who was rescued from the mountains of Iran in a high-stakes mission on Sunday.
The U.S. carried out a daring operation to extract two airmen who ejected from the F-15E fighter jet that was shot down by Iranian forces on Friday. The military plucked the pilot out of Iranian territory on Friday, and later pulled out the second service member who was hiding in the mountains.
But during a press conference on Monday, Trump accused a media organization of jeopardizing the mission for reporting that a second airman was missing on Friday. He did not name the media organization, but threatened to jail the journalist who first reported that a second airman was missing.
The plane was a two-seater. Thinking that Iran didn’t know there was a second pilot requires the assumption that Iranian intelligence is incapable of looking the plane up on Wikipedia.
Basically, I trust Iran far more than I trust the President of the United States.
It actually assumes that Iran doesn’t know the capabilities of its own neighbors, since a lot of Middle Eastern nations, including Israel, are operators of the F15.
Military intelligence doesnt need Wikipedia.
The point is to show how basic and common the information is.
People keep saying this in this thread. But there are multiple versions of the F15 and many are single operator aircraft. I don’t know much about our current inventory or what ones are in operation. Is there evidence of what model of F15 was shot down? I know one was the dual operator F15E. But I haven’t seen any info on the other one that they were not covering as much. The one that crashed outside of Iran.
Thanks for a legit answer. Still don’t see a reason why the information was leaked. What was gained? Outside of an exclusive.
I get that journalists are allowed to print whatever they want, but usually they will not print something if it might cause harm. This seems like one of those cases.
I don’t think information like that can be considered “leaked”, though. Of course there was a second pilot. That kind of plane has two. It would have been weird and mysterious if it didn’t have a second pilot.
Maybe it was possible they already got the other pilot. Maybe it was possible they confirmed the other pilot died already.
There’s a reason why this story was reported as a leak and not as “common sense tells you 2 pilots are missing, not 1”.