Plain speaking

Twitter is five years old. And like so much of new media it is the subject of snide asides from the Main Stream Media, perhaps sensitive to its ability to undermine their pre-eminence in the dissemination of news.

Today I had cause to contact the Radio 4’s World at One program after their ‘defence analyst’ stated that only British and French aircraft were operating the NFZ, under US co-ordination; which is not the case, as operations have involved Danish, Italian, and US planes today; with others, such as the Canadians, Qataris and Spanish awaiting orders.

A notable US contribution yesterday was three B-2 stealth bombers being tankered across the Atlantic from Missouri to Libya, and back, to make an attack on a Libyan airbase.

I claim no great expertise in military aviation, just that by following the twitter threads of FMCL and Cencio4, and other plane spotters, it is possible to track the operations off the Libyan coast as they converse with Maltese air traffic control prior to ‘going tactical’.

And while ‘real’ journalists try desperately to get military and political leaders to explain the purpose of resolution 1973; these ‘voluntary spies’, as president Lukashenko of Belarus called them earlier in the Libyan crisis, when they tracked Colonel Gaddafi’s personal Dessualt Falcon jet from Minsk to Tripoli, may well have found the answer the world’s media has been looking for as to the aim of Odyssey Dawn.

FMCL recorded a USAF EC-130J psyops plane transmitting a message in three languages. The message was a warning that any ship that attempted to put to sea would be destroyed. What is of interest is that the Al Jazeera producer Evan Hill has translated the Arabic version of the message as beginning with the statement, "regime of Gaddafi ends with the resolution of the UN."

Also of note is a plane apparently carrying Russian foreign minster Sergei Lavrov has landed in Algiers.