Thursday, September 04, 2014

Claim: Eleven passenger planes are missing from an airport in Libya - Snopes Says, MOSTLY FALSE



From Snopes:
Origins:
In early August 2014, some North African bloggers began to spread stories that several commercial airliners went missing from the Tripoli International Airport during or shortly after the facility was taken over by Zintan militia forces earlier in the summer. Later that month translations of the blog posts began to be picked up by news outlets in Western Europe and passed on as fact rather than gossip; by early September those tales from translations of blogs had spread to the United States under the guise of real news.   
The use of airplanes as terrorist weapons in 2001 makes it all too easy for us to anticipate their being used that way again. And despite denials from all sides — the airlines who are not missing any planes, the Libyan transport ministry, and the anti-government forces in control of the airport — the tales have found a ready audience among a populace already on edge in anticipation of the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. 
However, there have been no statements from the State Department, the Department of Defense, Homeland Security, or any other authority warning of stolen airliners. The national threat level has not been raised. Algerian and Moroccan military and air defense, already on high alert due to the unrest in nearby Libya, would undoubtedly have noticed multiple flights of unidentified passenger aircraft. 
As a thread on the aviation community site airliners.net documents, several of the planes claimed in rumors as "missing" or "stolen" have actually been accounted for, having been either caught outside of Tripoli at the time the airport fell to opposition forces or relocated by their operators (Air Contractors pf Dublin) to an airport in Malta for safekeeping. Some of the other airliners were likely destroyed in the fighting or damaged beyond the possibility of operation.
Remember this, everyone: Bill Gertz is a Putz.

5 comments:

midnight rider said...

That's some hoax when everyone from the Washington Times (not just the oriinal Free Beacon story) to MSNBC to Fox News to Glenn Beck to The Daily Mail to USA Today to PuffHo fell for it. And only Snopes has debunked it -- yesterday at that -- while others are still running with it as little as 10 hrs ago.

Some hoax indeed.

Meanwhile, Islamist militias are "keeping an eye" on our embassy in Tripoli for us until we return

Hmm....

Bad juju. Very bad juju...

midnight rider said...

Oh! Not to mention falling for it ourselves. Several times.

Bad juju and interesting times...

Anonymous said...

Still does not diminish the alarm bells about Obama permitting Libyans to train in the US as pilots and nuclear engineers.

Pastorius said...

MR,
If this story is true, then the MSM is covering it up.

They cover up many stories.

But if they are covering up this one, I think this would be the single worst case of dereliction of duty that I have seen from the media since their total failure to cover the evils of Communism.

midnight rider said...

Yeah I'm not sure what to make of this. Snopes is the only one disavowing it that I've been able to find. The administration is totally silent, either way, about it. And some pretty big organizations on both sides have now been reporting it since we first said they weren't, and are continuing to report it despite Snopes.

Weird