Expert debunks US friendly fire investigation

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The Pentagon has covered up major flaws in the US Army's Patriot missile system that prompted a battery to shoot down a British Tornado during the Iraq war last year, a top US scientist says.

Theodore Postol, professor of science, technology and national security policy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), says "every one" of the claims made by a Pentagon probe into the shoot down was false.

Postol led an MIT research group to analyse the success of the Patriot systems in the first Gulf war. After that conflict, the US Army claimed the Patriots had intercepted 96 per cent of the Scuds they had engaged.

"The real intercept rate was almost certainly zero. Now we have discovered a similar but far more insidious cover-up following Operation Iraqi Freedom," says Professor Postol, in a commentary published in the next of New Scientist.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200409/s1210275.htm