Did the IRGC plot to shoot down the Ukrainian airliner backfire? - Beyond the Matrix

The downing in the early morning on January 8th by two anti-air Tor SA-15 missiles of Ukrainian International airlines Flight 752, took the lives of 176 passengers and crew. The action was a blunder credited with triggering a wave of protests across Iran. Most passengers on the ill-fated flight were Canadian ex-pat Iranians and Iranian students returning to graduate school in Canada. That triggered an embarrassing series of lies by the IRGC and cover up that at one point led to President Rouhani to threaten his resignation. It was finally resolved when supreme ruler Ayatollah Khamenei ordered the IRGC commander to take responsibility for destruction of the airliner and wrongful death of its hapless passenger. But that wasn’t the end of this debacle. It now emerges that the IRGC may have plotted to down an Iranian civilian plane and blame it on the Americans. That speculation first surfaced in an Israel News Talk Radio interview with noted Washington military technologist expert, former US Defense Department official Dr. Stephen Bryen.

Note his remarks:

Stephen Bryen: There has been a constant stream of lies coming from Iran First, they said it was a mechanical failure. Then they said the plane was heading toward a sensitive military installation. Then they said the plane turned around. Then they said the black boxes were damaged and unrecoverable. Now, why fire two missiles at a commercial jet taking off from Tehran Airport on a standard exit flight route? What's going on here? It's very hard to answer that question. Accident, bad decision by some local military commander, highly unlikely; because the radar image of that plane would be so large, it wouldn't look anything like any cruise missile in anybody's imagination. And the path of it was so well determined that they would know that.

The question is what's really going on here, what happened, and why did it happen? I keep coming back in my mind to the theory that this was intended to be a provocation against the United States by shooting down an Iranian airline. They didn't know it was a Ukrainian, they thought it was Iranian, this is my guess. And by doing that, it would create this horrible incident, which would set the world against the United States. That was the idea. I think it was a revolutionary guard hatched plot.

Some support for Bryen’s hypothesis came in a later New York Times report regarding the cover up by the IRGC:

Gen. Amir Ali Hajizadeh, leader of the Revolutionary Guards aerospace division, was told of the news soon after. "I called the officials and told them this has happened and it's highly possible we hit our own plane," he said in a televised statement.
What followed, according to the NYT report, was an attempt by Iran's Revolutionary Guards to keep the news hidden — even from Iranian president Hassan Rouhani.
Rather than reporting to President Rouhani, Iran's Revolutionary Guards report directly to Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. As such, General Hajizadeh and other Revolutionary Guards generals reportedly didn't tell the Iranian president or military what they knew to be the likely truth: That Iran had accidentally fired two anti-aircraft missiles at a passenger jet, and that jet had crashed due to those missiles. As Iran publicly denied involvement in shooting down the plane, a committee was reportedly put together to investigate. Participants "were sequestered and ordered not to speak to anyone," according to the NYT report.

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