Russian plane crash: US president Obama says bomb 'possibly' brought down Metrojet airliner - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)
We have moved beyond "unnamed officials speaking on condition of anonymity" to Obama and Cameron. Its pretty unlikely they would be putting their credibility on the line unless there was good reason to do so.
People here initially said there had to be an innocent explanation for MH370. Most people now accept there is no innocent explanation.
It was the same with Germanwings. People said there had to be some innocent explanation, and more and more implausible theories were put forward. It was only when the French Prosecutor released clear evidence that people accepted the truth.
I have the greatest respect for air accident investigators. Their untiring efforts over many decades have made air safety such that we generally take it for granted.
But air accident investigation goes back many decades. To a time when design faults and mechanical failures and serious navigational errors were relatively common. And to a time when air crashes were generally accidents. And to a time when painstaking examination of the wreckage was often the only path to finding the truth.
But the world has changed. Innocent errors are less common. And malevolent actions are more common. Air crashes are now more likely to be a crime than at any time in history. At the same time, criminal investigators and intelligence services have access to tools like satellite data and cell phone records and metadata. Tools that did not exist when modern air accident investigation was born.
There is absolutely a place for traditional air accident investigation. But increasingly this will take place in parallel to other forms of investigation. The world has changed, and we must change with it.
It is sometimes the job of "unnamed officials" to leak information in advance of political leaders. Such "leaks" are rarely non-authorised.
To the best of our knowledge, ISIS has never claimed responsibility for something it has not done. There is no valid reason to suspect this is any different.
Russia's entry into the Syrian conflict likely put ISIS in a bind. ISIS really had to strike at Russia in some way. The alternative was to do nothing, and thereby send a message that ISIS feared Russia.
If this recording was of some other event, it is likely that event would have been found by now. There can't be that many examples of mid-air explosions of large aircraft that have been captured on video.
Bear in mind this may be quite a different type of bombing. Historically bombs have got onto planes in passengers bags. The location of the bomb within the hold was random. This time, we have a plane sitting at night at air airport where security is lax. The bomb may have been carefully placed somewhere in the tail so as to cause certain structural failure as well as immediately take out the recorders.