Reuters reports: “U.S. President Barack Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin discussed the Syria crisis and the situation in Ukraine during a meeting Monday on the sidelines of the climate summit in Paris, a White House official said.”

GARETH PORTER, porter.gareth50 at gmail.com, @GarethPorter
An investigative journalist and author of Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare, Porter just wrote the piece, “The real reason for Turkey’s shoot-down of the Russian jet,” for Middle East Eye, which states: “Although the Obama administration is not about to admit it, the data already available supports the Russian assertion that the Turkish shoot-down was, as Russian President Vladimir Putin asserted, an ‘ambush’ that had been carefully prepared in advance.

“The central Turkish claim that its F-16 pilots had warned the two Russian aircraft 10 times during a period of five minutes actually is the primary clue that Turkey was not telling the truth about the shoot-down. …

“Close analysis of both the Turkish and Russian images of the radar path of the Russian jets indicates that the earliest point at which either of the Russian planes was on a path that might have been interpreted as taking it into Turkish airspace was roughly 16 miles from the Turkish border – meaning that it was only a minute and 20 seconds away from the border. …

“Furthermore according to both versions of the flight path, five minutes before the shoot-down the Russian planes would have been flying eastward — away from the Turkish border.

“If the Turkish pilots actually began warning the Russian jets five minutes before the shoot-down, therefore, they were doing so long before the planes were even headed in the general direction of the small projection of the Turkish border in Northern Latakia province….

“The Turkish shoot-down was thus in essence an effort to dissuade the Russians from continuing their operations in the area against al-Nusra Front and its allies, using not one but two distinct pretexts: on one hand a very dubious charge of a Russian border penetration for NATO allies, and on the other, a charge of bombing Turkmen civilians for the Turkish domestic audience.

“The Obama administration’s reluctance to address the specific issue of where the plane was shot down indicates that it is well aware of that fact. But the administration is far too committed to its policy of working with Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar to force regime change to reveal the truth about the incident.”