Considering the history, only those with a mindset of complete deference to authority would have believed the USG when they claimed that the drone (or the manned Navy aircraft that was accompanying it) did not violate Iranian airspace.

When the USS Vincennes shot down Iran Air Flight 655 in 1988, killing 290 civilians, the US first denied the ship had been in Iranian waters. The investigation (released years later) revealed – and Adm. William Crowe admitted on ABC’s Nightline – that the USS Vincennes was deep in Iranian waters when it shot down the plane.

The USG had also initially claimed that Flight 655 was flying outside the corridor for commercial airliners and that is was operating without using the proper identification signals for civilian flights. When the report was finally released, the USG admitted that neither of these things were true (the report said the flight was flying “within the established air route” and the plane’s transponder was squawking over the “Mode 3” civilian channel as it should have been).

When Iranian jets fired warning shots at a US drone in 2012, the USG repeatedly insisted that the “aircraft was never in Iranian airspace”. But, a week after the incident, Pentagon spokesman George Little admitted that an “Iranian Su-25 fighter jet pursued the U.S. drone as it retreated from Iranian airspace”.

In 2016, when 10 sailors were detained after entering Iranian waters – a few miles from Iran’s naval base on Farsi Island – without permission, the USG admitted they had trespassed but claimed it was because the boats experienced “mechanical failure” and “inadvertently drifted” into Iranian waters. The U.S. government later admitted that story was false but never came up with a believable replacement story. Oh, and this just happened to occur on “Implementation Day” (the day Iran’s compliance with the nuclear deal was officially confirmed and the day the lifting of sanctions was scheduled to take place).

Now we have the Iranian government releasing detailed data to back their claim that the USG did violate their airspace while the USG (the aggressor nation, currently waging economic war against Iran, with a long history of lying about these types of provocative events) is telling the NYT that there is “concern” that the aircraft “actually did violate Iranian airspace at some point”.

A quality summary of the publicly available flight path data is here.

Quote source: Trump Says He Was ‘Cocked and Loaded’ to Strike Iran, but Pulled Back