The audio sounds cut and dry, plus US supports Turkish version, and that's good enough for me. Nevertheless, it does seem the Turks overreacted to a minor incident, and now we'll see how Russia responds. My guess is no cheek turning.
Did you listen to the same audio tapes as me?! Because on the version of the tapes the BBC posted, the audio quality was astonishingly poor, with a hell of a lot of static, interference and heavy accented English.
I am a fluent native speaker of English, and I could barely pick out even an handful of words from it, certainly not enough to even get a general idea of what the message is trying to say, and I was concerntrating and listening hard. So i would be amazed if the Russian pilots understood any of it at all.
Considering the Turkish version of the tapes should have been the clean recorded version before transmission, I cannot understand how the audio quality could be so atrocious.
A cynical person might think the Turks deliverably garbled up their 'warnings' to make them unintelligible to the Russians so they could claim they gave fair warning to lend their ambush the cover of reasonableness while not tipping the Russians off so they could ensure they could shoot the jet down.
