Remember the Vincennes?

That’s the name of the U.S. Navy warship that shot down an Iranian airliner with missiles in 1988, killing all 290 people including 60 children.

Vincennes Captain Will Rogers claimed he saw a jet fighter descending in fast attack approach not a widebody airliner ascending after taking off from an airport. 

Navy officials concocted an explanation to rationalize the criminal action of the Vincennes captain.

The Reagan Administration (along with much of the American mainstream news media) blamed Iran for allowing its airliner to fly outside the corridor for commercial airliners, allowing that airliner to operate without using identification signals for civilian airplanes and allowing the airliner to fly over a skirmish where lightly armed Iranian military motorboats were allegedly harassing the Vincennes, a heavily armed cruiser larger in size than any U.S. naval vessel except an aircraft carrier.

The truth was:

The Iranian airliner flew in the proper corridor for civilian aircraft.

The Iranian airliner used the proper civilian identification signals.

And neither the airliner pilot or Iranian air traffic controllers could have known that the Vincennes had entered Iranian territorial waters to attack non-menacing motorboats minutes before the airliner’s take-off.

Taken from here