Anyway, not saying the Egyptian investigators were right in this case (it seems clear that they weren't). Or defending authoritarian governments. Just providing an alternative view point, as someone who lived half his life in Egypt and half in the US.
BEA and the NTSB really really cannot be compared to CIA/FBI/DGSE. They are professionals with clear and apolitical goals. See the NTSB and BEA regularly criticising various government agencies, including in this case BEA being raided by the transport gendermes. Hell, even the MAK (equivalent air crash investigation agency for most of the former Soviet Union) dares criticise and publicly shit on and get into disputes with on government agencies not doing their job.
It's the Egyptians who are really the counterexample here in being absurdly terrible at their jobs. Wether it's just sheer incompetence, corruption, nepotism, or not wanting to embarrass the regime, we'll never know. Maybe it's a mix of the above. But especially in this crash, there is no reason for them to be so absurdly terrible at their jobs, there is nothing for them to be covering up (unlike the previous crash which was genuinely embarrassing for the country).
https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/the-crash-of-egyptair-fl...
Describing them as "hacks" is weird. In most dictatorships, the concern is usually "What does the country's leadership want the official story to be" rather than "What actually happened". Take this quote from the article for example
> "In my opinion, the problem with the report is that it appears to treat the findings of the Triple Committee — the group appointed by the public prosecutor’s office — as the unquestioned truth, and fails to push back on any of its assertions, even the ones that they disagreed with. Instead, because the Triple Committee concluded that a bomb in the galley was the cause of the crash, the EAAID bent itself into a pretzel trying to make the evidence fit that theory. Unfortunately, we don’t know why the Triple Committee and the EAAID chose to die on this hill"
EgyptAir is a government owned enterprise. It's managed by the "Ministry of Civil Aviation" who's head is always some general or commander from the Air Force. If the EAAID investigators were allowed to say that there was a "faulty equipment" then a lot of questions would have had to be answered. A lot of questions that have the possibility of embarrassing people all the way up the chain (especially that as mentioned, that particular oxygen mask was reported faulty from another aircraft and removed for maintenance before, and the crew frequently reported that the pilot oxygen supply always decreases on every flight).
Saying "it was terrorists" is something that no one has to feel embarrassed about. In fact in 2016 the Egyptian government were in the midst of a lot of arrests and suspension of most freedoms to "curb terrorist activities". And such thing plays well into that narrative.
Are you an EAAID investigator who wants to say "it was a faulty oxygen mask"? Ok. How do you fancy you, your brother, cousin, and neighbor spending the next 15-30 years in jail pending investigation on conspiracy against the country?
Take care, America.
See post WW2 Germany, and all the folks who got caught with nazi memorabilia in their attics for decades afterwards.
And even there, sometimes people will get treated like terrorists for saying the wrong political thing
Like it’s been happening for the last year. Including some protests getting outright made illegal
And as you say, even people that care a lot about the truth, will choose something else to protect themselves or their loved ones
This also occasionally happens in non-dictatorships, unless you considered George W a dictator when he was deciding to invade Iraq.
There are essentially two ways to solve a mystery:
A) Consider the evidence and draw a conclusion from them.
B) Consider the conclusion and draw the evidences for it.
Neither is the correct methodology, especially when politics, power dynamics, and social justice are involved.
That's because you're concerned about finding out what happened. Not everyone thinks like that, namely some (many) are concerned about creating what happened.
Because type A people are what are required to actually fix problems, or learn more things.
Type B people exist when those are ‘not desirable’. Which should indeed scare you, if you care about actual reality (or actual reality matters) in that domain.
B) appears preferable only under duress and then only to the benefit of saving one’s own skin temporarily, however long that may be.