Official Version of Naval Incident Starts to Unravel
Once again the American government has been caught lying red handed. As in the case of the British naval incident, the Iranians have proved to the world that they are not the ones who initiate aggression and that they always report the truth.
I have stopped believing anything coming out of America and Europe a long time ago. Frankly, I think that the entire western world's governments are made up of the worst kind of people who thrive on lies, fraud and murders.
Why should we Muslims want to emulate their kind of democracy and their kind of government systems?
awakenedgoyim
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by Gareth Porter
http://www.antiwar.com/porter/?articleid=12191
Despite the official and media portrayal of the incident in the Strait of Hormuz early Monday morning as a serious threat to US ships from Iranian speedboats that nearly resulted in a "battle at sea," new information over the past three days suggests that the incident did not involve such a threat and that no US commander was on the verge of firing at the Iranian boats.
The new information that appears to contradict the original version of the incident includes the revelation that US officials spliced the audio recording of an alleged Iranian threat onto to a videotape of the incident. That suggests that the threatening message may not have come in immediately after the initial warning to Iranian boats from a US warship, as it appears to do on the video.
Also unraveling the story is testimony from a former US naval officer that non-official chatter is common on the channel used to communicate with the Iranian boats and testimony from the commander of the US 5th fleet that the commanding officers of the US warships involved in the incident never felt the need to warn the Iranians of a possible use of force against them.
Further undermining the US version of the incident is a video released by Iran Thursday showing an Iranian naval officer on a small boat hailing one of three ships.
The Iranian commander is heard to say, "Coalition warship 73, this is Iranian navy patrol boat." He then requests the "side numbers" of the US warships. A voice with a US accent replies, "This is coalition warship 73. I am operating in international waters."
The dramatic version of the incident reported by US news media throughout Tuesday and Wednesday suggested that Iranian speedboats, apparently belonging to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard navy, had made moves to attack three US warships entering the Strait and that the US commander had been on the verge of firing at them when they broke off.
Typical of the network coverage was a story by ABC's Jonathan Karl quoting a Pentagon official as saying the Iranian boats "were a heartbeat from being blown up."
Bush administration officials seized on the incident to advance the portrayal of Iran as a threat and to strike a more threatening stance toward Iran. National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley declared Wednesday that the incident "almost involved an exchange of fire between our forces and Iranian forces." President George W. Bush declared during his Mideast trip Wednesday that there would be "serious consequences" if Iran attacked US ships and repeated his assertion that Iran is "a threat to world peace."
Central to the depiction of the incident as involving a threat to US warships is a mysterious pair of messages that the sailor who heard them onboard immediately interpreted as saying, "I am coming at you...," and "You will explode after a few minutes." But the voice in the audio clearly said "I am coming to you," and the second message was much less clear.
Furthermore, as the New York Times noted Thursday, the recording carries no ambient noise, such as the sounds of a motor, the sea or wind, which should have been audible if the broadcast had been made from one of the five small Iranian boats.
A veteran US naval officer who had served as a surface warfare officer aboard a US Navy destroyer in the Gulf sent a message to the New York Times on-line column "The Lede" Wednesday pointing out that in the Persian Gulf, the "bridge-to-bridge" radio channel used to communicate between ships "is like a bad CB radio" with many people using it for "hurling racial slurs" and "threats." The former officer wrote that his "first thought" was that the message "might not have even come from one of the Iranian craft."
Pentagon officials admitted to the Times that they could not rule out that the broadcast might have come from another source
The five Iran boats involved were hardly in a position to harm the three US warships. Although Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman described the Iranian boats as "highly maneuverable patrol craft" that were "visibly armed," he failed to note that these are tiny boats carrying only a two- or three-man crew and that they are normally armed only with machine guns that could do only surface damage to a US ship.
The only boat that was close enough to be visible to the US ships was unarmed, as an enlarged photo of the boat from the navy video clearly shows.
The US warships were not concerned about the possibility that the Iranian boats were armed with heavier weapons capable of doing serious damage. Asked by a reporter whether any of the vessels had anti-ship missiles or torpedoes, Vice Adm. Kevin Cosgriff, Commander of the 5th Fleet, answered that none of them had either of those two weapons.
"I didn't get the sense from the reports I was receiving that there was a sense of being afraid of these five boats," said Cosgriff.
The edited Navy video shows a crewman issuing an initial warning to approaching boats, but the footage of the boats maneuvering provides no visual evidence of Iranian boats "making a run on US ships" as claimed by CBS news Wednesday in its report based on the new video.
Vice Adm. Cosgriff also failed to claim any run toward the US ships following the initial warning. Cosgriff suggested that the Iranian boat's maneuvers were "unduly provocative" only because of the "aggregate of their maneuvers, the radio call and the dropping of objects in the water."
He described the objects dropped by the Iranian boat as being "white, box-like objects that floated." That description indicates that the objects were clearly not mines, which would have been dark and would have sunk immediately. Cosgriff indicated that the ships merely "passed by them safely" without bothering to investigate whether they were explosives of some kind.
The apparent absence of concern on the part of the US ships' commanding officers about the floating objects suggests that they recognized that the Iranians were engaging in a symbolic gesture having to do with laying mines.
Cosgriff's answers to reporters' questions indicated that the story promoted earlier by Pentagon officials that one of the US ships came very close to firing at the Iranian boats seriously distorted what actually happened. When Cosgriff was asked whether the crew ever gave warning to the Iranian boats that they "could come under fire," he said the commanding officers "did not believe they needed to fire warning shots."
As for the report circulated by at least one Pentagon official to the media that one of the commanders was "close to firing," Cosgriff explained that "close to" meant that the commander was "working through a series of procedures." He added, "[I]n his mind, he might have been closing in on that point."
Despite Cosgriff's account, which contradicted earlier Pentagon portrayals of the incident as a confrontation, not a single news outlet modified its earlier characterization of the incident. After the Cosgriff briefing, Associated Press carried a story that said, " US forces were taking steps toward firing on the Iranians to defend themselves, said the US naval commander in the region. But the boats – believed to be from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard's navy – turned and moved away, officials said."
That was quite different from what Cosgriff actually said.
In its story covering the Cosgriff briefing, Reuters cited "other Pentagon officials, speaking on condition of anonymity" as saying that "a US captain was in the process of ordering sailors to open fire when the Iranian boats moved away" – a story that Cosgriff had specifically denied.
are enemy occupied territory. They never tell the truth.
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"Stop judging by appearances, but judge justly."
Here's the Iranian footage.
...if those in charge of fabricating the incident, are actually doing two things: 1. complying with order from superior, and 2. purposely offering such a poor quality fabrication to be easily debunked achieving a counter effect.
Otherwise how could they be so clumsy, even if they recklessly assumed Iranians aren't filming their own routine patrol and anything will go.
Here is the text of the conversation that took place between the two patrolmen on the Iranian Navy speed boat as translated from Persian:
(http://www.payvand.com/news/08/jan/1097.html
0:07 #1: "Announce its position")
0:30 (Patrolman #2 calls the other by name with a reference to need for safety procedures)
0:45 #1: "Slowly get a little closer… can't make out the ship number"
0:50 #2: "Did you get it?"
0:51 #1: "Yeah, it is not clear"
0:56 #1: "Wait just a moment"
0:57 #2: "It is better now"
1:16 #1: "Is it 73?" (Boat proceeds to pull a little closer)
1:32 #1: "I hear something being announced from its loudspeakers, what is it saying?"
1:50 #1: "I think they're talking to us"
2:35 #2: "Channel?" (Getting ready to establish radio communication)
2:36 #1: "16"
2:37 #2: "What was the ship number?"
2:38 #1: "73"
2:40 (Then patrolman #2 starts the radio communication in English)
Objects From Iranian Boats Posed No Threat, Navy Says
By Robin Wright and Ann Scott Tyson
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, January 12, 2008
The small, boxlike objects dropped in the water by Iranian boats as they approached U.S. warships in the Persian Gulf on Sunday posed no threat to the American vessels, U.S. officials said yesterday, even as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff charged that the incident reflects Iran's new tactics of asymmetric warfare.
After passing the white objects, commanders on the USS Port Royal and its accompanying destroyer and frigate decided there was so little danger from the objects that they did not bother to radio other ships to warn them, the officials said.
"The concern was that there was a boat in front of them putting these objects in the path of our ships. When they passed, the ships saw that they were floating and light, that they were not heavy or something that would have caused damage," such as a mine, said Cmdr. Lydia Robertson, a spokeswoman for the Navy's Fifth Fleet in the Gulf.
But the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Michael Mullen, said the incident reflects Iran's shift to small craft that can aggressively menace larger naval vessels. "It's clearly strategically where the Iranian military has gone," Mullen said. The United States has "been concerned for years about the threat of mining those straits."
Although Mullen described last weekend's incident, in which five small Iranian speedboats approached three U.S. warships in the Strait of Hormuz, as the most "provocative and dramatic" encounter he could recall in the area, the Navy announced a few hours later that two other incidents occurred last month in which its ships had close calls with Iranian speedboats. On Dec. 19, the USS Whidbey Island fired warning shots when a single Iranian boat came within 500 yards of it in the strait. On Dec. 22, the USS Carr emitted warning blasts as three Iranian vessels sped close by in the same area, a Navy official said.
Despite five days of questions about the pattern of encounters in the Gulf, this is the first time the Pentagon has mentioned the December events. At a briefing Monday, Vice Adm. Kevin Cosgriff said U.S. and Revolutionary Guard naval units come across each other "regularly."
"For the most part, those interactions are correct. We are familiar with their presence; they're familiar with ours. So, I think in the time I've been here, I've seen things that are a concern, and then there's periods of time -- long periods of time -- where there's not as much going on," Cosgriff told reporters.
Since the incident on Sunday, the United States has emphasized its concern about a new level of Iranian military sophistication. "The incident ought to remind us all just how real is the threat posed by Iran and just how ready we are to meet that threat if it comes to it," Mullen told reporters yesterday.
The Pentagon released the full 36-minute video of the encounter yesterday. Additional close-ups on the footage show the Iranian speedboats zipping around the U.S. warships provocatively. None of the boats appears to have more than a four-man crew, each wearing an orange lifesaving vest. None of the boats appears to have any mounted weapons.
The USS Port Royal, an Aegis cruiser, has a crew of about 360 and carries missile launchers, torpedoes and artillery. The USS Hopper, a guided-missile destroyer, has a crew of about 350 and is armed with anti-ship cruise missiles, torpedoes and artillery. The USS Ingraham, a frigate, has a crew of about 215 and carries torpedoes, artillery and two helicopters. The video shows a U.S. helicopter flying over the Iranian boats.
The Navy is sensitive about small boats because of the 2000 al-Qaeda attack on the USS Cole as it refueled in Yemen, which resulted in the deaths of 17 sailors.
Questions remain about the verbal threat picked up on a common maritime radio channel. Pentagon officials acknowledged that they will probably not be able to determine the origin of the voice that threatened to "explode" an unspecified target, although a forensic examination has begun to try to determine the accent of the speaker and other details. ["probably not be able to determine the origin" usually means israeli involvement and the U.S. doesn't want to embarrass them. So they play like it's a mystery that will never be solved.]
Middle East experts, Farsi speakers and Iranians in the United States insist that the voice could not have come from Iran. The accent "sounded Pakistani, South Asian or an American trying to sound Iranian, but it definitely didn't sound Iranian," said Karim Sadjadpour, an Iranian-born American at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. [More likely the voice was israeli.]
Defense Department press secretary Geoff Morrell said the controversy over the radio threat missed the point. "If the radio transmission came from elsewhere, it is yet another reason why it is imperative for the Revolutionary Guards to behave in a responsible manner," he said in an interview. "We want to prevent future interactions on the seas from escalating into confrontations based on any misunderstanding."
Also yesterday, Mullen voiced "grave concern" about the al-Qaeda and Taliban sanctuary in the tribal areas of Pakistan, which he called a base for planning, training and financing worldwide operations. He said that there is a need for "continued pressure" on the region and that U.S. military operations in the tribal areas make "a lot of sense," although Pakistan would have to approve them.
On Afghanistan, Mullen said sending U.S. troops to fight insurgents there would have "a big impact," but he said Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has not made a final decision on a proposal to dispatch about 3,000 Marines to train Afghan troops and fight insurgents in southern Afghanistan this spring. The top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Army Gen. Dan McNeill, was in Washington yesterday to discuss Afghanistan with Gates.
Here
Jeder war ein großer Krieger
Hielten sich für Captain Kirk
I was glad to come
I'll be sad to go
So while I'm here
I'll have me real good time