| Topic: |
Science > Abortion |
| User: |
"james g. keegan jr." |
| Date: |
11 Jan 2008 11:17:57 AM |
| Object: |
Official Version of Naval Incident Starts to Unravel |
Official Version of Naval Incident Starts to Unravel
By Gareth Porter
Inter Press Service
Thursday 10 January 2008
Washington - Despite the official and media portrayal of the incident
in the Strait of Hormuz early Monday morning as a serious threat to U.S.
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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S.
warship, as appears to do on the video.
Also unraveling the story is testimony from a former U.S. 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
U.S. 5th fleet that the commanding officers of the U.S. warships involved
in the incident never felt the need to warn the Iranians of a possible use
of force against them.
Further undermining the U.S. 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 U.S.
warships. A voice with a U.S. accent replies, "This is coalition warship
73. I am operating in international waters."
The dramatic version of the incident reported by U.S. news media
throughout Tuesday and Wednesday suggested that Iranian speedboats,
apparently belonging to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard navy, had made
moves to attack three U.S. warships entering the Strait and that the U.S.
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
U.S. 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 U.S.
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 U.S. naval officer who had served as a surface warfare
officer aboard a U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S. ship.
The only boat that was close enough to be visible to the U.S. ships
was unarmed, as an enlarged photo of the boat from the navy video clearly
shows.
The U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S. ships
following the initial warning. Cosgriff suggested that the Iranian boat's
manoeuvres were "unduly provocative" only because of the "aggregate of
their manoeuvres, 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 U.S. ships'
commanding officers about the floating objects suggests that they
recognised 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 U.S . 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 characterisation of the incident. After the Cosgriff
briefing, Associated Press carried a story that said, " U.S. forces were
taking steps toward firing on the Iranians to defend themselves, said the
U.S. 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
U.S. captain was in the process of ordering sailors to open fire when the
Iranian boats moved away" - a story that Cosgriff had specifically denied.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/011108J.shtml
--
"You tried to steal the identity of a James G. Keegan Jr. who did in
fact author a book, and you're trying to convince people that you are
the same person." -- corrupt prison clerk heishman lying as "Osprey"
in an effort to cover-up his earlier lie that i was not an author
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