Now that cooler heads have reviewed this so-called incident, it's obviously and recognized as a monumental, crudely made, fake.
Even the Pentagon is distancing itself from it. Only Bush II thinks it's real, and we all know what kind of mental giant he is.
Even the Pentagon is distancing itself from it. Only Bush II thinks it's real, and we all know what kind of mental giant he is.
Glenn Greenwald
Thursday January 10, 2008 14:49 EST
The U.S. military inflicts more damage on its own credibility
(updated below - Update II)
It seems increasingly clear that the U.S. military's initial claims about its interaction with those five Iranian speed boats in the Strait of Hormuz was exaggerated in significant ways, approaching Jessica Lynch/Pat Tillman/Iraq-is-going-great territory. It's impossible to resolve all of the conflicting details of each side's self-serving version, but the most inflammatory facts which the Navy originally asserted, and which the American news media uncritically regurgitated, are quite dubious, if not demonstrably false.
Here, for instance, was the first paragraph of Tuesday's Washington Post story by Robin Wright and Ann Scott Tyson, highlighting the most dramatic and scariest part of the U.S. military's narrative:
We're coming at you, the Iranian radio transmission warned. Your ships will explode in a couple of minutes.
The next paragraph summarized the Navy's version that "five Iranian patrol boats sped toward the USS Port Royal and two accompanying ships as they crossed the Strait of Hormuz" and then "'maneuvered aggressively' on both sides of the U.S. ships." The next paragraph recounted:
After the radio transmission, two of the Iranian boats dropped "white box-like objects" into the water, [Vice Adm. Kevin J.] Cosgriff said.
Those are the two "facts" that infused the story with such a sinister tone -- explicit threats from the Iranian boats to destroy the American ships, followed by their dropping of unidentifiable boxes, which, one was supposed to infer, could easily have been explosive devices.
But the first "fact" seems almost certainly false, and the second one is highly questionable. Iranian Hooman Majd at The Huffington Post noted that the voices on the tapes issuing the melodramatic threats were unquestionably not Persian. As he put it: "the person speaking doesn't have an Iranian accent and moreover, sounds more like Boris Karloff in a horror movie than a sailor in the elite branch of Iran's military." A regular Iranian commenter at Cernig's blog made the same point. Listen for yourself to the audio and see how credible the threats sound.
Since then, additional facts have emerged strongly negating the claim that that message came from those Iranian boats. The audio of the threats is crystal clear in sound quality, with no ambient noise -- something highly unlikely to be the case if delivered from a small, speeding boat. Moreover, as the New York Times' Mike Nizza reports today, quoting a reader claiming to be a former Naval officer, the channel that was used to convey the transmission is easily accessible to all sorts of private parties and is often the venue for hoaxes, pranks, and false messages.
Even the Pentagon itself is now acknowledging the lack of proof for the initial version, "saying that the voice on the tape could have come from the shore or from another ship." As Nizza put it: "The list of those who are less than fully confident in the Pentagon's video/audio mashup of aggressive maneuvers by Iranian boats near American warships in the Strait of Hormuz now includes the Pentagon itself."
The video released by the U.S. military contained video and audio that were patched together, and as Cernig notes, the audio containing the threatening messages was suspicious from the start:
The section of the released tape which contains the actual threat to "blow up" anyone, as I noted yesterday, comes at the very end and is very much unconnected in any causal sense to the rest of it. The sound is clearer and less cluttered by background noise, while there is no video accompanying it -- the only such section of the tape -- just an ominously black screen. The accent of the alleged Iranian threatener is way wrong. I've known several Iranians well in the UK and their accents when speaking English were all very different from that on the tape -- less gutteral.
Moreover, the audio and video released by the Iranians, from the vantage point of one of the Iranian speed boats, shows verbal interaction between them and one of the American ships, in which each is identifying themselves to the other.
Read the complete article