Keystone Cops Confront Iran

The Pentagon has now admitted that the audio they released in their video of the naval encounter with Iran might not have come from the Iranian ships. The Washington Post reports Friday:

The Pentagon said yesterday that the apparent radio threat to bomb U.S. warships in the Persian Gulf last weekend may not have come from the five Iranian Revolutionary Guard speedboats that approached them -- and may not even have been intended against U.S. targets.

US officials are trying to spin this admission as not being a big deal.

They are, of course, wrong. It is a huge deal.

The New York Times reported on its website Thursday:

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.

Unnamed Pentagon officials said on Wednesday that the threatening voice heard in the audio clip, which was released on Monday night with a disclaimer that it was recorded separately from the video images and merged with them later, is not directly traceable to the Iranian military.

The Times reported Thursday:

The audio includes a heavily accented voice warning in English that the Navy warships would explode. However, the recording carries no ambient noise -- the sounds of a motor, the sea or wind -- that would be expected if the broadcast had been made from one of the five small boats that sped around the three-ship American convoy.

On Wednesday, a reader identifying himself as a former Navy officer with experience in the Strait of Hormuz wrote to the Times:

All ships at sea use a common UHF frequency, Channel 16, also known as "bridge-to bridge" radio. Over here, near the U.S., and throughout the Mediterranean, Ch. 16 is used pretty professionally, i.e., chatter is limited to shiphandling issues, identifying yourself, telling other ships what your intentions are to avoid mishaps, etc.

But over in the Gulf, Ch. 16 is like a bad CB radio. Everybody and their brother is on it; chattering away; hurling racial slurs, usually involving Filipinos (lots of Filipinos work in the area); curses involving your mother; 1970's music broadcast in the wee hours (nothing odder than hearing The Carpenters 50 miles off the coast of Iran at 4 a.m.)
On Ch. 16, esp. in that section of the Gulf, slurs/threats/chatter/etc. is commonplace. So my first thought was that the "explode" comment might not have even come from one of the Iranian craft, but some loser monitoring the events at a shore facility.

Indeed, it's not at all clear that the voice in the Pentagon's audiotape is even Iranian. The Washington Post reports:

Farsi speakers and Iranians told The Washington Post that the accent did not sound Iranian.

Presumably, all the information that we have now about this incident - that the radio communication that the Pentagon released as part of its video might not have come from the Iranian ships, and that the voice might not even be Iranian - was available to the Pentagon - if they were interested - when they released the tape. Why the rush to release this video without checking?

The most plausible explanation was that there was a rush to release the video prior to President Bush's trip to the region, because his key goal was to press the US case for isolating Iran.

And this is similar to what the Iranians have claimed, that the US was hyping whatever happened to try to bolster their case for isolating Iran ahead of the President's trip.

So, as with the release of the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran, where the US intelligence conclusion that Iran did not have a nuclear weapons program followed a period in which the US was claiming that they did and Iran was saying that they did not, and IAEA and Russia were saying that they had no evidence that Iran had a nuclear weapons program, the net effect of this incident is that the credibility of the US on Iran is diminished and the credibility of Iran is increased.

Members of Congress, and Presidential candidates, should be asking questions about the Pentagon's rush to release the tape, with the quite possibly unrelated audio. People in the region are likely to conclude that it is the U.S., not Iran, that is behaving in a dangerously provocative way.

It's difficult to overstate how low the credibility of U.S. statements is in the Middle East right now. It may actually be negative. If the U.S. announces that two plus two is four, some people in the Middle East are going to scratch their heads and say, "Well, until now we thought it was four, but perhaps it is five."

You have to wonder if some folks in the Washington foreign policy establishment are counting the days until they can put the empire under new management.

Comments

[RexPrimoris]

Good point, RibEye -- indeed, the Bush/Neo-Con/Pentagon/Military Industrial Complex power structure always needs a bogeyman in order to advance its self-interested agenda -- to wit, making money and enriching itself and its cronies, and achieving its faith-based, zealous and short-sighted ideological aims. Of course, to bring up a real threat like Osama bin Laden is far too embarassing for Bush, given our total failure to dismantle al Qaeda and capture or kill him, so Iran, with its loud and obnoxious, but ultimately powerless president, makes a good substitute.

[RibEye]

Oh I guess none knew, this also was a commercial to sell arms to our Arab ALLIES in the Persian gulf. Because Arabs and Israel do so much for us, we have to protect them from bad bad Iran. Even though Iran has not attacked any nation for over two centuries. And we gave every weapon in our inventory including biological to Saddam in the eighties(good job Rumsfeld) when he invaded Iran.
Fat chance of anyone from Saudi creeping over to Iraq to mix things up ey.

[BoulderSue]

Can anyone say Tonkin Gulf incident? First thing I thought of...

[Rockyman]

The neocons in power are itchin for a pretext to engage Iran in battle. Then Bush & Co can unleash their wrath via weaponry. Lets hope this possibly fabricated encounter is not the first of many on the way to more death and destruction in the Middle East.

[dlswriter]

We have better quality video of the Loch Ness monster from 70 years ago. The superpower navy shows us a video that a 5 year old with a cell phone could have produced better. I swear, the audio is the same voice as one of the guys Colin Powell broadcast before the UN claiming "concrete evidence" and proof of WMDs. The Bush admin is the greatest hoax ever perpetuated.

[RexPrimoris]

IneptitudePrideB4Fall:

In answer to the question you pose: Iran has consistently refused to kowtow to the U.S.-Israeli-Sunni attempt at regional hegemony.

[RexPrimoris]

Can you say "Gulf of Tonkin" redux? The motivation behind the apparent clumsy splicing of the video and audio is so transparently jingoistic, dishonest and deceitful, with such dangerous implications, it warrants an immediate congressional investigation. Where the hell is the outrage from the American citizenry and the mainstream media?

[UncleDave]

My,My The Thugs are lying again,and they couldn't even lie convincingly. News flash! What a pathetic bunch of losers.BUT.They should be feared,because They have the power to do as They wish.Disaster looms at every compass point.

[RickO]

These people are not that stupid but they seem to think we are. This is another case a intentional deception.

There were speculations than an incident between a couple of rubber dinghies and US task force could be the spark that touched off a shooting war with Iran and if this mashup was an attempt to foment that, this is as bad as it gets.