With those boats as close as they were in that video, I'm actually pretty surprised (after what happened to the USS Cole) that we didn't blow those little ers out of the water.
What's weird to me is the part about the white boxes dropped in the water. That almost sounds like it was a trial run to see if they could get close and drop explosives in or something like that.
With the Cole as example, I support firing on any boats that approach within a couple 100 yards, maybe more.
WTF are the Iranians up to?
dubya's in the region faking statesmanship and involvement, maybe he can fix up everything. Maybe they'll let him suit up in a flight suit, fire off a few rounds and play faux cowboy.
yeah, that's really some terrifying video. looks more like cigarette boats practicing a cocaine run, or the remake of a scene from Miami Vice.
Either way, we look about as prepared for consequences as our white house is for their actions.
...a lot of people in the know are saying the video and audio are faked...
Gulf Video "Fabricated," Iran Says
The Associated Press
Wednesday 09 January 2008
TruthoutIran on Wednesday called video and audio released by the Pentagon showing Iranian Revolutionary Guards boats confronting U.S. warships in the Strait of Hormuz "fabricated," an English-language state-run television station reported.
State TV did not give the name of the Revolutionary Guard figure and did not offer more details about how the official knew the footage was "fabricated."
The Pentagon on Tuesday released a four-minute, 20-second video that included audio showing small Iranian boats swarming around U.S. warships in the Persian Gulf. In the recording, a man speaking in heavily accented English threatened, "I am coming to you.... You will explode after ... minutes."
The Iranian boats appeared to ignore repeated warnings from the U.S. ships, including horn blasts and radio transmissions, according to the video, which was shot from the bridge of the destroyer Hopper.
Hooman Majd of Huffington post writes...Any Iranian can immediately identify Persian-accented English, particularly if the speaker has had little contact with the West, as is the case with Revolutionary Guardsmen and sailors. Iranians, you see, have difficulty with two consonants such as "p" and "l" next to each other; even Iranians who have lived in America for years will often pronounce "please" as "peh-leeze", or in this case, "explode" as "exp-eh-lode". On the tape, "explode" is pronounced perfectly, albeit as if the speaker was a villain addressing a superhero. Further, it is unimaginable, given what is known about the Revolutionary Guards (and I have met many), that one of its corps would speak in a such a manner, even if the accent were correctly Persian...
What would be the point, Dan? Especially if we didn't use the incident to escalate the confrontation a la' Gulf of Tonkin? (Which, by the way, is a stupid analogy).
Who knows...escalation maybe, or maybe they are planning an incident which more closely resembles Tonkin and they are laying the ground-work....
Yeah...let's side with IRAN govt controlled TV on this one. The US musta faked it.
ing morons.
Thats the way it works for some people on here. It's really pretty pathetic isn't it?
No one is siding with the Iranians on anything, all I'm saying is listen to the voices on the mic yourself and how robotic they sound...
Even the navy doesn't know where the voices came from anymore...
U.S.: Voices on Recording May Not Have Been From Iranian Speedboats
Chilling Threat Could Have Come From the Shore or Another Ship, Navy Says
ABC NewsJust two days after the U.S. Navy released the eerie video of Iranian speedboats swarming around American warships, which featured a chilling threat in English, the Navy is saying that the voice on the tape could have come from the shore or from another ship.
The near-clash occurred over the weekend in the Strait of Hormuz. On the U.S.-released recording, a voice can be heard saying to the Americans, "I am coming to you. You will explode after a few minutes."
The Navy never said specifically where the voices came from, but many were left with the impression they had come from the speedboats because of the way the Navy footage was edited.
Today, the spokesperson for the U.S. admiral in charge of the Fifth Fleet clarified to ABC News that the threat may have come from the Iranian boats, or it may have come from somewhere else.
We're saying that we cannot make a direct connection to the boats there," said the spokesperson. "It could have come from the shore, from another ship passing by. However, it happened in the middle of all the very unusual activity, so as we assess the information and situation, we still put it in the total aggregate of what happened Sunday morning. I guess we're not saying that it absolutely came from the boats, but we're not saying it absolutely didn't."
Apology accepted....
too bad it's to late for the M$M to take back their sensationalist headlines....
come on dan..if you don't blindly believe bush & company you obviously side with the enemy.. that's common knowldge now. For the record why would Iran do this considering there are people (tricky ) in this administration itching to start a fight...
When you are listening and quoting IRANIAN state controlled media, and then giving possible reasons why the Americans could be faking this event, like you did above....
Then your a ing moron.
Apology denied.
they faked Tonkin. i bet there were americans outraged that anyone would think their government faked tonkin.
...yeah, cause the U.S. would never provoke war with Iran....
...but now it seems more like it was some pole-jockey on another ship with a mic jackin around...
Now if you wanna take back your idiocy (not a chance)...and look into ALTERNATIVE reasons, I could go with that.
And I'll give you a legitimate alternative....
Al Queda could have sent these boats to harass American ships, under the guise of Iranian boats to escalate a conflict between them. Logical.
To immediately state the case of the Iranians saying the US is faking these events...and IMMEDIATELY come up with reasoning to support the IRANIAN's...
...shows everyone here more about you, than anything about the Iranians or this administration.
So, in simple terms.... you.
were you outraged when you found out about Tonkin?
...a lot of people in the know are saying the video and audio are faked...Within the Iranian theocracy, perhaps.
Bush may be rattling the sabre with Iran right now, but he's trying to salvage whatever he can of his presidency. Right now he's taking the obligatory stab at ME peace.
BBC releases Iran's video of U.S. Navy Encounter...
US now says it's not sure of the origin of the voices.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7181929.stm
Iran: Bush's Tonkin Gulf Tale Unravels
By Gareth Porter, IPS News
Posted on January 11, 2008, Printed on January 11, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/73455/
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."
( come on, dubya, put that crotch-padded flight suit, go hide in the basement of the WH and declare war on Iran. Your time as CiC is running out, unless you declare yourself President-for-Life.)
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.
( This I don't buy. A little fishing loaded with explosives punctured the Cole )
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.
( but they could carry explosives for a suicide attack )
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 maneuvers 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 characterization 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.
=======
*Gareth Porter is an historian and national security policy analyst. His latest book, "Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam", was published in June 2005.
© 2008 Independent Media Ins ute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/73455/
==============
A (news) mountain out of molehill. Very tricky, delicate to be in command of one of these ships. I hope the commanders can keep their ing cool, becasue dubya, head, neo- s, and Israel are ready bomb the out of Iran on the slightest, even imagined provocation.
imagined??? Terrorist loving piece of
Gee, I wonder if a dimm-o-crap was in the WH if all the
nay-sayers would be so quick to blame the United States and
claim it was all fake. If it was fake, how did the BBC get
the pictures of the bad guys in their boats? Bush had that
spliced into the video I guess.
were you angry when you found out about Tonkin?
"Terrorist loving piece of "
I love how you right-wing s get upset when I expose your and YOUR govt's bull .
The govt, ESP this govt, lies to us non-stop.
The military works for the govt, so they are liars, too.
The MSM also looks like a bunch of melo-dramatic, ratings/revenue chasing assholes, too.
Thanks to the lying, we'll probably NEVER know what really happened, but it sure ain't looking like the speedboats were the provocation initially described.
Last edited by boutons_; 01-12-2008 at 02:31 PM.
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