The Unknown Candidate: More Bush Lies to Ratchet Rhetoric for War with Iran

Friday, January 11, 2008

More Bush Lies to Ratchet Rhetoric for War with Iran

(U.S. Pentagon's version of the "confrontation.")

The following should come as no surprise to anyone who has witnessed Bush administration lies over the last seven years. The audio tape attached to the government released video of the recent "naval incident" in the Strait of Hormuz was almost laughable. The voice sounded like a bad American actor trying to sound like an Iranian terrorist speaking English.

I don't know about the rest of you, but I immediately said to my spouse that this looked like another lame attempt of the Bush administration to invent an incident to help make their case for war with Iran. They have been ratcheting up the rhetoric on Iran ever since the intelligence estimate indicated they were not an immediate nuclear threat to the U.S. or others in their region.

As ever, the mainstream spinmeisters cooperate by reporting whatever they are fed by the fed without digging to find out the real facts. Their complicity in the Bush agenda is, despite their apologies about their Iraq reporting, ongoing and completely irresponsible.

The 2008 election cannot come soon enough. I only hope we vote for our intereststhis time....

Iran's version of the incident.

Official Version of Naval Incident Starts to Unravel | By Gareth Porter | IPS:

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....

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