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Re: U.S. says Iranian boats harassed warships
WASHINGTON - Iranian boats harassed and provoked three American Navy ships in the strategic Strait of Hormuz, threatening to blow up the vessels, U.S. officials said Monday.
Iran's Foreign Ministry said Monday the confrontation was 'something normal' and was resolved, suggesting the Iranian boats had not recognized the U.S. vessels. National Security Council spokesman Gordon Johndroe said the Bush administration urges Iranians 'to refrain from such provocative actions that could lead to a dangerous incident in the future.'
Military officials told NBC News that two U.S. Navy destroyers and one frigate were heading into the Persian Gulf through the international waters of the Strait of Hormuz when five armed "fast boats" of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard approached at high speed, darting in and out of the formation.
At one point a radio message from one of the Iranian boats warned, "You are going to blow up within minutes."
The Navy warships went into defensive mode, radioed the usual warnings to steer clear, and in the end no shots were fired. U.S. military warships believe the Revolutionary Guard boats were "testing our defenses," the officials said.
Defense Department spokesman Bryan Whitman called it a 'serious incident.' Another U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, called it 'the most serious provocation of this sort that we've seen yet.'
The incident raised new tensions between Washington and Tehran as President Bush prepared for his first major trip to the Middle East.
A statement issued by the U.S. Navy's 5th Fleet in Bahrain said the incident occurred at about 8 a.m. local time Sunday as Navy cruiser USS Port Royal, destroyer USS Hopper and frigate USS Ingraham were on their way into the Persian Gulf and passing through the strait '” a major oil shipping route.
Five small boats began charging the U.S. ships, dropping boxes in the water in front of the ships and forcing the U.S. ships to take evasive maneuvers, said the Pentagon official. The boxes floated by, and officials said they didn't know what was in them because U.S. sailors didn't pick them up.
There were no injuries but the official said there could have been, because the Iranian boats turned away 'literally at the very moment that U.S. forces were preparing to open fire' in self defense.
The official, who asked to speak on grounds of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to discuss the issue publicly, said he didn't have the precise transcript of communications that passed between the two forces, but said the Iranians radioed something like 'we're coming at you and you'll explode in a couple minutes.'
At the State Department, spokesman Sean McCormack said he was not aware of any plans to lodge a formal protest.
'Without specific reference to this incident in the Strait of Hormuz, the United States will confront Iranian behavior where it seeks to do harm either to us or to our friends and allies in the region,' McCormack told reporters. 'There is wide support for that within the region and certainly that's not going to change.'
Whitman said the Pentagon will work with State and National Security Council officials to determine 'the appropriate way to address this with the Iranian government.'
But Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammed Ali Hosseini played down the incident, suggesting it was an issue of misidentification. He did not comment on the U.S. claims of the Iranian boats' actions.
'That is something normal that takes place every now and then for each party, and it (the problem) is settled after identification of the two parties,' he told the state news agency IRNA.
The incident was 'similar to past ones' that were resolved 'once the two sides recognized each other,' he said.
An Iranian Revolutionary Guard official also described the incident as nothing unusual.
'No unusual confrontation has taken place between the Guard's patrol vessels and U.S. ships,' state-run television quoted the official as saying. The official was speaking on customary condition of anonymity. The Guard official said the Guard's vessels were conducting normal patrols in the Strait of Hormuz when they saw three U.S. ships enter the waters of the region.
'The Guard's navy vessels, as usual, asked the ships to identify themselves and they did so and continued their path,' the TV quoted the official as saying.
At the Pentagon, Whitman said the U.S. vessels were in international waters, making a normal transit into the Gulf. He said the Iranian boats were operating at 'distances and speeds that showed reckless and dangerous intent '” reckless, dangerous and potentially hostile intent.'
The episode lasted 15 to 20 minutes, Whitman said, but he wouldn't say whether officials know for certain whether the were vessels were Iranian Revolutionary Guard or regular Iranian navy. The Revolutionary Guard forces have been known to be more aggressive than the regular navy.
'At least some were visibly armed. Small Iranian fast boats made some aggressive maneuvers against our vessels and indicated some hostile intent,' Whitman said.
Historical tensions between the two nations have increased in recent years over Washington's charge that Tehran has been developing nuclear weapons and supplying and training Iraqi insurgents using roadside bombs '” the No. 1 killer of U.S. troops in Iraq.
At about this time last year, Bush announced he was sending a second aircraft carrier to the Gulf region in a show of force against Iran. The U.S. Navy quietly scaled back to one carrier group several months later. But while the two were there, they staged two major exercises off Iran's coast.
As one of the world's most vital chokepoints for oil shipping, the 30-mile-wide Hormuz strait has been the subject of previous armed confrontations between the United States and Iran, most notably during the eight-year Iraq-Iran war of the 1980s.
The United States expressed concern when the Revolutionary Guard forces took over Iranian naval operations in the Persian Gulf and Strait of Hormuz from Iran's regular navy more than five months ago.
However, Sunday's incident was the first significant one since then.
In another incident off its coast, Iranian Revolutionary Guard sailors last March captured 15 British sailors and held them for nearly two weeks.
The 15 sailors, including one woman, were captured on March 23. Iran claims the crew, operating in a small patrol craft, had intruded into Iranian waters '” a claim denied by Britain.
Re: U.S. says Iranian boats harassed warships
Possibly a doctored incident, once again?
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/JA17Ak03.html
How the Pentagon planted a false story
By Gareth Porter
WASHINGTON - Senior Pentagon officials, evidently reflecting a broader administration policy decision, used an off-the-record Pentagon briefing to turn the January 6 US-Iranian incident in the Strait of Hormuz into a sensational story demonstrating Iran's military aggressiveness, a reconstruction of the events following the incident shows.
The initial press stories on the incident, all of which can be traced to a briefing by deputy assistant secretary of defense for public affairs in charge of media operations, Bryan Whitman, contained similar information that has since been repudiated by the navy itself.
Then the navy disseminated a short video into which was spliced the audio of a phone call warning that US warships would "explode" in "a few seconds". Although it was ostensibly a navy production, Inter Press Service (IPS) has learned that the ultimate decision on its content was made by top officials of the Defense Department.
The encounter between five small and apparently unarmed speedboats, each carrying a crew of two to four men, and the three US warships occurred very early on Saturday January 6, Washington time. No information was released to the public about the incident for more than 24 hours, indicating that it was not viewed initially as being very urgent.
The reason for that absence of public information on the incident for more than a full day is that it was not that different from many others in the Gulf over more than a decade. A Pentagon consultant who asked not to be identified told IPS he had spoken with officers who had experienced similar encounters with small Iranian boats throughout the 1990s, and that such incidents are "just not a major threat to the US Navy by any stretch of the imagination".
Just two weeks earlier, on December 19, the USS Whidbey Island, an amphibious warship, had fired warning shots after a small Iranian boat allegedly approached it at high speed. That incident had gone without public notice.
With the reports from Fifth Fleet commander Vice Admiral Kevin Cosgriff in hand early that morning, top Pentagon officials had all day Sunday, January 6, to discuss what to do about the encounter in the Strait of Hormuz. The result was a decision to play it up as a major incident.
The decision came just as President George W Bush was about to leave on a Middle East trip aimed in part at rallying Arab states to join the United States in an anti-Iran coalition.
That decision in Washington was followed by a news release by the commander of the Fifth Fleet on the incident at about 4am Washington time on January 7. It was the first time the Fifth Fleet had issued a news release on an incident with small Iranian boats.
The release reported that the Iranian "small boats" had "maneuvered aggressively in close proximity of [sic] the Hopper [the lead ship of the three-ship convoy]." But it did not suggest that the Iranian boats had threatened the boats or that it had nearly resulted in firing on the Iranian boats.
On the contrary, the release made the US warships handling of the incident sound almost routine. "Following standard procedures," the release said, "Hopper issued warnings, attempted to establish communications with the small boats and conducted evasive maneuvering."
The release did not refer to a US ship being close to firing on the Iranian boats, or to a call threatening that US ships would "explode in a few minutes", as later stories would report, or to the dropping of objects into the path of a US ship as a potential danger.
That press release was ignored by the news media, however, because later that Monday morning, the Pentagon provided correspondents with a very different account of the episode.
At 9am, Barbara Starr of CNN reported that "military officials" had told her that the Iranian boats had not only carried out "threatening maneuvers", but had transmitted a message by radio that "I am coming at you" and "you will explode". She reported the dramatic news that the commander of one boat was "in the process of giving the order to shoot when they moved away".
CBS News broadcast a similar story, adding the detail that the Iranian boats "dropped boxes that could have been filled with explosives into the water". Other news outlets carried almost identical accounts of the incident.
The source of this spate of stories can now be identified as Bryan Whitman, the top Pentagon official in charge of media relations, who gave a press briefing for Pentagon correspondents that morning. Although Whitman did offer a few remarks on the record, most of the Whitman briefing was off the record, meaning that he could not be cited as the source.
In an apparent slip-up, however, an Associated Press story that morning cited Whitman as the source for the statement that US ships were about to fire when the Iranian boats turned and moved away - a part of the story that other correspondents had attributed to an unnamed Pentagon official.
On January 9, the US Navy released excerpts of a video of the incident in which a strange voice - one that was clearly very different from the voice of the Iranian officer who calls the US ship in the Iranian video - appears to threaten the US warships.
A separate audio recording of that voice, which came across the VHS channel open to anyone with access to it, was spliced into a video on which the voice apparently could not be heard. That was a political decision, and Lieutenant Colonel Mark Ballesteros of the Pentagon's Public Affairs Office told IPS the decision on what to include in the video was "a collaborative effort of leadership here, the Central Command and navy leadership in the field".
"Leadership here", of course, refers to the secretary of defense and other top policymakers at the department. An official in the US Navy Office of Information in Washington, who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the issue, said that decision was made in the office of the secretary of defense.
That decision involved a high risk of getting caught in an obvious attempt to mislead. As an official at Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain told IPS, it is common knowledge among officers there that hecklers - often referred to as "Filipino Monkey" - frequently intervene on the VHF ship-to-ship channel to make threats or rude comments.
One of the popular threats made by such hecklers, according to British journalist Lewis Page, who had transited the strait with the Royal Navy is, "Look out, I am going to hit [collide with] you."
By January 11, Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell was already disavowing the story that Whitman had been instrumental in creating only four days earlier. "No one in the military has said that the transmission emanated from those boats," said Morrell.
The other elements of the story given to Pentagon correspondents were also discredited. The commanding officer of the guided missile cruiser Port Royal, Captain David Adler, dismissed the Pentagon's story that he had felt threatened by the dropping of white boxes in the water. Meeting with reporters on Monday, Adler said, "I saw them float by. They didn't look threatening to me."
The naval commanders seemed most determined, however, to scotch the idea that they had been close to firing on the Iranians. Cosgriff, the commander of the Fifth Fleet, denied the story in a press briefing on January 7. A week later, Commander Jeffery James, commander of the destroyer Hopper, told reporters that the Iranians had moved away "before we got to the point where we needed to open fire".
The decision to treat the January 6 incident as evidence of an Iranian threat reveals a chasm between the interests of political officials in Washington and navy officials in the Gulf. Asked whether the navy's reporting of the episode was distorted by Pentagon officials, Lydia Robertson of Fifth Fleet Public Affairs would not comment directly. But she said, "There is a different perspective over there."
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.
Re: U.S. says Iranian boats harassed warships
I dunno, I do have trouble believing this was faked... but if it was, people need to really investigate this and have people fired over this. Had this been real, and the captain of that ship been provoked so badly, he had WW3 at his fingertips. If that US boat shot at them, we'd be in a full fledged war. That isn't something that should be faked. I hope more comes out about the truth of this. WTF is Congress investigating baseball players for?? Times like this I think new Presidency won't even matter, they're all on the same side.
Re: U.S. says Iranian boats harassed warships
I dunno, I do have trouble believing this was faked... but if it was, people need to really investigate this and have people fired over this. Had this been real, and the captain of that ship been provoked so badly, he had WW3 at his fingertips. If that US boat shot at them, we'd be in a full fledged war. That isn't something that should be faked. I hope more comes out about the truth of this. WTF is Congress investigating baseball players for?? Times like this I think new Presidency won't even matter, they're all on the same side.
I won't make any definite statements on this as I haven't studied the case. But know this, it has happened before. The Lusitania pretext to WW1, Gulf Of Tonkin in Vietnam and the attack on USS Liberty during the Six Day War being among the heavily documented ones.
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