WASHINGTON - Despite the official and
media portrayal of the incident in the Strait of
Hormuz early on Monday as a serious threat to US
ships from Iranian speedboats that nearly resulted
in a "battle at sea", new information over the
past three days suggests the incident did not
involve such a threat and that no US 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 US 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 US
warship, as it appears to do on the video.
Also unraveling the story is testimony
from a former US 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 US 5th Fleet that the
commanding officers of the US warships involved in
the incident never felt the need to warn the
Iranians of a possible use of force against them.
Further undermining the US version of the
incident is a video released by Iran on 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 US warships. A
voice with a US accent replies, "This is coalition
warship 73. I am operating in international
waters."
The dramatic version of the
incident reported by US news media throughout
Tuesday and Wednesday suggested that Iranian
speedboats, apparently belonging to the Iranian
Revolutionary Guards Corps navy, had made moves to
attack three US warships entering the strait and
that the US 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".
George W
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 on Wednesday that the incident
"almost involved an exchange of fire between our
forces and Iranian forces". Bush declared during
his Mideast trip on Wednesday that there would be
"serious consequences" if Iran attacked US 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 US
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 on 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 US naval officer
who had served as a surface warfare officer aboard
a US Navy destroyer in the Gulf sent a message to
the New York Times online column The Lede on
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 US warships.
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 US
ship.
The only boat that was close enough
to be visible to the US ships was unarmed, as an
enlarged photo of the boat from the navy video
clearly shows.
The US 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 Admiral 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 US ships" as claimed by CBS
news Wednesday in its report based on the new
video.
Cosgriff also failed to claim any
run toward the US ships following the initial
warning. Cosgriff suggested that the Iranian
boat's maneuvers were "unduly provocative" only
because of the "aggregate of their maneuvers, 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 US ships' commanding officers
about the floating objects suggests that they
recognized 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 US. 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, the Associated Press carried a
story that said, "US forces were taking steps
toward firing on the Iranians to defend
themselves, said the US naval commander in the
region. But the boats - believed to be from the
Iranian Revolutionary Guards' 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 US 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.
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