US Navy Backing Off Iranian Threat Claims

Agence France-Presse on News.com.au (January 11, 2008 08:35am, US Navy threat may not have been Iranian) has this interesting info:

THE US navy says there is "no way to know" if a threat radioed to US warships in the Strait of Hormuz came from Iranian speedboats, casting doubt on the earlier US version of Sunday's confrontation.

"There is no way to know where this (radioed threat) exactly came from. It could have come from the shore... or another vessel in the area,'' Lieutenant John Gay of the US Navy Fifth Fleet in Bahrain said....

...overnight Iran released its own video to counter the charges, showing the crew of a speedboat contacting an American sailor via radio, asking him to identify the US vessels and state their purpose.

State-run Press-TV in Iran said the footage had been released by the Revolutionary Guards, the ideological force involved in the incident. Lt Gay said the threat was made through an "open bridge to bridge circuit'' and it would be "very difficult to determine'' that it came from the Iranian speedboats....

Richard Holt on the Telegraph has this story (5:37pm GMT 10/01/2008, Iranian video 'shows no threat to US navy'):

Iran has released a video which is claimed to show that its boats did not threaten US navy vessels in the Strait of Hormuz, as has been claimed by the Americans.

...the new video, broadcast by Iran's Press TV satellite station, gives a completely different version of the incident....

...Guards Brigadier General Ali Fadavi said Iran's boats had only approached the US ships to examine the registration numbers as they had been unreadable, Press TV said.

The video showed an Iranian naval officer on a small boat speaking via radio to a ship which can not be clearly identified. A total of three ships can be seen on the video.

The Iranian officer says: "Coalition warship 73 this Iranian navy patrol boat".

"This is coalition warship 73. I read you loud and clear," the person replied in what appears to be an American accent.

The Iranian officer then appears to ask for the ships to identify themselves, although not all his words can be understood: "Coalition warship 73 this Iranian navy patrol boat, request side number ... operating in the area this time," the Iranian voice says....


Video : http://link.brightcove.com/services/link/bcpid1137942530/bclid1155254697/bctid1370834932

The Latest Staged Play

Hooman Majd has a very interesting post over on HuffingtonPost (It's a Fake, Jan 9, 2008):

The Pentagon's version of the encounter in the Strait of Hormuz on Sunday morning, involving U.S. Navy warships and Iranian Revolutionary Guard patrol boats is, at the very least highly suspicious. On Tuesday, the Navy released video footage and an audiotape to back its claims that the Iranian boats acted in a threatening and provocative manner, but neither the video nor the audio are particularly convincing as proof that Iran had hostile intentions. The video, which shows what is claimed are Iranian boats speeding around U.S. ships, doesn't show any of the boats hurtling directly towards any of the navy ships, nor does it show what the Pentagon claimed the Iranians then did, namely dropped "white boxes" in the water. (I would have opened fire at those, wouldn't you?) The audio tape is even less convincing, mainly because the person speaking doesn't have an Iranian accent and moreover, sounds more like Boris Karloff in a horror movie than a sailor in the elite branch of Iran's military. (The tape is also separate from any video.) 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....