by D. Cupples (photos from U.S. DoD) | Last week, Pentagon officials told the U.S. media that small Iranian boats threatened U.S. destroyers. U.S. officials saw it as a "significant, provocative act." (MSNBC) 
Days later, the U.S. Navy released a video of the incident, with audio of someone saying "I am coming to you. You will explode in a few minutes." Iran released its own video of the incident, which did not include such threats -- to which, a Navy spokesperson responded: "I guess we're not saying that it absolutely came from the [Iranian] boats." (ABC News-1)
Yesterday, the story changed again. ABC News reported:
"The Navy Times, a weekly newspaper published by the Gannett company, quoted several veteran sailors as speculating the transmission could have come from a radio heckler, widely known among mariners by the ethnically insulting term "the Filipino Monkey."
"The newspaper, which serves the Navy community, said U.S. sailors in the Persian Gulf have heard the prankster possibly more than one person transmitting "insults and jabbering vile epithets" on unencrypted frequencies." (ABC News-2)
Why didn't Pentagon officials think about the "widely known" radio heckler before speaking to the media? Would this story have changed at all if the Iranians hadn't released a video account that contradicted the U.S. military's?
Iranian officials Iran accused Washington of fabricating the video and audio it released. In an interview, historian and national-security-policy analyst Gareth Porter commented:
"There were Pentagon officials apparently calling reporters and telling them that something had happened in the Strait of Hormuz, which represented a threat to American ships and that there was a near battle on the high seas. The way it was described to reporters, it was made to appear to be a major threat to the ships and a major threat of war. And that's the way it was covered by CNN, by CBS and other networks....
"Then I think the next major thing that happened was a briefing by the commander of the 5th fleet in Bahrain, the Vice Admiral Kevin Cosgriff, which is very interesting. If you look carefully at the transcript, which was not reported accurately by the media... Vice Admiral Cosgriff actually makes it clear that the ships were never in danger, that they never believed they were in danger, and that they were never close to firing on the Iranian boats. And this is the heart of what actually happened, which was never reported by the US media....
"The major thing to really keep in mind about this is that it was blown up into a semi-crisis by the Pentagon and that the media followed along very supinely. And I must say this is perhaps the worst - the most egregious case of sensationalist journalism in the service of the interests of the Pentagon, the Bush administration, that I have seen so far." (Truthout)
The most egregious case? Even more egregious than Administration officials' pre-Iraq statements about weapons of mass destruction, mushroom clouds, and a now-debunked Iraq-9/11 link? Worse than Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's manipulating journalists to get the public's mind off her role in using highly questionable statements to persuade Americans to support the Iraq invasion?
Related BN-Politics Posts:
* Dueling Videos Emerge from U.S.-Iran Boat Incident
* Iran: is the Administration Telling the Truth or Saving Face?
* Afghanistan: the Next Focus of our Fears?
* Violence Down in Iraq, despite Attacks & Rights Violations?
* Iraq: Conflicting Stories from the Front & at Home
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