Pentagon faked Iran boat ‘attack’

The Bush administration has been caught red-handed in manufacturing evidence of a “provocation” off the Iranian coast on Jan. 6, in which five small Iranian open-air speedboats were alleged to have threatened three massive U.S. guided missile warships. The U.S. Navy now admits that audio and videotape given to the media and widely publicized had been spliced together.

What is most ominous in all this is that no major U.S. politician or institution, or any international body, has denounced this dangerous and deceptive move, nor have they called for an inquiry or investigation. Neither the U.S. Congress—now in session—nor any of its committees, all of them now controlled by the Democratic majority elected on an anti-war vote, took action.

With almost half the U.S. Navy hovering off the coast of Iran, this war provocation must be challenged and confronted.

The media is giving wall-to-wall coverage to both Democratic and Republican politicians campaigning in primary elections. Each of these politicians could and should be confronted on where they stand on this Pentagon fraud and what steps they personally plan to take to pursue the matter.

The corporate media in the U.S., which gave the story days of coverage, should also be challenged.

The Stop War on Iran Campaign has taken the first steps. It has begun an emergency alert and petition to demand a full investigation of this war provocation and the illegal war games that the U.S. Navy has been staging in the Persian Gulf. The goal is to prevent President George W. Bush and the Pentagon from using this scenario or another staged operation to launch an attack on Iran.

The Stop War On Iran Campaign has also urged rank-and-file Navy personnel on U.S. ships in the Gulf and officers to reveal what they know of U.S. war preparations and past war games in the region.

Manufacturing a war crisis

For three days before Bush departed on an eight-day trip to the Middle East, the media were full of denunciations of Iran by Bush, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and top generals and Navy commanders, all denouncing Iran for a “dangerous provocation” and “a threat to world peace” based on this phony incident.

On arriving in Israel, even as the story was unraveling, Bush again threatened Iran and ominously warned that “all options are on the table to protect our assets.”

The U.S. Navy has now admitted that the video of the “incident” between the U.S. warships and the Iranian patrol boats was heavily edited and that the threatening voice on it warning “You may explode” may not have belonged to any Iranian sailors. Yet this video was the basis for the latest threats against Iran.

Who manufactured this video? Who spliced together completely different sound and video footage? Who signed off on it? Who distributed it to all the major media? It was viewed and commented on at the highest levels of the Bush administration.

This is hardly the first time that a manufactured U.S. crisis has launched a war.

On Feb. 5, 2003, Secretary of State and former Gen. Colin Powell presented satellite photos to the United Nations to prove that Iraq was developing weapons of mass destruction. This false charge, endlessly repeated, became the justification for the U.S. bombing, invasion and continuing occupation of Iraq.

Before the first Gulf War in 1991, photo images of Iraqi units supposedly massed on the Saudi Arabia border for an invasion also turned out to be totally fraudulent.

Manufactured evidence was also used in the famous Gulf of Tonkin incident, when North Vietnamese Coast Guard boats supposedly attacked two U.S. destroyers off the coast of Vietnam in August 1964. This fraud provided the justification for a congressional resolution authorizing the escalation of the U.S. war against Vietnam.

This latest fabrication comes after a National Intelligence Estimate from 16 top U.S. spy agencies publicly reported that Iran has not had a nuclear weapons program since at least 2003, nor does it possess any nuclear weapons.

This NIE Report exposed to the world a rift within the top levels of the U.S. military and the ruling class, where there is concern that the Bush/Cheney push for a wider war involving Iran would boomerang.

The attempt by the administration to suppress the NIE Report and the fact that it was publicly released are signs of just how overstretched and conflicted the U.S. government is as it faces massive popular resistance in both Iraq and Afghanistan, along with growing instability in Pakistan.

Even after the NIE Report, Bush’s threats on Iran continued unabated. But the U.S. charge of a Jan. 6 Iranian “provocation” began to unravel by Jan. 9 and soon turned into a miniscandal.

Iran charged that the U.S. footage was a “bad fake” and that the audio and video were not even synchronized. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard released its own four-minute video clip showing its two- and three-person, clearly unarmed speed boats asking the U.S. warships to identify the number on their ship and their reason for being in the area. A U.S.-accented voice responded by giving the number of his ship and claiming to be operating in international waters.

Blog commentaries asked the obvious question: Why in the U.S. Navy’s video was there no ambient background noise of water, wind and motors as the small open Iranian boats supposedly made threats to “explode” the warships? This and other discrepancies discredited the U.S. story.

By Jan. 10 the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet in Bahrain cast doubt on the earlier U.S. version of the incident. “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,” Lt. John Gay told the French Press Agency. Some media speculated the message was from “a prankster.”

But none of the corporate media have even once asked what this deadly array of U.S. warships is doing in the narrow waters off the coast of Iran that are vital to shipping. This is the real issue.

U.S. warships violate international law

The largest and deadliest ships in world history, armed and in attack mode, with targets already selected, are now off the coast of Iran. This is international lawlessness on a grand scale.

Contrary to what the corporate media claim, the conduct of the vast U.S. armada in the Gulf is in explicit and continual violation of international law and United Nations treaties.

According to a Jan. 15 article by Kaveh L. Afrasiabi in Asia Times OnLine, there is no “international water” in the Strait of Hormuz. The two-mile-wide inbound traffic lane there is within Iran’s territorial waters.

Vice Adm. Kevin Cosgiff claimed that the U.S. ships were “five kilometers outside Iranian territorial waters.” This is impossible. Even a voice from one of the U.S. ships says, “I am engaged in transit passage in accordance with international law,” making it clear that the commanders recognized that they were inside Iranian waters. Peaceful transit through passageways is permitted, according to the 1982 U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea.

The U.S. has refused to sign this international treaty, along with countless other international agreements, yet it invokes its right to avail itself of convenient parts of the UNCLOS treaty, such as transit for its giant warships through the territorial waters of other countries. On the other hand, the U.S. Navy flagrantly violates the provisions that explicitly prohibit actions like the continual war exercises, nor does it bring its submarines to the surface as required.

U.S. position slipping

Bush’s visits to the Israeli apartheid state and to the occupied Palestinian West Bank confirm that the U.S. president has no solutions and no proposals even worth coverage in the corporate media. U.S. credibility is at an all-time low throughout the Arab world. On a world scale there is a drastic decline in the ability of U.S. imperialism to influence events or impose its colonial solutions.

Even in the United Arab Emirates, Bush’s lecture on democracy to a gathering of oil-rich feudal monarchs, their political appointees, wealthy corporate investors, and police and military functionaries aroused only a perfunctory scattering of applause. By all accounts his efforts to rally support for a U.S.-led Arab alliance to financially squeeze and isolate Iran flopped.

Throughout the region, U.S. puppet rulers fear their own masses and fear standing too close to Bush. For imperialism and for the thin strata of corrupt rulers in the area, the war in Iraq is a disaster. And the war in Afghanistan is in serious disarray. The U.S. alliance with the Pakistani military is in crisis. Israel, Washington’s one totally dependent and usually dependable military outpost, proved unable to destroy Hezbollah in Lebanon or even to defeat Hamas by starving and surrounding Gaza.

While each of the many ships in the U.S. armada has the deadly power to destroy entire cities with one launch, the political, diplomatic and economic position of the U.S. is slipping faster than the dollar. This can drive U.S. imperialism to ever more drastic adventures and desperate measures. It is also what silences large sections of the U.S. ruling class and top political leaders of both parties.

The world movement for human progress and all opponents of endless U.S. wars must be on full alert at the possibility of a new, deadly military offensive. They must continue to expose this phony incident off the coast of Iran and confront the U.S. war makers.