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luke
Joined: 11 Feb 2007
Location: by the sea
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 Posted: Wed Jan 16, 2008 12:10 pm Post subject: How the Pentagon planted a false story ( what a surprise! ) |
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| Quote: | How the Pentagon planted a false story
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." |
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luke
Joined: 11 Feb 2007
Location: by the sea
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| Posted: Wed Jan 16, 2008 12:16 pm Post subject: |
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heres another interesting related article
| Quote: | Legal mist stokes US-Iran tensions in strait
The recent, and escalating, tension between Iran and the US in the narrow corridor of the Strait of Hormuz has once again drawn attention to the strait's international maritime status, and to the ramifications of this tension as a flashpoint in the Middle East.
In a significant raising of the temperature, US President George W Bush on Sunday accused Iran of threatening security around the world by backing militants and urged his Gulf Arab allies to confront "this danger before it is too late".
Speaking in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates during his seven-nation tour of the Middle East, Bush said the US is strengthening its "security commitments with our friends in the Gulf" and "rallying friends around the world to confront this danger". He also called Iran "the world's leading state sponsor of terror".
Tension spiked markedly last week when Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) speedboats were involved in an "incident" with three US Navy vessels, which claimed they were international waters.
Yet there is no "international water" in the Strait of Hormuz, straddled between the territorial waters of Iran and Oman. The US government claimed, through a Pentagon spokesperson, Bryan Whitman, that the three US ships "transiting through the Strait of Hormuz" were provocatively harassed by the speedboats. This was followed by the Pentagon's release of a videotape of the encounter, where in response to Iran's request for ship identification, we hear a dispatch from one of the US ships stating the ship's number and adding that "we are in international waters and we intend no harm".
Thus there is the issue of the exact whereabouts of the US ships at the time of the standoff with the Iranian boats manned by the IRGC patrolling the area. According to Vice Admiral Kevin Cosgiff, the US ships were "five kilometers outside Iranian territorial waters". Yet, this is disputed by another dispatch from the US ships that states, "I am engaged in transit passage in accordance with international law."
Given that the approximately three-kilometer-wide inbound traffic lane in the Strait of Hormuz is within Iran's territorial water, the US Navy's invocation of "transit passage" harking back to the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, (UNCLOS) is hardly surprising. [1]
Although the US has yet to ratify the UNCLOS, it has been a strong advocate of its provisions regarding navigational rights, thus explaining the US officers' availing themselves of "international law". [2]
It is noteworthy that in May 2006, Bush urged the US Congress to "act favorably on US accession to the convention". But, in light of the legal ramifications of the US-Iran standoff in the Persian Gulf, discussed below, opponents of the UNCLOS may have become emboldened. According to them, the convention "prohibits two functions vital to American security: collecting intelligence and submerged transit of territorial waters".
However, irrespective of how Congress acts on the pending legislation on UNCLOS, the fact is that the US cannot have its cake and eat it. That is, rely on it to defend its navigational rights in the Strait of Hormuz and, simultaneously, disregard the various limitations on those rights imposed by the UNCLOS - and favoring Iran. These include the following:
Per Article 39 of the UNCLOS, pertaining to "duties of ships during transit passage" US ships passaging through the Strait of Hormuz must "proceed without delay" and "refrain from any threat or use of force against the sovereignty, territorial integrity or political independence of states bordering the strait".
Per Article 40, "During transit passage, foreign ships may not carry out any research or survey activity without the prior authorization of the states bordering the straits." And yet, by the US Navy's own admission, it has been conducting sonar activities in the area, to detect submerged vessels. This, in turn, has harmed the Persian Gulf's aquatic mammals. In light of a recent US court ruling limiting the US Navy's sonar activities off the California coast, Iran now has greater political leverage to seek information regarding the activities of US warships transiting through its territorial waters.
Given the US's verbal acrobatics, of trying to depict as "international waters" what is essentially Iran's territorial water in the inbound traffic channel of the Strait of Hormuz, it collides with Article 34 of UNCLOS. This regards the "legal status of waters forming the straits used for international navigation", that strictly stipulates that the regime of passage "shall not affect the legal status of the waters forming such straits". Following the UNCLOS, Iran's territorial water extends 12 nautical miles at the Strait of Hormuz.
The Pentagon videotape of the incident shows a US helicopter hovering above the US ships, which is in clear contradiction of Article 19 of the UNCLOS, which expressly forbids "the launching, landing or taking on board of any aircraft" during transit passage.
Article 19, elaborating on the meaning of "innocent passage", states that "passage is innocent so long as it is not prejudicial to the peace, good order or security of the coastal state". And that means a prohibition on "any exercise or practice with weapons of any kind" and or "any act of harmful and serious pollution".
In other words, US warships transiting through Hormuz must, in effect, act as non-war ships, "temporarily depriving themselves of their armed might". And any "warning shots" fired by US ships at Iranian boats, inspecting the US ships under customary international laws, must be considered an infringement on Iran's rights. This technically warrants a legal backlash in the form of the Iranians temporary suspending the US warships' right of passage. Again, the US could be technically prosecuted by Iran in international forums for conducting questionable activities while in Iranian territorial waters.
Under Article 25 of the UNCLOS, a "coastal state may take the necessary steps in its territorial sea to prevent passage which is not innocent ... the coastal state may suspend temporarily in specified areas of its territorial sea the innocent passage of foreign ships if such suspension is essential for the protection of its of security, including weapons exercise."
Per Article 30, "If any warship does not comply with the laws and regulations of the coastal state concerning passage through the territorial sea and disregards any request for compliance therewith which is made to it, the coastal state may require it to leave the territorial sea immediately."
Pursuant to Article 42 of the UNCLOS, "states bordering straits may adopt laws and regulations relating to transit passage" and "foreign ships exercising the right of transit passage shall comply with such laws and regulations." In this connection, Iran's 1993 maritime law echoes Article 20 of the UNCLOS: "In the territorial sea, submarines and other underwater vehicles are required to navigate on surface and to show their flag." Yet, disregarding both international law and Iran's laws, the US Navy until now has refused to comply with the requirement of surface passage of its submarines through the Strait of Hormuz.
In light of the above, the Strait of Hormuz has now turned into a most fertile source of tension and conflict between Iran and the United States, touching on the larger issue of international law of the sea and the navigational regime through the strait(s).
Iran could conceivably use its privileged geographical position to tap into the complex set of rules pertaining to the navigational regime, as a form of (geo) political leverage to wring concessions from the US Navy, and its regional allies, with respect to security and maritime affairs of the Persian Gulf.
Note 1. The UN Convention on the Law of the Sea strikes a balance between the sovereign rights of coastal states and the right of passage of foreign ships, requiring concessions from both sides. It prohibits passing ships from "any act aimed at collecting information or use and threat of force".
2. The Iranian press have complained of the US's intention to use the man-made, artificial islands by the United Arab Emirates for military purposes, to complement the US's forward base in Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. They wonder if this has been one of the unstated purposes of Bush's visit to the region, given the brisk operational tempo of the US Navy with regard to Iran. This includes the US's plan to implement the provisions of its multilateral PSI (Proliferation Security Initiative) , such as ship interdiction, already exercised with regard to North Korea, with respect to Iran. Yet, the PSI initiative collides head-on with the UNCLOS-based limitations on the US Navy's activities in the semi-landlocked Persian Gulf and, especially in the Strait of Hormuz, discussed in this article.
Kaveh L Afrasiabi, PhD, is the author of After Khomeini: New Directions in Iran's Foreign Policy (Westview Press) and co-author of "Negotiating Iran's Nuclear Populism", Brown Journal of World Affairs, Volume XII, Issue 2, Summer 2005, with Mustafa Kibaroglu. He also wrote "Keeping Iran's nuclear potential latent", Harvard International Review, and is author of Iran's Nuclear Program: Debating Facts Versus Fiction. |
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Mandy
Joined: 07 Feb 2007
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| Posted: Wed Jan 16, 2008 12:51 pm Post subject: |
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| Nice finds |
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nekokate
Joined: 13 Dec 2006
Location: West Yorkshire, UK
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| Posted: Wed Jan 16, 2008 8:41 pm Post subject: |
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| Interesting. Where did you get those reports from, though, Luke? I assume valid sources, but without references it's hard to re-reference them. |
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Mandy
Joined: 07 Feb 2007
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luke
Joined: 11 Feb 2007
Location: by the sea
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luke
Joined: 11 Feb 2007
Location: by the sea
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| Posted: Wed Jan 16, 2008 11:53 pm Post subject: |
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| Quote: | Perilous Journalism in the Persian Gulf
Uncritical coverage of Strait of Hormuz incident
George W. Bush's goal of elevating the Iran threat (New York Times, 1/8/08 ) got a major boost last week from the news media, who failed to question the Pentagon's alarmist account of an encounter between U.S. and Iranian boats.
On January 6 in the Strait of Hormuz, the entrance to the Persian Gulf, U.S. Navy ships were approached by five small speedboats, allegedly affiliated with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. After some radio communication, the Iranian boats turned away.
Overwhelmingly, U.S. media took the White House's alarmist version of these events at face value. The L.A. Times (1/8/08 ) reported:
Officials said the boats came within 200 yards of the warships and radioed the Americans. "They said something like, 'I am coming at you and you will explode,'" a military official said. "That is overt aggression."
Corporate media sometimes reported the official claims as fact. CNN's Kyra Philipps (CNN Newsroom, 1/7/08 ) summed up this "high drama in the high seas": "Five Iranian boats threaten three U.S. ships in international waters. One even radioed that the U.S. ship would soon explode."
NPR host Renee Montagne (Morning Edition, 1/8/08 ) reported that "a group of Iranian boats charged and threatened American warships on their way into the Persian Gulf." Meanwhile, PBS Anchor Jim Lehrer reported (1/7/08 ), "The Iranians warned the ships they'd blow up, and then dropped boxes into the water."
The proof the media offered to support these claims was a Pentagon video, broadcast on all major TV networks, that depicted some small boats approaching a U.S. Navy ship. A radio transmission could be heard in which a voice made a threatening statement.
Following the White House line, the media represented the incident as a dramatic close call that could have led to a violent escalation. ABC News anchor Charles Gibson (1/8/08 ) reported that "President Bush called it a provocative act. And the Navy video would indicate that's something of an understatement." And a New York Times editorial (1/9/08 ) chastised Iran for having "played a reckless and foolish game in the Strait of Hormuz this week that--except for American restraint--could have spun lethally out of control."
After Iran released its own video recording of the event--which showed a more routine exchange between the U.S. and Iranian vessels--the Pentagon distanced itself from the claim that the Iranian boats had issued a verbal threat. Three days after its original report citing unnamed officials who implied the threat had been issued from the boats, the L.A. Times (1/11/08 ) "clarified" that a key part of the official version of events was inaccurate: "Clarifying earlier accounts, officials said Thursday that they did not know whether a radio call in which a voice threatened to 'explode' the U.S. ships came from the small boats or whether it came from another source." Retreating from the account that definitely attributed the transmission to the speedboats, the officials now said only that "the radio threat was received at the same time as the encounter with the Iranian boats."
U.S. officials conceded that the Navy's video of the speedboats and the audio of the threat were discrete recordings that had been spliced together through editing. New York Times correspondent Nazila Fathi (1/10/08 ) wrote:
Naval and Pentagon officials have said that the video and audio were recorded separately, then combined. On Wednesday, Pentagon officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak officially, said they were still trying to determine if the transmission came from the speedboats or elsewhere.
Navy warship crews and veterans interviewed by Navy Times (1/15/08 ) raised the possibility that the voice featured in the video was a maritime heckler, well-known to American ships operating in the Middle East, "who listens in on ship-to-ship radio traffic and then jumps on the net shouting insults and epithets."
Moreover, the media's portrait of the Strait of Hormuz incident as a dramatic confrontation seemed to be contradicted by U.S. Navy Commander Vice Admiral Kevin Cosgriff's statement (1/7/08 ) in response to a question about the potential damage these small boats could have caused: "They had neither anti-ship missiles nor torpedoes. And I wouldn't characterize the posture of the U.S. 5th Fleet as 'afraid' of these ships or these three U.S. ships 'afraid' of these small boats."
For all of the uncertainty that remains about the January 6 incident, one thing that was certain was that one of the goals of George W. Bush's trip to the Mideast was to elevate the threat posed by Iran. On January 8, Bush stated (New York Times, 1/9/08 ) his intent to "remind" allies in the Persian Gulf that "Iran was a threat, Iran is a threat, and Iran will continue to be a threat if they are allowed to learn how to enrich uranium.''
How convenient, then, that this incident--which happened just as Bush's trip got underway--appeared to offer "further evidence that Iran is unpredictable and remains a threat," as a Pentagon spokesperson told CNN (1/7/08 ). |
from http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=3245 |
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major.tom
Macho Business Donkey Wrestler
Joined: 21 Jan 2007
Location: BC, Canada
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| Posted: Thu Jan 17, 2008 1:32 am Post subject: |
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| Wow, you've found some real gems there, Luke. Thanks for sharing. |
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