The Keystone Kops Play Brinksmanship
For those of you breathlessly following the apparent standoff between Iranian fast boats and U.S. warships earlier this month in the Straits of Hormuz in the hopes that it would trigger a war, each succeeding revelation about the incident leaves the Pentagon – and by extension the White House – looking more and more like a bunch of smacked asses.
In the latest installment of The Keystone Kops Play Brinksmanship, it turns out that a heckling audio recording was spliced onto the now famous video of the fast boats, a decision made by no less a personage than Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and other Pentagon bigs.
The voice has been identified as that of “Filipino Monkey,” an equal opportunity heckler who frequently cuts into VHF ship-to-ship channels in the region to make threats or rude comments.
It is safe to say that Gates and Company were trying to put a fast one over on an American public – and our dear friends in the Persian Gulf as President Bush was about to set out for a trip there to shore up his . . . um, legacy.
Well, the ruse failed, so the red meat crowd will have to wait a little longer for another lame excuse to start a war.
A final thought or three:
* Am I the only one who continues to believe that the ability of the U.S. to gather intelligence, especially in an ostensibly grave situation like a naval showdown, is pretty awful?
* The goodwill that Gates has engendered since taking over from the draconian Donald “Stuff Happens” Rumsfeld goes poof as he is revealed to be just another shameless hack for the Leader of the Free World.
* This would be the would-be leader who prattled on his Mideast trip that he didn’t agree with the recent National Intelligence Estimate on Iran so he is going to pretty much ignore it and continue to pursue a policy Tehran that is predicated on saber rattling.
* I’m so freaking sick and tired of our brave men and women in uniform being used as political pawns, as well as being repeatedly lied to by my government over matters of national and global security.
How about you?
10 Responses to “The Keystone Kops Play Brinksmanship”
Has there been confirmation of this besides the link provided?
Cosmo:
From the linked article:
“A separate audio recording of that voice . . . 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.”
There are a lot of other stories out there confirming the change.
I Googled “Gulf Threat May Not Have Come From Iranian Boats” and there were to many to cut and paste.
The Robin Wright , The Washington Post, seemed to cover it all.
Let's see how Bushco spins this one. I say a few of the Navy officers get sacked, and everyone else calls'em a few bad apples, like at Abu Ghraib.
There are some links here, here, here and here, and one from the Navy Times.
Additionally, the entire Pentagon video has now been posted at YouTube. The heckling voice does not occur in the original video, so yes, it was spliced in later. As further evidence of that, note that in the video with the heckling voice, there is no background noise of the type that would be there if it were made from the deck of a speedboat (how pathetic that Pentagon video editors could't even mix in some ambient background noise from the original recording). This distortion of the facts was clearly intended to manipulate public opinion.
Another issue that has been ignored by the mainstream media is the issue of whether this incident occurred in “international waters” as claimed by the Pentagon. The truth is, there is no such thing in the Strait of Hormuz. The territorial waters of Iran meet the territorial waters of Oman, with no international zone in between. This is acknowledged in the Pentagon video by the U.S. Navy ship reporting that it is “engaged in transit passage in accordance with international law”. The US ships were in the 3 km wide inbound traffic lane in the Strait of Hormuz, which is within Iran's territorial water. “Transit passage” is allowed by international treaty.
For news on this issue, I had to turn to the Asian press, in this case the Asia Times.
What! You mean that a sailors video camera didn't pick the radio calls out of the air!!
Give me a break. The first I heard the navy said that there was no way of knowing where the transmissions were coming from so the video seems an accurate representation of what would of been seen and heard by those who heard the radio transmissions. That it hasn't been made an issue by the US press is because it's not an issue. The threats were made at the same time the video was shot..
EEllis, I believe you are mistaken. If you watch the Pentagon release I linked to, you will hear the conversation as filmed on the bridge of the American ship. Watch the Iranian video an you'll hear the same thing. In fact, in both the American and Iranian versions the “sailor's videocamera” does indeed record the audio, since it was spoken aloud right next to the camera.
The Iranian video is HERE. The exchange in question takes place about 4 minutes in. It's hard not to make a rude comment about your research-free quick-draw comment. This is a serious issue in which the American media were fed bogus information to disinform them and us, which is becoming all too familiar.
If your employees fabricate evidence to deceive you and influence you to make bad decisions based on misinformation, you would fire them. Accurate reporting by our government is essential to our ability to make sound decisions. Instead we're being tricked by propaganda of the very type we lambasted the Soviets' Pravda about for 50 years.
Seems Whitman the spokesman at the start of the Hormuz incident is a career Pentagon official, in the vain of Doug Fife, has a history of spin and lies.
1) Whitman and embedded reporters and spin
http://books.google.com/books? id…Zq64TVzJ5XT30mI
2) Iraq readiness on borders
http://www.defenselink.mil/news/…e.aspx? id=15068
3) Whitman lies/spins about draft
http://www.defenselink.mil/news/…e.aspx? id=47029
4) Whitman lies about private Lynch
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world…cas/ 3043115.stm
Sorry about the duplication, but Whitman seems to be a serial spinner,
Sorry Green I just don't see the problem. If the radio transmission was at the same time as the video I have no problem with them being put together. If the camera was next to a speaker that was repeating the transmission would it have been on there? If yes, then the fact that it wasn't does not make adding the transmission later fabricating evidence. The first time heard reference to the clip I heard that the transmissions were added and that they could not verify the source of the transmission. So? To be honest adding the sound is actually a more accurate representation of what was going on than leaving the transmissions out would be.