Iran is contesting Washington's version of the Jan. 5 incident in the Strait of Hormuz. From the Los Angeles Times [2], Jan. 11:
Iran releases its own tape on Hormuz ship incident
BEIRUT -- Iran released a videotape Thursday to support its side of an ongoing propaganda battle with Washington over a weekend naval confrontation in the narrow waterway leading into the Persian Gulf.The videotape, broadcast on Iran's state-owned English-language Press TV [3] channel, was meant to bolster Iran's contention that nothing more than routine contact took place between speedboats of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and three U.S. warships attached to the Bahrain-based 5th Fleet.
U.S. officials, including President Bush, have alleged that the Iranian boats harassed the ships in what they described as a dangerous provocation in the Strait of Hormuz. They released a four-minute, 20-second videotape this week purporting to show snippets of the incident with the Iranian boats sailing too close to the U.S. ships and making threats by radio during what was described as a 20-minute confrontation.
Iran has called the U.S. tape a fake. Its own version, also brief and heavily edited, shows the Revolutionary Guard naval forces making radio contact with the warships, and the Americans calmly replying in what Iranians describe as everyday interaction.
"Coalition warship 73, this is Iranian navy patrol boat 16. Come in. Over," an Iranian sailor aboard a speedboat says in English to a U.S. warship apparently in the distance. "Request present course and speed."
"This is coalition warship 73," a voice says over the radio in American English. "I am operating in international waters."
[...]
U.S. officials, including President Bush, have alleged that the Iranian boats harassed the ships in what they described as a dangerous provocation in the Strait of Hormuz. They released a four-minute, 20-second videotape this week purporting to show snippets of the incident with the Iranian boats sailing too close to the U.S. ships and making threats by radio during what was described as a 20-minute confrontation.
Iran has called the U.S. tape a fake. Its own version, also brief and heavily edited, shows the Revolutionary Guard naval forces making radio contact with the warships, and the Americans calmly replying in what Iranians describe as everyday interaction.
"Coalition warship 73, this is Iranian navy patrol boat 16. Come in. Over," an Iranian sailor aboard a speedboat says in English to a U.S. warship apparently in the distance. "Request present course and speed."
"This is coalition warship 73," a voice says over the radio in American English. "I am operating in international waters."
A Jan. 9 New York Times [4] report also raised doubts about the US version:
The unidentified Revolutionary Guard official quoted in the Iranian news media asserted that the video of the speedboats had been released to coincide with a trip by President George W. Bush to the Middle East and "was in line with a project of the Western media to create fear." The official said the sounds and images on the video did not go together, adding, "It is very clear that they are fake."
The Fars news agency had said that the confrontation had been fabricated to present Iran as a threat to its neighbors before Bush's trip so he could justify United States forces in the gulf.
The episode was initially described Monday by American officials who said it took place Sunday in the Strait of Hormuz.
They said five armed Iranian speedboats approached three United States Navy warships in international waters, then maneuvered aggressively as a radio threat was issued that the American ships would be blown up. No shots were fired. The video runs slightly more than four minutes and, Pentagon officials said, was shot from the bridge of the guided-missile destroyer Hopper.
The audio includes a heavily accented voice warning in English that the navy warships would explode. However, the recording carries no ambient noise — the sounds of a motor, the sea or wind — that would be expected if the broadcast had been made from one of the five small boats that sped around the three-ship American convoy.
Pentagon officials said they could not rule out that the broadcast might have come from shore, or from another ship nearby, although it might have come from one of the five fast boats with a high-quality radio system.
Blogger Glenn Greenwald on Salon [5] has also been keeping track of reasons for skepticism:
Iranian Hooman Majd at The Huffington Post noted [6] that the voices on the tapes issuing the melodramatic threats were unquestionably not Persian. As he put it: "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." A regular Iranian commenter at Cernig's blog made the same point [7]. Listen for yourself to the audio [8] and see how credible the threats sound.
Greenwald then goes on to make the obvious analogy to the Gulf of Tonkin [9]. If this is another such subterfuge, perhaps its evident collapse after not even a week is a sign that the healthy adversarial relationship between press and state has been revived somewhat since 1964—and perhaps even, despite our deep skepticism, that the Internet and "crowdsourcing" are having a salubrious effect on the intellectual climate...
See our last post on Iran [10].
