Thursday, January 17, 2008

HOW PENTAGON PLANTED SPEEDBOAT STORY

"... the Navy disseminated a short video into which was spliced the audio of a phone call warning that U.S. warships would "explode" in "a few seconds"... Pentagon officials had all day Sunday, Jan. 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... A separate audio recording of a voice, which came across the VHS channel open to anyone with access to it, was spliced into a video.. That was a political decision... made in the office of the secretary of defence. That decision involved a high risk of getting caught in an obvious attempt to mislead."

"... The decision to treat the Jan. 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, Cmdr Robertson of 5th Fleet Public Affairs would not comment directly. But she said, "There is a different perspective over there."

http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=40801