You remember that little showdown between Iranian boats and our ships in the Gulf last weekend…the one the Pentagon quickly came up with video to support their contentions? Well, guess what?
As the Righties get their knickers all twisted because some of us don’t – gasp – immediately take the US military and the Bush administration at their word over what happened in the Gulf on Sunday…Iran releases its own video of the events. Reuters: “Iran released a video on Thursday which it said showed its boats did not threaten U.S. navy vessels in the Gulf, countering [...]
Um, even the Pentagon is backing down. That’s striking.
The Lede: Less Confidence on U.S.-Iran Incident
Pentagon says audio could have been from elsewhere, Iran releases a competing video [...]
Glenn Greenwald, writing at Salon, sums things up this way:
The U.S. military inflicts more damage on its own credibility
It seems increasingly clear that the U.S. military’s initial claims about its interaction with those five Iranian speed boats in the Strait of Hormuz was exaggerated in significant ways, approaching Jessica Lynch/Pat Tillman/Iraq-is-going-great territory. It’s impossible to resolve all of the conflicting details of each side’s self-serving version, but the most inflammatory facts which the Navy originally asserted, and which the American news media uncritically regurgitated, are quite dubious, if not demonstrably false. Here, for instance, was [...]
UPDATE: I’m bumping this back to the top, thanks to this new information:
Navy Times: Prankster May Have Been Behind Radio Threats
It just gets more and more bizarre. From The Navy Times: “The threatening radio transmission heard at the end of a video showing harassing maneuvers by Iranian patrol boats in the Strait of Hormuz may have come from a locally famous heckler known among ship drivers as the “Filipino Monkey.”[...]
Tags: Bush Administration, Iran
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