The reporters Andrew Scutro and David Brown– writing for the Navy Times, no less– delved into some of the questions I raised here about who in the Navy decided to super-impose a separate audio onto the video of the Iranian patrol boats that was released last Tuesday, and why.
Well, the “why” of it anyway. They quote Chief of Naval Operations (i.e. the US’s highest-ranking naval officer) Adm. Gary Roughead as saying:
- “The reason there is audio superimposed over the video is it gives you a better idea of what is happening.”
However, he gave that answer in response to this question:
- When asked if U.S. officials considered whether the threats came from someone besides the Iranians when releasing the video and audio, Roughead said…
And that question never really did get answered…
But anyway, Roughead, like Bob Gates last week, was clearly supporting the decision to juxtapose the two separate tracks in the presentation released Tuesday.
Scutro & Brown’s article contains lots of quotes from U.S. Navy officers who have served in the Gulf that illustrate just how wide-open and insecure the existing radio channels of communication are. They therefore also illustrate how urgent it is to establish a secure, dedicated hot-line between the militaries of, in particular, the US and Iran.
They officers quoted make many references to a frequent radio-channel user who openly calls himself “Filipino Monkey”– which is, some of them say, a phrase used worldwide to denote someone who uses radio channels for unnecessary chatter. Scutro & Brown quote the spokeswoman for the 5th fleet in Bahrain as saying of the (threatening-sounding) audio transmissions used in the video compilation as released,
- “We don’t know for sure where they came from… It could have been a shore station.”
Anyway, good work, so far from the Navy Times, which is owned by Gannett, which is owned by McClatchy.
What would be even better would be if they– and other key opninion-shapers in the US– would start to agitate forcefully and openly for the establishment of hotlines and other robust deconfliction mechanisms in the Gulf. That need is still great, as evidence by the statement Israeli PM Olmert made yesterday, warning that even after his recent talks with Pres. Bush, “all options remain open” with regard to Iran’s nuclear program.
That is quite clear diplomatese for saying Israel may well still go ahead and bomb Iran’s nuclear installations or launch some other form of military attack against Iran.
Israel might do that itself, directly. Though Israeli planes would still need, at the very least, to have coordination with US military air-controllers if they want to reach Iran in one piece– and even more so, to reach home safely again afterwards. And anyway, if Israel did inflict a significant military strike on Iran, no-one in Iran including the highest leaders would believe that Israel had done this without US connivance. More especially so after GWB himself said he personally doesn’t really believe the December NIE.
Or, Israel might hope to have Iran attacked more effectively and more economically– from their standpoint– by sparking some form of provocation in the crowded waters of the Persian Gulf that, in the absence of secure communications between the US and Iranian navies, could rapidly jack-knife the whole region into the hell of an outright US-Iranian war.
Something that the professional militaries of neither country want. And neither do the great majority of the US (or Iranian) peoples.
Does George Bush understand the danger of these scenarios? Perhaps that is the scariest question of all to contemplate.
One important point: The U.S. ships were in Iranian territorial waters exercising the “right of transit passage”. See http://warincontext.org/2008/01/14/editorial-its-not-the-end-of-times-just-the-end-of-bush/
Iranian territorial waters extend twelve miles from shore and the US Navy claims its ships were fifteen miles out, which seems improbable in a 21-mile-wide strait with separated two-mile-wide traffic lanes, but as Sy Hersh wrote: Truth is the first casualty of war.
web comment on the Navy’s claim that they don’t know where the radio transmissions came from:
What complete and utter BS. I served in the Navy for 8 years, and I know they have the radio detection equipment on board that would have located the source of the transmission within seconds. Not buying this fairytale in the slightest… (2)My thoughts exactly. Something really stinks here.
web comment on Filipino Monkey:
Any Iranian can immediately identify Persian-accented English, particularly if the speaker has had little contact with the West, as is the case with Revolutionary Guardsmen and sailors. Iranians, you see, have difficulty with two consonants such as “p” and “l” next to each other; even Iranians who have lived in America for years will often pronounce “please” as “peh-leeze”, or in this case, “explode” as “exp-eh-lode”. On the tape, “explode” is pronounced perfectly.
web comment illustrating need for hotlines:
A Chinese attack submarine and destroyer shadowed U.S. warships [including the carrier Kitty Hawk] in November in the Taiwan Strait, sparking a 28-hour standoff that brought the group to a battle-ready halt in the tense waters, a report in a Taiwan daily said Tuesday.
How terrible-H, any sense that something like this would happen when you were in Lebanon?
http://www.dailystar.com.lb/articlebr.asp?edition_id=1&categ_id=2&article_id=88051
Don,
Actually, it is usually pronounced ex-ehplode, I believe – at least that is the case in Arabic-accented English. In Arabic, and as I recall also in Persian (which I learned just enough to get into trouble if I was not careful, and have mostly forgotten now) it is against the rules to have more than two adjacent consonants, so you have to put a vowel in there somewhere.
And you are right. There are certain English pronunciation “markers” that tell you that you are talking to a Persian (or Farsi, or Kurdish, or Arabic, etc.) speaker. Certain vowels are also telling, and even just the resonance of the speach and where it tends to “sit” in the vocal apparatus, give you a sense of whether it is real or faked, or something else altogether. Actors who are convincing at accents generally have a sense of where the speech “sits”, and getting that location right is probably the number one key to a convincing accent.
DOWN, you pedant! DOWN, I say!
For the US to establish a hotline, in the view of the current US Administration, this would be tantamount to a recognition of Iran’s regional standing as a military power. While Iran’s present standing definitely warrants such recognition, any US acknowledgment would deflect from its long standing dismissal of Iran. This is related to the US political categorization of terror, which can be exploited for the purposes of dehumanizing competitors to power and influence in the ME.
Ahmadinejad has been advocating that the security of the region is best addressed via greater political, security, economic and cultural cooperation between Iran and the GCC – Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
Ahmadinejad has been advocating that the security of the region is best addressed via greater political, security, economic and cultural cooperation between Iran and the GCC – Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
He’s also been advocating that the Holocaust never happened and that there are no homosexuals in Iran.
Ahmadinejad’s comments referring to the holocaust have been deliberately mistranslated and put out of context by the mainstream Western media. The actual context he uses is that the holocaust should not in any way justify the forced occupation of Palestine. He goes on to state that it is unfair that the Europeans ejected their Jewish population, which created the problem in the first place, burdening the peoples of the Middle East with an injustice that has lasted now for more than sixty years.
Regarding homosexuals in Iran, it is certainly a fact that there exists no accepted and open gay culture today in Iran. I’m old enough to remember when there was none in the United States. I also remember President Reagan openly denouncing the birth of gay culture in San Francisco, during the early 1980’s.
Indeed, Mark, MEMRI has had a great time distorting what Ahmadinajad has said.
Regarding the comment on homosexuals, that, too, was not quite accurately translated by the interpreter, I believe. What he said was not that there are no homosexuals in Iran. What he actually said was something on the order that “we do not have homosexuals in Iran the way you do here“, which is a true statement, as you pointed out, and which I would interpret to mean something rather different than “we do not have homosexuals in Iran”.
Say Peter, as much as I abhor what the Bushists did in fabricating a major incident over Hormuz, (see Gareth Porter’s latest here:
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=40801
the reliance of Kaveh’s “novel” interpretation of the Strait of Hormuz, as simply Iranian waters, is not helpful. The Strait is hardly akin to being, say, the Panama Canal. It’s a recognized international sea-lane. This deserves more comment…. (and less uncritical acceptance)
Scott:
From a letter to the editor in Asia Times from Kaveh Afrasiabi:
[T}he two shipping lanes in the Hormuz Strait traverse Iran’s and Oman’s territorial waters, which explains my point about the absence of “international waters”. Nearly all the inbound ships, including US warships, use the traffic lane on the Iranian side, thus subjecting them to the provisions of international laws of the sea regarding transit passage mentioned in my piece. What is more, per US media reports, eg, the Christian Science Monitor, the three US Navy ships “were on patrol about 12 miles from Iranian territory in the Strait of Hormuz”. There is, of course, a major distinction between transit and patrol and the latter, conducted in Iran’s territorial waters, would be an infringement on Iran’s sovereign rights.
Sorry Mark (?), but that doesn’t explain a thing. Kaveh is not an international lawyer, and in this realm, he’s simply talking utter nonsense.
Scott, I suggest a blog post titled “Law of the Sea and the Hormuz Straight Incident at Galrahn’s Information Dissemination blog.
http://informationdissemination.blogspot.com/2008_01_01_archive.html
In particular, an experienced JAG offers perspectives in the comments section. Hope this helps.