“Tonkin”-type escalation averted in Persian Gulf? Hearings?

The agility of the Iranian government’s information capabilities has protected the US from what could well be an attempt by some moles deep within the Pentagon to jerk our country into a broad and extremely damaging military conflagration with Iran. Now– as during that the worryingly similar Gulf of Tonkin Incident in 1964– the US Congress needs to react.
But this time Congress’s reaction should be of a very different kind. It should swiftly launch a thorough-going investigation into who in the Pentagon was responsible for producing and authenticating the very harmful (and quite possible knowingly misleading) video of the recent Persian Gulf incident that the Pentagon disseminated last Tuesday.
And it should ensure that secure communications channels are established between the US and Iranian naval forces operating in the Gulf, to prevent unintended escalations between the two forces as they maneuver in the Gulf’s tight confines.
Back in the 1964, US Pres. Lyndon Johnson claimed that Vietnamese naval ships had attacked US navy ships in the Gulf of Tonkin. A congressional resolution followed that gave permission for a considerable escalation of US military power against Vietnam. By the time the falsity of the original claims had been discovered, it was far, far too late.
This week, some officials somewhere in the US military chain of command– it is unclear exactly where– reported that on Sun., Jan. 6, Iranian patrol boats, operating off the coast of their own country there in the Persian Gulf, had been streaming towards US naval vessels operating there (thousands of miles away from the US), and that a voice on the commonly used CB-type radio channel through which the commanders of ships operating in the Gulf’s tight confines communicate had warned: “I am coming to you. … You will explode after … minutes.”
On Tuesday, shortly before he left on his current tour of Mideast countries, Pres. G.W. Bush blamed Tehran for for having acted provocatively, as he prepared to take his warning that “Iran is a threat” in person, to Israel and the US’s Arab allies.
Here’s AFP from Washington, on Tuesday:

“We viewed it as a provocative act. It is a dangerous situation and they should not have done it, pure and simple,” Bush declared in his first public remarks on Sunday’s incident in the Strait of Hormuz.
Shortly after he spoke, the Pentagon released a video and audio tape that appeared to confirm its charge that Iranian speedboats swarmed three US warships in the Strait and radioed a threat to blow them up.
“My message today to the Iranians is, they shouldn’t have done what they did,” he added. “I don’t know what their thinking was, but I’m telling you what I think it was, I think it was a provocative act.”

But now, reports are proliferating that that the Pentagon video may well have been doctored, or for other reasons may not have been what it seemed.
Mike Nizza has an excellent round-up of the affair, here.
One crucial piece of evidence in all this is a video that Iran’s own PressTV media organization released, and posted on its website, which purported to be original video shot by an officer on one of the patrol boats. I’m not on a fast internet connection here so can’t view it all. Nizza writes:

The clip is a bit over 5 minutes long. The first few minutes are views of coalition warships shot from smaller boats (if you thought the motorboats seemed to be moving fast in the American video, wait until you see the bow waves on the warships). In the latter portion, we see an Iranian on the boat using a microphone handset to hail “coalition warship 73″ by radio, in fairly clear but accented English, and we hear responses in an American voice…

He also refers to an NYT paper-edition article by Nazila Fathi from Tehran, in which Fathi contributes her own significant remark about the Pentagon’s video that

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.

She also writes– though this may have been reported by Thom Shanker from Washington– that,

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.

Sadly, those Pentagon officials remain unidentified. The “official” view from the Pentagon, including from Secdef Robert Gates, remains that the video their people had released on Tuesday was the real thing.
This section of that report was interesting:

The Pentagon immediately dismissed the assertion that the [original] video, which shows Iranian speedboats maneuvering around and among the Navy warships, had been fabricated. Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman, said Iran’s “allegation is absurd, factually incorrect and reflects the lack of seriousness with which they take this serious incident.”
Naval and Pentagon officials have said that the video and audio were recorded separately, then combined. On Wednesday, Pentagon officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak officially, said they were still trying to determine if the transmission came from the speedboats or elsewhere.

So many things are going on here!
The video and audio were “recorded separately”? Huh? And then, un-named Pentagon officials speaking on background say they’re not sure if the threats as originally reported had even come from the people on the patrol boats, but may have come from elsewhere?
Nizza’s blog post gives some useful background about how access to the CB channel in question, Ch.16, is extremely random, and what gets transmitted on it includes lots of very trivial, entertainment-style or name-calling noise. I’ll note that I’ve been calling for a long time now for a secure, dedicated military-to-military hot-line between the US and Iranian naval commanders in the Gulf, which could certainly help avert the possibility of any malignant (or even just “jokingly” irresponsible) third party being able to jerk the two navies into the broad military conflagration that– I still think– neither of them wants.
I still believe that the US military high command, up to and including Centcom commander Adm. William Fallon, and probably also the overall military leader, Joint Chiers Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen, is strongly opposed to any escalation against Iran, which would almost certainly push the already unsustainably overstretched US military into a quite un-“winnable” war with Iran. So I am really not sure why Secdef Gates, who has also gone on the record urging a risk-averse stance towards Iran, was so definitive in telling a press conference yesterday that, “I have no question whatsoever about the [original] report on this incident from the captains of the ships and also from the video itself.”
We all, certainly, need to know what’s been going on inside the Pentagon itself on this issue. Which office there was it, precisely, that was responsible for releasing the original video? If the audio and video on it were indeed recorded separately, who was responsible for combining them in the way they were combined? I’m thinking that if some “joker” somewhere did voice this threat into Channel 16, then someone combining that with some video footage from the theater would already have a potentially wide variety of video clips to choose from… So why choose this one?
Also, is the audio portion of that feed actually time-stamped to be synchronous with the video portion of it?
Also, if you are running a video camera to record this incident– not unusually, since apparently both sides were already doing it– then why not run the audio associated with that actual video feed?
Also, who in the chain of command signed off on the “authenticity” of the compiled audio/video and authorized its dissemination?
Also, more importantly, it looks as if there are some offices in the Pentagon that may well be complicit in an effort to jerk the US into a conflagration with Iran. Who are they? When will the Pentagon identify them for the US citizenry?
We urgently need congressional hearings into this whole incident, so we can be confident that there are not moles inside our own military who would jerk our country into a disastrous war. The whole incident needs to be investigated rapidly and completely– and certainly not just within the Pentagon itself.
As a final note, I just want to underline the hugely increased role that “information engagement” plays in today’s military encounters or proto-encounters. The fact that the Iranians had recorded, and have been able to disseminate, their own video version of this same encounter changes things completely from the version Bush proclaimed on Tuesday. (And I don’t recall that back on Tuesday or Wednesday anyone was questioning the authenticity or integrity of that original Pentagon video. It was only after the Iranians started challenging it and distributed their own video record of the incident that questions started arising about the US version?)
This equalization of the international “information battlefield” between the stronger powers and the weaker powers in the world is a phenomenon that is deeply transforming the nature of warfare in the present age.
In Lebanon in 2006, Hizbullah was able to (a) safeguard the integrity of its own communications and means of near real-time dissemination of information, while also (b) hacking in some instances into the IDF’s communications. Those capabilities were an important component of Hizbullah’s survival through that long and punishing war, and therefore of their victory in it. (Even though they were weakened in several important respects by it, Israel’s strategic position was weakened even more.)
So this week, we have not had a Gulf of Tonkin incident. Thank God!!! What we should have, though, is another kind of congressional follow-up to this alarming incident: a formal enquiry into the whole story about the provenance and dissemination of the Penatgon’s Tuesday video. And legislation mandating the creation of a secure hot-line between the US and Iran.