Final Word on the Boat Taunt

The bottom line is that the Pentagon and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates made the call to play up the incident, which had happened the day before, and was nothing more than common occurrence, and according to an anonymous Pentagon consultant "just not a major threat to the U.S. Navy by any stretch of the imagination".

An official in the U.S. Navy Office of Information in Washington, who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the issue, said that decision was made in the office of the secretary of defence.

[...]

That decision in Washington was followed by a news release by the commander of the 5th Fleet on the incident at about 4:00 a.m. Washington time Jan. 7. It was the first time the 5th Fleet had ever issued a news release on an incident with small Iranian boats.

[...]

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.

  IPS

The Navy apparently decided it was best to distance itself from the report, knowing full well the truth would become all too obvious all too quickly.

The commanding officer of the guided missile cruiser Port Royal, Capt. David Adler, dismissed the Pentagon's story that he had felt threatened by the dropping of white boxes in the water. Meeting with reporters on Monday, Adler said, "I saw them float by. They didn't look threatening to me."

The naval commanders seemed most determined, however, to scotch the idea that they had been close to firing on the Iranians. Vice-Adm. Kevin Cosgriff, the commander of the 5th Fleet, denied the story in a press briefing on Jan. 7. A week later, Comdr. Jeffery James, commander of the destroyer Hopper, told reporters that the Iranians had moved away "before we got to the point where we needed to open fire".

The original press release didn’t say anything about any audio threat or boxes dropped in the water. But when the news media did not pick up on the release, a new and improved one was put out . Aren’t you surprised?

Iranian Boat Taunt Update

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.”

[...]

While the threat — “I am coming to you. You will explode in a few minutes” — was picked up during the incident, further jacking up the tension, there’s no proof yet of its origin. And several Navy officials have said it’s difficult to figure out who’s talking.

[...]

“Based on my experience operating in that part of the world, where there is a lot of maritime activity, trying to discern [who is speaking on the radio channel] is very hard to do,” Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Gary Roughead told Navy Times during a brief telephone interview today.

[...]

So with Navy officials unsure and the Iranians accusing the U.S. of fabrications, whose voice was it? In recent years, American ships operating in the Middle East have had to contend with a mysterious but profane voice known by the ethnically insulting handle of “Filipino Monkey,” likely more than one person, who listens in on ship-to-ship radio traffic and then jumps on the net shouting insults and jabbering vile epithets.

Navy women — a helicopter pilot hailing a tanker, for example — who are overheard on the radio are said to suffer particularly degrading treatment.

[...]

Several Navy ship drivers interviewed by Navy Times are raising the possibility that the Monkey, or an imitator, was indeed featured in that video.

[...]

Rick Hoffman, a retired captain who commanded the cruiser Hue City and spent many of his 17 years at sea in the Gulf was subject to the renegade radio talker repeatedly, often without pause during the so-called “Tanker Wars” of the late 1980s.

[...]

Furthermore, Hoffman said radio signals have a way of traveling long distances in that area. “Under certain weather conditions I could hear Bahrain from the Strait of Hormuz.”

[...]

Another former cruiser skipper said he thought the Monkey might be behind the audio threats when he first heard them earlier this week.

“It wouldn’t have surprised me at all,” he said. “There’s all kinds of chatter on Channel 16. Anybody with a receiver and transmitter can hear something’s going on. It was entirely plausible and consistent with the radio environment to interject themselves and make a threatening comment and think they’re being funny.”

This former skipper also noted how quiet and clean the radio “threat” was, especially when radio calls from small boats in the chop are noisy and cluttered.

“It’s a tough environment, you’re bouncing around, moving fast, lots of wind, noise. It’s not a serene environment,” he said. “That sounded like somebody on the beach or a large ship going by.”

[...]

The former skipper noted that he warned his crew about hecklers when preparing to transit Hormuz. “I tell them they’ll hear things on there that will be insulting,” he said. “You tell your people that you’ll hear things that are strange, insulting, aggravating, but you need to maintain a professional posture.”

  Navy Times

Los Angeles Times
November 12, 1987
MESSAGES FROM ROGUE RADIO OPERATOR COULD PROVOKE ATTACK;
FILIPINO MONKEY: ON BACKS OF MANY IN TENSE GULF

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A cargo ship was sailing through the Strait of Hormuz recently when it was challenged by an Iranian warship demanding to know what it carried.

Iranian gunboats in these waters frequently attack vessels they suspect of carrying war materials to Iraq, and for the crew of the cargo ship, it was a tense moment.

"What is your cargo? What is your cargo?" the voice of an Iranian officer crackled over the radio.

Before the ship's captain could respond, a third voice came on the air: "I am carrying machine guns and hand grenades to Iraq . . . and the atom bomb."

The Filipino Monkey had struck again.

[...]

"He's dangerous," one gulf-based shipping source said. "He gets on the radio when ships are being challenged, and some of the things he tells the Iranians could provoke an attack."

Most of what he tells the Iranians is unprintable.

'Doesn't Like Iranians'

"Whoever he is, he doesn't seem to like Iranians very much," the shipping source said. "He tells them what he thinks of them in graphic terms."

Memories vary, but most shipping sources who have listened to the Monkey say they first heard him about three years ago.

"He started out by playing music and then by taunting other seamen, usually Filipinos, with curses in the middle of the night," one official recalled.

[...]

Also, there may be more than one Monkey. Because he has been broadcasting for far longer than any normal tour of duty for seamen or oil workers in the gulf, officials think the Filipino Monkey has spawned imitators and that there may now be more than one radio operator using the same moniker.

[...]

Early last month, for instance, he broke into the middle of a tense radio exchange between a U.S. ship and an Iranian warship.

The Iranian ship had locked its weapons radar onto the U.S. warship, which was warning it in no uncertain terms to stand down. The warning was repeated three times until the Filipino Monkey added his own.

"Iranian warship, Iranian warship," he said. "You gonna get it now."

  Editor at Large

Okay, the Navy has known about this ‘Filipino Monkey’ for two decades. You heard the strange sounding voice yourself. Why the decision at this particular time to make fools of themselves by issuing accusatory and inflammatory statements, with such flimsy ‘proofs’ about an Iranian ‘aggression’ that barely escaped retaliation? I think we know.

And also, in the original telling, of the Navy ships being within a hair’s breadth of firing on the Iranian boats, fortunately the Iranians turned and went in another direction seconds before they would have been blasted. In that situation, had it been real, and in any other that is subject to interference on radios, which is apparently common, where’s the safeguard against an explosive incident? What if the Navy had blasted the Iranian boats and the threat had not come from them? Also, whatever became of the “white boxes” tossed into the water in the original report? Surely they didn’t just go uninvestigated, left to float on the sea?

New WBW contributor The Rittenhouse Review discovers a delightful column by John Podhoretz urging Dubya to make an “October Surprise” from an early Iraq invasion.

"There's a luscious double trap in starting the war as soon as possible, Mr. President. Your enemies are delirious with excitement about the corporate-greed scandals and the effect they might have on your popularity and the GOP's standing in November.

"If you get troops on the ground quickly, they will go berserk. Incautious Democrats and liberal pundits will shriek that you've gone to war solely to protect yourself from the corporate-greed scandal. They will forget the lesson they so quickly learned after Sept. 11, which is that at a time of war the American people want their political leaders to stand together.

"Your enemies will hurl ugly accusations at you, Mr. President. And at least one of them will be true - the accusation that you began the war when you did for political reasons.

"But that won't matter. It won't matter to the American people, and it won't matter as far as history is concerned. History will record that you and the U.S. military brought an end to a barbaric regime on its way to threatening the world."

   Unqualified Offerings, July 19, 2002

This is all George Bush is focused on, as revealed in his regular quips about his confidence in history being the judge of his administration.

Podhoretz may be a warmongering neocon (In a widely quoted and much maligned article for the New York Post, [2006] Podhoretz asked whether "liberal democracies have now evolved to a point where they can no longer wage war effectively because they have achieved a level of humanitarian concern for others that dwarfs any really cold-eyed pursuit of their own national interests?" […] Thus, he surmised regarding the Iraq War: "What if the tactical mistake we made in Iraq was that we didn't kill enough Sunnis in the early going to intimidate them ...? Wasn't the survival of Sunni men between the ages of 15 and 35 the reason there was an insurgency and the basic cause of the sectarian violence now?" – Rightweb)– for all I know, he could be ‘Filipino Monkey’, but he was certainly on the money in his assessment of our American public.

Update 1/17/08: Final word

Iranian “Boat Taunt”

Of course video can be edited; we know that.

Iran has released a video of the “encounter” between small Iranian boats and the US Navy. No threats are heard or seen. The US Navy is saying that the video has been edited to cut out that part. Possibly. But this is the pot calling the kettle black, because the US release was reported as coming from two different tracks, one video and one audio. How simple is it to offer two mismatched tracks? Even simpler than dubbing an audio over a video. At any rate, watch this CNN clip and listen to the audio track offered by the US Navy.

Whaddya think? Bogus?

The US has been embarrassed or goaded into lodging a formal complaint now, so we can turn this into an explosive incident.

You know, we have to do something so that George can leave office with something to show history for his years as a "war president". I was just thinking about that a little earlier today, wondering if maybe before he leaves we would see the capture of Bin Laden. I can't believe he'll leave without something definitive to laud in the anals of war history. The Iraq fiasco isn't going to cut it.

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.

Update:

Just two days after the U.S. Navy released the eerie video of Iranian speedboats swarming around American warships, which featured a chilling threat in English, the Navy is saying that the voice on the tape could have come from the shore or from another ship.

  ABC

Uh huh. But we filed that formal complaint anyway.

The Navy never said specifically where the voices came from, but many were left with the impression they had come from the speedboats because of the way the Navy footage was edited.

Uh huh. As was intended by the Navy.

We're saying that we cannot make a direct connection to the boats there," said the spokesperson. "It could have come from the shore, from another ship passing by. However, it happened in the middle of all the very unusual activity, so as we assess the information and situation, we still put it in the total aggregate of what happened Sunday morning. I guess we're not saying that it absolutely came from the boats, but we're not saying it absolutely didn't."

Oh what a tangled web….

Absolutely par for the Bush 'Bogus' Administration course. Make up something and see if anybody calls us on it. If they do, just make up something else.

Update 1/17/08 Final word

Iran

Professor Juan Cole analyzes the Iranian ship taunting affair and concludes with a point I alluded to in my post:

"The US says it won't protest the incident, which means that they concur it wasn't an intentional provocation from Tehran."

But, you might read his analysis anyway, to see what he thinks it was.

What the US Navy squawking was was part of the intention to whip up the dying interest in more war here in this country.

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.

Update 1/17/08 Final word

You Didn't Forget About the Need to Pre-empt Iran, Did You?

Lest we get to November without having attacked Iran…

In what U.S. officials called a serious provocation, Iranian boats harassed and provoked three U.S. Navy ships in the strategic Strait of Hormuz, threatening to explode the American vessels.

[...]

Five small boats began charging the U.S. ships, dropping boxes in the water in front of the ships and forcing the U.S. ships to take evasive maneuvers, the Pentagon official said.

[...]

There were no injuries but the official said there could have been, because the Iranian boats turned away "literally at the very moment that U.S. forces were preparing to open fire" in self defense.

  USA Today

Whew! Close one! John Woo would be proud.

I think this is another one of those incidences where actual details will trickle in, and who knows, it wouldn’t be unprecedented that things are a bit exaggerated.

The article (taken from an AP report) does say the State Department spokesman said he was unaware of any plans to lodge a complaint. How serious could it have been then? The "threatening to explode the American vessels" comment doesn’t receive any further explanation. "Dropping boxes in the water in front of the ships" is left unexplained. And I don’t see anything in the report about where exactly the U.S. ships were headed, other than they were “making a normal transit into the Gulf." Normal "show of force" transit, perhaps? The Yahoo offering identifies the US ships as a cruiser, a destroyer and a frigate. The UK Guardian says a Pentagon official said…get this…

…he didn't have the precise transcript of communications that passed between the two forces, but said the Iranians radioed something like "we're coming at you and you'll explode in a couple minutes."

Something like. And the State Department spokesman rattles his saber:

"Without specific reference to this incident in the Strait of Hormuz, the United States will confront Iranian behavior where it seeks to do harm either to us or to our friends and allies in the region," McCormack told reporters. "There is wide support for that within the region and certainly that's not going to change."

Our friends and allies in the region are about to be one in number: Israel. Wide support from Israel perhaps.

And perhaps we won’t specifically refer to this incident, because there’s nothing there. Or perhaps there’s something else there that we don’t want to have to admit. You'll have to forgive my skepticism, but there are precedents.

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.

Update Trickle:

On Friday, the U.S. Navy announced the same team of naval ships had been searching in the Arabian Sea for a sailor missing for a day from the USS Hopper.

[...]

Iran and the United States do not have diplomatic relations. Switzerland represents U.S. interests in Tehran, while Pakistan represents Iranian interests in Washington.

  CNN

Update: 1/08/08

Trickle Update 1/12/08: 'Filipino Monkey'

Update 1/17/08 Final word