(Il presunto attacco di feroci pasdaran iraniani contro pacifici navigli statunitensi in gita
turistica nello Stretto di Hormuz... non è mai esistito: il sonoro che accompagna il video
statunitense è stato artefatto di proposito dagli strateghi di Washington. Per chi ha seguito
le vicende jugoslave, una simile falsificazione è solo deja vu...
L'unica cosa vera, in questa vicenda, è che navi da guerra USA percorrono con dispotica
arroganza i mari di paesi molto lontani da casa loro. Con quale diritto? IS)


http://www.workers.org/2008/world/iran_0124/

Pentagon faked Iran boat 'attack'


Anti-war group demands investigation of U.S. war provocation

By Sara Flounders
Published Jan 17, 2008 1:38 AM


The Bush administration has been caught red-handed in manufacturing evidence of a
"provocation" off the Iranian coast on Jan. 6, in which five small Iranian open-air
speedboats were alleged to have threatened three massive U.S. guided missile warships.
The U.S. Navy now admits that audio and videotape given to the media and widely
publicized had been spliced together.

What is most ominous in all this is that no major U.S. politician or institution, or any
international body, has denounced this dangerous and deceptive move, nor have they
called for an inquiry or investigation. Neither the U.S. Congress—now in session—nor any
of its committees, all of them now controlled by the Democratic majority elected on an
anti-war vote, took action.

With almost half the U.S. Navy hovering off the coast of Iran, this war provocation must be
challenged and confronted.

The media is giving wall-to-wall coverage to both Democratic and Republican politicians
campaigning in primary elections. Each of these politicians could and should be
confronted on where they stand on this Pentagon fraud and what steps they personally
plan to take to pursue the matter.

The corporate media in the U.S., which gave the story days of coverage, should also be
challenged.

The Stop War on Iran Campaign has taken the first steps. It has begun an emergency alert
and petition to demand a full investigation of this war provocation and the illegal war
games that the U.S. Navy has been staging in the Persian Gulf. The goal is to prevent
President George W. Bush and the Pentagon from using this scenario or another staged
operation to launch an attack on Iran.

The Stop War On Iran Campaign has also urged rank-and-file Navy personnel on U.S.
ships in the Gulf and officers to reveal what they know of U.S. war preparations and past
war games in the region.



Manufacturing a war crisis

For three days before Bush departed on an eight-day trip to the Middle East, the media
were full of denunciations of Iran by Bush, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and top
generals and Navy commanders, all denouncing Iran for a "dangerous provocation" and "a
threat to world peace" based on this phony incident.

On arriving in Israel, even as the story was unraveling, Bush again threatened Iran and
ominously warned that "all options are on the table to protect our assets."

The U.S. Navy has now admitted that the video of the "incident" between the U.S. warships
and the Iranian patrol boats was heavily edited and that the threatening voice on it
warning "You may explode" may not have belonged to any Iranian sailors. Yet this video
was the basis for the latest threats against Iran.

Who manufactured this video? Who spliced together completely different sound and video
footage? Who signed off on it? Who distributed it to all the major media? It was viewed and
commented on at the highest levels of the Bush administration.

This is hardly the first time that a manufactured U.S. crisis has launched a war.

On Feb. 5, 2003, Secretary of State and former Gen. Colin Powell presented satellite
photos to the United Nations to prove that Iraq was developing weapons of mass
destruction. This false charge, endlessly repeated, became the justification for the U.S.
bombing, invasion and continuing occupation of Iraq.

Before the first Gulf War in 1991, photo images of Iraqi units supposedly massed on the
Saudi Arabia border for an invasion also turned out to be totally fraudulent.

Manufactured evidence was also used in the famous Gulf of Tonkin incident, when North
Vietnamese Coast Guard boats supposedly attacked two U.S. destroyers off the coast of
Vietnam in August 1964. This fraud provided the justification for a congressional
resolution authorizing the escalation of the U.S. war against Vietnam.

This latest fabrication comes after a National Intelligence Estimate from 16 top U.S. spy
agencies publicly reported that Iran has not had a nuclear weapons program since at least
2003, nor does it possess any nuclear weapons.

This NIE Report exposed to the world a rift within the top levels of the U.S. military and the
ruling class, where there is concern that the Bush/Cheney push for a wider war involving
Iran would boomerang.

The attempt by the administration to suppress the NIE Report and the fact that it was
publicly released are signs of just how overstretched and conflicted the U.S. government is
as it faces massive popular resistance in both Iraq and Afghanistan, along with growing
instability in Pakistan.

Even after the NIE Report, Bush's threats on Iran continued unabated. But the U.S. charge
of a Jan. 6 Iranian "provocation" began to unravel by Jan. 9 and soon turned into a
miniscandal.

Iran charged that the U.S. footage was a "bad fake" and that the audio and video were not
even synchronized. Iran's Revolutionary Guard released its own four-minute video clip
showing its two- and three-person, clearly unarmed speed boats asking the U.S. warships
to identify the number on their ship and their reason for being in the area. A U.S.-
accented voice responded by giving the number of his ship and claiming to be operating
in international waters.

Blog commentaries asked the obvious question: Why in the U.S. Navy's video was there no
ambient background noise of water, wind and motors as the small open Iranian boats
supposedly made threats to "explode" the warships? This and other discrepancies
discredited the U.S. story.

By Jan. 10 the U.S. Navy's Fifth Fleet in Bahrain cast doubt on the earlier U.S. version of the
incident. "There is no way to know where this [radioed threat] exactly came from. It could
have come from the shore ... or another vessel in the area," Lt. John Gay told the French
Press Agency. Some media speculated the message was from "a prankster."

But none of the corporate media have even once asked what this deadly array of U.S.
warships is doing in the narrow waters off the coast of Iran that are vital to shipping. This
is the real issue.



U.S. warships violate international law

The largest and deadliest ships in world history, armed and in attack mode, with targets
already selected, are now off the coast of Iran. This is international lawlessness on a grand
scale.

Contrary to what the corporate media claim, the conduct of the vast U.S. armada in the
Gulf is in explicit and continual violation of international law and United Nations treaties.

According to a Jan. 15 article by Kaveh L. Afrasiabi in Asia Times OnLine, there is no
"international water" in the Strait of Hormuz. The two-mile-wide inbound traffic lane
there is within Iran's territorial waters.

Vice Adm. Kevin Cosgiff claimed that the U.S. ships were "five kilometers outside Iranian
territorial waters." This is impossible. Even a voice from one of the U.S. ships says, "I am
engaged in transit passage in accordance with international law," making it clear that the
commanders recognized that they were inside Iranian waters. Peaceful transit through
passageways is permitted, according to the 1982 U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea.

The U.S. has refused to sign this international treaty, along with countless other
international agreements, yet it invokes its right to avail itself of convenient parts of the
UNCLOS treaty, such as transit for its giant warships through the territorial waters of other
countries. On the other hand, the U.S. Navy flagrantly violates the provisions that
explicitly prohibit actions like the continual war exercises, nor does it bring its
submarines to the surface as required.



U.S. position slipping

Bush's visits to the Israeli apartheid state and to the occupied Palestinian West Bank
confirm that the U.S. president has no solutions and no proposals even worth coverage in
the corporate media. U.S. credibility is at an all-time low throughout the Arab world. On a
world scale there is a drastic decline in the ability of U.S. imperialism to influence events
or impose its colonial solutions.

Even in the United Arab Emirates, Bush's lecture on democracy to a gathering of oil-rich
feudal monarchs, their political appointees, wealthy corporate investors, and police and
military functionaries aroused only a perfunctory scattering of applause. By all accounts
his efforts to rally support for a U.S.-led Arab alliance to financially squeeze and isolate
Iran flopped.

Throughout the region, U.S. puppet rulers fear their own masses and fear standing too
close to Bush. For imperialism and for the thin strata of corrupt rulers in the area, the war
in Iraq is a disaster. And the war in Afghanistan is in serious disarray. The U.S. alliance
with the Pakistani military is in crisis. Israel, Washington's one totally dependent and
usually dependable military outpost, proved unable to destroy Hezbollah in Lebanon or
even to defeat Hamas by starving and surrounding Gaza.

While each of the many ships in the U.S. armada has the deadly power to destroy entire
cities with one launch, the political, diplomatic and economic position of the U.S. is
slipping faster than the dollar. This can drive U.S. imperialism to ever more drastic
adventures and desperate measures. It is also what silences large sections of the U.S.
ruling class and top political leaders of both parties.

The world movement for human progress and all opponents of endless U.S. wars must be
on full alert at the possibility of a new, deadly military offensive. They must continue to
expose this phony incident off the coast of Iran and confront the U.S. war makers.




Articles copyright 1995-2007 Workers World. Verbatim copying and distribution of this
entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved.

Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@...
Subscribe wwnews-subscribe@...
Support independent news http://www.workers.org/orders/donate.php