We've had a lot of discussion here about the recent incident in the Gulf. The informed conclusions have been uniform on at least one point: the U.S. Navy showed impressive restraint in the brief standoff. But as more information has come out, it now seems less clear that the explicit threat against the American warships--"I am coming at you. You will explode in a couple of minutes"--came from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard patrol boats:
Unnamed Pentagon officials said on Wednesday that the threatening voice heard in the audio clip, which was released on Monday night with a disclaimer that it was recorded separately from the video images and merged with them later, is not directly traceable to the Iranian military.
Apparently this kind of chatter on the radio is not uncommon in that part of the world. The Times quotes a retired sailor as saying "my first thought was that the "explode" comment might not have even come from one of the Iranian craft, but some loser monitoring the events at a shore facility."
A couple of points. First, the sailors we see on the tape would have been foolish to assume that the threat was not made by the Iranian ships that were then menacing their task force. Further, if the voice did not come from the IRGC ships, that does little to mitigate the conduct of those ships as seen on the tape. But the voice did come from somewhere. Even the man the Times quotes assumes that it came from a "shore facility"--presumably an Iranian shore facility. Either way, somebody verbally threatened to attack our ships just as the IRGC was physically threatening to do so. As a Navy spokesman told ABC News:
"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."
The confusion has now caused some to question the entire story as reported by the Navy. The Navy claimed that "white boxes" were being dropped into the water--though those boxes cannot be seen on the tape. Admiral Glenn Greenwald, the left-wing blogosphere's resident expert on all things military, is screeching conspiracy:
The bit about the "white boxes" being dropped into the water seems almost equally dubious [as the audio]. Neither the video of the incident released by the U.S. military, nor the video version released by the Iranian government, includes any such event, nor are there any references to it at all on the audio.
The Navy reported what its people saw and heard. If what they heard turns out to have been some bizarre transmission from shore, that doesn't change what we see on the tape: Iranian ships harassing and threatening American vessels in international waters. There's no reason to doubt our sailors' statements that the Iranians were dropping unidentified objects into the water--unless your default assumptions are that the American military is habitually mendacious, and that the Iranian regime is unerringly truthful.
