Officers Speak on Strait Incident

Spook86 is discussing the conspiracy angle of the recent Strait of Hormuz incident, and he is making excellent points on the various angles involving the mysterious voice aspect.

In looking around the morning news we found an interview with two of the people some are claiming to be involved in the latest Bush administration conspiracy to go to war with Iran, namely Capt. David Adler of the cruiser USS Port Royal and Cmdr. Jeffrey James of the destroyer USS Hopper.

They said the incident on Jan. 6 started out routinely, as the three ships entered the strait, but when five Iranian boats began acting provocatively Adler ordered his sailors to man their weapons as he tracked the Iranian speed boats.

"We progressed on, we saw these ... small boats coming in at us," Adler said. "So instead of going by us, which we would have [expected] with smugglers, they were now going down the sides of the ships. So that indicates, you know, some more proactive maneuvering."

As the Iranian boats surrounded the U.S. ships, the Americans received a radio transmission in heavily accented English.

"I am coming to you. You will explode in a few minutes," the voice on the transmission said, and with the small Iranian boats surrounding their ships, the U.S. commanders had to take the apparent threat seriously.

The interview goes on and is an interesting read. While some will ignore it, if we put ourselves in those officers situation it isn't difficult to understand how details like the threatening messages contributed to the situation. Apparently, hindsight is better than 20/20 for armchair partisans.

As we read these emerging details, we believe it confirms our earlier thoughts this weekend. The issue here doesn't appear to be political conspiracy originating from the White House in the spirit of the Gulf of Tonkin types, rather the issue continues to look political within the Pentagon, specifically between those who think public political rhetoric helps vs those who don't believe it helps. We dismissed the conspiracy theories like this.

Clearly the Gulf of Tonkin theory that the Navy is trying to start a war doesn't apply. Not only have their been previous incidents involving warning shots fired that went previously unreported, and can now be verified by talking to USS Whidbey Island (LSD 41) sailors (it is no longer an OPSEC issue because the Pentagon said it happened), but for a conspiracy to exist here it would require nearly 1200 sailors on what is now 5 different warships to make up stories. The flip side of that is it would require the CIA to be the people in the small boats, and in this latest incident those CIA operatives would be so well infiltrated that they can put their movie on Iranian TV. The conspiracy doesn't really mean much here.

With 1200+ officers and sailors to interview, we believe the conspiracy theory will fade away as the left side of politics attempts to be serious about the situation leading into tomorrow nights debate, and by serious we mean attack Bush without attacking the Navy. Should the question be posed in the debate, and with CNN you never know, it will be very interesting to see what answers emerge. There is real potential for a candidate like Obama to be very statesmanlike compared to the Republicans, or very amateur next to Hillary Clinton.

It will also be interesting to see who stays with the Gulf of Tonkin line of thinking. Some serious news organizations have run with that line, and while partisans who can't actually explain a theory will repeat it, because serious news organizations have said it the time is approaching they either explain their theories or get called out by serious journalists for lacking credibility.