The Pentagon continues to change its official excuse for this week’s incident in which a pair of US boats crossed into Iranian territorial waters, and by some accounts one even ran aground into an Iranian island, now denying that their “mechanical failures” even happened.
Instead, Defense Secretary Ash Carter claimed today that the sailors made a “navigational error” and didn’t tell anybody about it until after they got caught in Iranian waters. He appeared to be setting the stage for more revision, saying the military still doesn’t “fully know” what happened.
The new claim doesn’t jibe with previous reports of the incident, particularly the reports that one of the boats ran aground, as it’s hard to imagine they mis-navigated so much they slammed into an island. Even if that turns out not to have happened, it’s unimaginable that the crew wouldn’t have known of the location of an island that houses a large Iranian naval base.
The Navy is talking up having a future investigation into what is happening, though for now they say the focus is on “reintegration” exams to ease the sailors into a return to duty after spending several hours in Iranian custody.
On the bright side, at least it wasn’t Turkey’s territory that was violated…
True those sailors would not be around now
It was necessary for Qud’s Force’s Navel assets to take the Sailors of the US Navy into custody for their own protection.
Did you see these Zio-Wahabbi Pirates arsenal?
Yeah no kidding!!
Lies Lies and more lies
Hogwash. I guess they expect that nobody that sails will talk about this. How it works now is that you have an electronic map in front of you at all times that pinpoints your exact position. There simply is no way of getting lost anymore for any modern ship. Heck even the charter fishing boats have this technology now. Are we supposed to think that they don’t have this simple basic stuff on board? it’s an electronic screen that shows exactly where you are, which way you are headed, where you were at seconds and minutes ago. It will even show the depth of the water and an under-water map of the bottom!! You can navigate these without even looking out at the water. Just look at the screen and as you change your course you can watch it happen right there in front of you. You can zoom in and zoom out all that stuff.
It’s 100% ridiculous BS to say that they didn’t know exactly where they were at all times. This is standard basic equipment now for anyone who goes out in the larger spans of water. They are like 200 bucks down at wallmart to buy!
It is indeed hard to believe that the commanders of both ships made a navigational error. Say the equipment of boat A steers that boat towards Farsi Island. Would the commander of boat B follow A without asking “where the H are you going”?
Exactly correct. There is no way they are telling the truth about what they were up to. Good thing that Iran didn’t take whatever bait it was they were tossing out.
The ever-changing menu of excuses is patently bogus. The “may have run aground” business however suggests the truth: special ops spy mission, probable deployment of electronic eavesdropping equipment.
Beyond that we’ll have to wait for Seymor Hersch to tell us what the mission was all about.
The Quds Force possibly fried there Chip’s with ESM making the Gun Boats Crews unable to control them. They had no choice but to surrender and their Commanders saved the Crews lives by doing so.
I believe the Quds force have a Russian electronic warfare device called Khibiny. If so the Qud’s Force has the ability to disable US vessels, the electronic device disabled all radars, control circuits, systems, information transmission, etc. on board the US Gun Boat.
The same thing happened in the Black Sea in 2014 to the USS Donald Cook DDG-75 when a Russian Electronic warfare Jet flew over and fried them.
http://www.voltairenet.org/article185860.html
Entirely possible. Electronic countermeasures certainly exist, but details, capabilities, and actual incidents are hard to confirm. Heard about the Cook incident, light on details.
Re the Farsi Island mystery, I wrote this today as a comment to: http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2016/01/19/the-riverine-mysteries/
“Jeff Davis posting under “Jeffrey Fein” due to a Disqus problem.
Farsi Island hosts a “highly sensitive military base”. There can be little doubt that its surrounding territorial waters are continuously monitored by radar. The American military certainly knows this, and any attempt to put spook-types ashore would therefore have to be under water, presumably by submarine-deployed Navy seals. The riverine boats would be detected, and intercepted before they ever got to shore, as appears to be the case here.
What they were up to, tasked by whom, for what purpose, and driven by what motivation I won’t speculate, there are way too many possibilities and attendant unknowns. But I would draw your attention to one small point:
You may recall a comment from early on in the reports, that one of the boats may have “run aground/drifted ashore”. I don’t know how that comment came into being, or by whom authored, but I consider it an interesting piece of “evidence”. Spooks will have a “cover story” and compliant media to get the story out. This “drifted aground” narrative element feels like a piece of a prepared-in-advance story, that has since been discarded because — and I’m not entirely clear on this point — the Iranians appear to have intercepted the two boats before they reached shore. So the folks who were in charge of issuing the cover story, and quickly, so as to most effectively “own” the narrative, jumped in lickety-split with their ready-to-go version. That would explain where the “drifted ashore” element came from. Note also that the “drifted ashore” piece has since disappeared, almost as if it had never existed.
Another piece of the puzzle. Make of it what you will.”
I don’t believe the equipment malfunction story. Farsi Island is about midway between Saudi Arabia and Iran, roughly 70 miles from either coast. If the small US boats were traveling from Kuwait to Bahrain, they would have been, or should have been keeping close to the Saudi coast. For them to have “drifted” maybe 60 miles off course without asking for help or being picked up by another US vessel is simply unbelievable.
Iran has the right to challenge any ship entering Iranian waters, just as the US would if an Iranian or other ship was close to the US shore.
But in fact, the US really has no defense justification for even being in the Persian Gulf. So the US presence is and always has been a provocation and is nothing more than part of the overall strategy of conquest.