Iran threat was phony....duh.

Last Monday, Pentagon officials issued disturbing information to journalists in Washington about a provocative Iranian threat against U.S. ships in the Gulf. The information made big news, reported by all the major U.S. and international newspapers and television networks. The story was front-page headlines just as President Bush was departing for a 10-day tour of the Middle East, where one of his top priorities would be convincing Arab states to help the Bush administration confront Iran.

According to U.S. officials, who initially provided some of the information off-the-record and not for attribution to an identifiable spokesperson, five Iranian speedboats approached three U.S. navy vessels in the Strait of Hormuz and acted aggressively. Senior U.S. military officials as well as Bush himself variously called Iran's behavior reckless, provocative and dangerous. But the detail that spiced up the story and really grabbed the headlines was at first provided off-the-record to reporters. Officials said that as the speedboats maneuvered, a warning was issued by ship-to-ship radio that the U.S. ships would explode momentarily. "I am coming at you, and you will explode in a few minutes," is the quote the NY Times used, provided by an anonymous American official. A similar version made it into the first paragraph of the Washington Post's account. Soon afterwards, the Pentagon released a video of the incident along with the verbal threat. The Pentagon was effectively accusing Iran of planning, carrying out or at least feigning suicide attacks on U.S. ships, reminiscent of the Al Qaeda attack on the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000. The Post's Robin Wright wrote that "the Pentagon had consistently given the impression that the [radio] threat was linked to the Iranian boats."

Now, the Navy Times newspaper is casting serious doubt on the claim that it was the Iranians who issued the kamikaze warning. It seems that the threat might have been uttered by a local heckler known in Gulf shipping lanes as "Filipino Monkey," who's been famous in the region for 25 years for interrupting Gulf radio communications with insults and epithets. The Navy Times article, by Andrew Scutro and David Brown, quoted several current and former Navy seamen saying the verbal threat may well have been a prank. "It's been a joke out there for years," said a civilian seaman quoted by paper.

Along with other news media over the last few days, Navy Times quotes Navy brass effectively back peddling from the version put out by the Pentagon last week. "We don’t know for sure where they came from,” said Commander Lydia Robertson, spokeswoman for 5th Fleet in Bahrain, according to Navy Times. "It could have been a shore station." Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Gary Roughead told the paper: "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."

There may be a serious problem here. Has the Bush administration's demonization of Iran so pervaded the U.S. government that the judgement of vital decision-makers is becoming dangerously clouded? So when a possible practical joker issues a threat to a warship, you have a Strangelovian military chain of command from Bahrain to Washington racing to insist that the crazy, murderous mullahs in Tehran are at it again. By the Pentagon's own account, one of the warships very nearly took out at least one of the Iranian vessels but the order to fire was prevented at the last minute when the speedboats turned away. It goes without saying that an armed clash like that between two long-time adversaries could have ignited a much larger confrontation. Bush recently warned that Iran's nuclear ambitions have raised the specter of World War III and he has not ruled out a U.S. military strike on Iran to degrade its uranium-enrichment facility.

In due course, I hope that we establish who issued the verbal threat to blow up the U.S. ships. Was it "Filipino Monkey"? An imitator? If the Pentagon had better proof that it was an Iranian, we would have seen it by now. Incidentally, the Iranians always denied making the threat, and accused the U.S. of hyping a routine ship-to-ship interaction in international waters into a fabricated confrontation. “This is an ordinary occurrence, which happens every now and then for both sides,” Iranian Foreign Minister spokesman Mohammed Ali Hosseini said immediately afterwards.

But I'm more interested in knowing if there was any monkey business involved in how the Pentagon originally spun the sensational kamikaze angle to the press and the global public. How seriously did the officers on the three ships take the suicide-attack threat? Were they certain that it had been issued by the Iranians? Did they consider or believe that it could have come from a prankster? How carefully did the Pentagon analyze the verbal threat once it was relayed back to Washington? Were officials there completely convinced that the threat came from Iran? Or did they have doubts yet went ahead anyway and indicated to reporters that Iran did it? Were officers on the scene and Pentagon officials in Washington aware that pranksters are prevalent on the Gulf radio networks? Did they factor that into their risk assessment and into their decision to point a quick finger at Iran?

If "Filipino Monkey" or somebody of that ilk turns out to be the culprit, it means that the Pentagon either can't tell the difference between a prank and a threat, or that it's too busy confronting Iran to bother trying to do so. Either way, it's another reason to worry.