[Infowarrior] - IO: How the Pentagon Planted a False Story

[Richard Forno]

http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=40801

January 16, 2008

How the Pentagon Planted a False Story

by Gareth Porter

Senior Pentagon officials, evidently reflecting a broader administration
policy decision, used an off-the-record Pentagon briefing to turn the
January 6 U.S.-Iranian incident in the Strait of Hormuz into a sensational
story demonstrating Iran's military aggressiveness, a reconstruction of the
events following the incident shows.

The initial press stories on the incident, all of which can be traced to a
briefing by deputy assistant secretary of defense for public affairs in
charge of media operations Bryan Whitman, contained similar information that
has since been repudiated by the Navy itself.

Then the Navy disseminated a short video into which was spliced the audio of
a phone call warning that U.S. warships would "explode" in "a few seconds."
Although it was ostensibly a Navy production, IPS has learned that the
ultimate decision on its content was made by top officials of the Defense
Department.

The encounter between five small and apparently unarmed speedboats, each
carrying a crew of two to four men, and the three U.S. warships occurred
very early on Saturday January 6, Washington time. But no information was
released to the public about the incident for more than 24 hours, indicating
that it was not viewed initially as being very urgent.

The reason for that absence of public information on the incident for more
than a full day is that it was not that different from many others in the
Gulf over more than a decade. A Pentagon consultant who asked not to be
identified told IPS that he had spoken with officers who had experienced
similar encounters with small Iranian boats throughout the 1990s, and that
such incidents are "just not a major threat to the U.S. Navy by any stretch
of the imagination."

Just two weeks earlier, on December 19, the USS Whidbey Island, an
amphibious warship, had fired warning shots after a small Iranian boat
allegedly approached it at high speed. But that incident had gone without
public notice.

With the reports from 5th Fleet commander Vice-Adm. Kevin Cosgriff in hand
early that morning, top Pentagon officials had all day Sunday, January 6, to
discuss what to do about the encounter in the Strait of Hormuz. The result
was a decision to play it up as a major incident.

The decision came just as President George W. Bush was about to leave on a
Middle East trip aimed in part at rallying Arab states to join the United
States in an anti-Iran coalition.

That decision in Washington was followed by a news release by the commander
of the 5th Fleet on the incident at about 4:00 a.m. Washington time Jan. 7.
It was the first time the 5th Fleet had ever issued a news release on an
incident with small Iranian boats.

The release reported that the Iranian "small boats" had "maneuvered
aggressively in close proximity of [sic] the Hopper [the lead ship of the
three-ship convoy]." But it did not suggest that the Iranian boats had
threatened the boats or that it had nearly resulted in firing on the Iranian
boats.

On the contrary, the release made the U.S. warships handling of the incident
sound almost routine. "Following standard procedures," the release said,
"Hopper issued warnings, attempted to establish communications with the
small boats, and conducted evasive maneuvering."

The release did not refer to a U.S. ship being close to firing on the
Iranian boats, or to a call threatening that U.S. ships would "explode in a
few minutes," as later stories would report, or to the dropping of objects
into the path of a U.S. ship as a potential danger.

That press release was ignored by the news media, however, because later
that Monday morning, the Pentagon provided correspondents with a very
different account of the episode.

At 9 a.m., Barbara Starr of CNN reported that "military officials" had told
her that the Iranian boats had not only carried out "threatening maneuvers,"
but had transmitted a message by radio that "I am coming at you" and "you
will explode." She reported the dramatic news that the commander of one boat
was "in the process of giving the order to shoot when they moved away."

CBS News broadcast a similar story, adding the detail that the Iranian boats
"dropped boxes that could have been filled with explosives into the water."
Other news outlets carried almost identical accounts of the incident.

The source of this spate of stories can now be identified as Bryan Whitman,
the top Pentagon official in charge of media relations, who gave a press
briefing for Pentagon correspondents that morning. Although Whitman did
offer a few remarks on the record, most of the Whitman briefing was off the
record, meaning that he could not be cited as the source.

In an apparent slip-up, however, an Associated Press story that morning
cited Whitman as the source for the statement that U.S. ships were about to
fire when the Iranian boats turned and moved away ­ a part of the story that
other correspondents had attributed to an unnamed Pentagon official.

On Jan. 9, the U.S. Navy released excerpts of a video of the incident in
which a strange voice ­ one that was clearly very different from the voice
of the Iranian officer who calls the U.S. ship in the Iranian video ­
appears to threaten the U.S. warships.

A separate audio recording of that voice, which came across the VHF channel
open to anyone with access to it, was spliced into a video on which the
voice apparently could not be heard. That was a political decision, and Lt.
Col. Mark Ballesteros of the Pentagon's Public Affairs Office told IPS the
decision on what to include in the video was "a collaborative effort of
leadership here, the Central Command, and Navy leadership in the field."

"Leadership here," of course, refers to the secretary of defense and other
top policymakers at the department. An official in the U.S. Navy Office of
Information in Washington, who asked not to be identified because of the
sensitivity of the issue, said that decision was made in the office of the
secretary of defense

That decision involved a high risk of getting caught in an obvious attempt
to mislead. As an official at 5th Fleet headquarters in Bahrain told IPS, it
is common knowledge among officers there that hecklers ­ often referred to
as "Filipino Monkey" ­ frequently intervene on the VHF ship-to-ship channel
to make threats or rude comments.

One of the popular threats made by such hecklers, according to British
journalist Lewis Page, who had transited the Strait with the Royal Navy is,
"Look out, I am going to hit [collide with] you."

By Jan. 11, Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell was already disavowing the
story that Whitman had been instrumental in creating only four days earlier.
"No one in the military has said that the transmission emanated from those
boats," said Morrell.

The other elements of the story given to Pentagon correspondents were also
discredited. The commanding officer of the guided missile cruiser Port
Royal, Capt. David Adler, dismissed the Pentagon's story that he had felt
threatened by the dropping of white boxes in the water. Meeting with
reporters on Monday, Adler said, "I saw them float by. They didn't look
threatening to me."

The naval commanders seemed most determined, however, to scotch the idea
that they had been close to firing on the Iranians. Vice-Adm. Kevin
Cosgriff, the commander of the 5th Fleet, denied the story in a press
briefing on Jan. 7. A week later, Cmdr. Jeffery James, commander of the
destroyer Hopper, told reporters that the Iranians had moved away "before we
got to the point where we needed to open fire."

The decision to treat the Jan. 6 incident as evidence of an Iranian threat
reveals a chasm between the interests of political officials in Washington
and Navy officials in the Gulf. Asked whether the Navy's reporting of the
episode was distorted by Pentagon officials, Cmdr. Robertson of 5th Fleet
Public Affairs would not comment directly. But she said, "There is a
different perspective over there."