Archive for January 15th, 2008
US fails to isolate Iran from Arabs – Bush throws tantrum after failing to hoodwink Arabs
US fails to isolate Iran from Arabs
2008/01/15American fumbling blamed for enabling Iran to boost ties with US allies in Middle East.
by Pakinam Amer in Cairo
(Aljazeera)
George Bush, the US president, has urged Arab states to think of Iran as the greatest threat to their security, but his warnings are likely to fall on deaf ears in the Middle East.
During a stop in the United Arab Emirates on his Middle East tour on Sunday, Bush called Tehran a “sponsor of terror” and urged Arab allies to confront Iranian “extremism”.
But Middle East analysts say the US president is too late as key American allies in the Arab world have thrown their weight behind a growing rapprochement with Iran.
Seyed Mohammad Marandi, a political analyst and professor of political science at Tehran University, said American fumbling in the Middle East has pushed Arabs to adopt dialogue with the Islamic Republic.
He said: “America’s wrong policies in the Middle East have ironically helped Iran’s voice be heard more clearly, as well as Iran’s political prudence that has kept it away from the conflicts in the area.
“At this moment in time, the United States’ popularity is at its lowest level among the people all over the Arab world, and Iran’s popularity has grown immensely as the only regional power standing against the United States in the same region.”
Unprecedented moves
For most of 2007, the US tried to push through a UN resolution to impose economic sanctions on Iran if it did not halt its alleged nuclear weapons programme.
But Washington failed in its bid to isolate Iran in the Middle East.
Not only did its Arab allies reject a punitive US military strike against Iran, but they were also keen on bolstering their own ties with the country.
The members of the Gulf Co-operation Council countries invited Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran’s president, to attend their annual meeting held in Doha, Qatar last December while Egypt engaged in shuttle diplomacy of its own with Tehran.
Often contentious issues between Iran and its neighbours, such as a string of disputed islands bordering the United Arab Emirates, were shelved for later “dialogue” in favour of building trust and rapprochement.
Weeks later, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia invited Ahmadinejad to perform the Hajj in Mecca.
Even Egypt has been keen on extending a friendly hand towards Iran. For the first time in 27 years, the two countries are discussing the possibility of renewing diplomatic relations and reopening Tehran’s embassy in Cairo.
In 1980, Tehran cut off ties when Anwar Sadat, then Egyptian president, hosted Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, the deposed Shah of Iran.
Iran also blamed Egypt for supporting its enemy during the eight-year Iran-Iraq war.
But last week, Ahmadinejad told Iranian television that if Egypt decided to restore full diplomatic ties, he would “put the new Iranian ambassador on the next plane to Cairo”.
Street name changed
Iran also caved in to Egyptian demands and recently changed the name of a Tehran street honouring Khaled el-Islamboli, the man who assassinated Sadat.
Fahmy Howeidy, an Egyptian scholar and expert on Iran, believes recent conflicts, including the Iraq war, have elevated Tehran’s importance in the region.
“For one, no one can talk about the Iraqi file without mentioning Iran. Iran is also involved in the Lebanese and Afghani files and it has connections with the Syrians, the Palestinians. Thus, if anyone wants to reach a settlement in the region, he should approach Iran,” he told Al Jazeera.
Mustafa Bakri, an Egyptian MP and opposition journalist, agrees.
He said: “In the coming period, Iran will play a significant role in the Gulf regional security, perhaps even with the undeclared consent of the international powers.
“At the same time, the Gulf countries would seek to assure Iran that their lands will not be a base from which any war against it will be launched.”
Mohammad Ali Hosseini, Iran’s foreign ministry spokesman, earlier said that existing relations between Iran and its Arab neighbours should be strengthened.
He said: “We believe the stronger the ties get, the more stability, peace and security the Persian Gulf region will enjoy and that is a crucial necessity needed by both Iran and its neighbours in the region.”
Marandi believes that the normalisation of Arab ties with Iran also plays to domestic consumption.
“It’s despite US pressure that Arab countries are extending a friendly hand towards Iran,” he said.
“The reality is that a lot of the Arab regimes have always been very close to the United States and some of them have been dependent on the United States.
“It’s for the benefits of these governments to strengthen ties with the Iranian government and be seen as independent.”
Role in Iraq
In Iraq, Iranian influence – and involvement – is becoming pivotal to stabilising the country, five years after the US-led invasion that toppled the Saddam Hussein government.
In late January, US and Iranian representatives are expected to sit for a fourth round of discussions over Iraq’s security.
Ahead of the talks, US generals who once accused Iran of arming and training Shia death squads, conceded that Iran has a constructive role to play in Iraq by curbing arms and fighters from crossing the border.
Hussein Hafez, a political science professor at Baghdad University, said the US has tried to isolate Iraqi Shias from Iran since 2003.
He said: “Iraq’s Shia society is an integral element in the architecture of America’s tie-up with Iran and vice versa. Iran is a major and influential state in the region. It is not possible any more for the American think-tanks and decision-makers to deal so naively and simply with a state like Iran.”
Hafez says Tehran’s ongoing support for Shia militias, which he believes undermine US efforts in Iraq, make US-Iran negotiations “inevitable”.
“The Iranian-US dialogue in so many ways reminds me of the US foreign policy shift before its complete defeat in Vietnam; back then,the American strategy experts had noted that the US administration had changed its policies towards the countries of south-east Asia.”
However, Iraq is unlikely to benefit from US-Iran talks, he said.
“Unfortunately, the US does not care about the interests of any of Iraq’s factions. It is its own interests that it serves.”
Cautious steps
While the threat of war between the US and Iran has significantly subsided since a National Intelligence Estimate report said Tehran halted its nuclear weapons programme in 2003, tensions remain high.
Bush’s Iran terror warning earlier this week was preceded by a showdown between Iranian gunboats and US warships in the Gulf.
Iranians say such brinkmanship and speeches means that Tehran still distrusts Washington’s intentions and is waiting for the US elections for any signs of a shift in strategy.
“Iran is wary of the US policy change,” says Marandi in Tehran.
“I don’t think that the Iranians really believe that this US administration has shifted its policy towards Iran and I think that they are waiting to see what the next administration will do.”
With additional reporting by Doha Al Zohairy in Cairo and Alireza Ronaghi, Al Jazeera’s Iran correspondent.
http://mathaba.net/0_index.shtml?x=577937
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Bush throws tantrum after failing to hoodwink Arabs: Hosseini
Tehran Times Political Desk
TEHRAN — Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohamamd-Ali Hosseini said on Monday that U.S. President George W. Bush’s latest anti-Iran remarks were a result of his failure to convince Arab governments to support the Zionist regime.
Addressing the leaders of the United Arab Emirates on Sunday, Bush branded Iran as the “world’s leading state-sponsor of terror”. He said Tehran threatens nations everywhere and that the United States was “rallying friends around the world to confront this danger before it is too late.”
“Bush’s remarks show his frustration and failure in the last months of his presidency. Since he has failed to convince Arab and Muslim countries to support the Zionist regime, he is putting the blame on others,” Hosseini argued.
He added, “Bush should know that the world’s intense hatred of his policies has a real and logical root which is undeniable and should not spark annoyance and meaningless and repetitious verbal attacks.”
The U.S. president’s efforts to isolate Iran “show that he is unaware that relations between regional countries are indissoluble and that the greedy powers’ unilateralism is unable to influence their destiny.”
Hosseini asserted that Middle Eastern states are determined to expand their comprehensive relations.
He said the U.S. president is displeased about Iran’s success in addressing ambiguities over its nuclear activities and is seeking to undermine the growing cooperation between the Islamic Republic and the International Atomic Energy Agency through unfounded allegations.
The Foreign Ministry spokesman advised Bush to respect the demands and the civil rights of U.S. citizens, to adopt a logical foreign policy, and to stop inflicting excruciating torture at the Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib prisons.
Bush is once again pursuing the baseless policy of U.S. neoconservative leaders, which led to the “historic and unforgivable mistake” of attacking Iraq and the expansion of terrorism and insecurity in the region, Hosseini said.
Apparently, the Bush administration has not learned its lesson from failure in the region, but the U.S. president has lost all credibility in the eyes of the world due to his baseless remarks, he added.
Iranian Foreign Minister Manuchehr Mottaki has said Bush’s efforts to strain Iran’s relations with the Arab states would be doomed to failure
“Bush is trying to strain Iran’s relations with the Persian Gulf states, all to no avail,” Mottaki told Aljazeera TV aired on Monday.
There is no anti-Iranian public sentiment among the Persian Gulf littoral nations, he stated.
The minister emphasized that “Bush’s endeavors will get nowhere, because currently Iran has promoted its relations with the regional states through cooperation and political negotiation.”
Now Iran is cooperating with Persian Gulf littoral states even in security fields, he added
Real ID: From “No Fly” to “No Drive” Lists?
Real ID: From “No Fly” to “No Drive” Lists?
Truth News
January 13, 2008
ABC breaks the ice for us: in the future, and not too far into it, the process of getting and renewing a driver’s license will become more difficult, stressful, and fraught with all manner of unnecessary nonsense supposedly designed to protect us from terrorists, or rather CIA patsies paraded about to frighten us into submission, and as well prevent illegals from taking to the roads, never mind Alaska, Connecticut, Idaho, Louisiana, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Utah, Washington and West Virginia allow illegals to hold a license, thus demonstrating the above is little more than a threadbare excuse.
Of course, when the rubber meets the road, we discern the real reason — a national ID, complete with RFID and possibly biometrics, is all about easing us into the control grid.
According to apparatchik Michael Chertoff and the commissariat of Homeland Security, the whole affair is a matter of national security. “We are now over six years from 9/11,” Chertoff impatiently declared, “we live every day with the problems of false identification. Simply kicking this problem down the road year after year after year for further discussion, further debate and analysis is a time-tested Washington way of smothering any proposal with process.”
In other words, never mind that most people oppose Real ID and civil libertarians warn of vexing abuse, Chertoff and the neocons are itching to get us all in lumbering databases, the next step in a plan that will ultimately result in the chipping of the population at large.
“I think the time has come to bite the bullet,” Chertoff continued, “and get the kind of secure identification I am convinced the American public wants to have,” or rather the government tells them they must have, as most people hate the idea and eighteen states have passed legislation rejecting the law and Congress has refused to put any money into implementing it.
But never mind. It is a win-win situation for AOL, Microsoft, Verizon and Yahoo, all who stand to clean up if Chertoff manages to force his card on Americans at large. “The Information Technology Association of America (ITAA) sent a letter to Congress this week begging for more federal funding for Real ID,” Privacy Digest noted last October. In addition to the above corporate culprits, we can add Digimarc and Northrop Grumman, “companies that specialize in creating high-tech ID cards, as well as Choicepoint and LexisNexis, data brokers that make their money selling personal information about you to advertisers and the government. These companies stand to make millions in contracts from states who are struggling with a federal mandate to overhaul their licensing systems and share more data by the May 2008 deadline,” a date right around the corner, thus explaining Chertoff’s impatience.
“Real ID is so unpopular because in addition to being a $23 billion unfunded mandate, it will build a vast national database of personal information, expose us to a greater risk of identity theft, and move us ever closer to a total surveillance society.’
It may also be a way to keep “terrorists” off the roadways — not the Muslim cave dwelling brand of terrorist, mind you, but the kind that exercises his or her right to petition the government under that rusty old anachronism, the First Amendment to the Bill of Rights of the Constitution.
As we know, thousands of Americans are on the Federal Aviation Administration’s No-Fly List and the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center has compiled a terrorist watch list of over 700,000 people. Moreover, as Dave Lindorff writes, the government is in the business of passing this information out to private companies. “The Wall Street Journal reported that the FBI made its list of people with even remote links to terrorism — having associated, perhaps inadvertently, with a terror suspect, for example — available to a wide range of private companies, from banks and rental-car companies to casinos.”
And who exactly are these primary terrorists, the ones you don’t want to associate with, that is if you ever want to fly again? They are “law-abiding Americans” who were detained and questioned — we used to call this harassment — “based on their political viewpoints,” according to Nancy Chang, a senior litigation attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights. “I think what they are doing is harassing people who are opposing the war and publicly speaking out against administration policy,” John Dear, a Jesuit priest and member of the Catholic peace group Pax Christi, told Lindorff.
Back in 2003, we learned that the FBI “collected extensive information on the tactics, training and organization of antiwar demonstrators and … advised local law enforcement officials to report any suspicious activity at protests to its counterterrorism squads,” the New York Times reported. Of course, this is simply a continuation of the FBI’s COINTELPRO, initiated in the 1960s to “neutralize” the opposition — i.e., render activists not only politically impotent, but often wreck their lives as well.
In 2006, we discovered that COINTELPRO didn’t go away, as the official history would have it, but lives on to this day at the Pentagon. “An antiterrorist database used by the Defense Department in an effort to prevent attacks against military installations included intelligence tips about antiwar planning meetings held at churches, libraries, college campuses and other locations,” reported the New York Times. The database, known as Talon, “showed that the military used a variety of sources to collect intelligence leads on antiwar protests, including an agent in the Department of Homeland Security, Google searches on the Internet and e-mail messages forwarded by apparent informants with ties to protest groups.”
In short, the FBI and the Pentagon are still in the business of compiling lists and checking them twice, and many if not most of these people end up grounded, as noted above.
Now we have Chertoff and ABC telling us the same rules may soon apply to driving a car. As Chertoff told ABC, the Real ID is about preventing “terrorists” from driving — with illegal immigration tacked on as a selling point — and, if the behavior of the FBI and the Pentagon are any indicator, the real terrorists are not Muslim guys who were trained on U.S. military bases and had a fondness for cruising topless bars, but are antiwar activists and other troublemakers.
Soon enough, many of us – those who believe the Constitution says what it means — may be reduced to walking to work and the grocery store… that is until a Real ID card will be required to hold job or buy a loaf of bread.
Malcolm X: True as it ever was
Malcolm X: True as it ever was
S-400 air defense systems to be deployed in central Russia
MOSCOW, January 14 (RIA Novosti) – Russia’s advanced S-400 air defense missile systems will be initially deployed in central regions of the country, the Air Force commander said on Monday.
The S-400 Triumf (SA-21 Growler) air defense system is expected to form the new cornerstone of Russia’s theater air and missile defenses up to 2020 or even 2025.
“The S-400 air defense systems will be primarily deployed in central Russia, and only after that in other regions of the country, when more systems become available,” Col. Gen. Alexander Zelin said.
Russia successfully conducted last year live firing tests of the S-400 air defense complex at the Kapustin Yar firing range in south Russia’s Astrakhan Region, and deployed a battalion equipped with the new system to protect the airspace around Moscow.
The S-400 is designed to intercept and destroy airborne targets at a distance of up to 400 kilometers (250 miles), twice the range of the U.S. MIM-104 Patriot, and 2.5 times that of the S-300PMU-2.
The system is believed to have high capability to destroy stealth aircraft, cruise missiles, and ballistic missiles, with an effective range of up to 3,500 kilometers (2,200 miles) and a speed of up to 4.8 kilometers (3 miles) per second.
A regular S-400 battalion comprises at least eight launchers with 32 missiles and a mobile command post, according to various sources.
http://en.rian.ru/russia/20080114/96525152.html
The Bilderberg Group – Rulers of the World
The Bilderberg Group – Rulers of the World
“The war is not against Bin Laden. We are the enemy”
First meet, 1954
Interview with investigator and author, Daniel Estulin, on his book, “The True Story of the Bilderberg Group”, which describes an annual gathering where the European and American political elite, and the wealthiest CEOs of the world, all come together to discuss the economic and political future of humanity. Highly secretive, the press has never been allowed to attend, nor have statements ever been released on the group’s conclusions or discussions. Also discussed are the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission.
Guns and Butter – Nov 28th 2007
Russia to Cut Down Money Flow to OSCE
Russia to Cut Down Money Flow to OSCE
By: Vladimir Solovyev
on: 14.01.2008
Moscow has used the lag between the recent parliamentary and upcoming presidential elections in Russia to launch yet another fierce attack on the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Grushko said on Wednesday that the organization had failed to overcome a fundamental crisis and some countries are using it in their own vested interests. The diplomat also regretted that the OSCE does not listen to Moscow’s numerous proposals to reform the organization and added that Russia may decide to cut the financing for it. Kommersant sources report that Russia’s fees in the OSCE’s budget could be halved.
Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Grushko came with blistering criticism for the OSCE on Wednesday at a news conference in Moscow pointing to several flaws that impede the work of the organization, according to Russia. “Some countries have adopted a course to use the organization to their own ends,” he said. “Actual security problems are outside the OSCE’s scope of activities though they were listed as goals when the organization was first set up. These flaws, according to Mr. Grushko, indicate that the organization has “failed to overcome a fundamental crisis”.
The high-ranking Russian diplomat paid particular attention to the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) whose observers decided not to monitor the recent Russian parliamentary election after they accused Moscow of impeding their work. Alexander Grushko said that the ODIHR “needs a fundamental reform” and Moscow knows how to do it.
The Russian deputy foreign policy chief said Moscow has long been suggesting a common code of rules for the ODIHR’s monitoring activities. He regretted that these “reasonable, modest and balanced” proposals were never heard. The diplomat noted that the reform was still under consideration but he announced that Russia would cut its fees to the OSCE’s budget. “Russia is already cutting the financing of the OSCE,” Alexander Grushko said. “If we look at the evolution of this fee, it is increasingly comes in accordance to the ability of a country to pay.”
Sergey Ryabkov, director of the Foreign Ministry’s European cooperation department, explained to Kommersant that the principle of a country’s paying capacity is a way the budget is formed in the UN. “This is a complex method which takes into account the GDP per capita in every country as well as a number of other factors,” Mr. Ryabov said. He noted, however, that the budget issue should not be linked to a recent political rift between Moscow and the OSCE. “This is not a stick in the wheel but a part of the reforming and putting in order in the budget area,” he said. He added that order should also be brought to election monitoring. “Things that are happening at the ODIHR are ridiculous and cannot cause anything but irony as a reaction to them,” the diplomat said referring to the recent row between the OSCE and Moscow in the heat of the Duma election. “We need to seek a stronger control of the countries over all the organization’s activities. There is no other area where the reform would be more important.”
Moscow raises the issue of its fees to the OSCE’s budget every time its relations with the organization get a new turn of the downward spiral. The parties have been in some sort of a frozen conflict for a couple of years, and the argument almost always rests on the difference in positions on events in former Soviet republics that Russia traditionally considers a sphere of its interests. The last bitter rift occurred in 2004 during the presidential election in Ukraine. Following the run-off where Viktor Yanukovich was beating Viktor Yushchenko, according to official statistics, OSCE observers announced that the poll had been rigged. In contrast, CIS observers were saying that everything was fine. It was the OSCE’s staunch position that opened the way to the Orange Revolution and following events that sent West-leaning Viktor Yushchenko to power.
Tensions have not eased since then. Russian foreign policy chief Sergey Lavrov said at the last session of OSCE member countries’ foreign ministers on November 29that the relations had hit the point of no return. “It’s either we agree on common rules of monitoring or difficulties here will jeopardize the outlook of the ODIHR as part of the organization.”
Moscow has been gradually cutting its fees to the OSCE’s coffers over the past years. Moscow sent to the organization’s budget €7.2 million in 2005, according to the Russian office at the OSCE in Vienna. The sum shrank to €6.8 million a year late to fall to €5.9 million this year. It is unclear how far the fees are going to be cut this time. The Russian Foreign Ministry told Kommersant the sum could be halved.
Alexander Grushko’s Wednesday statement continues Moscow’s attempts to make the OSCE easier to deal with particularly with an eye to the March presidential poll that Russia promised to invite ODIHR observers to. But terms for the mission will be laid out by Moscow, Mr. Grushko underscored.
Kommersant sources at the OSCE headquarters in Vienna do not think that a drop in the Russian financing for the budget is so serious. “The idea is no new,” the source in Vienna said. “It has been voiced many times. Russia is dropping hints that it pays a lot and gets very little in return. Clearly, each party acts to suit its own ends but not the welfare of humankind. And this is the way Moscow is trying to punish the OSCE by money.”
Vladimir Solovyev
http://www.kommersant.com/p840248/r_527/OSCE_Observers_Election/
Did “Filipino Monkey” Almost Cause WWIII?
Did “Filipino Monkey” Almost Cause WWIII?
By: Scott MacLeod
on: 15.01.2008
Did a notorious airwave prankster known as “Filipino Monkey” nearly trigger a U.S.-Iranian war in the Gulf on Jan. 6?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.
–By Scott MacLeod/Cairo
http://time-blog.com/middle_east/2008/01/did_filipino_monkey_nearly_cau.html
