Originally posted by Ack-Ack
And I'm sure the Iranian news agency and the state-run English-language channel Press TV are models for journalist integrity and wouldn't post any government fed propoganda, especially in a totalitarian theocracy that has 100% control over the media.
The US Navy has never stated that video was of a different incident or that it never happened. The US Navy has maintained it's a video of the incident that lasted 20 minutes.
From the AP News
I think you're mistaking the State Department's statement that they aren't going to file an official complaint as they consider this to be a non-issue.
Yes, a report by the CIA did say that the Iranians had stopped trying to further develop plans to make a nuclear weapon due to the difficulty they were having in procurring nuclear material for the weapons.
That is one of the reported reasons why they have been trying to build a nuclear power plant that would give them weapons grade plutonium. There is no refutting that the Bushehr facility will produce weapons grade plutonium, which would then allow the Iranian government to restart their nuclear weapons program once again.
I'm sure you were referring to the CIA as the secret service (i.e. an intelligence service) and not trying to say the US Secret Service disagreed with Bush. Though, the Secret Service doesn't like the fact that a large amount of counterfit US large bills comes from Iran. One of the reasons for the major changes to the appearance of US bills is due to countries like Iran and North Korea counterfitting operations.
Maybe it's time we start blowing up those Iranian oil rigs again and sink some of the Iranian naval ships to remind them who's King.
ack-ack
Meanwhile even the conservative german Focus reports in this (german) article
http://www.focus.de/politik/ausland/hormus-zwischenfall_aid_233120.html that the radio-threatening shown in the first US video was not from the iranian boats. So Mr. Geoff Morell from the Pentagon.
Also the article mentions another US-official, Mr. Frank Thorp - a spokesman of the US Navy, who said that this was not the radio traffic between the iranian and the US ships but another one recorded between people of any possible nations.
But in the video teh Bush-government showed you saw 5 iranian speedboats, 3 US ships and the radio call of an iranian who threatens the US by his english sentence "You will explode soon...".
Now thats, what I call a manipuilation and propaganda to bring people to a mad point where they whish that a war starts.
Or - like you have mentioned - to attack installations and ships in order to show who is the king in teh region. Maybe that works in some ghettos where the strongest gang leader is the King of the region but at least I would not call this a civilized behavior - especially when innocent people have to die for such demonstrations.
Interesting also the CIA report: It said that Iran has stopped in 2003 its military nuclear program. Thats long before Mr. Ahmadinedjad - a much more radical leader than Mr. Chatami - became president of Iran.
I assume that the CIA send its reports also to the president of the USA.
Nevertheless, Mr. Bush continued to tell the people in many speaches after the date of the CIA report that Iran still has a military nucvlear program and is only few months away from producing nuclear weapons - threatening the whole world, so a Maginot-Line-defense-system has to be built in Poland and so on.
But this is normal for propaganda actions. Bush knows that Iran has no military nuclear program, but he tells his people that Iran is producing nuclear weapons. That causes fear and so it is accepted when Bush starts a new war to show who is the king in region (using your words). The CIA report has maybe stopped this development.
So next was the boat-incident.
This propaganda tricks have been used by every nation throughout history in order to cause fear and then start a war.
Even Hitler started the 2nd World War by "proving" that polnish soldiers have attacked the german news sender in Gleiwitz and used this as an excuse ofr his attack against Poland. Later it was revealed that KZ-prisoners were put into polnish uniforms and then killed and placed in Gleiwitz to "proof" the attack on Germany.
