Headlines screamed about a provocative action by Iran against American warships in the Strait of Hormuz early in January. But the tension sparked by the reports fizzled as TV footage showed that the Iranian craft were tiny speedboats, and the Pentagon soon admitted that the guttural voice threatening "You will explode" could have come from just about anywhere.
The incident wasn't just a fizzle to investigative historian Gareth Porter, however. Interviewed on Democracy Now, Porter called it "the most egregious case of sensationalist journalism in the service of the interests of the Pentagon, the Bush administration, that I have seen so far." The Navy itself didn't react in a way that justified the dramatic headlines, Porter said, citing remarks by Vice Admiral Kevin Cosgriff, commander of the U.S.' Fifth Fleet in Bahrain. Here is an exchange between Cosgriff and reporter Tony Capaccio of Bloomberg News during a press conference January 7:
Capaccio: "Can you give the public a sense of the potential damage these vessels, even these small vessels, could have caused? Did they have any anti-ship missiles on them, for instance, or torpedoes?"
Cosgriff: "Neither anti-ship missiles nor torpedoes, and I wouldn't characterize the posture of the U.S. Fifth Fleet as afraid of these ships or these three U.S. ships afraid of these small boats. Our ships… followed the procedures they've been trained to follow to increase their own readiness in the face of events like this… And I didn't get the sense from the reports I was receiving that there was a sense of being afraid of these five boats. That said, we take the potential for a small craft to inflict damage against a larger ship seriously…"
Yet two days after Cosgriff made his comments, Fox's Sean Hannity said to Geraldo Rivera, "It wouldn't have bothered me one bit, Geraldo, if we blew those ships right out of the water." More alarmingly, as Democracy Now co-host Juan Gonzalez pointed out, the question of whether the U.S. should have fired on the tiny Iranian boats was used as a talking point in a debate among Republican candidates on the Fox network—the whole thing blown into an imperfect media storm brought to us by the folks who sold us the old neocons' tale of WMD in Iraq.?
