Bush Clears US Navy to Keep Blasting Sonars

US Weasel-in-Chief, George w. Bush, used his middle eastern tour to quietly sign an order exempting the US Navy from an environmental law that would have restricted it from using submarine sonars off the California coast.

From The Guardian:

The Navy training exercises, including the use of sonar, “are in the paramount interest of the United States” and its national security, Bush said in a memorandum.

“This exemption will enable the Navy to train effectively and to certify carrier and expeditionary strike groups for deployment in support of worldwide operational and combat activities, which are essential to national security,” the memo said.

The decision drew immediate criticism from environmentalists who had fought to stop the Navy’s sonar training.

“The president’s action is an attack on the rule of law,” said Joel Reynolds, director of the Marine Mammal Protection Project at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “By exempting the Navy from basic safeguards under both federal and state law, the president is flouting the will of Congress, the decision of the California Coastal Commission and a ruling by the federal court.”

 

Showdown In The Gulf – Clumsy Propaganda?

The Bush/Cheney regime’s contentions about a provocative charge against three US Navy, “armed to the teeth” warships by plainly gunless Iranian “gunboats” is beginning to spring a lot of leaks.

The US Navy’s own video shows a small flotilla of speedboats, not gunboats, as is apparent from this Navy close-up of one of the boats released to the media. But the navy also released a video on which someone with a heavy accent is supposed to have threatened the US warships, saying “I am coming to you… you will explode …after minutes.”

From the New York Times:

The audio includes a heavily accented voice warning in English that the Navy warships would explode. However, the recording carries no ambient noise — the sounds of a motor, the sea or wind — that would be expected if the broadcast had been made from one of the five small boats that sped around the three-ship American convoy.

A commentator who claimed to be a former US Navy officer with experience in the Gulf wrote to the paper warning against putting much reliance on anything heard in that region on Channel 16 UHF:

“But over in the Gulf, Ch. 16 is like a bad CB radio. Everybody and their brother is on it; chattering away; hurling racial slurs, usually involving Filipinos (lots of Filipinos work in the area); curses involving your mother; 1970’s music broadcast in the wee hours (nothing odder than hearing The Carpenters 50 miles off the coast of Iran at 4 a.m.)

“On Ch. 16, esp. in that section of the Gulf, slurs/threats/chatter/etc. is commonplace. So my first thought was that the “explode” comment might not have even come from one of the Iranian craft, but some loser monitoring the events at a shore facility.”

This episode is beginning to sound an awful lot like the Bush/Cheney agitprop that has been the signature of this administration. We know Cheney is squirming in his pants to get at Iran and we know these charlatans are entirely willing to lie right into the faces of the American people to get their way.

 

Washington Sticking to its Guns

The United States is insisting that five “armed Iranian gunboats,” one shown in the picture below taken by the US Navy during the incident, really did charge and threaten a flotilla of three, massively armed, state of the art warships in the Straits of Hormuz over the weekend.

Iran says the claims are a total hoax conjured up to coincide with US president George w. Bush’s trip to the Middle East. The Iranians point out that the soundtrack on the video released by the US Navy doesn’t match the images. That got the Navy and Pentagon backpeddling with the explanation that the audio and video were recorded separately and matched up later.

“We viewed it as a provocative act,” Mr. Bush told reporters in the Rose Garden on Tuesday, just hours before he left for the weeklong trip to the Middle East. “It is a dangerous situation, and they should not have done it, pure and simple.”

The US has all but formally acknowledged overflying Iranian territory and actually deploying special forces teams into Iran. Fortunately those aren’t provocative acts.

 

Showdown in the Gulf – Very, Very Scary

Okay, a little more information is coming out regarding the supposed Iranian provocation of US warships in the Persian Gulf yesterday. The incident involved what were described as Iranian gunboats that closed with three US Navy warships including the Ticonderoga-class, Aegis guided missile cruiser, USS Port Royal shown below.

Now the Port Royal, all 567 feet of her, is armed to the teeth with an unrivalled electronics warfare suite, all manner of missiles, deck guns and, for close-in defence, the Mk. 15 Phalanx gatling gun that can spew out 12.75 mm. depleted uranium rounds at the respectable rate of 4,500 rounds per minute. The Phalanx is designed to take out all manner of threats including supersonic, sea skimming anti-ship missiles.

So what about those lethal Iranian gunboats? Here’s a picture of one of them taken with a telephoto lens from one of the US warships:

If you don’t see any guns on this gunboat, maybe that’s because there don’t seem to be any. It’s a speedboat and, given the lifejackets worn by the crew, it seems they weren’t looking to die that day in a suicide attack either. Video released by the navy shows these tiny boats surfing about in the wakes of the US warships but always keeping a respectable distance away.