Your bullshit-ometer should be making an awful racket in response to the shifting
explanations given for the twenty-four-hour Iranian hostage scare involving
two US Navy boats intercepted in the Gulf.
First they told us “at least one of the boats” had experienced a “mechanical
failure.” Then they said the boats had run
out of fuel, although it wasn’t clear if they meant both boats. Then they
said “there was no mechanical problem.” Then they claimed that the two
crews had somehow not communicated with the military command, although “they
could not explain how the military had lost contact with not one but both of
the boats.” As the New York Times reported:
“Even as Mr. Kerry was describing the release
on Wednesday morning, American military officials were offering new explanations
about how the two 49-foot patrol boats, formally called riverine command boats,
had ended up in Iranian territorial waters while cruising from Kuwait to Bahrain.”
And they still haven’t explained it — or any of the other distinctly odd circumstances
surrounding this incident.
The best they could do was have an anonymous Navy officer aver “When you’re
navigating in those waters, the space around it gets pretty tight.” However,
as the Times put it:
“But that is hardly a new problem, and the boats’ crews
would almost surely have mapped out their course in advance, paying close attention
to the Iranian boundary waters. And each boat has radio equipment on board,
so it was unclear how the crews suddenly lost communication with their base
unless they were surrounded by Iranian vessels before they could alert their
superiors.”
We are told they were on a “training mission” — but what kind of mission? The
Washington Post adds a helpful detail by telling
us that “The vessels, known as riverine command
boats, are agile and often carry Special Operations forces into smaller bodies
of water.”
Ah, now we’re getting somewhere.