When in doubt, start another war

[debgeisler]

You may have heard that the Navy's all up in arms about threatening messages it received from Iranian warships. Threaten our warships, by jiggy, and you might start a war (a war that our president has been trying to build justification for now for more than a year).

This story from the AP, via the Cleveland Plain Dealer online, raises serious questions about the purported threats. It seems some experts think they were pranks:

Cairo, Egypt - A threatening radio message at the end of a video showing Iranian patrol boats swarming near U.S. warships in the Persian Gulf may have come from a prankster rather than from the Iranian vessels, the Navy Times newspaper has reported.

A video and audio recording of the Jan. 6 incident in the Strait of Hormuz featured a man in accented English saying, "I am coming to you. . . . You will explode after . . . minutes."

Cmdr. Lydia Robertson, spokeswoman for the Fifth Fleet in Bahrain, said the Navy was still trying to determine the source of the transmission but believed it was related to the Iranian actions.

[...]

However, the Navy Times, a weekly newspaper published by the Gannett company, quoted several veteran sailors as speculating the transmission could have come from a radio heckler.

The newspaper, which serves the Navy community, said U.S. sailors in the Persian Gulf have heard the prankster - possibly more than one person - transmitting "insults and jabbering vile epithets" on unencrypted frequencies.

In other words, it might just be an idiot with a radio...not an official idiot with a radio and a few warships.

Oh, and this guy with a radio? He's been around for a while:

"For 25 years there's been this mythical guy out there who, hour after hour, shouts obscenities and threats," Hoffman said.

"He could be tied up pierside somewhere or he could be on the bridge of a merchant ship."

Comments

Marine radios

[nojay.livejournal.com]

Any sea-going ship larger than a small pleasurecraft has, by international maritime law, to carry a VHF transceiver and monitor channel 16. It's used for Mayday calls or to contact other ships if there's a need (like "Look where you're going, you idiot! You're about ram me!").

The jammer (known to Western ships crews as "Filipino Monkey") has been abusing channel 16 in that vicitnity for a long time. There's probably a bunch of folks who have done it over the decades under the common nom de radio-net.

The USN recorded video of the Iranian speedboats challenging the USN ship to identify itself and the ships it was escorting. The Straits of Hormuz are not international waters but in fact mostly Iranian territorial waters. There is an agreed international shipping channel through the Strait which all sensible shipowners stick closely to, but the Iranians are well within their rights to demand such ships identify themselves. For that purpose they use channel 16 since any ships they encounter will be able to reply on the same channel. "Filipino Monkey" picked up on the conversation and threw in the "you will explode" line, resulting in the scare story served up by the USN among others.