Las amenazas de una radio fantasma en el Estrecho de Hormuz casi desata confrontación bélica

January 13, 2007 (LPAC)--In a press conference at U.S. 5th Fleet headquarters in Bahrain today, the commanders of two U.S. Navy warships which were involved a week ago in a confrontation with Iranian Revolutionary Guard speedboats in the Strait of Hormuz acknowledged that the radio threats heard by the ships may have been coincidental to the speedboats' buzzing of the U.S. ships, and may not have come from the Iranian boats. The acknowledgment was made amidst comments otherwise devoted to elaborating that the ships had initiated, in the words of Cmdr. Jeffrey James, "our pre-planned responses trying to warn them off before we had to take any lethal action." The speedboats left the area before the ships' procedures dictated an opening of fire on them.

The Washington Post reported yesterday, that Middle East experts, Farsi speakers and Iranians in the United States insist that the voice presented in the Pentagon's recording of threats it said were made against the ships, could not have come from Iran. The Post quoted Karim Sadjadpour, an Iranian-born American at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, that the accent "sounded Pakistani, South Asian or an American trying to sound Iranian, but it definitely didn't sound Iranian." A report in Friday's Navy Times quoted a 5th Fleet spokeswoman, that they don't know where the transmissions came from, and might have come from the shore. The Navy Times article suggests the source of the threats may be a person or persons called "Fillipino Monkey," who for the past 25 years has jumped on American ship-to-ship radio communications "shouting insults and jabbering vile epithets."

Lyndon LaRouche commented on these developments, that if the communication happened at all, it may have been the work of someone's irregular forces attempting to trigger an incident.