The Strait of Hormuz incident was hand-crafted out of spit and toilet paper.

WASHINGTON, Jan 15 (IPS) - Senior Pentagon officials, evidently reflecting a broader administration policy decision, used an off-the-record Pentagon briefing to turn the Jan. 6 U.S.-Iranian incident in the Strait of Hormuz into a sensational story demonstrating Iran’s military aggressiveness, a reconstruction of the events following the incident shows.

The initial press stories on the incident, all of which can be traced to a briefing by deputy assistant secretary of defence for public affairs in charge of media operations Bryan Whitman, contained similar information that has since been repudiated by the Navy itself.

Then the Navy disseminated a short video into which was spliced the audio of a phone call warning that U.S. warships would “explode” in “a few seconds”. Although it was ostensibly a Navy production, IPS has learned that the ultimate decision on its content was made by top officials of the Defence Department.

The encounter between five small and apparently unarmed speedboats, each carrying a crew of two to four men, and the three U.S. warships occurred very early on Saturday Jan. 6, Washington time. But no information was released to the public about the incident for more than 24 hours, indicating that it was not viewed initially as being very urgent.

The reason for that absence of public information on the incident for more than a full day is that it was not that different from many others in the Gulf over more than a decade. A Pentagon consultant who asked not to be identified told IPS that he had spoken with officers who had experienced similar encounters with small Iranian boats throughout the 1990s, and that such incidents are “just not a major threat to the U.S. Navy by any stretch of the imagination”.

Just two weeks earlier, on Dec. 19, the USS Whidbey Island, an amphibious warship, had fired warning shots after a small Iranian boat allegedly approached it at high speed. But that incident had gone without public notice.

With the reports from 5th Fleet commander Vice-Adm. Kevin Cosgriff in hand early that morning, top Pentagon officials had all day Sunday, Jan. 6, to discuss what to do about the encounter in the Strait of Hormuz. The result was a decision to play it up as a major incident.

Well, I bet you won’t hear this story on World News Tonight, because our news media, which presumably has all the resources available to find out about, cross check and analyze such current events that might be considered newsworthy, completely rolled over for the Pentagon. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that in doing so, they put all the sailors on those Navy vessels at risk, not to mention everybody else.

We live in a Culture of Lies, and this culture of ours will not survive. One way or the other, it’s all going to come apart.

The decision to make hay out of this came just as Bush was heading to the Middle East to cobble together an anti-Iran club. He did not succeed. During the early morning of 1/7/08, the Commander of the 5th Fleet issued a press release on this routine encounter, even though normally such an event would not trigger a press release. The release referred to standard procedures and made no reference to threats or danger.

The media ignored this press release.

At 9 a.m., Barbara Starr of CNN reported that “military officials” had told her that the Iranian boats had not only carried out “threatening maneuvers”, but had transmitted a message by radio that “I am coming at you” and “you will explode”. She reported the dramatic news that the commander of one boat was “in the process of giving the order to shoot when they moved away”.

CBS News broadcast a similar story, adding the detail that the Iranian boats “dropped boxes that could have been filled with explosives into the water”. Other news outlets carried almost identical accounts of the incident. The source of this spate of stories can now be identified as Bryan Whitman, the top Pentagon official in charge of media relations, who gave a press briefing for Pentagon correspondents that morning. Although Whitman did offer a few remarks on the record, most of the Whitman briefing was off the record, meaning that he could not be cited as the source.

People in the Defense Department manufactured this incident and spliced the video together, and our mainstream media dutifully played it out.

An official in the U.S. Navy Office of Information in Washington, who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the issue, said that decision was made in the office of the secretary of defence.

The story quickly fell apart, and nobody owns it now. The Navy Commanders stand by their first reports: they were never close to firing on the Iranian boats. Whatever things people in the Arab world or wherever say about this incident, whatever insults and accusations they hurl about it being propaganda and lies, they are correct.

The decision to treat the Jan. 6 incident as evidence of an Iranian threat reveals a chasm between the interests of political officials in Washington and Navy officials in the Gulf. Asked whether the Navy’s reporting of the episode was distorted by Pentagon officials, Cmdr Robertson of 5th Fleet Public Affairs would not comment directly. But she said, “There is a different perspective over there.”

Not to put too fine a point on it, but the chasm is between political officials in Washington and practically everybody else on the planet.

People in the military are used and killed. Americans paying the bills for all this are being used and killed. People in Iraq and all around the world are being used and killed. Everybody knows this, but it seems like nobody can do anything to stop it.

One of these days will come the tipping point.

“A house divided against itself cannot stand.” I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved — I do not expect the house to fall — but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other. — Abraham Lincoln