The story that the Pentagon presented to the world through the news media a week ago about the naval encounter with Iran in the Straits of Hormuz has now largely unraveled. We now know the following:
– the audio threats that appeared on the Pentagon video were spliced in.
– the Pentagon cannot say where the threats came from.
– it is now almost certain that the audio threats did not come from the Iranian boats. The radio channel on which the threat was picked up is well-known to contain “heckling” by unknown parties. The audio doesn’t have the noise that one would expect if it came from the moving Iranian boats. Farsi speakers and Iranians told the Washington Post the voice did not sound Iranian. (This was all reported last week.)
– it is not true that the U.S. was “about to fire” on the Iranian boats.
– whatever happened, it appears to not have been at all unprecedented in terms of naval encounters between the U.S. and Iran, and the immediate U.S. reaction following the incident suggests it was not initially perceived as being out of the ordinary. (These assertions are documented here.)
Therefore, a reasonable conclusion, based on what we now know, is that this was a manufactured incident, in the sense that the account that the Pentagon presented to the world through the media was significantly false, and they knew or should have known that it was significantly false when they presented it.
Peace and Justice Post 
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