Now how to blame Iran for this one?
Navy fighter jets crash in Persian Gulf

Two U.S. Navy fighter jets plunged into the Persian Gulf Monday, after what initial reports suggest was a mid-air collision, a defense official said.

Posted by: b | Jan 7 2008 19:40 utc | 3

tangentially
secrecynews: NSA Releases History of American SIGINT and the Vietnam War

During the Vietnam War, North Vietnamese intelligence units sometimes succeeded in penetrating Allied communications systems, and they could monitor Allied message traffic from within. But sometimes they did more than that.
On several occasions “the communists were able, by communicating on Allied radio nets, to call in Allied artillery or air strikes on American units.”
That is just one passing observation (at p. 392) in an exhaustive history of American signals intelligence (SIGINT) in the Vietnam War that has just been declassified and released by the National Security Agency.
From the first intercepted cable — a 1945 message from Ho Chi Minh to Joseph Stalin — to the final evacuation of SIGINT personnel from Saigon, the 500-page NSA volume, called “Spartans in Darkness,” retells the history of the Vietnam War from the perspective of signals intelligence.
The most sensational part of the history (which was excerpted and disclosed by the NSA two years ago) is the recounting of the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Incident, in which a reported North Vietnamese attack on U.S. forces triggered a major escalation of the war. The author demonstrates that not only is it not true, as Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara told Congress, that the evidence of an attack was “unimpeachable,” but that to the contrary, a review of the classified signals intelligence proves that “no attack happened that night.”
Several other important Vietnam War-era episodes are elucidated by the contribution of SIGINT, including the Tet Offensive, the attempted rescue of U.S. prisoners of war from Son Tay prison, and more.

doc is linked at link above

Posted by: b real | Jan 7 2008 20:49 utc | 5

Why would Iran provoke a peace loving people like the U.S.?

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Jan 8 2008 2:07 utc | 7

Thanks to b real @ 5. I look forward to reading the text, and wonder
how much it will reveal about North Vietnamese capacity for reading American signals, which was apparently extremely high and well exploited.
Naturally, one also wonders about the state of SIGINT and COMSEC in the Iraq-Iran theater, where there have already been interesting revelations (vulnerability of Thuraya phones, the Chalabi betrayal, etc.) I suspect
that many within the U.S. forces in Iraq underestimate the SIGINT capabilities of their adversaries, and that sloppy COMSEC is frequent. (Just guessing, of course, or, more accurately “mouthing off” on a topic about which I know nothing via first hand experience.) Continuing in this vein, it is rather easy to predict that within at most a few decades China will be the dominant power in signals intelligence, clandestine monitoring and the “black arts”. Even under that hypothetical Sinaic security regime those who “have done nothing wrong” will have nothing to worry about. So we should probably be grateful to our present day “silent partners in communication” who are helping us learn to be good citizens of the future global union.
Please excuse my veering off topic.

Posted by: Hannah K. O’Luthon | Jan 8 2008 7:25 utc | 9

dear dear dear me
cnn is incapable of calling a speedboat a speedboat – & wanders often to ‘iranian ships’ or ‘iranian boats’ – as freud sd sometimes a cigar is just a cigar – & a speedboat is just a speedboat

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Jan 8 2008 21:20 utc | 11

Bush Castigates Iran, Calling Naval Confrontation ‘Provocative Act’

Mr. Bush will visit three Gulf states — Kuwait, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates — during his stay in the Middle East. Experts on Iran said the episode in the Strait of Hormuz gave Mr. Bush an opening to press his message that Iran is a danger.
“I think he’s realized that a lot of the international steam on Iran has been lost in the wake of the N.I.E.,” said Michael Jacobson, an expert on Iran at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a research organization in Washington. “I think he’s doing what he can to try to refocus the international community on the dangers that Iran poses.”

Posted by: b | Jan 9 2008 9:16 utc | 13

dan
they were thinking more along the lines of the-three-stooges-at-sea kind of thing. laughably brutal without being in the least comic

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Jan 9 2008 20:42 utc | 15

How many speedboats laden with EFP’s could you buy with the cost of the two F-18s lost earlier this week?

Posted by: Cloned Poster | Jan 9 2008 21:12 utc | 17

dan
have no idea about their sense of humour but was watching a learned & supremely pompous professor of game theory at some elite american university sd there was no possibility of a conflict between the u s & iran. he didn’t giggle either but he did have those eerie scientology eyes

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Jan 9 2008 21:31 utc | 19

re Fake Video – good to see NYT carrying story. Guess the lab that manufactures those bin Laden videos had some spare time on their hands.
So, now they’ve gone from faking/provoking incidents as excuse for aggressive wars, to merely manufacturing videos claiming, errr I mean proving, such incidents happened. Again, it worked well enough for war on terra…Now if only NYT will follow up by exposing bin Laden videos, maybe we’ll really start getting somewhere.
And while they’re at it, why don’t they investigate Tuesday’s manufactured NH voting results…Christ, what isn’t all lies all the time now…At least impt. factions of the Elite oppose Iran assault, so we’re safe for the moment….

Posted by: jj | Jan 10 2008 10:10 utc | 21

Fitting here – McClatchy: U.S. counterfeiting charges against N. Korea based on shaky evidence

a 10-month McClatchy investigation on three continents has found that the evidence to support Bush’s charges against North Korea is uncertain at best and that the claims of the North Korean defectors cited in news accounts are dubious and perhaps bogus. One key law enforcement agency, the Swiss federal criminal police, has publicly questioned whether North Korea is even capable of producing “supernotes,” counterfeit $100 bills that are nearly perfect except for some practically invisible additions.
…
Klaus Bender, the author of a book on the subject, “Moneymakers: The Secret World of Banknote Printing,” said that the phony $100 bill is “not a fake anymore. It’s an illegal parallel print of a genuine note.”
“It goes way beyond what normal counterfeiters are able to do,” said Bender, whose book first spotlighted the improbability of North Korean supernotes. “And it is so elaborate (and expensive) it doesn’t pay for the counterfeiting anymore.”
Bender claims that the supernotes are of such high quality and are updated so frequently that they could be produced only by a U.S. government agency such as the CIA.
As unsubstantiated as the allegation is, there is a precedent. In his new book on the history of the CIA, journalist Tim Weiner detailed how the agency tried to undermine the Soviet Union’s economy by counterfeiting its currency.
Making limited quantities of sophisticated counterfeit notes also could help intelligence and law enforcement agencies follow payments or illicit activities or track the movement of funds among unsavory regimes, terrorist groups and others.

Posted by: b | Jan 10 2008 14:02 utc | 23

Fucking liars: U.S.: Voices on Recording May Not Have Been From Iranian Speedboats

Just two days after the U.S. Navy released the eerie video of Iranian speedboats swarming around American warships, which featured a chilling threat in English, the Navy is saying that the voice on the tape could have come from the shore or from another ship.
…
The Navy never said specifically where the voices came from, but many were left with the impression they had come from the speedboats because of the way the Navy footage was edited.
Today, the spokesperson for the U.S. admiral in charge of the Fifth Fleet clarified to ABC News that the threat may have come from the Iranian boats, or it may have come from somewhere else.
We’re saying that we cannot make a direct connection to the boats there,” said the spokesperson. “It could have come from the shore, from another ship passing by.
…

Posted by: b | Jan 10 2008 21:42 utc | 25

Thanks b real – link @25 corrected.

Posted by: b | Jan 10 2008 22:11 utc | 27

the fabrication of this situation was so so crude – it tells us a great deal about the intra-elite rivalry in those united states
i’d say cheney’s wing is going at it – mad as meataxes before his heart bursts & with the nie reports they are such an insistent humiliation of those elements that want to extend their already bloody war – (note their carpetbombing of iraq intensifies each day)
i think the forgery is so plain its intent is to subvert

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Jan 11 2008 0:39 utc | 29

Very caustic, very funny

…
These speed boats had no guns. No planes. Nothing. Drug runners using these cigarette boats are better armed. Pirates off of Kenya are better armed. Kayakers paddling down streams are better armed. Sunbathers in Miami are certainly better armed! I recently watched films of the Kamikaze pilots of WWII fame. They were scary. This was not. And if we can’t shoot tiny boats, our navy should be sold to India for scrap. Of course Iran can sink our navy as it is pinned in the narrow straits of Hormuz but this will be done from land, not from tiny boats with a single Evenrude motor. What next? Attacks from a jihad jetski?
The fact that the Pentagon misstated this ‘confrontation’ means we must replace the clowns who couldn’t tell the difference from the Battle of Midway and Girls Gone Wild. This ‘confrontation’ should have not made ANY NEWS AT ALL. …
…

Posted by: Hamburger | Jan 11 2008 13:49 utc | 31

Navy Times: ‘Filipino Monkey’ may be behind radio threats, ship drivers say

The threatening radio transmission heard at the end of a video showing harassing maneuvers by Iranian patrol boats in the Strait of Hormuz may have come from a locally famous heckler known among ship drivers as the “Filipino Monkey.”
Since the Jan. 6 incident was announced to the public a day later, the U.S. Navy has said it’s unclear where the voice came from. In the videotape released by the Pentagon on Jan. 8, the screen goes black at the very end and the voice can be heard, distancing it from the scenes on the water.
…
In recent years, American ships operating in the Middle East have had to contend with a mysterious but profane voice known by the ethnically insulting handle of “Filipino Monkey,” likely more than one person, who listens in on ship-to-ship radio traffic and then jumps on the net shouting insults and jabbering vile epithets.
Navy women — a helicopter pilot hailing a tanker, for example — who are overheard on the radio are said to suffer particularly degrading treatment.
Several Navy ship drivers interviewed by Navy Times are raising the possibility that the Monkey, or an imitator, was indeed featured in that video.
Rick Hoffman, a retired captain who commanded the cruiser Hue City and spent many of his 17 years at sea in the Gulf was subject to the renegade radio talker repeatedly, often without pause during the so-called “Tanker Wars” of the late 1980s.
“For 25 years there’s been this mythical guy out there who, hour after hour, shouts obscenities and threats,” he said. “He could be tied up pierside somewhere or he could be on the bridge of a merchant ship.”
And the Monkey has stamina.
“He used to go all night long. The guy is crazy,” he said. “But who knows how many Filipino Monkeys there are? Could it have been a spurious transmission? Absolutely.”

Posted by: b | Jan 12 2008 6:28 utc | 33