Glenn Greenwalt on the American-Iranian incident in the Strait of Hormuz

Glenn Greenwald and his sock puppets believe that the Navy, the military and the Bush administration lied about what happened. You can read his rant here.

Kevin Sullivan at Independent Liberal takes him to task.

Glenn Greenwald–who I consider a generally reliable resource on matters of domestic politics–brings the same abundance of outrage when he writes on foreign policy, but for whatever reason forgoes all of those annoying things we call facts.

Take, for instance, this post from yesterday on the American-Iranian incident in the Strait of Hormuz. Let me just preface this by noting that Greenwald offered nothing terribly “new” to the discussion, and instead echoed the same Left-Wing conspiracy theories on what happened there that day. This gem starts us off:

Those are the two “facts” that infused the story with such a sinister tone — explicit threats from the Iranian boats to destroy the American ships, followed by their dropping of unidentifiable boxes, which, one was supposed to infer, could easily have been explosive devices.

But the first “fact” seems almost certainly false, and the second one is highly questionable. Iranian Hooman Majd at The Huffington Post noted that the voices on the tapes issuing the melodramatic threats were unquestionably not Persian. As he put it: “the person speaking doesn’t have an Iranian accent and moreover, sounds more like Boris Karloff in a horror movie than a sailor in the elite branch of Iran’s military.” A regular Iranian commenter at Cernig’s blog made the same point. Listen for yourself to the audio and see how credible the threats sound.

This is, in sum, insane. For starters, it’s not only logical to infer that the boxes were explosives, it was in fact the appropriate Naval response following the JAG investigation of the USS Cole bombing. This forced the Navy to account for how our ships–whether docked or in motion–should deal with such attacks. Well built ships and training wont suffice, in cases such as these, you need to give your sailors the leeway to respond appropriately. Many of Greenwald’s fellow citizens were on those ships, yet their immediate security apparently took a backseat to the dangers of inference. The good sense of Stuart Koehl was apparently lost on Greenwald.

But the insanity continues. Not only does Greenwald not trust his own Navy, but he instead opts to defer the whole matter to someone who’s sole credential is the fact that he’s an Iranian-American. Not only that, but he is an Iranian who has served as an advisor to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Some of the comments that follow are interesting and well reasoned:

This is an interesting debate, but a rather silly one, I think. ChrisWWW - your interest in holding the government’s feet to the fire, so to speak, is fine, but it seems that you assume the Bush administration is lying, presumably about everything. And your dislike (hatred?) of Bush causes people like you and Greenwald to then give our enemies equal credibility with our government. That’s silly. It’s also, frankly, juvenile. I get sick of the constant conspiracy theories spun by opponents of this administration. An incredible amount of time is spent - wasted - trying to figure out the “Diebold angle” on every damn thing that happens. And the danger is that this mentality creates real problems, which is the point that the other MikeS seems to be making. It must be clear to those pulling the strings in Iran that attiudes such as those expressed by you here have considerable political traction in the US. Ahmadinejad’s regime can, therefore, safely conclude that pushing the envelope a bit more will be permitted - permitted by the American people, that is, many of whom have become so poisoned by BDS that even a real attack on an American ship might be brushed off as not worth responding to. So I don’t think you want anybody to be killed, but I think that you have effectively hidden from your own conscience that that is the practical result of your views, since they are widespread.
Hey - I supported and continue to support the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and I know that innocent people have been blown to pieces by US forces as a result of these wars. I don’t try to assuage my conscience by denying that. I also know that young men and women more worthy of life than me have given theirs defending a cause they believe in. I admit that. You, and others like yoou, however, occupy a moral world where, apparently, there are no negative moral consequences as the result of your views. This is simple-minded and intellectually dishonest.
So maybe that is whatt MikeS meant. And, by the way, thank you MikeS, sir, for your service.

And one is funny:

As a 22 year veteran of the US Army, I can vouch for pretty much everything ChrisWWW asserts. Every video recorder, every digital camera, even every cell phone capable of taking video and stills, owned by every soldier now serving in the military, is digitally connected to the White House, as per Army Regs (see AR 25-1, Army Knowledge Management and Information Technology Management). They all go into the BushChiplerPretzelBurton filter; that’s the same one that monitors every single telephone call made by every single American. That way, if Bush or Cheney find a need to squelch the truth, they not only control every single facet of digital media that might have been taken of the event, they also can automatically erase any proof that ever existed. And of course every single serviceman or woman now serving is immediately given the White House talking points within 2 hours so that they can unquestioningly swear to the new "truth". Didn’t you guys read that part of the Patriot Act?