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Brazen neocons are at it again

LEE ANDERSON

After the USS Maine, the Lusitania, Gulf of Tonkin and 9/11, you'd hope people would start to investigate the desperate attempts by our military-industrial-oil complex to lure the American people into supporting yet another bloody and costly war that only serves to enrich those already fat with money and power.

On Jan. 8, just as our neocon-controlled president left for his Mideast tour, our military claimed that three naval warships came under aggressive action by five small Iranian vessels in the Straight of Hormuz. Upon close inspection of the facts as presented, the case dissolves like our constitutional rights in the salt chuck.

The Associated Press report by Robert Burns described the three U.S. warships coming under hostile action by five comparatively tiny Iranian patrol boats and that threatening words were spoken by the Iranians during a radio transmission.

Vice Adm. Kevin Cosgriff, commander of the U.S. 5th Fleet, said the message from the Iranians was clear as he describes the action -- "they were closing (on) our ships and the ships would explode." And his report goes on, "Subsequently, two of these boats were observed dropping objects in the water generally in the path of the final ship in the formation, the USS Ingraham."

Think about this. You are the captain of a multibillion-dollar U.S. warship with hundreds, maybe thousands of American lives in your charge and you don't obliterate those "white, box-like objects" that could have been mines with your rotary cannons. No, instead you risk the ship and everybody's lives and just keep on steaming right past them; you don't even bother to pick them up and inspect them, as the article points out.

It just doesn't wash.

The next day CNN runs tapes of the exchange as filmed and recorded by the Iranians and it looks and sounds like a typical hailing, identifying and ships passing, but nothing aggressive. Who do we believe? The Iranians, who have no good reason to invite our bombs onto their cities, or our neocons, who lied us into Iraq? While no doubt Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a loose cannon, he accused Bush of "sending a message of confrontation."

Remember that on Dec. 3, 2007, the National Intelligence Estimate released a consensus report by all 16 American spy agencies finding that Iran has no nuclear program and that the findings support a 2004 report by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Anybody who'd been hearing the Bush/Cheney war drums beating ever louder, and remembers Sen. John McCain's little song, "Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran," was expecting the worst.

This staged event is a probing exercise to determine the American people's gullibility and likely acceptance of yet another false flag initiation into another war on another oil rich country.

What will they try next?

Since the official story produced by our government is obviously as bogus as the one about the guy in the cave who paralyzed our Air Force and took down a half dozen of our buildings with box cutters, initiating two, going on three wars, what's not to believe?

Thanks, neocons, at least for being so brazen as to finally wake up so many sleeping consumers, err, I mean Americans.

Lee Anderson lives in Duvall.