Tonkin Mark-II

For starters, I'm not dead. Thanks for asking. Been a little busy trying to write a book.

But something made headlines around the world today that got my Conspiracy Senses tingling. Apparently, a "fleet" of Iranian high speed boats manuevered agressively in the presence of a bunch of American warships and for no apparent reason threatened to blow them all up. Bush goes on air calling this "provocative action" and, lo and behold, hops on a plane the very next day for a trip to Israel.

Now, normally I'm not one to get swept up into conspiracy theories. I'm quick to concede that alot of really weird things happen in this world that, if you didn't know better, would look as if someone planned them. But the timing of this just seemed really odd. Is it possible that President Bombsalot had the foresight to pull a Tonkin just before he boarded a plane to one of the most warlike countries on the face of the Earth? Surely his BFF Olmert would take that as face value, even if he thought it was fake, and the U.S. Corporate media--which so far has missed no opportunity to regurgitate Bushite propaganda on Iran--would be slow as hell to call him on it.

At first I thought I was just being paranoid, but then I saw this:


It comes in about the last thirty seconds of the tape where the video suddenly cuts away and goes to an audio clip, apparently from the bridge of the USS Hopper. Now, let's look past the fact mister "I'm coming for you... you are going to explode in a few minutes" has this weird sort of Midwestern accent that sounds like he's from Milkwaukee. Let's even look past the fact that he's talking in a growl like he's trying to disguise his voice. Let's even look past the fact that there's no logical reason for the audio to be so thoroughly disconnected from the video, seeing how the first part of the clip was shot from the bridge anyway. Let's look past all of these peculiarities and ask, "What is this?"


It doesn't look like warship to me. Doesn't even look like a motor torpedo boat. It looks a civilian speedboat with a couple of Yamaha outboard motors. It's not flying any flag, it has no visible markings, and if you watch the video you find that at least one of the other boats cruising around is painted black and grey. So what was it exactly that prompted Seaman Too-Busy-Shooting-Home-Movies-To-Report-To-My-Battle-Stations Jones to conclude that these were Iranian Revolutionary Guard boats?

Color me paranoid, but the more I chew on this the more it tastes like a sad Bush publicity stunt to sell yet another meaningless war that nobody really wants. It's a stunt that expects us to believe that the Iranian Military would be stupid enough to threaten--much less attack--three U.S. warships with a couple of unarmed speed boats. But then, the Bush Administration expects us to buy most of their other lies (the economy is strong, the Iraqis like being occupied, Chavez is a dictator and Musharraf isn't) no matter how ridiculous they appear, so I guess this one shouldn't be all that surprising. It's just history--and the Vietnam War--repeating itself.