Flaws in US version of tanker narrative exposed by veteran navy officer

Nafeez Ahmed

The administration in Washington is not known to tell the truth, since American officials, whether civilian or military, are raised on preposterous lies, which they continue to utter throughout their careers in the misconstrued belief that they are fooling the world by blaming their opponents.

Here we present you an interesting analytical exposure of the recent sabotage incidents of vessels in the Gulf of Oman for the ‘Insurge Intelligence’ site by its founding editor, investigative journalist Nafeez Ahmed, titled: “Flaws in US Version of Tanker Narrative Exposed by Veteran Navy Officer”.

The Trump administration has released a range of photographic and video footage of its allegation that Iran attacked a Japanese-owned oil tanker near the Strait of Hormuz, but a Canadian military analyst and former Navy officer for nearly twenty years has called the footage into question, highlighting unresolved anomalies in the US version of events. His reservations are backed by Japanese government sources.

A number of other actors — the US, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Israel — as well as other extremist groups, have been flagged as potential culprits in the attacks that Donald Trump administration views as a new plan for ‘American Energy Dominance’.

The US government, citing the statement of a so-called explosives expert of the American navy, claims that its grainy video, including supposed fragments of an exploded weapon and a magnet from an unexploded device, indicates that limpet mines were attached to the side of the oil tankers, and that Iran possess these mines.  

This claim, however, is challenged by the analysis of a veteran navy officer. According to Dr. Gwynne Dyer who has served as a Reserve Naval Officer in the Canadian Naval Reserve, US Naval Reserve, and British Navy Reserve for a total of 17 years, the alleged US intelligence about the recent incidents in the Gulf of Oman does not add up.

He calls the US claim incoherent and unconvincing. His analysis coheres with that of the private US intelligence firm Stratfor, which notes of the spate of recent attacks that while Iran would have reason to control movement of vessels around its territory “to send a message of resolve in the face of Washington’s economic and military pressure, on second thought, it doesn’t make strategic sense for Iran to target Japanese or European vessels at a time when it is seeking to retain the EU’s political and economic support.”

The intelligence firm Strafor suggests that culprits might include al-Qaeda, and other regional radical outfits that have a similar modus operandi of targeting oil tankers.

Writing in a local Canadian newspaper, Dr. Dyer — who has taught military history and war studies at the Canadian Forces College in Toronto and the British Military Academy in Sandhurst — observed that as limpet mines “cling to ships’ hulls by magnetic force but have to be placed by hand. This means they were probably placed while the ships were in port”, because it is: “almost impossible to place a limpet mine once a ship is underway, since other boats cannot come close enough without being spotted, and swimmers (including scuba divers) cannot keep up.”

This analysis contradicts the explanation initially put forward in a joint statement by the UAE, Norway, and Saudi Arabia at a UN briefing, alleging that limpet mines were placed by divers deployed by speed boats.

All six tankers that have been attacked sailed from ports in Saudi Arabia or the UAE.

According to Dr. Dyer, given the implausibility of the mines being deployed as suggested by the UAE, Norway and Saudi Arabia, this suggests that the mines would have been planted on the tankers before departure. But this raises other questions.

In Dr. Dyer’s words: “So, is security in Saudi and UAE ports so lax, even after the first attacks in May, that foreign agents can plant limpet mines on tankers before they sail?”

US officials, in an apparent botched effort to cover-up their complicity, have released a grainy aerial video of a supposed small Iranian boat at one of the tankers Guards allegedly removing an unexploded limpet mine.

But this too makes little sense for Dyer, who says: “Limpet mines are generally fitted with ‘anti-handling devices’ (i.e. they explode when you try to remove them), and yet everybody on that boat crowded onto the bow as if to get as close to the explosion as possible.”

Dyer raises the possibility that the mines could have been planted surreptitiously by Saudi Arabia or the UAE in order to generate a justification for a long-desired war on Iran. He mentions the potential role of Israel but argues that the former would be unlikely to consent to their regional dabbling.

According to him: “The leading candidates are Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, the two Arab countries that are doing their best to push the United States into a war against Iran on their behalf. Benjamin Netanyahu would also love to see the US attack Iran, but one doubts that Israel’s de facto Arab allies would want special Zionist forces operating openly on their territory.”

Japanese government officials, however, appear to be even less convinced of the US position. A senior Japanese government official told the daily ‘Japan Today’. “The US explanation has not helped us go beyond speculation.”

The newspaper quoted a government source close to Prime Minister Shinzo Abe who responded to US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s claim that the US assessment was based on intelligence, the weapons used, the level of expertise needed to execute the operation, and the fact that no group operating in the area has the resources and proficiency to act with such a high degree of sophistication.

The Japanese source close to the prime minister commented: “These are not definite proof that it’s Iran. Even if it’s the United States that makes the assertion, we cannot simply say we believe it.”

A separate government source at the Japanese Foreign Ministry went further, suggesting that Pompeo’s own criteria of sophisticated expertise sufficient to conduct the attack might implicate both the US and Israel, He said: “That would apply to the United States and Israel as well.”

US National Security Advisor, John Bolton, who is notorious for his anti-Iran views, claimed that he had advanced warning of the attacks, claiming that the US intelligence on Iran’s alleged role in earlier attacks on oil tankers in May came from the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad.

Zionist sources, in league with the warmongering Bolton, claim that Mossad had tipped off the United States on an impending Iranian attack on American interests in the Persian Gulf, prompting Washington to deploy an aircraft carrier strike group to the region, in a sharp escalation of US President Donald Trump’s pressure campaign.

These doubtful sources further claim that Israeli officials conveyed information gathered by Mossad on an alleged Iranian plan to attack either a US or US-allied target.

The alleged intelligence was reportedly passed on by Israeli National Security Advisor Meir Ben Shabbat to his counterpart, John Bolton, in April — a month prior to the May attacks on four oil tankers off the coast of Fujairah.

According to Bolton himself, the meeting with Ben Shabbat covered “our shared commitment to countering Iranian activity & other actors in West Asia & around the world.”

According to independent observers, these claims of having advanced information, do not implicate Iran in the oil tanker blasts, but point to the plans of both the US and its surrogate, the Zionist regime, to carry out such acts of sabotage as false flag operations, in a bid to lay the blame on the Islamic Republic.

The conclusions of the US-Israel intelligence coordination, as claimed by the joint John Bolton-Ben Shabbat statement, even after the Fujairah tanker attacks, does not seem to match British intelligence assessments that Iran does not pose a threat.

At a recent Pentagon press conference, a senior British military official, Major General Chris Ghika — a deputy commander of Operation Inherent Resolve, the coalition conducting operations against Daesh in Iraq and Syria — contradicted the US position when he remarked that “No — there’s been no threat from Iranian-backed forces” in the region. “We monitor them along with a whole range of others because that’s the environment we’re in.”

So, in view of these fact, who really wants a war?

The answer is obvious. It is not Iran, but subversive elements who have disturbed peace of the region, such as Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Israel, who are pressuring the US for war. 

Military analyst Gwynne Dyer suggests that Iran has the capability to easily shut down the Strait of Hormuz, if the need arises, and in such a case, the transport of a significant portion of the world’s oil supplies would be stopped, triggering catastrophic price hikes and the collapse of major Western economies.

The Islamic Republic of Iran has clearly said that it neither carry out the tanker blasts, nor does it want war, but, if attacked, it will resolutely defend itself and make the aggressor pay dearly for its blunder.

Dr. Dyer points out that while President Donald Trump’s intentions are unclear, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National Security Adviser John Bolton “probably do want a war with Iran. They would never say that, but they spin every bit of data in as anti-Iran a direction as possible. That includes, of course, their analysis of who is behind these attacks.”

During Bolton’s previous tenure in the US government, evidence emerged that the Bush administration had attempted to fabricate an incident which could be used to justify a long-planned military strike on Iran

According to a former senior US intelligence official, a meeting in the office of the then US Vice-President Dick Cheney in 2005 occurred a few weeks after five Iranian patrol boats approached three US Navy warships in the Strait of Hormuz.

Press reports described Iranian ship-to-ship radio transmissions threatening to “explode” the warships, but within a week, an internal Pentagon inquiry concluded that there was no evidence that the Iranian boats were the source of the transmissions, and that they originated from a prankster long known for sending fake messages in the region. Regarding the meeting with Cheney, the former US official said that: The subject was how to create a casus belli between Tehran and Washington.”

The story of the latest incident is further complicated by the testimony of the Japanese owner of the tanker, who said that sailors on board the ship had seen something flying toward it just before the explosion above the waterline.

Yutaka Katada, president of Kokaku Sangyo Company said at a press conference in Tokyo: “We received reports that something flew towards the ship. The place where the projectile landed was significantly higher than the water level, so we are absolutely sure that this wasn’t a torpedo. I do not think there was a time bomb or an object attached to the side of the ship.”

These eyewitness accounts expose the lies of Trump and team to implicate Iran in tanker blasts,

US hostility toward Iran comes in the context of the escalation of the Trump administration’s plan for “American Energy Dominance”.

In May, the White House issued a triumphant statement on Trump’s efforts to “open up new export opportunities for American energy producers, saying: “We are exporting more and more energy as production soars and President Trump negotiates better market access for our producers.”

The White House statement also trumpeted the government’s success in rolling back environmental regulations and climate change commitments.

While oil exports have nearly doubled, and US liquid natural gas (LNG) exports have increased by 272 percent, they are nowhere near where the US administration wants them to be.

In the New York Times late last year, Bethany McLean — who famously reported on the Enron scandal — warned that the shale boom driving Trump’s export ambitions could be about to grind to a halt as the industry’s mounting debts, declining profits and dwindling production rates come home to roost.

US shale is still expensive and over the last decade Iran had successfully captured much of America’s hoped for export market despite sanctions. Iran is a major oil and gas supplier to China, India, Korea and Turkey. It also supplies European markets, namely Italy, Spain, France and Greece, along with Japan and the UAE. Asian buyers in particular have explored the possibility of purchasing Iranian oil in currencies other than the dollar to bypass US sanctions.

Iran is thus a major geopolitical competitor to the Trump administration’s export plans, as well as to the role of the dollar as the de facto reserve currency for the global oil trade. The Trump administration has made no secret of its ambition to take Iranian oil exports down to zero with a view to undermine Iran’s economy, and the sabotage of oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman are part of this American strategy.