The Obama administration will say anything to protect their Iranian buddies. Powerline noted the other day that the US, really, the Obama administration, had been humiliated badly. Today we get
(CNN) Â Defense Secretary Ash Carter said that a mistake in navigation was the reason U.S. sailors entered Iranian waters earlier this week.
“I think that this much is clear, there was a navigational error of some kind,” he said at a press conference on Thursday. “All the contributing factors to that we don’t know yet, and we’re still talking to those folks, and we’ll find out more … but they were clearly out of the position that they intended to be in.”
The two U.S. Navy boats seized by Iran with 10 sailors on board were within three miles of Iran’s Farsi Island when the Iranians took them, according to a U.S. defense official directly familiar with the latest information about the incident.
The boats had drifted off course, but one was also suffering engine trouble, making it impossible for the Americans to rapidly back off and return to international waters when they were approached by armed Iranian naval boats, the official said.
I bet you didn’t know that it was a friendly gesture to commandeer foreign flagged vessels, then make the sailors kneel with their hands on their heads, and force a female sailor to comply with Sharia and put a hijab on.
https://twitter.com/NoahCRothman/status/687290811898269697
I’ll repeat what I said the other day: how does this just happen to two US Navy vessels? If one was having mechanical issues, was there a call made to another US Navy vessel? Did the navigational aids for both vessels just happen to happen? Did the sailors in charge of positioning on both boats just happen to mess up? Did no one on the other US Navy vessels in the area fail to note that these vessels, surely being tracked by the bigger boats, were out of position?
One of the boats began to have its engine “run roughly” during the transit from Kuwait to Bahrain, according to the details of what the crew has said. It’s not yet clear at what point they drifted off course, or if they even understood they were off course. It’s not believed the engine trouble was the cause of going off course.
And then they apparently missed a check-in call. Again, one would think that, if there was a mechanical issue, the boat commander would place a comm to one of their superiors on a larger naval vessel. It just doesn’t pass the smell test, unless the smell is the odor of covering Team Obama’s posterior to defend Iran.
(Powerline) IBD quotes Christopher Harmer, retired operations commander for the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet in Bahrain. Harmer told CNN there was “no reason for a small vessel to be out that far and especially without escorting ships around it,†and “the Navy has to explain why you have small ships transiting 300 miles of open ocean.â€
These weren’t some old style boats, but state of the art, highly advanced Combat Boat 90’s. There are too many questions, and not enough answers, and liberals have to admit that if this happened under a Republican president they’d be asking these same questions.
