WARMONGERS WILL HAVE TO WAIT …
|| By FITSNEWS || The U.S. Department of Defense says media reports about a U.S.-flagged cargo ship being seized by the Iranian Navy are false.
Al-Arabiya – a Saudi Arabian news outlet – reported that an American vessel had been seized in the Strait of Hormuz, with thirty-four U.S. crew members taken hostage. The station added that an Iranian warship had fired on the vessel, and “directed it to Bandar Abbas port on the southern coast of Iran.”
Pentagon sources say there was an incident in the Strait of Hormuz – a Persian Gulf bottleneck where twenty percent of the world’s oil is transported – but the container ship involved is registered in the Marshall Islands.
The ship – a container vessel called the Maersk Tigris – was bound for the port of Jebel Ali in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. No Americans were on board, according to the Pentagon.
This is the second time in recent weeks America’s military leaders have disputed accounts of naval activity in the Persian Gulf.
Last week, the Pentagon rebuked an Associated Press report which claimed the U.S.S. Theodore Roosevelt was “steaming toward the waters off Yemen” for the purpose of intercepting Iranian ships.
In other words America’s warmongers (young and old) will have to wait a little longer for our Middle Eastern interventionism to produce the desired response.
12 comments
Per the Marshall Islands agreements with the USA, the US Navy would still be responsible for the protection of that ship.
The Compact of Free Association with the United States gives the U.S. sole responsibility for international defense of the Marshall Islands. It allows islanders to live and work in the United States, and establishes economic and technical aid programs.
Maersk is a Denmark based shipping conglomerate. One of their ships, the Maersk Alabama was the ship involved in the Captain Phillips Somalia hijacking. Very, very few non US based ships transiting the world have US Crewmembers.
And the Marshall Islands are a US protectorate “… with the US providing defense, subsidies, and access to social services. …”.
You are almost certainly right about the non-US crew.
The ship is definitely headed to Bandar Abbas – probably 6-8 miles away making just headway as of about 20 minutes ago. It has entered an area where ships moor prior to making port for loading/unloading well inside Iran’s territorial waters.
It will be interesting to see what the Command in Chief chooses to do here. if it were me, there’d be a couple more Iranian patrol boats on the bottom pf the Persian Gulf.
Now that we’ve joined Al Qaeda in their fight against Iran, maybe we can get permission to fly their flag on our ships, no?
We’ve only got about 470 US flagged merchant ships, it wouldn’t be worth the effort.
lol
That’s great, it starts with an earthquake. Birds and snakes, an aeroplane.
Leo..nard Bernstein
(only part of the song I know)
Here’s another one that popped up https://ca.news.yahoo.com/maersk-tigris-ship-manager-declines-pentagon-says-iran-153907921.html
I read somewhere else that destroyers are being sent to the Iranian coast.
Who’s right? Who’s wrong? News ain’t what it used to be.
Imagine if these truth-spilling spoilsports had spoiled it for Tonkin.
You know something is true when Washington denies it before it is even reported.