Bush calls Iran provocateurs: US backtracks on the Iranian speedboat incident

John Amato, Crooks and Liars: Here ’s the video of the Iranian speed boat incident via the US Navy.

While going to a peace summit, President Bush had this to say the other day about the Iranian boat incident:

We viewed it as a provocative act,” Mr. Bush told reporters in the Rose Garden, just hours before he left for a weeklong trip to the Middle East. “It is a dangerous situation, and they should not have done it, pure and simple.”

I guess attacking a country that didn’t attack us was an act of kindness to him. This sure sounds like Iranian warmongering to me. However, the US is backtracking on the incident saying that:

Just two days after the U.S. Navy released the eerie video of Iranian speedboats swarming around American warships, which featured a chilling threat in English, the Navy is saying that the voice on the tape could have come from the shore or from another ship.

We’re saying that we cannot make a direct connection to the boats there,” said the spokesperson. “It could have come from the shore, from another ship passing by. However, it happened in the middle of all the very unusual activity, so as we assess the information and situation, we still put it in the total aggregate of what happened Sunday morning. I guess we’re not saying that it absolutely came from the boats, but we’re not saying it absolutely didn’t.”

And as Think Progress found out: Official Version of Naval Incident Starts to Unravel. Mike posted this in his round up, but Newshoggers have a nice full round up of the story