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Pentagon 'will use force'
09/01/2008 19:40 - (SA)
Washington - The Pentagon warned on Wednesday it is prepared to use force if its warships are threatened in international waters and dismissed as "absurd" an Iranian claim that it faked a video of an incident in the Strait of Hormuz.
"In the future we will follow very formal, deliberate procedures for dealing with threats like this as we did in the past," said Pentagon spokesperson Bryan Whitman.
"We were fortunate that we did not have to escalate to the use of force, but as always we are prepared to if our vessels are threatened in international waters," he told reporters.
His comments were the latest in a war of words over an incident on Sunday in which the Pentagon said five Iranian speedboats swarmed three US warships in the Strait of Hormuz and radioed a threat to blow them up.
The warships radioed warnings, blew their horns and took evasive manoeuvres but no shots were fired, Pentagon officials said.
The Pentagon on Tuesday released a video to support its charge that the Iranian boats engaged in reckless and provocative manoeuvres around the ships in international waters.
It also made public an audiotape in which a voice is heard to declare: "You will explode in a few minutes".
Iran accused the United State of "clumsily" fabricating the evidence.
"The pictures that the Pentagon broadcast of the naval incident are file pictures and the voices have all been fabricated," the Fars news agency quoted a senior commander in the Iranian Revolutionary Guards as saying.
"The voices and pictures broadcast by the Pentagon about the latest incident have been fabricated so clumsily that the pictures and voices in the video are not even synchronised," the Guards commander added.
"That fact that it is a fake is clear to all."
Whitman said the Iranian accusation "is absurd and factually incorrect and reflects a lack of seriousness with which they take this serious incident".
- AFP
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