What really happened to British Navy boarding party?

By Justin Walker

'There is something very fishy going on. HMS Cornwall is a state of the art ship with a radar tracking system that would have seen the Iranian boats as they left port. Why did the captain of HMS Cornwall not go to cut off the Iranians?. Why did the gemini boats not fight or at least run away when they saw the six boats coming?. No RN captain would send its people out without protection! Either the captain is an incompetent fool OR he was ordered to stand by and do nothing!' -- Beryl Hutchinson, Larnaca, Cyprus

'Knowing the waters well and having been myself 'captured' by the IRG, something smells here. Cornwall had the eye in the sky (helicopter) watching overhead, the zodiac boats can do 30 knots and the interdict was approx 2 miles from Cornwall. How did they not see the Iranian fleet steam up and 'surround' the zodiacs? How do you surround a rubber dinghy capable of 30 knots. Or is this the issue the USA has been needing to justify an offensive move against Iran?' -- Phillip Carr, Sherborne

The above people made these comments in the BBC 'Have Your Say' section of the BBC News website. If you know anything about the military and how things are done, there is absolutely no way that these poor sailors and marines were accidently allowed to be captured - this was a carefully planned 'psych op' to escalate British and overseas public opinion into accepting military action against Iran.

Poor Faye Turney -- interviewed by the BBC just moments before she went out on this 'routine' search of a 'smuggling' ship. We all know from our research into 9/11 that you have to believe in huge coincidences if you are to believe the official story. Well how about this ... there are currently thousands of British servicemen and women operating in Iraq and the Gulf and, guess what, not only does the BBC embed itself with the actual ship that was going to be involved with this major news story (along with selected newspaper journalists), but they also just happen to interview the young woman a couple of hours before she goes out on patrol. The 'hidden hand' needs a human face to get the most from this sort of operation -- if it were just fifteen hunky males in trouble, we would be concerned but not that concerned ... but a young mother with a three-year-old waiting back home for Mummy to come back, now that's something to really get people animated about.

Now to the actual capture itself. The military always, when they put their people into harms way, ensure that close support is available in the form of immediate firepower and reinforcements. The only exception to this are Special Forces who are trained to operate independently of other friendly units and to be able to operate behind enemy lines without immediate backup. A boarding party from a Royal Navy ship are not Special Forces, even though half of them in this particular case were Royal Marine commandos. The normal procedure for a Royal Navy boarding party is for their ship to place itself in a position were it can give covering or warning fire from its most appropriate weaponry, which in this case would have been shipboard mounted GPMGs (General Purpose Machine Guns) and the ship's helicopter. In other words, the boarding party's ship would be no more than 1800 metres (effective range of a mounted GPMG) away from the designated ship to be searched. So what happened in this particular case -- how far away was HMS Cornwall from this freighter? If it was further than two kilometres then that boarding party was deliberately sent out to be captured ... and if Cornwall was within two kilometres then why no support given with warning shots?

HMS Cornwall is bristling with radar and high tech surveillance devices -- how come they did not pick up the Iranian Revolutionary Guard's patrol boats as they were approaching the RN boarding party? And what about the helicopter -- one report says it was sent away when it was seen that the boarding party had received a friendly welcome from the suspected freighter. If that's true, then this is a break with normal SOPs (standing operational procedures).

It is also reported that the Cornwall had communication problems with the boarding party -- now problems with radios do occur, but the ship should have been close enough for other forms of communications to be used (lights, rockets and signal flags) in order to alert the boarding party as to the Iranian patrol boats movements. We also learn from other sources that Commodore Nick Lambert, senior naval officer in the area, was desperately trying to sort out Rules of Engagement with the Ministry of Defence in London and that hesitation here prevented any action from being taken to save the boarding party from capture. Excuse me! Rules of Engagement are decided before deployment and are constantly reviewed, and at no time would you put your people into harms way without knowing your latest Rules of Engagement.

One final thing -- the Rigid Inflatable Boats (RIBs) used by the boarding party are capable of over 30 knots and, as we have seen when Greenpeace use them effectively, are extremely manouvreable. I just find it very strange that skilful avoiding tactics using excellent boatmanship (which you would expect from the Royal Navy), but not firing any shots to exacerbate the situation, were not used by the boarding party to get back to the Cornwall -- assuming of course the Cornwall was at a distance offering 'close support'.

The Ministry of Defence should give us an accurate, minute by minute, account of what happened, but my belief is that we will never know the full truth. Let's hope that some of the Navy personnel involved will speak out.