US President Donald Trump on Friday blamed Iran for attacks on oil tankers near the strategic Strait of Hormuz, but he also held out hope that implicit US threats to use force would yield talks with the Islamic Republic as the Pentagon considers beefing up defenses in the Persian Gulf area.
A day after explosions blew holes in two oil tankers just outside Iran’s territorial waters, rattling international oil markets, the Trump administration seemed caught between pressure to punish Iran and reassuring Washington’s Arab allies without drawing the US closer to war.
“Iran did it,” Trump said on Fox News Channel’s Fox & Friends.
He did not offer evidence, but the US military has released a video it said showed the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps removing an unexploded mine from one of the oil tankers targeted near the Strait of Hormuz, suggesting that Tehran wanted to cover its tracks.
By pointing the finger at Iran, Trump was keeping a public spotlight on an adversary he accuses of terrorism, but has also invited to negotiate. The approach is similar to his diplomacy with North Korea, which has quieted talk of war, but not yet achieved his goal of nuclear disarmament.
Iran has shown little sign of backing down, creating uncertainty about how far the Trump administration can go with its campaign of increasing pressure through sanctions.
Iran denied any involvement in the attacks and accused Washington of waging an “Iranophobic campaign” of economic warfare.
A US Navy team was on Friday collecting forensic evidence aboard one of the tankers, the Japanese-owned Kokuka Courageous, said a US official who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Apparently alluding to the US video, Trump said that Iran’s culpability had been “exposed.”
He did not say what he intended to do about it, but suggested that “very tough” US sanctions, including efforts to strangle Iranian oil revenue, would have the desired effect.
“They’ve been told in very strong terms we want to get them back to the table,” Trump said.
Just a day earlier, the president took the opposite view, saying on Twitter that it was “too soon to even think about making a deal” with Iran’s leaders.
“They are not ready, and neither are we,” he said on Twitter.
Last month, the US ended waivers that allowed some countries to continue buying Iranian oil, a move that is starving Iran of oil income and that coincided with what US officials called a surge in intelligence pointing to Iranian preparations for attacks against US forces and interests in the Persian Gulf region.
In response to those intelligence warnings, the US on May 5 announced that it was accelerating the deployment of the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier battle group to the region.
It also sent four nuclear-capable strategic bombers to Qatar and has beefed up its defenses in the region by deploying more Patriot air-defense systems.
Pentagon deliberations about possibly sending more military resources to the region, including more Patriot missile batteries, could be accelerated by Thursday’s dramatic attack on the oil tankers, officials said.
At the Pentagon, Acting US Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan said that Iran is not just a US problem.
The US’ goal is to “build international consensus to this international problem,” and to ensure that US military commanders in the region get the resources and support they need, he said.
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
RSS