More evidence of a lack of unified command and control. Iranian Navy has to fight the fight the IRGC yahoos start..

This doesn't make sense unless the Iranians probably wanted to spike the price of crude for a couple of days..

This is how the "Hidden Imam" crap starts to happen..


WASHINGTON (AP) - An Iranian fleet of high-speed boats charged at and threatened to blow up a three-ship U.S. Navy convoy passing near Iranian waters, then vanished as the American ship commanders were preparing to open fire, the top U.S. Navy commander in the area said Monday.

The incident raised new tensions between Washington and Tehran as President Bush prepared to depart Tuesday on his first major trip to the Middle East.

The three U.S. warships - cruiser USS Port Royal, destroyer USS Hopper and frigate USS Ingraham - were headed into the Persian Gulf through the Straits of Hormuz on what the U.S. Navy called a routine passage inside international waters when they were approached by five small high-speed vessels believed to be from Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy.

The Iranians "maneuvered aggressively" in the direction of the U.S. ships, said Vice Adm. Kevin Cosgriff, the commander of U.S. 5th Fleet, which patrols the Gulf and is based at nearby Bahrain. The U.S. ship commanders took a series of steps toward firing on the boats, which approached to within 500 yards, but the Iranians suddenly fled back toward their shore, Cosgriff said.

At one point the U.S. ships received a threatening radio call from the Iranians, "to the effect that they were closing (on) our ships and that the ships would explode - the U.S. ships would explode," Cosgriff said.

"Subsequently, two of these boats were observed dropping objects in the water, generally in the path of the final ship in the formation, the USS Ingraham," he added. "These objects were white, box-like objects that floated. And, obviously, the ship passed by them safely."

The boxes were not retrieved, so U.S. officials do not know whether they posed an actual threat. Cosgriff the U.S. ship commanders were moving through a standard series of actions - including radio calls to the Iranians that went unheeded - but did not reach the point of firing warning shots.

"We take this deadly seriously," Cosgriff told a Pentagon news conference via video link from Bahrain.

http://apnews.myway.com/article/20080107/D8U1AS1G5.html