Iranians v. Navy Nukes, and the Boy Who Cried Wolf

The Iranian boat and the US fighting vessel?--Underbelly's military correspondent smelled "Gulf of Tonkin" from the get-go. "Yeah," he snarled in an email that I stamped in at 9:15 a.m. Monday. "Right: you normally play chicken with a destroyer armed with nukes?" I'm not informed enough to contradict him--but comes now the formidable Glenn Greenwald who makes a powerful (if not completely slam-dunk) case that the report was, indeed, a fake (link). Looks to me like Greenwald has the best of it, but consider this possibility: these guys have, at the very least, a real "cry wolf" problem--that is, they've lied so often, and about so much, that we just naturally assume they are lying now.

Remember the BBC in World War II--when they started reporting Allied victories, people believed them because they had conscientiously reported allied defeats.