The case of how ten U.S. sailors came to be detained in Iranian waters may be maddeningly simple, according to Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., but it’s impossible to say for sure just yet.
“Some people are saying that they just decided to take a shortcut,” McCain told the Washington Examiner on Wednesday. “Now, whether it’s that simple or not, I do not know.”
That explanation would go against Secretary of State John Kerry’s insistence that the two U.S. patrol boats entered Iranian waters “inadvertently.” McCain, a former Navy pilot, wouldn’t say who had promoted the alternative theory. But he said the Pentagon’s slow pace of releasing information on the two-week old incident is raising questions in Congress.
“We’re still trying to get the details from the Defense Department, which makes me wonder,” he said.
Rep. Ryan Zinke, R.-Mont., who served 23 years as a Navy SEAL, suggested that “Iranian jamming” of the boats’ GPS systems might have caused the sailors to leave international waters by mistake.
“It seems to me that a number of very straightforward planning considerations either weren’t planned, or the plan wasn’t followed,” Zinke told the Examiner on Tuesday. “Where did the Iranians intercept them? Did they intercept them with a superior force? Were they actually in Iranian territorial waters or were they in international waters?”
