The US/Korea antisubmarine maneuvers in the Yellow Sea are over and the silence is deafening. The news media has dropped the story. According to various Internet sites, the US Government pushed the story out of the 24-hour news cycle and censored footage of the exercises, though the European arm of CNN has posted this footage. [Scroll down below the fold.]
http://theintelhub.com/2010/11/30/cnn-aboard-uss-george-washington-censored-in-america/
Curiously, the US military has released a b-roll.
http://www.dvidshub.net/video/101695/uss-george-washington-flight-operations
Digging around for clues as to what really happened only produced circumstantial evidence. The big geophysical question was not answered in the media or commented on by the military organizations involved: Did the USS George Washington stay clear of China’s “exclusive economic zone”, effectively conceding to China’s rejection of international “law” which sets a country’s maritime boundary 14 miles from the shore. Did the Chinese, in effect, push the US Navy back a few more miles away from its shores and further its version of the Monroe Doctrine which would exclude the US Navy from the Yellow, East and South China Seas?
The hint that this accommodation did, in fact, get done and that is why North Korea has backed down can be gleaned from some very curious photos posted by both the Chinese and US military on the Internet. The China photo is the clearest and shows a screen in the control room of the USS George Washington with a vertical white line in the middle of the Yellow Sea. [It is photo #9 at the url below].
This photo must have been released by the US Navy and it is interesting that the Chinese military web site made sure that it was posted. The Western news organizations did not highlight this particular view of the control desk in their reports, but one in which the vertical white line is hard to see.
So the US Government blinked. Perhaps it sent some submarines or submersibles into the “exclusive economic zone” just to remind the Chinese that naval war is changing and that aircraft carriers are relics of past wars that are used for symbolic purposes to influence public opinion. As the reporter for CNN stated the sound of jets landing and the vibrations they cause when they stop abruptly make for great “b-roll”.
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Here is an example of the official Chinese spin on the crisis for internal consumption. Mean old America is trying to cause a break up between close friends — not very perceptive Mr. Li Hongmei when your Government gave the order to attack.
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