It's something straight out of a tired, if not ominously routine international spy thriller. A somewhat wooden-looking commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps naval forces, standing before a large map of the Persian Gulf, sings Tehran's recent seizing of a US spy drone, an in-tact ScanEagle long-endurance unmanned aerial vehicle. Above the map, in writing, the warning: "We will trample the US under our feet."
That's according to a video report released Tuesday by the state-controlled Press TV. It comes at a moment of increasing tensions over Tehran's nuclear ambitions, which have American forces showing muscle by sea, a point Rear Admiral Ali Fadavi plays up in the report. He says that his forces "hunted down" the ScanEagle, a 4-foot spy plane—perfect for launching off ships—made by Boeing, when it entered Iranian airspace over the gulf, forcing ("spoofing") the drone to land electronically.
Didn't this just happen? Yes—twice.