Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGG) faked an entire video claiming to show American warships transiting disputed waters in the Persian Gulf by piecing together old scraps of unrelated footage, French analysis confirms.

The original video, published by the IRGC on April 28, allegedly showed the flight deck of a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier and was used to advance the claim that Iran was spying on the American military. It went public just weeks after Washington placed the IRGC on its list of terrorist organisations.

As Breitbart News reported, Iran’s Tasnim news agency claimed a camera-equipped Iran Revolutionary Guards’ spy drone captured the footage.

It said a Guard drone flew over the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower and another U.S. warship in the Persian Gulf. The images show fighter planes parked on the carrier deck.

A high definition footage obtained by #IRGC naval forces shows the #US warships being closely monitored in the #PersianGulf waters, south of #Iranhttps://t.co/BEaY2NhbIL pic.twitter.com/k8Pzh8wdGO — Tasnim News Agency (@Tasnimnews_EN) April 27, 2019

A week after the film was first made public, it was dismissed by the U.S. Navy as “several years old.”

Now France 24 has used Google Earth satellite images to determine the video was taken prior to December 2017, when work was undertaken to extend the landing strip used to show the drone’s original takeoff.

Photos taken after that date show that the surface area of the landing strip is increasing, while the one seen in the video resembles the strip before work began.

The overhead view of the aircraft carrier is similarly called into question. The images are of good quality, but there are no markers in the viewfinder, like GPS coordinates and image scale, that are usually included in footage taken by military drones, France 24 reports.

The images allegedly taken by the IRGC drone were in fact generated by a computer.

This is further supported by the fact that the aircraft are missing key identifying factors. The planes on the flight deck do not have inscriptions that would allow us to determine their registration number and the unit to which they belong.

The military ships are also missing these details, though the aircraft carrier emblazoned with the number 69 appears to be a reproduction of USS Dwight D. Eisenhower.

In all, everything about the Iran video can be deconstructed to show its pretence is built on shallow artifice.