White House proffers "proofs" without a face on Iran
By Libby Spencer
As promised, the White House has delivered its "proof" that Iran is secretly arming Shia militia with these new IEDs. Cernig has already exposed the holes in their theory to the point of making Swiss cheese of their spurious contentions so I won't repeat it here. Go over and read his post but I will add this much.
If the White House is so secure in their intel, why did they provide it in a super secret press conference where it was presented by some unnamed sources and reporters were not allowed recording devices or to photograph the evidence but were instead provided a pre-made Pentagon disk of photos? I have a theory about that.
I'd guess that they've learned at least this lesson from their cooked intel on Iraq. The propaganda failed because there was so much on the public record, most especially including video footage of White House spokespersons making fraudulent claims, that now bedevil their credibility. If there's no public record outside of unillustrated news articles that they can later dismiss as partisan hackery, it will make plausible denialability all the easier down the line, when these new "proofs" are similiarly exposed as ginned up "alternate intelligence."
Update: Whole lot of debunking going on. Scott Horton has much more. [hat tip Lester]
Update Two: Cernig checks in with a link to the first photo released from the disk. I guess I wasn't that far off when I suggested it takes a long time to engrave serial numbers on shrapnel. It does seem somewhat odd that a bomb allegedly manufactured in Iran would use English instead of Farsi. I think it gives my plausible denialability theory a little credence as well.
(Cross-posted at The Impolitic.)
As promised, the White House has delivered its "proof" that Iran is secretly arming Shia militia with these new IEDs. Cernig has already exposed the holes in their theory to the point of making Swiss cheese of their spurious contentions so I won't repeat it here. Go over and read his post but I will add this much.
If the White House is so secure in their intel, why did they provide it in a super secret press conference where it was presented by some unnamed sources and reporters were not allowed recording devices or to photograph the evidence but were instead provided a pre-made Pentagon disk of photos? I have a theory about that.
I'd guess that they've learned at least this lesson from their cooked intel on Iraq. The propaganda failed because there was so much on the public record, most especially including video footage of White House spokespersons making fraudulent claims, that now bedevil their credibility. If there's no public record outside of unillustrated news articles that they can later dismiss as partisan hackery, it will make plausible denialability all the easier down the line, when these new "proofs" are similiarly exposed as ginned up "alternate intelligence."
Update: Whole lot of debunking going on. Scott Horton has much more. [hat tip Lester]
Update Two: Cernig checks in with a link to the first photo released from the disk. I guess I wasn't that far off when I suggested it takes a long time to engrave serial numbers on shrapnel. It does seem somewhat odd that a bomb allegedly manufactured in Iran would use English instead of Farsi. I think it gives my plausible denialability theory a little credence as well.
(Cross-posted at The Impolitic.)
Labels: Iran, Iraq, White House
posted by Libby Spencer at
11:18 AM
2 Comments:
Of course it stinks and would smell as fishy even if they didn't have such a proven history of manufacturing "evidence."
Even if these things are Iranian, there is no way to determine how they arrived - whether they were planted by the US or purchased on the international arms market through brokers or from some other government sympathetic to the Shiite insurgency or unsympathetic to the US.
By
Capt. Fogg, at 1:21 PM
I'm so jaded at this point I wouldn't believe the Iranians are delivering them unless I saw verified footage of Khamenei personally handing them to Sadr.
By
Libby Spencer, at 12:33 PM
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