After John Bolton issued a statement on May 5 about “troubling and escalatory indications” from Iran, Americans have heard a barrage of reports from reputable news organizations echoing charges about Iran’s “troubling” actions.
Now U.S. aircraft carriers are said to on the move while Saudi Arabia reporters its oil tankers have supposedly been sabotaged.
It’s all very reminiscent of the run-up to the disastrous invasion of Iraq in 2003. Yet Bolton, with a long record of misrepresenting intelligence reporting, is still treated as a reputable source by the credulous Barbara Starr of CNN.
Ben Armbruster cuts through the static at LobeLog.
Instead of expressing skepticism about such a statement from someone who’s been gunning for war with Iran for nearly two decades, and from an administration that has been doing the same for the past two and a half years, reports from U.S. mainstream media outlets basically served as a public relations service, simply repeating Bolton’s statement with little scrutiny across multiple mediums. For example, this was a headline from CNN the next day: “US deploying carrier and bomber task force in response to US deploying carrier and bomber task force in response to ‘troubling’ Iran actions.”
In fact, the U.S. military describes such deployments are “routine” and that stated the carrier group in question, the Lincoln Carrier Strike Group, had already been deployed to “the Central Command region,” as Bolton put it in his statement.
The Daily Beast reported last week that that “multiple sources close to the situation” said Bolton and Team Trump blew the intelligence on Iran “out of proportion, characterizing the threat as more significant than it actually was.”
