White House quietly corrects statement on Iran’s nuclear capabilities, hopes nobody will notice
The administration did not issue a formal correction or publicize the change.
The White House issued a significant correction to an earlier statement it had made regarding Iran’s nuclear capabilities on Monday night, shifting its stance dramatically, with little fanfare.
On Monday morning, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu held a press conference during which he laid out a trove of documents he claimed proved Iran was running a secret nuclear weapons program, in violation of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. “Iran lied, big time,” he said.
In response to that presentation, the White House issued its own statement to reporters at around 7:30 p.m., according to CNN, condemning the “new” findings.
“The United States is aware of the information just released by Israel and continues to examine it carefully,” White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders wrote in an official statement. “These facts are consistent with what the United States has long known: Iran has a robust, clandestine nuclear weapons program that it has tried and failed to hide from the world and from its own people.”
As the day wore on, however, it became obvious that the information Netanyahu had presented to the public was actually outdated — most of it from the period between 1993 and 2003, The Atlantic notes — and likely part of a broader scheme to convince Trump to withdraw the United States from the Iran agreement. An assessment by Defense Secretary Jim Mattis on Thursday, as well as one he gave in October, also contradicted Netanyahu’s claim that the nuclear deal was ineffective.
The White House, perhaps hoping to avoid an incident, subsequently took stock of its situation and quietly issued a minor, but drastic correction to its initial statement at around 9:30 p.m. Monday night, posting the amended version to the WhiteHouse.gov website.
“These facts are consistent with what the United States has long known,” the new statement read. “Iran had a robust, clandestine nuclear weapons program that it has tried and failed to hide from the world and from its own people.”
The subtle swap from “has” to “had” shifted the tone of the statement substantially, pushing the administration’s accusation from the present to the past tense.
After multiple outlets made note of the differences between the two statements, the White House on Tuesday told reporters that the original wording had simply been the result of a “clerical error.”
https://thinkprogress.org/white-house-qu...t-145ff2856326/
"
| 22.901 Beiträge
zitieren
| 74 Beiträge
Besucher
Forum Statistiken
