DRONES OVER IRAN: YAWN

The Washington Post may have put the story on page one. Drudge may have hyped it in gajillion-​​point type. But, really, I don’t see why peo­ple are mak­ing such a fuss over the fact that the U.S. has been fly­ing unmanned spy planes over Iran.
After all, we found out last month that American troops have been run­ning covert raids on Iranian soil, to gather intel­li­gence on Tehran’s nuclear pro­gram. And there’s been word for weeks that American jets of some kind have been buzzing through Iranian air­space, test­ing the Mullah’s early-​​warning sys­tems. So it’s only nat­ural, these days, to have drones sup­port these efforts.
There was one inter­est­ing part of that story, though: that “the drones were first spot­ted by dozens of Iranian civil­ians and set off a national news­pa­per frenzy in late December over whether the coun­try was being vis­ited by UFOs.“
Now, if the Pentagon had sent fly­ing saucers to Iran, that would have been some news.
THERE’S MORE: Fox News is trum­pet­ing a head­line that the “Pentagon Denies Flying Drones Over Iran.” But inside the body of the arti­cle, noth­ing of the sort takes place.
“Senior Defense Department offi­cials said Monday they have no knowl­edge of any U.S. drone flights over Iran,” accord­ing to Fox, “and U.S. intel­li­gence offi­cials would not com­ment on any such flights.“
Maybe Fox had its green­est rook­ies report­ing this story. But hav­ing “no knowl­edge” of some­thing is a clas­sic non-​​denial denial — a cover-​​your-​​ass move, not a straight answer. And any reporter with more than a month of expe­ri­ence would know the difference.

February 14th, 2005 | Drones | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.