Busted

by emptywheel

Justin Rood is much more generous than Jeff Stein, in his description of how Assistant Secretary of State Chris Hill got caught making claims about Iranian-North Korean ties he couldn't substantiate. Rood says:

Experts Stein spoke with agreed: it wouldn't be unheard of for Iran to watch a North Korean test -- in fact, they did so in 1993. Perhaps Hill was confused about the dates. Perhaps he spoke out of class. Or perhaps the intelligence doesn't actually exist.

Jeff Stein, who noticed the AP's scoop on this, is a little less cautious:

With the current strife in the Middle East as bad as it is, you wouldn’t think Bush administration officials would dare to make up reasons to get us into another war.

But there was Chris Hill, the State Department’s top Asia hand, saying Iranian officials were in North Korea for Kim Jong Il’s July 4th missile extravaganza.

“Explosive, if true,” as the British tabloids would say.

He later snarks,

Wikipedia has its problems, but it can’t be much worse than what Chris Hill, and a long line of other Bush administration officials, have been telling Congress.

Of course the claim turned out not to be true.

“Hill . . . told reporters he could not confirm reports that Iranian officials had witnessed the July 4 launches,” the AP said. “He said he misspoke when he earlier told lawmakers that he could confirm such reports.”

Now I'm most fascinated by how Hill's now-retracted claim came up. George Allen fed it to him.

“Now, these missile tests . . .” Sen. George Allen, R-Va., asked Hill at a July 20 hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “Is it not true that there was at least one or more Iranian officials there to watch these missile launches?”

“Yes, that is our understanding,” Hill said.

Objection! Leading the witness. This is a ploy the Republicans use a lot (they used to use it with Colin Powell, before Powell exhausted his credibility), to push reasonable officials to voice propaganda they probably harbor suspicions about. I'd suggest the story isn't simply that Chris Hill made a claim he couldn't substantiate, but that someone seeded the claim with the reliable but stupid George Allen.

And of course, Allen's ploy worked. Hill has retracted the comments. But as Stein shows, both experts and mainstream journalists still believe Hill's claim is operative. No wonder our allies in the region don't believe us anymore.

One more detail, one of my pet peeves. If there is a connection between North Korea's and Iran's nuclear programs, it passes right through Pakistan. Yet once again, the administration neglects to admit that point, the real pressing nuclear danger, in favor of spinning its lies.

Comments

[freepatriot]

well, maybe there were a few Iranians in the Pakistani delegation that witnessed the North Korean missile launches

can you prove this didn't happen ???

you gotta learn to turn their tactics around and stomp on their balls with them

the bushies don't want to talk about the pakistanis ???

so include a Pakistani link in every question

it isn't hard to just make shit up