(ANTIMEDIA) At a press briefing on Thursday, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer asserted that Iran had attacked a U.S. naval vessel. This statement was taken as part and parcel of his argument defending the Trump administration’s decision to put Iran “on notice.”
However, as the Intercept confirmed directly with Pentagon spokesperson Christopher Sherwood, the attack in question actually took place on a Saudi warship, and the suspected perpetrators of the attack are the Houthi rebels currently leading an insurrection in Yemen, not Iran.
But Iran is allegedly backing the Houthi rebels in Yemen. So surely, any attack committed by those rebels against the U.S. or its allies can be deemed and Iranian assault by way of proxy, right?
Not according to the U.N. experts, who presented a report to the U.N. Security Council just this past weekend. It stated:
“The panel has not seen sufficient evidence to confirm any direct large-scale supply of arms from the Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran, although there are indicators that anti-tank guided weapons being supplied to the Houthi or Saleh forces are of Iranian manufacture.” [emphasis added]
For those skeptical of claims made by so-called U.N. experts, perhaps one could analyze the claims made by the mainstream media regarding Iran’s role in Yemen to see if there is any substance to the narrative that Iran is backing the Houthi rebels in Yemen. As noted by a Truth-out article published in October 2015, the mainstream media struggles to produce any compelling evidence of Iranian involvement, even with the enormous resources at their disposal:
“[A] recent article published by the Guardian on October 8, 2015, again states that: ‘It is now six months since a coalition of countries, led by Saudi Arabia, took on Iran-backed Houthis who had swept through the country earlier this year.’ The words ‘Iran-backed Houthis’ are again hyperlinked. This time, the hyperlink takes you to another Guardian article, which explains that a ‘source’ has revealed that no more than 10 Gulf-trained fighters have arrived in Yemen. The article references Iran only once by again claiming that the Houthis are Iranian-backed, but this is not hyperlinked to any other source and at no point in the article does the writer even try to explain in which of the Gulf states these fighters, who number no more than 10, were trained before their deployment into Yemen.”