CIA chief 'behind Soleimani's assassination' killed in downed plane in Afghanistan

[wishstar]

52. US states NO CIA, only 2 US Air Force onboard, Per new Time magazine report:

https://time.com/5775758/military-crash-cia-disinformation/

The wreckage of a U.S. military plane that crashed and burned in a snowy mountainous region in Afghanistan on Monday was still fresh when Iranian state TV ran a story claiming a top CIA officer was among the dead. Like all good propaganda, the story was mostly false, but with a scintilla of truth. Two American service members had been killed when the U.S. Air Force jet slammed into the snowy ground, but U.S. officials insist there was no CIA onboard.

The U.S. military says it could not have gotten the news out sooner. But the Iranian version of events that circulated in the information vacuum had people inside and outside the U.S. wondering who to believe. The Trump Administration’s now-familiar pattern of slow, incomplete and sometimes disingenuous responses to events has ground down public and internal trust of its messaging and created an opportunity for adversaries like Iran and Russia to spread disinformation and sow confusion among allies and U.S. officials. The wrong information can spread about an event whether it happened on a remote Afghan mountainside or a maximum-security American compound. “If false reports are not authoritatively or convincingly disproven, they can take on a life of their own,” James Cunningham, former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan told TIME. “Once that happens, it’s very hard to undo that.”

Critics and some U.S. officials say the growing dearth of trust in America’s word is symptomatic of an Administration led by a President who calls journalists “the enemy of the people”, frequently labels factual or unflattering news coverage as “fake news”, and has himself made more than 12,000 false or misleading statements during his tenure, according to a count by The Washington Post. A trust gap has formed between journalists and Administration spokespeople who often see challenging questions as political attacks, and treat offending outlets with disdain.

Overall, there are fewer on-record press briefings in the Pentagon, the State Department, the White House and other agencies in this Administration, says a former senior Trump Administration official. He says that’s due in part to the top-down nature of the Administration and in part to subordinates’ efforts to protect the President. There is an internal battle afoot with some senior Administration officials arguing for more public briefings, and while the White House Press Secretary hasn’t briefed from the podium since March 2019, the Pentagon and State Department have resumed holding more frequent press conferences to win back that global public trust. But it’s an uphill battle against the megaphone of the Twitter presidency —and the active disinformation campaigns being waged overseas against the U.S. “No one believes us anymore,” one frustrated senior U.S. official said.