U.S. has no evidence Iranian leader took hostages

July 31st, 2005 at 20:19 Björn Hallberg

Really? I’m shocked.

A month after Americans who were held hostage in Tehran 25 years ago asserted that the president-elect of Iran was among their captors, U.S. officials said they had turned up no evidence to support that contention.

Detailed analyses performed by the CIA comparing photos of a similar-looking Iranian captor in 1979 and the president-elect, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, clearly showed that the photos were of different men, a U.S. official said.

“Similar-looking” in that they’re both Iranian and have a beard. This is the third time I bring this up and I hope this will be the end of it. The entire fake news story was brought to you by exile Iranian political hopefuls (remember Iraq and the Chalabi crowd) and bolstered by certain right-wing bloggers and news sources. But now the US State Department can’t contradict the hostages in public either, so like the article says, it’s quite quandary. But in good American tradition, why not just make something up?

Entry 189 filed under: Middle East, North America. This entry was posted 3 years, 4 months ago. RSS feed for comments on this post.