Veteran Pentagon Reporter Gobsmacked Trump Boasted to the World ‘He Gave Iran Permission to Strike a U.S. Military Base’
Former editor of Defense One and veteran Pentagon reporter, Kevin Baron, joined MSNBC on Wednesday to react to President Donald Trump’s remarks at the NATO summit earlier in the day. Baron zeroed in on one of Trump’s remarks in particular — which he called simply “unfathomable” – Trump suggesting that he gave a green light for Iran to attack the U.S. air base in Qatar earlier in the week.
“As a journalist who’s covered the Pentagon for 15 years and lots of NATO summits, the headline that struck me was Trump telling the world, boasting to the world that he gave Iran permission to strike a U.S. military base. At that line where he said that when they asked, ‘Oh, is 1 o’clock okay? I said, fine, sure, we moved people out, go right ahead,” Baron began, adding:
That to me is unbelievable. I think that’s something we can’t just like paper over and take as the normal course of events in this combat mission that happened. So I’d start with that.
Second, the reporting and the back and forth about this intelligence assessment. I was the editor of a defense publication for 10 years and spent a lot of my time being very careful with headlines and how we characterize what we’re reporting. I think there’s a little bit of truth on both sides here. This is an initial intelligence assessment. It’s from DIA, yes, but it did say low confidence. If you don’t lead with that, you set up this kind of conflict and it’s kind of you give a wind to the people you’re reporting on to come back and say, hey, you’re mischaracterizing here. I think we’re seeing a little bit of that happening.
The president’s right to say that this is an initial report. It’s a DIA report. It’s not the official White House assessment. It’s by no means a final assessment, but where they go over the line is this just insistence that they got it right. The obliterated line. And the very odd kind of childish deflection of oh why don’t you reporters you know why are you making the pilots feel bad I guarantee you no pilot feels bad about the job they did they did just fine and it’s not the job of the media to be you know celebrating the president’s wins or the military strikes. It’s their job to report on them so I think you know Kelly O’Donnell did a great job in that press conference with her exchange with the president.
But the constant denigration of the media reporting, especially abroad at a NATO event, is just something you never see in normal times. It’s one of the many concerning patterns. And that, again, that line of the president admitting that he gave Iran permission to attack a U.S. Military base is just unfathomable to me.
Other observers were quick to pick up on Trump’s comments as well and they quickly circulated on social media.
Below is an exact transcript of what Trump said:
You saw that, where 14 missiles were shot at us the other day. And they were very nice. They gave us warning. They said, “We’re going to shoot them.”
“Is 1 o’clock OK? They said it’s fine.” And everybody was emptied off the base, so they couldn’t get hurt, except for the gunners. They call them the gunners. And out of 14 high-end missiles that were shot at the base in Qatar, all 14, as you know, were shot down by our equipment. Amazing stuff, amazing what they can do.
Watch the clip above via MSNBC.
