On Saturday, two oil facilities in Saudi Arabia were attacked by drones, severely damaging the installations and disrupting the nation’s oil supply. Houthi rebels based in Yemen claimed responsibility for the attacks, but the Saudi government has cast much of the blame on Iran.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Saturday declared that Iran was responsible for the attacks, not the Houthis, and argued that the attack could not have come from Yemen, but rather from the Northern Persian Gulf, which lies between Iran and Saudi Arabia. No evidence has been released yet that definitively implicates either Iran or the Houthis in the attacks.
President Donald Trump tweeted on Sunday that the U.S. is "locked and loaded depending on verification," but some observers are hesitant to trust the evidence produced by the government. WGBH News Analyst Charlie Sennott said he is skeptical of the government’s claim.
During an interview with Boston Public Radio on Monday, Sennott said that the Trump administration has previously used dubious evidence to drum up a rationale to target Iran militarily.
“This administration has been so eager to have a confrontation with Iran, [it’s] a really good time to take a deep breath in the world,” Sennott said. “I think more likely this is going to require a lot more investigation.”
Sennott also cautioned Americans to be wary of evidence put out by the Trump administration that is being used as evidence to support a military strike. A former correspondent for The Boston Globe during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Sennott said it was faulty intelligence that also landed the U.S. in two quagmires that have destabilized the region.
“This is a really serious development in the Middle East, to put it mildly,” Sennott said. “I just think we need to learn from Iraq. We need to learn from how we’ve been manipulated by intelligence in the past.”
Sennott is also the CEO of the GroundTruth Project.
