After an explosion from a satellite failure in Iran, Donald Trump takes to Twitter to deny that the U.S. has any part in the situation… even though Iran hasn’t accused us of anything.
The rocket intended to launch the satellite appears to have disintegrated at the Imam Khomeini Space Center.
Donald Trump’s tweet is accompanied by a classified image from a United States spy satellite.
As pictures from commercial satellites of a rocket’s smoking remains began to circulate, President Trump denied Friday on Twitter that the United States was involved. It was an unusual message because the Iranian government had neither acknowledged the accident nor blamed the United States. His tweet ended with an apparent taunt: “I wish Iran best wishes and good luck in determining what happened” in the fiery accident.
But Mr. Trump also included in his tweet a high-resolution image of the disaster, immediately raising questions about whether he had plucked a classified image from his morning intelligence briefing to troll the Iranians. The president seemed to resolve the question on Friday night on his way to Camp David when he told reporters, “We had a photo and I released it, which I have the absolute right to do.”
New York Times
In February, reports surfaced that the Trump administration had “accelerated a secret American program to sabotage Iran’s missiles and rockets… as part of an expanding campaign by the United States to undercut Tehran’s military and isolate its economy.”
Sources
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/30/world/middleeast/trump-iran-missile-explosion-satellite-image.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/13/us/politics/iran-missile-launch-failures.html
Photo: Public Domain