Each of the historical cases, under both Democratic and Republican administrations, involved senior US military officials making significantly more detailed public comments than has been the case so far in the Minab strike.<\/p>\n
Annie Shiel, a former US official who worked on civilian harm reduction at the state department, said previous cases followed a pattern where the US had “come out and said ‘it was not us’, only for media and [non governmental organisation] reporting to show that in fact it was a US strike, and then the US has to walk that back.”<\/p>\n
The Pentagon’s appointment in the Minab case of an investigating officer outside CENTCOM was “at least on paper a good start on independence”, said Shiel who is now US Advocacy Director with the Center for Civilians in Conflict (CIVIC). <\/p>\n
But she told the BBC she would “absolutely” expect further acknowledgement of any US role while the probe is ongoing.<\/p>\n
Corroborating details about the incident has also been complicated by the fact Iranian authorities have not granted independent access to the site. The UN Fact Finding Mission on Iran said on 17 March it had sought access but not been permitted to visit the site.<\/p>\n
Charles O Blaha, former director of the State Department’s Office of Security and Human Rights, said a lack of transparency in Washington could stem from a “reluctance” within the administration to contradict the president after he blamed Iran for the strike, a claim he described as “really far-fetched and very clearly not true”.<\/p>\n
Blaha spent 32 years in the US foreign service and is now a senior adviser to Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN). He attributed the relative silence in the Minab case to what he saw as a rejection by the administration of “any negative news about the war they branded as unpatriotic”.<\/p>\n
Additional reporting by Catherine Alaimo<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Each of the historical cases, under both Democratic and Republican administrations, involved senior US military officials making significantly…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":556615,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":["post-556614","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/556614","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=556614"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/556614\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/556615"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=556614"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=556614"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=556614"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}