Sun, May 8, 2016
URL of the original posting site: https://www.clarionproject.org/news/white-house-foreign-policy-advisor-we-duped-public-iran
Secretary of State John Kerry was a primary negotiator of the Iran deal for the Obama administration. (Photo: © Reuters)
An interview with U.S. President Obama’s foreign policy advisor is sparking outrage for the revealed admission that the public was duped about the Iran deal. In an interview with the New York Times magazine, Ben Rhodes happily admits, “The way in which most Americans have heard the story of the Iran deal presented — that the Obama administration began seriously engaging with Iranian officials in 2013 in order to take advantage of a new political reality in Iran, which came about because of elections that brought moderates to power in that country — was largely manufactured for the purpose for selling the deal. Even where the particulars of that story are true, the implications that readers and viewers are encouraged to take away from those particulars are often misleading or false.”
Rhodes noted how the working of the deal were set in place in 2012, a year before the elections, and that concluding a deal with Iran was one of the goals of the Obama administration from the outset.
Rhodes further gloated that information doled out to the public by the press corps and think tanks on the deal was through a virtual “echo chamber” of the information given to them by the White House.
“They were saying things that validated what we had given them,” Rhodes said.
“We had test drives to know who was going to be able to carry our message effectively, and how to use outside groups like Ploughshares, the Iran Project and whomever else. So we knew the tactics that worked,” he said.
Explaining how the White House was able to get the media to be its mouthpiece, Rhodes said, “The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”
Commenting on Rhodes revelation, New York Post columnist John Podhoretz, writes that the White House “played us for fools … Congratulations, liberals of the Washington press corps and elite organizations: You’re a bunch of suckers. We all know this because the Obama White House just told us so.”
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