Front-page headline in the Times: "Iran-Supplied Bomb Is Killing More Troops in Iraq, U.S. Says." So can we believe it? Not sure. We have to wait until the article's 11th paragraph to get anything even resembling evidence, and it's followed up by doubts:
American intelligence says that its report of Iranian involvement is based on a technical analysis of exploded and captured devices, interrogations of Shiite militants, the interdiction of trucks near Iran's border with Iraq and parallels between the use of the weapons in Iran and in southern Lebanon by Hezbollah.
Some critics of Bush administration policy, saying there is no proof that the top echelons of Iran's government are involved, accuse the White House of exaggerating the role of Iran and Syria to divert attention from its own mistakes.
So has The New York Times seen any of this evidence? Is it compelling? And is there any evidence that these are Iranian-made in the governmental sense, rather than simply produced by Iranian splinter groups that don't much like our country? We're never told.
And who are these critics? Should we be listening to them? No one knows. They don't even get a quote.
You know, I've seen this movie before, and I didn't like it.