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9 months ago
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The much-anticipated US military response to the killing of three American service members last week has commenced, despite what Fox News and ABC News were reporting and then recanting earlier today.
“I have a point of clarification in some of my reporting just moments ago, as you know, in some of these situations, the first reports can be wrong,” FNC’s Jennifer Griffin told Neil Cavuto live on-air in the past 30 minutes. Followed by a reiteration of her earlier reporting that “multi-layered attacks” in Syria were in fact occurring, the retract of sorts by the highly respected Griffin looks like a case of jumping the gun.
The Pentagon has just confirmed that 85 targets have been hit in its first strike against Iranian-backed and affiliated groups in Syria and Iraq. Earlier this week, President Biden said he had made a decision on what the US counterattack would be. Iran has denied it was in anyway responsible for the fatal attack on a US base in Jordan on Sunday. There have been 165 attacks on US troops in the region since the horrific October 7 attack on Israel by Hamas, who are backed by Iran.
“Well-placed sources told us that the US airstrikes had begun but it looks like some of those initial explosions on the ground in Syria, it is not clear that those were caused by the US military,” Griffin added this afternoon of the attacks. “We’re trying to get clarification at this point. We do believe that the campaign to respond to the death of those three Americans is anticipated to begin in the coming hours and days as we’ve been reporting and anticipating. But those initial explosions on the ground in Syria, the first reports of them, they were not caused by US war planes or US missiles.”
Griffin said that initial explosions on the ground in Syria were a “coincidence.” It is unclear right now who or how those explosions in Syria were caused. The reports of the American response came mere hours after President Joe Biden and top military officials attended the return of the bodies of Sgt. William Jerome Rivers, Spc. Kennedy Ladon Sanders and Spc. Breonna Alexsondria Moffett to the United States and their families.
The trio were killed on January 28 while on assignment in Jordan. More than 40 other members of the military were injured in the attack by an enemy drone. Biden
Also citing military sources, ABC News reported earlier that the US response had begun. In the fog of war, the Disney-own entity also walked back their initial reports.
Neither ABC News nor Fox News have responded to a requests from Deadline on what occurred in their reporting and checks and balances.
As Fox News and ABC were going heavy on the supposed start of America’s targeted response, CNN, MSNBC and the BBC stayed on non-military matters. The Warner Bros Discovery-owned network had an interview with the governor of Connecticut on health care cost relief. The Comcast-owned cable newser say Katy Tur talking to guests about potential Congressional aid for Ukraine and Israel. The BBC had a segment on the Biden administration saying an Iranian-back group” and its drone were responsible for the death of the US military personnel on January 28.
It wasn’t until 1:10 p.m. PT, that CNN went on the air with the news of the strikes, with Nic Robertson reporting from Tel Aviv.
MSNBC followed soon after.
“I think we’re going to see a much larger scale of air strikes than we have seen until now,” said NBC News national security and global affairs reporter Dan De Luce. “Until now they were quite limited, quite calibrated over the past few months. This is going to be much larger scale involving a lot more aircraft, a lot more missiles, dozens of targets.”
CNN’s MJ Lee, reporting from the White House, said that the administration had not yet confirmed the strikes on the targets, but “it is hard to overstate just what a consequential decision making process this has been for the president following the deaths of those three U.S. service members following that drone strike in Jordan.”
At around 1:26 pm PT, the BBC citied CBS News that “US begins strikes on Iraq and Syria”
That is a far cry from what Fox News were saying almost 45 minutes previously.
“Eight targets have been hit in the Deir ez-Zur area of Syria, resulting in six dead,” stated Fox News’ Mike Tobin this afternoon from Tel Aviv as the much-anticipated US response to the killing of three American service members commenced. “Everyone in the region knew some sort of a strike was coming,” the correspondent told FNC’s Martha MacCallum, noting Syrian media as his source.
