Iranian Propaganda vs. U.S. Talking Points: How We Determined the Real Damage to U.S. Military Bases
So in the early days of the war between the U.S., Israel and Iran, my colleagues and I started seeing a lot of these videos that were filmed on U.S. military bases and also foreign bases, where the U.S. operates in the Gulf and the Middle East. And they showed a number of Iranian, usually drone strikes, on key infrastructure. And then not too long after that, we started seeing a stream of Iranian satellite imagery that came out of Iranian state media that were then filtering down through social media. And these images claim to show very massive swaths of destruction at these bases that the U.S. operates out of. And normally, what we would do is we would hit these up against American satellite imagery. But the U.S. government requested for American satellite companies to restrict the release of this imagery in the Middle East and the Gulf — not even restrict it, but even to retroactively remove images going back to early March. And also, U.S. officials weren’t talking a whole lot …
