Headline says "possibly" – the US (along with Britain) also said that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction... when will people start to see past the headlines these days, and realise the political (or otherwise) agenda/narative that's being pushed?!
Great example of this yesterday. Carole Cadwalladr, the Guardian journalist who rocketed to fame on the back of the Cambridge Analytica story, was publicising her podcast about online trolling.
Her guest was a man called Marc Owen Jones, who is a journalist who moved into academia. He's currently Assistant Professor of Middle East Studies at Hamid bin Khalifa University in Qatar, where he holds himself out as an expert in propaganda and misinformation. Naturally, he focuses on misinformation put out by the UAE (which Qatar never does of course).
Now Jones, an self-proclaimed expert on trolling, was among the worst trolls attacking
@City_rabin, claiming he was a bot/shill/paid propagandist for the UAE. Rabin and I both pointed this out to Cadwalladr and I offered to talk to her about our experience of trolling. Jones then jumped in, repeating his baseless lies, like Trump about the election. He was asked for proof of this and, like Donny T, could offer none. So Cadwalladr is hosting a podcast on trolling and using someone she could patently see was a troll to talk about his work uncovering trolls. Who all, coincidentally, are either sympathetic to the UAE or he claims emanate from the UAE.
The Guardian of course first gave a platform to McGeehan, who was then an ordinary citizen, about how the UAE was hell on earth, deeply repressive, with venal rulers, yet Qatar was very much moving in the right direction when the reality was there was little to choose between the two.
The Guardian, true to its liberal credentials, supports the #MeToo movement yet employs those known sex pests Nakrani & Glendenning. The Guardian regularly criticies Putin & press freedom in Russia yet sent a load of journalists to the World Cup, one even writing a book about it, saying how great it was and what a good chap Putin was.
The Guardian where Comment is free but hypocrisy is sacred.