One again, Trump makes an outright lie. And, once again, the mainstream media goes after the gaffe he made in the lie, instead of the lie itself.
And, once again, Fox counters about the gaffe, and fails to address the lie.
To be clear, having a foreign nation take control of a US drone or, for that matter, a vessel, is not unpresidented. Hell, it isn’t even unprecedented.
Here’s a list. Please add to it. (All summaries/links courtesy of WikiPedia or NYTimes.)
- 2016-01-12: 2016 U.S.–Iran naval incident
On January 12, 2016 two United States Navy riverine command boats were seized by Iran‘s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Navy after they entered Iranian territorial waters near Iran’s Farsi Island in the Persian Gulf. Initially, the U.S. military claimed the sailors inadvertently entered Iranian waters due to mechanical failure, but it was later reported that they entered Iranian waters because of navigational errors.[3] The U.S Secretary of State John Kerry called the Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif within five minutes. His call was followed by multiple other phone calls between the two ministers. The sailors had a brief verbal exchange with the Iranian military and were released, unharmed, 15 hours later.
The release was hailed by the Obama administration as an unintended benefit of the new diplomatic relationship with Iran established by the nuclear accord,[4] while some US Republican presidential hopefuls such as Ted Cruz and Donald Trump criticised the US response to the detention, which they deemed too weak.[5] - 2011-12-04: Iran–U.S. RQ-170 incident
On 4 December 2011, an American Lockheed Martin RQ-170 Sentinel unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) was captured by Iranian forces near the city of Kashmar in northeastern Iran. The Iranian government announced that the UAV was brought down by its cyberwarfare unit which commandeered the aircraft and safely landed it, after initial reports from Western news sources disputedly claimed that it had been “shot down”.[1] The United States government initially denied the claims but later President Obama acknowledged that the downed aircraft was a US drone and requested that Iran return it. - 2001-04-01: Hainan Island incident
On April 1, 2001, the Hainan Island incident occurred when a mid-air collision between a United States Navy EP-3E ARIES II signals intelligence aircraft and a People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) J-8II interceptor fighter jet resulted in an international dispute between the United States of America and the People’s Republic of China. - 1994-12-17: North Koreans Free U.S. Pilot Held 13 Days
An American helicopter pilot stepped solemnly out of North Korea this morning, ending 13 days of captivity and a crisis that had threatened to reignite the nuclear tensions on the Korean peninsula. - 1968-01-23: Pueblo incident
USS Pueblo (AGER-2) is a Banner-class environmental research ship, attached to Navy intelligence as a spy ship, which was attacked and captured by North Korean forces on 23 January 1968, in what is known today as the “Pueblo incident” or alternatively, as the “Pueblo crisis“. -
1960-04-01: 1960 U-2 incident
The 1960 U-2 incident occurred during the Cold War on 1 May 1960, during the presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower and the premiership of Nikita Khrushchev, when a United States U-2 spy plane was shot down while in Soviet airspace. The aircraft, flown by Central Intelligence Agency pilot Francis Gary Powers, was performing photographic aerial reconnaissance when it was hit by an S-75 Dvina (SA-2 Guideline) surface-to-air missile and crashed near Sverdlovsk. Powers parachuted safely and was captured.