State Department refuses to admit that Mullah Mansour was killed inside Pakistan

In a State Department press briefing that took place yesterday, spokesman Mark Toner refused to admit that the drone strike that killed Taliban emir Mullah Mansour actually took place in Pakistan. Toner originally suggested that he had no idea where the strike took place. Instead, he said that he doesn’t “have any more clarity of where the actual strike took place,” and maintained that it was “in that border region. I just can’t say on which side of the border it was.”

The full text of the exchange between Toner and the reporter is reproduced below. Kudos to the reporter who doggedly followed up the answers and exposed just how silly Toner’s statement was by asking if State Department knew where the strike occurred.

“So you don’t know where you targeted him? You just guessed? I mean, how could you fire something out of the sky and blow something up and kill people and not know what country it’s in? Come on,” the reporter asked.

“You check these things before you fire, usually, right?,” the reporter responded to Toner’s obvious attempt to deflect the question.

Of course the US military and State Department know the exact geographical location of the strike. Toner also knows this as well (it is why he changes his tune and later states “what we’re willing to share is that it was in — the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region”).

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Image courtesy of AP