There seems to be quite a bit of…dissembling?…here, and it’s not all Qatar’s.

On the matter of whether Qatar supports terrorism while hosting our military base, there’s this from Undersecretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence David Cohen:

Press reports indicate that the Qatari government is also supporting extremist groups operating in Syria. To say the least, this threatens to aggravate….

Wait. What? The US’ State Department gets its intel from the press? Well, that would be consistent with President Barack Obama only knowing what’s going on in the world from newspaper articles.

There’s more.

Qatar is a US “frenemy,” according to Jonathan Schanzer, of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. On one hand, it hosts the biggest US military base in the Middle East…and acts as the “white knight” intermediary in hostage negotiations.

But, but. The US doesn’t negotiate with hostage takers. Do we?

None of this is to say that Qatar is squeaky clean, but we certainly can’t tell from what State claims.