They why haven't they done that in any previous round of attacks? The risk of loosing credibility and giving Iran the opportunity for a propaganda win significantly outweighs any benefit to lying about this.
There is no benefit, and significant risk, in lying about that (it's an easily disproven claim if they're lying).
I don't trust them because I like them. I trust them because being truthful is in their best interest (and I trust they will always act in their own interest).
This letter is a public part of the negotiation process. It shouldn't be surprising that they are primarily using arguments that are, at least on the face, "patriotic".
They are capable of hitting aerial targets as well. They have recently been deployed by the US Navy as a cheaper way to counter cheap aerial drones launched by Iranian proxies (~$100k Hellfire vs a ~$1m SM2).
Your friend’s dad’s death is also my (very trivial) connection to Kaczynski. That morning our family had gone Christmas tree shopping, and the tree was scheduled to be delivered later that day. As it turned out, the delivery driver was also a Verona volunteer firefighter and ended up responding to the explosion, delaying our tree to the next day. It’s a super trivial connection, but it has always stuck with me.
No, a whole bunch of work was (hypothetically) _not_ done to verify if they were supported or not. I'm not suggesting that it's a good thing, I'm suggesting that laziness, sloppiness, or a simple oversight are just as plausible as malice.
It is _less_ effort to say "We support these specific platforms, and rather than doing actual feature detection, we'll just load a bunch of polyfills to make it work on anything else".
What don't you buy? They test with a certain set of supported platforms. If a client isn't one of those (whitelisted) platforms, then they may send out a bunch of inefficient polyfills so they know XYZ functionality exists, even if it's slow.
No, it really doesn't. It could just as likely mean they load a bunch of slow polyfills and workarounds when the browser is not part of a whitelist (assuming it won't have support for various APIs that it actually does support).