Shortly after the United States began conducting air strikes in Syria, the Pentagon revealed that it was not only bombing ISIS targets, but also a group that was all but previously unheard of in the public sphere: the Khorasan Group. A week later, however, serious questions exist about whether the group was, as claimed, about to attack the United States, and whether it even exists.

“The United States has also taken action to disrupt the imminent attack plotting against the United States and Western interests conducted by a network of seasoned [al-Qaeda] veterans—sometimes referred to as the Khorasan Group—who have established a safe haven in Syria to develop external attacks, construct and test improvised explosive devices and recruit Westerners to conduct operations,” read a September 23 statement from U.S. Central Command. Pentagon press secretary Rear Admiral John Kirby went on Good Morning America to announce that “the individuals plotting and planning [the allegedly imminent attack] were eliminated.”

President Barack Obama then publicly cited the attacks on the Khorasan Group as proof that “we will not tolerate safe havens for terrorists who threaten our people.”

These official claims were repeated far and wide, including on this Web site. But in the week or so since the first U.S. bombs hailed on targets within Syria—a country that has not, unlike Iraq, requested an American military presence, and with which Congress has not declared we are at war—a number of journalists are questioning the very existence of the Khorasan Group. Troublingly, such inquiries are being met with less than satisfactory responses as government officials back away from earlier claims.

At The Intercept, Glenn Greenwald and Murtaza Hussain compiled a tick-tock of the alleged invention and subsequent backpedaling away from the supposed dangers of the group. They note that Foreign Policy’s Shane Harris quoted a senior U.S. counterterrorism official as describing Khorasan as having “the desire to attack, though we’re not sure their capabilities match their desire.”

The New York Times then piled on: “One senior American official on Wednesday described the Khorasan plotting as ‘aspirational’ and said that there did not yet seem to be a concrete plan in the works. The Associated Press—which broke the news of the group’s supposed existence earlier in September—published another report in which its sources “offered a more nuanced picture.”

Kirby and F.B.I. director James Comey admitted they didn’t know when or where the group was supposedly going to attack, and Kirby appeared to dismiss the very idea that reporters and the American public should care: “We can have this debate about whether it was valid to hit them or not, or whether it was too soon or too late. . . . We hit them. And I don’t think we need to throw up a dossier here to prove that these are bad dudes.”

Bad dudes? The world is full of “bad dudes.” Thinking some operatives qualify as “bad dudes” is a pretty sketchy metric for launching air strikes in another country, and it’s a very different metric than the one Director of National Intelligence James Clapper put forth just days earlier: “in terms of threat to the homeland, Khorasan may pose as much of a danger as the Islamic State.”

By this point, a number of journalists had expressed their doubts about the story the government had presented.

Syrian activists telling us theyve never heard of Khorasan or its leader

— Richard Engel (@RichardEngel) September 24, 2014