President Donald Trump was not telling the truth, by his own admission. After bombing Iran without congressional authorization, citing an imminent threat posed by a nuclear program that has been an “imminent” threat for the last 30 years, the president was quick and eager to claim vindication via “total obliteration.” The Islamic Republic’s nuclear enrichment capabilities, and its stockpiles of highly-enriched uranium, he insisted within hours of the strikes, were straight-up gone.
“Tonight, I can report to the world that the strikes were a spectacular military success,” he claimed in a televised address, asserting that the attacks on the sites at Fordo, Natanz and Esfahan had been “completely and totally obliterated,” and with them the threat posed by what Iran insists is a civilian nuclear energy program.
Except: How could anyone really know that? The isotopes had not even settled and already people were out there making confident claims about what had or had not transpired. That’s a point that Trump himself shifted to days later, after someone with access to a classified Defense Intelligence Agency report leaked it to the media, revealing that the bunker-busting strikes would likely prove only to be a hiccup, setting back Iran’s nuclear program not by “basically decades” but, per one U.S. official, by “a few months, tops.”
Commenting on the report, Trump engaged in his usual, tiresome bombast and predictable doubling down on a bogus claim. “It’s been obliterated — totally obliterated,” he insisted. But then he undercut himself: “They did a report, but it was like, if you look at the dates, it’s just a few days after it happened. So they didn’t see it.”
“I would say issue the report when you know what happened,” Trump added.
Of course, if it is too early to claim failure then it is also too early to claim success. As Trump conceded, in the hours and days after the attack on Iran, no one really knew what the hell was going on; left unsaid, but implicit, was that he didn’t either.
The reporting since has demonstrated the need for skepticism, particularly with respect to claims from this administration. Intercepted communications have now revealed Iranian officials “remarking that the attack was less devastating than they had expected,” The Washington Post reported, citing U.S. officials who had seen the classified intelligence. Rafael Grossi, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, has also said that — damage to its declared centrifuges aside — Iran could likely begin enriching uranium again “in a matter of months.”
Then there’s the fact that Iran, before the strikes, had a large supply of highly-enriched uranium; not enriched to the degree necessary for a weapon, but not far from it. It also now has an added incentive to build a nuclear bomb, having been provided with one more example of how the lack of such a deterrent makes the country susceptible to attack.
“All told,” nuclear arms control expert Jeffrey Lewis wrote in a piece for Foreign Policy, “Iran likely retains the 900 pounds of highly enriched uranium that the IAEA said Iran had produced, as well as an extensive network of underground facilities to produce centrifuges, enrich the material further, and assemble it into a small stockpile of nuclear weapons if that’s what it chooses to do.”
Trump has lied about — or at best, is in living denial of — that fact too: that, even if its declared centrifuges were indeed obliterated, Iran likely retains the nuclear material it already produced.
“I think all of the nuclear stuff is down there,” Trump told reporters while attending the NATO summit at The Hague, referring to the Fordo enrichment facility, “because it’s very hard to remove and we did it very quickly.”
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Commercial satellite imagery, by contrast, shows a line of trucks coming and going from Fordo in the days ahead of the telegraphed strike, at the least suggesting there was indeed time to haul material away from the facility and others, like the one targeted at Isfahan, believed to have stored the country’s highly-enriched uranium. “Iran has made no secret that they have protected this material,” the IAEA director general told CNN, saying he believed Iran’s uranium stockpile — per The New York Times, “stored in special casks small enough to fit in the trunks of about 10 cars” — had indeed been moved.
All of which is to say that Marco Rubio is right. “I hate commenting on these stories,” Trump’s secretary of state told Politico in the immediate aftermath of the strike, “because often the first story is wrong and the person putting it out there has an agenda.”
Rubio was referring to the leak of classified U.S. intelligence undermining official claims, not having a sudden fit of self-awareness, but the point is a good one: Don’t trust the first story out the gate, especially when it’s delivered by an unapologetic deceiver like Trump, who cares not whether what he says is true.
Those concerned about the proliferation of lies under the present administration, which pairs its disregard for objective truth with brutish lawlessness at home and abroad, should then welcome any correction, even if doing so requires transgressing long-standing norms.
“The information we had in the intelligence committee was not the same information being given to the American people. I couldn’t believe it,” Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., said in 2007, referring to the Bush administration’s case for invading Iraq some four years earlier. “I was angry about it,” Durbin said on the Senate floor, speaking of all the claims about phantom weapons of mass destruction, “[but] frankly, I couldn’t do much about it because, in the intelligence committee, we are sworn to secrecy. We can’t walk outside the door and say, ‘The statement made yesterday by the White House is in direct contradiction to classified information that is being given to this Congress.’”
And so a couple hundred thousand Iraqis and thousands of U.S. soldiers were killed in a war that did not need to happen — and might have been prevented had official assertions been further undercut by leaks of the more accurate intelligence. Durbin kept his word, but at what cost?
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Some Democrats, unfortunately, have not yet abandoned this 2003 mindset.
“Leaks are never ok, of course not,” Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., the top Democrat on the House intelligence committee, recently told the BBC. Himes was himself critical of Trump’s strike on Iran, and the subsequent claims he made, but was easily goaded into condemning the person who exposed the president’s falsehoods. “I hope whoever leaked this information is identified,” he said, “and made an example of.”
In that, this Democratic lawmaker joins the Trump administration and an FBI led by a loyalist, Kash Patel, in seeking out the “anonymous, low-level loser in the intelligence community” who enabled Democrats and others to point out that the president was misleading the public about matters of war and peace. It is perhaps understandable that a member of Congress would not actively solicit a leak, if only to avoid prosecution themselves, but why — in this era of lawlessness and authoritarianism — would a member of the opposition actively demand retribution?
In Trump’s first stint in office, we saw what this looked like: Reality Winner, a former intelligence contractor, was sentenced to more than five years in prison for leaking a classified report showing that the Russian government had indeed infiltrated U.S. election systems.
Second-term Trump, emboldened by a Supreme Court that has repeatedly given permission to do as he pleases, is eager to make more examples of truth-tellers.
“The Democrats are the ones who leaked the information on the PERFECT FLIGHT to the Nuclear Sites in Iran. They should be prosecuted!” he posted on Truth Social last month. It’s a point he doubled down on in an interview on Fox News: “They should be prosecuted,” he said, referring to Democrats and anyone else who might have shed light on his imperfect air strikes. Investigators, he said, could catch the leaker and their accomplices “easily,” he continued. “You go up and tell the reporter, ‘national security, who gave it?’ You have to do that. And I suspect we’ll be doing things like that.”
An authoritarian leader is deploying uniformed soldiers and masked, secret police on the streets of American cities, unilaterally sentencing legal immigrants to life in a foreign prison and asserting the right to ignore the law and strip newborn children of the citizenship guaranteed by the Constitution. In such a lawless environment, it is beyond absurd for one side — for those already being targeted for political prosecution — to insist that an “example” be made of those who would dare expose official falsehoods. Anyone who cares about the truth should be applauding those who tell it, not demanding fidelity to rules that no longer apply.
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