White House confirms Trump objected to Israeli strikes in Syria
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CIA says intelligence indicates Iran nuclear programme ‘severely damaged’
After the US dropped bombs on three Iranian nuclear sites at the weekend, Trump said the Iranian nuclear programme was “obliterated” On Tuesday night, a leaked initial intelligence assessment suggested the damage was limited and possibly only set back Iran’s efforts by months. The White House said the “flat-out wrong” assessment was leaked by “a low-level loser in the intelligence community”
There’s been a lot of back and forth on the scale of damage the US strikes inflicted on Iran’s nuclear programme. Here’s how the story has unfolded:
After the US dropped bombs on three Iranian nuclear sites at the weekend, Trump said the Iranian nuclear programme was “obliterated”.
Then on Tuesday night, a leaked initial intelligence assessment – from the Pentagon’s Defence Intelligence Agency – suggested the damage was limited and possibly only set back Iran’s efforts by months.
The White House said the “flat-out wrong” assessment was leaked by “a low-level loser in the intelligence community”.
On Wednesday, Trump told a Nato summit in The Hague that the strikes led to the “virtual obliteration” of Iran’s nuclear capabilities and set it back “by decades”.
US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth dismissed the leaked intelligence as only a “preliminary” assessment in which we can only have “low confidence”.
Later the same day, Israel’s Atomic Energy Commission (IAEC) said the “devastating” strike “destroyed the site’s critical infrastructure”.
And now CIA director John Radcliffe has released a statement saying he has “credible intelligence” that Iran’s programme was severely damaged and will take years to rebuild.