Many lawmakers cautioned the damage done to Iran’s nuclear program may fall short of the Trump administration’s claims.
CIA Director John Ratcliffe and other top intelligence officials briefed lawmakers for the first time about the Saturday strike — a meeting held as Trump administration officials have worked overtime to push their argument that the attacks left Iran’s nuclear facilities “obliterated.”
“The point is: We don’t know,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.). “Anybody who says we know with certainty is making it up because we have no final battle damage assessment.”
“Certainly, this mission was successful insofar as it extensively destroyed and perhaps severely damaged and set back the Iranian nuclear arms program. But how long and how much really remains to be determined by the intelligence community itself,” he added.
Reports emerged Tuesday about a preliminary assessment that said the U.S. strikes may have set the Iranian nuclear program back by “a few months.” The administration has pushed back forcefully at those reports, including at a Pentagon briefing earlier Thursday.
Some Democrats criticized Trump’s assessment that the plants were obliterated, which they widely viewed as overzealous, especially after seeing the latest information in the classified setting.
“I hope that is the final assessment,” said Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), the ranking member on the Intelligence Committee. “But if not, does that end up providing a false sense of comfort for the American people?”
Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) said all of the descriptions of the damage to the program were fitting.
“Everybody’s got their own words: set back, obliterated, destroyed, greatly diminished. It’s all of those things. I would say, I think all those are accurate, depending on how you use any one of those terms,” Cramer said.
But pressed to select his own term, Cramer paused.
“I would say that it is severely set back. And not just because the bunker busters were so effective at Fordow and the other sites that got hit by the missiles. And just to build a building like that would take probably a year, just to get some scientists up and running … it would take a long time to reestablish from scratch.”
Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) faulted Trump for his glowing assessment of the mission before the planes had even returned.
“The way this should work is the president and the secretary of Defense should have waited until they had an assessment in their hands, and then figure out what they want to share publicly about that assessment. That’s not what happened in this case,” Kelly said.
“The president said something, the secretary of Defense repeated it, before they had anything from the [Defense Intelligence Agency]. I think that’s pretty clear to people. I mean, he basically made his own assessment based on very limited information. … The airplanes weren’t even back in Missouri by the time he’s doing his own personal [battle damage assessment].”
Read the full report at TheHill.com.
