(AFP) – US intelligence concluded Wednesday that Iran was not rebuilding nuclear enrichment capacities destroyed last year by the United States and Israel, contradicting a key justification by President Donald Trump for his ongoing war. Tulsi Gabbard, a Trump ally who is director of national intelligence, offered mixed signals on the backdrop and outcomes of three weeks of war as she and other officials appeared before Congress. She also assessed that Iran’s leadership remained intact.
“As a result of Operation Midnight Hammer, Iran’s nuclear enrichment program was obliterated,” Gabbard said in prepared testimony to the Senate intelligence committee, referring to the June 2025 US attack. “There has been no efforts since then to try to rebuild their enrichment capability,” Gabbard wrote. She did not repeat the conclusion before cameras. Pressed by a Democratic senator, Gabbard said that she did not have enough time to read the full testimony at the hearing but did not refute the assessment.
Trump has repeatedly said he ordered the attack on Iran alongside Israel on February 28 because of an “imminent threat.” Trump said after the June 2025 bombing that the United States had completely destroyed Iran’s nuclear sites, but since his latest war he has maintained that Tehran was nonetheless weeks away from a nuclear bomb and that he had to act. The UN nuclear watchdog and most observers have not supported the finding of an imminent nuclear bomb by Iran, which was negotiating with Trump’s envoys on a deal in the days before the attack. John Ratcliffe, director of the CIA, told senators when asked about the negotiations: “It was very clear that Iran, while they were talking, they had no intentions of following through.”
Gabbard herself had been an outspoken opponent of war with Iran as a Democratic congresswoman. One of her senior aides, Joseph Kent, resigned in protest Tuesday as director of the National Counterterrorism Center, saying that Iran posed no “imminent threat” and that Trump was misled by Israel and media outlets. Democrats attacked Gabbard over the war, saying she had not proven that Iran posed any threat beyond what it has since the 1979 Islamic revolution.
“President Trump said, we are not the policemen of the world. He ran on that,” Democratic Senator Michael Bennet said. “Now he’s turned us into the world’s policeman, into its jury, into its judge, into its executioner,” he said. In her remarks to senators, Gabbard said Iran had been suffering heavy blows in the weeks of attacks — which included the killing of the longtime supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — but that the Islamic republic was still functioning. The US intelligence community “assesses the regime in Iran to be intact but largely degraded due to attacks on its leadership and military capabilities,” Gabbard said.
“If a hostile regime survives, it will likely seek to begin a years-long effort to rebuild its military, missiles, and UAV forces,” Gabbard said, referring to unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones.
In other findings, Gabbard predicted that Russia would keep pressing its four-year invasion of Ukraine, a war that Trump had vowed to end upon taking office, largely by pressing Kyiv to compromise. US intelligence “assesses that Russia has maintained the upper hand in the war against Ukraine,” Gabbard said. “US-led negotiations between Moscow and Kiev are ongoing. Until such an agreement is met, Moscow is likely to continue fighting a slow war,” she said.
Gabbard said the United States faced a threat if there were an “escalatory spiral” in Ukraine or elsewhere, which could potentially lead to the use of nuclear weapons. She noted that China was “rapidly” modernizing its military with a goal of being able to seize Taiwan, the self-governing democracy claimed by Beijing. However, US intelligence “assesses that China likely prefers to set the conditions for an eventual peaceful reunification with Taiwan short of conflict.” Trump plans to travel in the coming weeks to China, a trip he delayed due to the war in the Mideast.
– Shaun TANDON
© 2024 AFP
