‘Totally obliterated,’ reiterates Trump, sneers at intel report about US strikes on Iran N-sites

President Donald Trump on Wednesday reiterated his claim that US bomb strikes on nuclear installations in Iran completely destroyed Tehran’s nuclear programme, and chided media for giving too much credence to an “initial” intelligence report that suggests otherwise. “It’s been obliterated, totally obliterated,” Trump said about the Iranian nuclear site at Fordo during a news conference at the NATO Summit in The Hague, Netherlands.

A preliminary classified assessment by the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon’s military intelligence wing, said that airstrikes on three Iranian nuclear sites did not destroy the facilities completely and set Iran’s nuclear programme back by a few months, not years. The assessment was first reported by CNN, followed by NBC News and other outlets.

Trump acknowledged the existence of the Defense Intelligence Agency’s report, which has not been made public, but suggested the data used was insufficient.

“They did a report, but it was like, if you look at the dates, it’s just a few days after, so they didn’t see the sites,” Trump said. “The report was not a complete report,” he said.

‘A preliminary, low confidence assessment’

“This is a preliminary, low confidence assessment—not a final conclusion—and will continue to be refined as additional intelligence becomes available,” a senior DIA official told CBS News on Wednesday. “We have still not been able to review the actual physical sites themselves, which will give us the best indication.”

“Final battle damage will take some time, but initial battle damage assessments indicate that all three sites sustained extremely severe damage and destruction,” Caine said.

Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had asserted that the Saturday night strikes on Fordo, Natanz and Isfahan sites had totally “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear programme.

The White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt called the initial assessment “flat-out wrong” and slammed the “anonymous, low-level loser in the intelligence community” who leaked the findings to the press.

The Pentagon has launched a “leak investigation” with the FBI, Hegseth said Wednesday. He also noted that the report was preliminary and was labeled “low confidence”.

Hegseth criticised the “fake news” and said, “If you want to make an assessment of what happened at Fordo, you better get a big shovel and go really deep, because Iran’s nuclear program is obliterated,” he said.

Meanwhile, Israel’s Atomic Energy Commission said that the US strike on Fordo “destroyed the site’s critical infrastructure and rendered the enrichment facility inoperable.”

The combined strikes by the US and Israel have “set back Iran’s ability to develop nuclear weapons by many years,” it added.