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A leaked Defense Intelligence Agency report is casting doubt on President Donald Trump’s claim that recent U.S. airstrikes “completely and totally obliterated” three Iranian nuclear facilities, instead concluding the mission only set back Iran’s program by several months.
The report, published by CNN and The New York Times, comes just days after Trump approved the strikes amid escalating tensions between Israel and Iran. In a national address immediately following the operation, Trump declared the sites “completely and totally obliterated.”
While members of the Trump administration have waged a new war to discredit the initial report from the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency, multiple experts told Fox News Digital that there is too little information available right now to accurately determine how much damage the strikes did.
Piecing together a thorough intelligence assessment is complex and time-consuming, they said.
FBI INVESTIGATING IRAN STRIKE LEAKER, LEAVITT SAYS: ‘THEY SHOULD BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE’
Trump said Saturday that the U.S. completed a “very successful” strike against Iranian nuclear sites at Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan, saying that Iran’s nuclear enrichment installations have been “obliterated.” (Fox News)
Dan Shapiro, who previously served as the deputy assistant secretary of Defense for the Middle East and the U.S. ambassador to Israel, said he didn’t put a lot of stock in both overly pessimistic or overly optimistic assessments that emerged quickly, and said that the initial assessment from DIA was likely only based on satellite imagery.
“That’s one piece of the puzzle of how you would really make this assessment,” Shapiro, now a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, told Fox News Digital. “You’d really want to have to test all the other streams of intelligence, from signals intelligence, human intelligence, other forms of monitoring the site, potentially visits by…
