Pentagon details Iran bombing amid questions about scope of damage
By: Dan Lamothe and Alex Horton (The Washington Post)
Why don't intrepid war reporters go to Iran and gather facts on the ground? That is what journalists do, isn't it?
But none of this reporting is really about journalism. It's about personalities and propaganda. It's about getting Trump.
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
The Pentagon’s top officials on Thursday revealed new details about the U.S. bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities and the subsequent defense of a U.S. military installation in Qatar that faced a retaliatory attack, describing both as intricate operations with little margin for error while largely sidestepping lingering questions about the fate of Tehran’s uranium stockpile.
Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters that Sunday’s aerial raid on Iran — Operation Midnight Hammer — was the culmination of a secret project that traces to 2009 and a small team within the Pentagon’s Defense Threat Reduction Agencypeople involved, he said, spent the ensuing years studying how Tehran was building an underground lair to enrich uranium — and how the U.S. military might dismantle it should Iran attain the ability to weaponize it.
“You do not build a multilayered underground bunker complex with centrifuges and other equipment in a mountain for any peaceful purpose,” Caine said.
Their 15 years of work was revealed this past weekend when six B-2 stealth bombers, under cover of darkness, each dropped two 30,000-pound bunker-busting rounds on the Fordow nuclear enrichment facility. The first bomb “forcibly removed” a concrete cap that Iranian officials had emplaced in an attempt to shield the complex from an attack, with the next 11 falling precisely down mountaintop vents inside to maximize destruction, Caine said. A seventh B-2 carrying two additional bombs flew with the other six in case it was needed, and later dropped them on Iran’s Natanz nuclear facility before returning home to Missouri with the other aircraft that participated.
Caine said the military does not “grade our own homework,” leaving the damage assessments for the U.S. intelligence community to complete. But the bombs used — known formally as the Massive Ordnance Penetrator, or Guided Bomb Unit 57 — were built specifically for the mission, released according to plan, hit their intended targets, and exploded as intended, the general said.
“We know that the trailing jets saw the first weapons function and the pilots stated, quote, ‘This was the brightest explosion that I’ve ever seen. It literally looked like daylight,’” Caine added.
These and other details were revealed Thursday as President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth continued to voice outrage at the disclosure of a classified early assessment of the bombing, a document produced by the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency that suggested the attack may have set back the Iranian nuclear program by months, rather than years. Trump and Hegseth have said the strike “obliterated” Tehran’s nuclear development capacity, but Caine has been more selective in his language pending a complete analysis by the U.S. intelligence community.
The media coverage of the intelligence report — labeled “low-confidence” in nature and reported as such by numerous news outlets — prompted Trump to direct Thursday’s Pentagon news conference to — as he put it on social media — “fight for the Dignity of our Great American Pilots,” officials familiar with the discussion said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the issue’s sensitivity.
Hegseth opened the news conference by attacking the news media for covering the initial intelligence assessment, suggesting reporters had been “hunting for scandals” to make Trump look bad. The preliminary assessment, he alleged, had been “leaked because someone had an agenda to try to muddy the waters and make it look like this historic strike wasn’t successful.”
As Hegseth, a former Fox News personality, repeatedly and bitterly criticized the assembled journalists, he sought to bolster the claims that he and Trump have made about the damage caused by Sunday’s strikes. He and Caine were addressing the news media, Hegseth said, to “clarify what these weapons are capable of,” adding that “anyone with … two eyes, some ears and a brain [would] recognize the kind of firepower” that was employed would have a “devastating effect.”
Hegseth, asked how he could feel confident of that just a few days after the strike, cited the “skill of the men and women and the capabilities of the systems they employed, and the recognition so far that it was a highly successful mission.”
The performance appeared to appease the president, who posted on social media shortly after it was complete: “One of the greatest, most professional, and most ‘confirming’ News Conferences I have ever seen!”
But Hegseth’s tone and delivery disappointed some in the Defense Department, given its nonpartisan mission. “Thin skin,” said one senior defense official, speaking like some others on condition of anonymity to avoid retaliation. “Not a good look.”
Caine, as a military officer, sought to avoid partisan issues during the briefing. But he did face difficult questions, including whether he had been asked by Trump or Hegseth to provide a “more rosy intelligence assessment” of the strike.
“No, I have not, and no, I would not,” Caine responded, adding that his job is to provide options to the president and other senior leaders, and then execute orders they issue.
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The press will accept the 'evaluation' of the Ayatollah Khamenei before giving any credence to the Trump administration. The press is more concerned with 'getting Trump' than getting facts.
The media is pretty pathetic. I've seen parts of this where the bloggers were more concerned with a pilot not being identified by gender instead of the success of the mission.
These stories tell the truth about the damage.
UN Atomic Energy Watchdog Chief Confirms Trump's Air Strikes Wrecked Iran's Nuclear Capabilities
Pete Hegseth Dropped a Bunker Buster on the Fake News Media This Morning
The Ayatollah is a POS, so I don’t put any faith in anything he has to say. But at least he has never tried to convince us that people in Ohio were eating dogs and cats, so don’t expect me to trust Trump on anything.
They still dont get it.
"...two additional bombs flew with the other six in case it was needed, and later dropped them on Iran’s Natanz nuclear facility before returning home..."
...when there's so much wreckage you have to find another target.
And sadly. most democrats will still believe the Ayatollah over our own military.
I hope the mission did everything they claim it did. But right now, they are not presenting proof that it did. In this presser, they showed video of bomb testing as if it were proof of the actual result. That’s sketchy as hell. There would be nothing wrong with just admitting that it will take some time to know the full extent of the damage done. But they are incapable of such honesty.