President Donald Trump on Monday lashed out at press reports indicating that the audacious bombing and missile strikes he ordered against three Iranian nuclear sites hadn’t been as effective as he and his top defense officials have claimed.
In a Truth Social post, Trump claimed the target nuclear sites hit by the U.S. over the weekend “were totally destroyed, and everyone knows it” while accusing “the fake news” of trying to “demean” his administration by saying otherwise.
He singled out CNN anchor Anderson Cooper, senior ABC correspondent Jonathan Karl, and Brian Roberts, the owner of NBC News parent company Comcast, as “working especially hard” on the alleged “falsehood,” though he purposefully misstated the name of Cooper in a homophobic taunt, calling him “Allison” instead.
“It never ends with the sleazebags in the Media, and that’s why their Ratings are at an ALL TIME LOW — ZERO CREDIBILITY!” he added.
But Trump’s claim that American forces were successful in entirely destroying the Fordow, Esfahan and Natanz facilities doesn’t match available evidence.
Satellite photographs made available by Maxar Technologies showed several craters and new holes atop a ridge near the site of the Fordow nuclear facility outside Qom, one of three of the sites hit on Saturday and one of two attacked using 30,000 pound Massive Ordinance Penetrator (MOP) bombs dropped from B-2 stealth bomber aircraft.
The photos also show blocked tunnel entrances preventing access to the facility, but no damage to a large support building nearby.
Other photographs released by the company show damage to the other two sites at Esfahan and Natanz, but not necessarily the catastrophic result hinted at by Trump in a Sunday post on Truth Social in which he said “monumental damage” had been inflicted by the combination of MOP bombs and Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles filed from an Ohio-class submarine.
While Trump claimed that “obliteration” is an accurate way to describe the state of the targets after the attack, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Rafael Mariano Grossi, said no one “is in a position to assess the underground damage at Fordow” at this time.
“As for the assessment of the degree of damage underground, on this we cannot pronounce ourselves. It could be important; it could be significant, but no one … neither us nor anybody else could be able to tell you how much it has been damaged,” he added.
Trump’s boasts also contradict what was said by his top military adviser, General Dan Caine, chairman of the U.S. joint chiefs of staff, at a press conference on Sunday.
The Air Force general told reporters it was “way too early ... to comment on what may or may not still be there.”
Iran has vowed to retaliate for the attacks and on Monday launched ballistic missiles at an American airbase in Qatar.
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