Democratic Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy appeared on MSNBC Wednesday to accuse the Trump administration of misleading the public and misrepresenting the effectiveness of the operation in Iran.
The United States launched a 37-hour operation involving seven B-2A Spirit bombers and up to 14 GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrators to strike Iranian nuclear facilities in Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan on Sunday. During an appearance on “Deadline: White House,” Murphy blasted the administration for saying the strike “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear capacity.
“There is always going to be low confidence in assessing a strike in a foreign country designed to destroy something underground. We don’t have cameras underneath there. We don’t know exactly what we hit or what we didn’t hit. But the initial assessment of DIA [Defense Intelligence Agency], of the photographic evidence, is that they did not fundamentally destroy those assets,” Murphy said.
Murphy also criticized the administration’s claims of success, calling them “lies” meant to mislead the American public about the effectiveness of the military action.
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“They’re mad. They’re furious. You can see it in their voice because they got caught in a lie. They got caught in a lie. They went out there and said that the nuclear capacity of Iran was obliterated, that we’d set back the program at least a year,” Murphy said. “They knew they were lying when they said it. They got caught in the lie. That’s super embarrassing. And they’re trying to cover up that lie with this righteous indignation, blaming everybody but themselves for the fact that they did the really unforgivable sin of national security communication.”
Murphy then said that misleading intelligence can lead to unintended consequences, including unnecessary wars.
“They fudged intelligence about our national security. You can’t do that because, as we’ve seen over and over again over the course of our history, that’s what gets us into unnecessary wars of choice. That’s what gets not dozens or hundreds of Americans killed, but thousands of Americans killed. They’re angry because they got caught lying this weekend,” Murphy said.
The DIA, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and even the Iranian government has already disputed a CNN report claiming limited damage from U.S. strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites, reinforcing the assessment that Tehran’s nuclear progress was significantly set back. Contrary to CNN’s findings, these agencies, along with the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission, said the strikes inflicted substantial damage on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure.
“This is a preliminary, low-confidence report and will continue to be refined as additional intelligence becomes available,” a senior DIA official told the Daily Caller News Foundation in a statement. “We are working with the appropriate authorities to investigate the unauthorized disclosure of classified information.”
U.S. Special Envoy Steve Witkoff also said on “The Ingraham Angle” that it would be “almost impossible” for Iran to revive its nuclear weapons programs at the sites targeted by the U.S. strike. Witkoff emphasized what he called the lasting damage to the program’s core components.
“The conversion, destroying of the conversion facility, which not a lot of people are aware of, that stops the enrichment process in the beginning, and it’s needed to finish the enrichment process. Once you get to 90%, you now must metallicize the material, shape it into a round ball, a round metallic ball. That round metallic ball goes into the bomb. Without conversion, you can’t begin enrichment, and you can’t end enrichment in a successful weaponization. That was taken out,” Witkoff said.
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