THE HAGUE: US President Donald Trump said on Wednesday (Jun 25) that the damage to Iranian nuclear sites from American missile strikes over the weekend was severe, even as he acknowledged that the available intelligence on the matter was inconclusive.
His comments followed reports by Reuters and other media outlets on Tuesday revealing that the US Defense Intelligence Agency had assessed that the strikes had set back Iran’s nuclear programme by just a few months, despite administration officials saying the programme had been obliterated.
“The intelligence was … very inconclusive,” Trump told reporters while meeting with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte ahead of a summit in The Hague.
“The intelligence says, ‘We don’t know, it could have been very severe.’ That’s what the intelligence says. So I guess that’s correct, but I think we can take the ‘we don’t know’. It was very severe. It was obliteration,” Trump added.
Later, during the same round of comments, Trump argued that Iran’s nuclear deal had been set back “basically decades, because I don’t think they’ll ever do it again”.
Trump, who arrived in the Netherlands late on Tuesday for NATO’s annual leaders’ summit, was sitting beside Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who both also cast doubt on the reliability of the DIA assessment.
Rubio said the US was opening an investigation into the leak of the DIA report. He also suggested the report’s contents had been misrepresented in the media.
