UN watchdog and intercepted Iran call undermine Trump's boasts about ending nuke program
First, a top official with the United Nations's nuclear watchdog told CBS News that Iran's production capabilities would be able to enrich weapons-grade uranium within a few months, in the event Iran's government orders production of a nuclear-tipped missile.
Then, The Washington Post revealed that U.S. intelligence sources intercepted a call between top Iranian officials commenting on the strikes and describing them as less destructive than Tehran was expecting.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt fired back personally in a statement: 'It's shameful that The Washington Post is helping people commit felonies by publishing out-of-context leaks. The notion that unnamed Iranian officials know what happened under hundreds of feet of rubble is nonsense. Their nuclear weapons program is over.'
The Independent reached out Sunday for further comment.
The administration spun a narrative of total annihilation to describe the extent of damage to Iran's nuclear program this past week after the president ordered strikes on three Iranian facilities on June 21.
An initial U.S. intelligence assessment was leaked to the press and caused headaches for the administration as it claimed that Iran's stockpile of uranium was not hit during the attack and that centrifuges at the three sites were mostly intact following the strikes.
Officials including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth angrily scolded reporters after publication of the assessment, which they blamed on an effort to make the president look bad.
But questions remain about key parts of the nuclear weapons development process in Iran — including, most crucially, whether the full extent of Iran's nuclear and arms production sites have actually been identified.
On Sunday, International Atomic Energy Agency director Rafael Grossi told CBS News that Iran could be producing enriched uranium within a matter of months, explaining that the country's nuclear program did not suffer 'total' destruction — as President Donald Trump explicitly claimed multiple times this past week, and again on Sunday.
'It is clear that there has been severe damage, but it's not total damage, first of all,' Gross saidi. 'And secondly, Iran has the capacities there; industrial and technological capacities. So if they so wish, they will be able to start doing this again.'
But neither Grossi nor The Washington Post 's reporting contradicted one crucial aspect of the intelligence CIA Director John Ratcliffe briefed members of Congress on this past week.
Ratcliffe and the U.S. intelligence community maintain that Iran's metal conversion operations centered at Isfahan were wholly or near-completely destroyed, a setback that Ratcliffe maintained this past week would delay Tehran's progress on nuclear weapons development for years, not months.
The plants are used for fabricating enriched uranium into metal, a final step in the process before it is ready for testing and use inside of an operational nuclear missile. Isfahan was the only known facility inside Iran conducting this process.
An administration official told The Post that the destruction of those capabilities proved that the depiction of events on the intercepted call was 'wrong', adding: 'We know that our weapons were delivered precisely where we wanted them to be delivered and they had the effect that we wanted.'
The CIA director also told Congress that U.S. intelligence believes that the vast majority of Iran's enriched uranium was hit during the attack and is now 'buried' at Fordow. Grossi, meanwhile, maintained that it was possible Iran had moved the stockpile. The Times of Israel reported one expert as saying that it was a credible possibility for Iran to have another hidden metal conversion site.
Israeli intelligence also concluded that the Iranian program was set back by 'years' due to the extent of the damage, according to The Times of Israel.
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The Independent
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- The Independent
Nearly 600 Israeli ex-security officials appeal to Trump to end war
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The Independent
an hour ago
- The Independent
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The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
John Oliver: ‘Gaza is being starved by Israel'
John Oliver opened his latest episode of Last Week Tonight with a look at the dire famine in Gaza, which Israeli leaders and American supporters continue to deny. Oliver honed in on former Fox News host Megyn Kelly, who denied the credibility of images from Gaza of emaciated children. 'I kind of hoped we were done with Megyn Kelly as a society,' said Oliver to cheers, 'and collectively, you actually don't have to litigate this case one photo at a time. He cited reports from the United Nations, aid organizations and Israeli human rights groups all confirming the same thing: 'What's happening in Gaza right now is a famine,' he said. 'All the information we have points to that, except for this fucking guy [Netanyahu] and a few adult junior detectives squinting at each photo of a skeletal child to figure out if they're the right kind of dying.' 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Trump, Oliver reminded, was convicted on 33 counts of falsifying business records; since retaking office, his administration has halted or dropped 109 enforcement actions against corporate misconduct, and even issued the first ever pardon of a corporation, for crypto exchange BitMex. 'It is frankly no wonder experts have called this moment 'the ripest environment for corruption by public officials and business executives in a generation',' said Oliver. 'Though to be unfair, it's not like the environment was unripe before Trump took office. Republican and Democratic administrations have both taken a pretty lax approach to corporate crime for a while now. You might have noticed that stories about corporate malfeasance rarely end with executives going to jail or the companies getting shutting down.' Oliver focused on one key reason why: deferred prosecution agreements (DPAs), which are 'basically out-of-court settlements for companies to avoid being prosecuted', he explained. 'Essentially, the government will come to a company and say 'hi, company. Government here. You did a crime, and we have enough evidence to prosecute you.' But instead of then doing that, they then strike a deal where if the company behaves itself for a certain amount of time, the criminal charges eventually disappear.' Unfortunately, DPAs also 'don't really do much', Oliver continued. 'And sometimes, companies that have done massive harm have used them to literally get away with murder.' Oliver first looked at the history of DPAs, which were never supposed to apply to corporations. The concept arose out of a 1974 law that was supposed to help juvenile and first-time offenders avoid prosecution in favor of rehabilitation. DPAs for corporations flourished in the wake of the Enron scandal, when many employees of the fraudulent company's embattled accounting firm Andersen blamed the government for shutting down the company and putting them out of work. 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No individuals were held responsible, but because the company withheld information, at one least one woman was convicted of negligent homicide for a crash involving her boyfriend that later determined to be caused by the faulty switch. (Her conviction has since been overturned.) 'Thankfully, GM hasn't killed any more people with its cars since then, as of taping,' said Oliver. 'But other companies with DPAs have shown a much greater propensity for recidivism,' such as HSBC. In the early 2010s, the company got in trouble for allowing Mexican cartels to launder $880m in drug trafficking proceeds and facilitating $660m in transactions by sanctioned regimes. The company paid a fine of around $2bn, during a year in which they made over $13bn in profit, and no individuals were prosecuted. When the deal expired in 2017, the government dropped all charges … and a month later, the government charged them with rigging currency rates, and offered them another DPA. 'That is ridiculous,' said Oliver. 'At this point, it's not even a deferred prosecution agreement. It's more like prosecutorial edging. I'll say it before and I'll say it again: let the government come.' Finally, there's Boeing, which entered into a DPA in 2021 following the catastrophic crashes of two 737 Max planes the company knew were poorly designed. Boeing agreed to a fine and three years of demonstrating good behavior to avoid prosecution. 'It's an agreement that many felt was toothless,' said Oliver, 'especially given that one judge involved with the case later called what Boeing had done 'the deadliest corporate crime in US history'.' At the start of 2024, just two days before their probationary period was set to end, Alaska Airlines passengers filed a class-action suit against the company after a door broke off a 737 Max mid-flight. Though the incident demonstrated Boeing was not in compliance with the DPA, the government offered them a plea deal and another fine. This year, the Trump administration downgraded Boeing's punishment to a non-prosecution agreement, removing the possibility of prosecuting them over the 737 Max in the future. 'Which is completely infuriating,' Oliver fumed, as it is 'clearly great news for stockholders and not for anyone else.' 'This is not sustainable,' said Oliver of a cycle where corporate misbehavior leads to harm to government fine on repeat. 'And unfortunately, I wouldn't expect any of that to change for at least, say, three-and-a-half years But it is worth asking for a hypothetical future, when we have a government that isn't run by a pro-corruption felon, what could we be doing better to hold corporations accountable?' Oliver recommended making DPAs more of a deterrent by dramatically increasing fines and actually prosecuting executives, and more transparency of corporate compliance records. 'But the hard truth here is, if we want more accountability, the government is going to have to show more willingness to prosecute repeat offenders, even if it affects a large company's ability to do business.'
