Iran-Israel latest: Trump's CIA director insists Iranian nuclear sites ‘severely damaged' despite leaked intel
CIA director John Ratcliffe says "new intelligence" indicates Iran 's nuclear program was severely damaged by recent US strikes, and that it would take years to be rebuilt.
He was speaking after a leaked Defense Intelligence Agency assessment found that Donald Trump 's airstrikes on three Iranian nuclear sites had only set back the country's nuclear program by a matter of a few months.
President Donald Trump has repeatedly insisted the US bombing of Iran's nuclear facilities was a success, claiming it obliterated Tehran 's nuclear programme and set it back decades.Mr Trump compared the US operation to the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings in Japan, which killed an estimated 150,000 to 246,000 people, mostly civilians.
'That hit ended the war. I don't want to use an example of Hiroshima. I don't want to use an example of Nagasaki, but that was essentially the same thing, that ended that war. This ended that with the war,' he said at the Nato summit.
A Trump-brokered fragile ceasefire between Israel and Iran continued to hold into Thursday, with Iran revealing over 600 people have died in Israeli airstrikes.
Trump officials to give first classified briefing to Congress on Iran strikes
Senators are set to meet with top national security officials today as many question president Donald Trump's decision to bomb three Iranian nuclear sites — and whether those strikes were ultimately successful.
The classified briefing, which was originally scheduled for Tuesday and was delayed, also comes as the Senate is expected to vote this week on a resolution that would require congressional approval if Trump decides to strike Iran again.
Democrats, and some Republicans, have said that the White House overstepped its authority when it failed to seek the advice of Congress and they want to know more about the intelligence that Trump relied on when he authorized the attacks.
"Senators deserve full transparency, and the administration has a legal obligation to inform Congress precisely about what is happening," said Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer, who said Tuesday that it was "outrageous" that the Senate and House briefings were postponed.
A similar briefing for House members was pushed to Friday.
CIA director John Ratcliffe, secretary of state Marco Rubio and defence secretary Pete Hegseth are expected to brief the senators today.
Director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was scheduled to be at the Tuesday briefing, but will not be attending, according to a person familiar with the schedule.
Alisha Rahaman Sarkar26 June 2025 06:30
What satellite images and leaked intelligence say about Trump's Iran strikes?
Satellite pictures taken after the U.S. military's airstrikes on three Iranian nuclear facilities show significant damage to the sites – but not necessarily to the extent claimed by Donald Trump.
The U.S. president has repeatedly claimed that the facilities in Fordow, Isfahan and Natanz were 'completely and totally obliterated' in the weekend attack.
The images do appear to show damage on the ground following the bombing raid, including new craters, holes in mountain ridges and collapsed tunnels. However, they did not reveal definitive proof that the heavily fortified underground facilities were breached after US B-2 bombers struck the nuclear facilities.
More here.
What satellite images and leaked intel say about Trump's Iran strikes
Pictures show superficial damage to Iran's nuclear sites, while a leaked intelligence report suggests the strikes only set back Tehran's atomic programme by a matter of months
Alisha Rahaman Sarkar26 June 2025 05:49
Nato chief bizarrely calls Trump 'daddy'
The head of Nato fawned over President Donald Trump at a press conference on Wednesday, excusing the president's foul-mouthed tirade against Iran and Israel as 'daddy' using 'strong language.'
Mark Rutte, the Secretary General of Nato, beamed while sitting next to Trump at The Hague on Wednesday and praised the president for intervening in the conflict between Iran and Israel by sending U.S. bombers to destroy nuclear facilities.
Trump called the mission a 'tremendous victory for everybody' and claimed hostilities between Israel and Iran would stop by using an analogy of two children fighting in the schoolyard.
Ariana Baio reports.
NATO chief bizarrely calls Trump 'daddy' as he tries to brush off F-bomb rant
NATO chief referred to Trump as 'daddy' while praising his intervention with Iran and Israel
Alisha Rahaman Sarkar26 June 2025 05:14
Watch: Trump says he crippled Iran's nuclear plants but US intel disagrees
Trump said he crippled Iran's nuclear plants — but US intel tells a different story
A leaked preliminary intelligence assessment reportedly found that the US military strikes on three Iranian nuclear facilities over the weekend did not destroy the nuclear programme, despite Donald Trump repeatedly claiming the US 'obliterated' Iran's nuclear infrastructure. The Defense Intelligence Agency's initial assessment, leaked to CNN, says the strikes likely only delayed Iran's nuclear ambitions by a few months. Despite the leaks, Mr Trump boasted that he had 'stopped the war,' while speaking at the Nato summit.
Jane Dalton26 June 2025 05:05
CIA director says Iran's nuclear sites 'severely damaged'
CIA director John Ratcliffe has said that a body of credible intelligence indicated that Iran's nuclear program was severely damaged by recent US strikes, and that it would take years to be rebuilt.
'This includes new intelligence from a historically reliable and accurate source/method that several key Iranian nuclear facilities were destroyed and would have to be rebuilt over the course of years," Mr Ratcliffe said in a statement.
His statement comes after a Defense Intelligence Agency initial assessment leaked on Tuesday found that the US bombing of three Iranian nuclear sites had only set back the country's nuclear program by several months.
The CIA chief claimed that the new findings were based on 'credible intelligence' and that they contradicted what he called 'illegally sourced public reporting regarding the destruction of key Iranian nuclear facilities".
President Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed that the US strikes "obliterated" the nuclear facilities, even though satellite images showed the strikes managed to cause limited damage to the sites.
Alisha Rahaman Sarkar26 June 2025 04:47
Iran reveals its official death toll
Iran's health ministry has claimed that at least 610 people, including 13 children, were killed in Israel's almost two-week-long airstrikes on Iran.
The ministry spokesperson said just over a hundred people were killed in the final night of the conflict before the ceasefire commenced on Tuesday.
Additionally, 4,700 people suffered injuries during the 12-day war, the spokesperson said.
The figures fell short of US-based human rights group HRANA's estimated death toll of 1,054 people.
Alisha Rahaman Sarkar26 June 2025 04:14
Trump demands end of Netanyahu's graft trial
US president Donald Trump has demanded that the Israeli justice system drop its corruption case against prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
'I was shocked to hear that the State of Israel, which has just had one of its Greatest Moments in History, and is strongly led by Bibi Netanyahu, is continuing its ridiculous Witch Hunt against their Great War Time Prime Minister!' Trump wrote on Truth Social.
In his lengthy rant, Mr Trump called the case against his ally "politically motivated".
"Bibi Netanyahu's trial should be CANCELLED, IMMEDIATELY, or a Pardon given to a Great Hero, who has done so much for the State," Mr Trump added.
Alisha Rahaman Sarkar26 June 2025 04:13
US hospitals on high alert for cyberattacks
American hospitals, water dams and power plants are reportedly on high alert for potential Iranian cyberattacks:
Iran retaliation fears as hospitals and power plants on high alert for cyberattacks
The Trump administration attacked three main nuclear sites in Iran late Saturday
Jane Dalton26 June 2025 04:04
In pictures: Protests in Iran and Iraq
Jane Dalton26 June 2025 03:03
Iran set to block nuclear watchdog inspections
Iran's parliament has agreed to fast-track a proposal that would effectively end co-operation with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN watchdog.
Parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf criticised the IAEA for having "refused to even pretend to condemn the attack on Iran's nuclear facilities" by the United States.
"For this reason, the Atomic Energy Organisation of Iran will suspend co-operation with the IAEA until security of nuclear facilities is ensured, and Iran's peaceful nuclear programme will move forward at a faster pace," Mr Qalibaf told politicians.
IAEA director-general Rafael Grossi said he had written to Iran to discuss resuming inspections of their nuclear facilities.
"We need to return," he said.
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Live updates: Top Trump officials to brief senators on U.S. airstrikes against Iran's nuclear enrichment sites
What to know today Top Trump administration officials will brief senators today on the U.S. airstrikes on Iran's nuclear enrichment sites, but Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard will not be among them. CIA Director John Ratcliffe, who will be among those giving the briefing, said yesterday that Iran's sites were "severely damaged." Meanwhile, Iranian lawmakers voted voted almost unanimously yesterday to suspend cooperation with the United Nations' nuclear watchdog, which will make it more difficult to assess the damage from the strikes and monitor the country's nuclear enrichment activities. President Donald Trump is holding an event to tout the sweeping Republican domestic policy bill as the Senate races to pass it by a self imposed deadline of July Fourth. Polls indicate the massive bill is publicly unpopular despite including many proposals the president supports
The Guardian
an hour ago
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Australians trapped in Iran followed Dfat advice – only to find themselves stranded at border
Australians who were advised by the government to flee Iran via its border with Azerbaijan say they were marooned at the crossing without consular help for days – with two men taken into Iranian police custody and a grandmother taken into medical care after running out of medication while waiting for assistance. Rose, 70, who asked for her real name not to be used due to security fears, had rushed to Iran to visit a relative in the south of the country at the beginning of May. She was due to fly from Tehran on 17 June. But on 13 June, Israel launched its missile assault on Iran. When the attack began, the Sydney grandmother left Tehran, eventually making her way to the Azerbaijani border on the Caspian coast after being advised it was wise to do so by the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. Sign up for Guardian Australia's breaking news email Her daughter said she informed Dfat that Rose was en route to the crossing on Tuesday 17 June. Her daughter, who also asked for anonymity to protect her mother, said Rose and her family were told that the 'government had consular staff in Azerbaijan, including at its border crossing, to support Australians leaving Iran'. Rose arrived at the border at Astara on Friday 20 June, just hours after the Australian embassy in Tehran was evacuated, her daughter said. When Rose tried to cross into Azerbaijan, she was told by border officials that she needed a visa and a code from Dfat to enter the country. Australians must obtain an Azerbaijani visa online, then apply for a code to enter the country from the Australian embassy in Turkey – which covers Azerbaijan – after the Azerbaijan government's approval. Australians can then enter Azerbaijan with the correct individual 11-digit code. According to the Australian government's Smart Traveller website, it can take four business days or longer for a border crossing code to be issued. With patchy internet connection at the border, she arranged a visa with the help of her family, applied for a code, and began waiting. On Wednesday evening this week, Dfat's advice was that it had 'consular staff in Azerbaijan at the border to provide assistance as required'. At 6.30am on Thursday, six days after applying to cross the border, Rose's family was sent her code, by which time she had been taken into medical care because of her heart condition. She ran out of medication over the weekend. Rose said she had seen American, British and Belgian citizens receive their codes within minutes or hours. 'I was sitting there for the last five days – they were all going. But I'm the only one [still here],' Rose said on Wednesday, before her code had arrived. 'Unfortunately, I'm trying to call Dfat and there's not a sense of any help – they just say 'We are sorry, but we can't do anything about it,'' she said. 'Of course I am afraid. It's lucky there is no fighting between these governments, that's good, but we are not sure how long it will last.' She is now receiving treatment in a clinic in another Iranian city, the name of which she does not want disclosed due to safety fears. Rose's daughter in Sydney said she was angry about her mother's treatment. 'She ran out of critical heart medication over the weekend and despite this, Dfat still failed to cut through whatever red tape was holding this border crossing closed to our citizens,' she said. 'The government sent her to a locked door. We didn't expect a plane or any assistance beyond giving her authorisation to go through, using a visa she had obtained on her own - but they failed,' she said. 'To tell vulnerable people who trust them that they have help at a border for them when they clearly didn't … They didn't change the message even when they became well aware that the process was not working.' Brothers and business co-owners Sam, 33, and David, 35 – whose names have also been anonymised – had been due to return home to Perth on 14 June after visiting relatives in Iran. Sign up to Breaking News Australia Get the most important news as it breaks after newsletter promotion Dfat advised them to travel to Astara, in Iran, and arrived on Saturday 21 June. They applied to the Australian embassy in Ankara for their code to enter Azerbaijan that day. Sam received his code on Thursday morning. As of Thursday afternoon Australian time, David was yet to receive his code. Sam's Iranian visa expired five days ago. Sam said he and David were arrested by Iranian police in Astara on Tuesday evening and taken into custody for four hours. 'They treated us very bad, they did a body search and searched everything we had, they asked us to open our phone and they accused us of spying for Israel. They kept us in police custody for four hours,' he said. 'That was terrifying, I was scared. They told us to go to our hotel and not leave until we cross the border.' Sam said he would not leave Iran without his brother. 'It's a very confusing situation going between Ankara and Canberra – they are not very well organised for this,' he said. 'The team in Ankara is not coordinating with the team in Canberra.' Sam said he had watched as Japanese, German, Ukrainian and Italian groups were escorted over the border. 'We didn't even get basic help to cross the border. We have not seen a single Australian official at the border,' he said. Guardian Australia understands the foreign minister, Penny Wong, has raised Australia's concerns with the speed of processing of border crossing codes with her Azerbaijani counterpart. The government's concerns have also been raised by Australia's heads of mission in Turkey and Iran. It is understood Azerbaijan authorities are overwhelmed by the number of visa and code requests after Israeli and US airstrikes on Iran began. Over 3,000 Australians in Iran have applied for Dfat assistance since 13 June. Dfat said that officers in Azerbaijan, including at its border crossing were 'working hard to support Australians seeking to leave Iran'. Officers have been at the border crossing during opening hours every day since 23 June, a spokesperson said. 'Dfat is working with Azerbaijan authorities to help facilitate border crossing codes. We acknowledge that the number of people seeking to leave as well as the unstable internet connectivity in Iran is making the border crossing more difficult,' a spokesperson said. 'Unfortunately, at this stage our ability to provide consular services is extremely limited due to the situation on the ground.'
The Guardian
an hour ago
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It's time for America to remember how dangerous regime change is
The ceasefire between Iran and Israel might still hold, but if not, the United States might double down on its weekend strikes and seek the overthrow of the Iranian regime. Donald Trump threatened this in comments and tweets earlier, and top officials such as Marco Rubio have said they wouldn't mind it if it happened. Israeli leaders are openly in favor. If the US goes down this road, it will not be for the first time. In the last 80 years, Washington has overthrown many regimes. For a superpower, toppling foreign governments is not so hard to do. Getting the outcome you want is. This makes regime change as dangerous as it is seductive, as past US attempts clearly show. The US overthrow of the Japanese and German governments in the second world war made a whole generation of American leaders too optimistic about regime change. Germany's and Japan's transformation into strong democratic allies was a source of inspiration for the regime changes that dotted the cold war – but a misleading one. The only successful changer of regimes in the two centuries before had been Napoleon Bonaparte – and his regimes were fleeting. The United States helped overthrow Iranian leader Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953, but this sowed seeds of resentment that helped birth today's extremist government. In 1954, the CIA recruited a group of Guatemalan exiles to overthrow the Soviet-leaning leader Jacobo Árbenz. In 1961, US-backed rebels landed at the Bay of Pigs, in a failed attempt to overthrow Cuba's Fidel Castro. The US and the Soviet Union fought covert and overt wars to topple regimes from the 1960s until the 1980s, especially in Latin America, but also in Africa and beyond. After the cold war, regime change took on a new purpose as American leaders imagined a better world, free of violent ethnic hatred and a post-Soviet space full of flourishing democracies aligned with the United States. The popularity of the theory of democratic peace, according to which democracies are unlikely to go to war with each other, made the practice of turning non-democratic regimes around seem like the bedfellow of world peace and helped justify regime change on moral as well as national security grounds. And so, the US and its allies overthrew more regimes. The first target was Serbian autocrat Slobodan Milošević. His overthrow proceeded in stages, beginning with coercive airstrikes on his allies in 1995, spreading to Serbia itself in 1999, and ending with the toppling of his regime in elections in 2000. The US role in changing the regimes in Ukraine, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan over the next few years – the so-called color revolutions – was indirect and more limited than adversaries like Russia have made it out to be, but two decades later none of these countries is very stable or democratic. Serbia is ruled by a Kremlin-leaning nationalist. Kyrgyzstan is unstable, Georgia has become a client state of Russia and, sadly, Ukraine is under siege from a vengeful Russian president. The long-term outcomes of fostering uprisings against unwanted regimes have thus not been promising. The 9/11 attacks unleashed a fury of American vengeance that made possible military action on a much larger scale. If the US role in changing the regimes of these post-socialist states was visible mostly in the 'grey zone', nothing was opaque about the overthrow of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein. In Afghanistan, America's lightning-fast campaign made quick work of the Taliban. But US technological advantages melted in the face of an insurgency in a country that was foreign to most Americans who went to fight there, and in which the US national interest was limited to finding Osama bin Laden. After two decades of trying to construct an Afghan democracy, Joe Biden wisely withdrew, acknowledging defeat, and with it the limits of America's regime-changing power. In 2003, the US military also crushed the Iraqi regime with 'shock and awe' that impressed the world – just as the Trump administration's recent bombing of Iran initially did. The regime that replaced Saddam in Iraq was more democratic, but it was also a strategic gift to Iran, who now expanded its power into the vacuum that regime change had created. Military intervention in Libya in 2011 removed Muammar Gaddafi, nobly enforcing the UN doctrine of 'Responsibility to Protect'. But it left behind a sore in the side of all of north Africa and the Mediterranean basin, one that added to the chaos in Syria, encouraged the collapse of Mali and facilitated Europe's immigration crisis. Russia is now attempting regime change in Ukraine but has encountered similar challenges. Its experience there is an abject reminder of the fact that to everyone except the would-be regime-changer, these operations mostly look like brutal imperialism. The unsatisfactory history of regime change can hide the practice's allure. To live with imperfection, with messiness, with injustice, and with enemies, is very hard to do – especially as the stakes mount, as in Iran in recent weeks. Meanwhile, the diplomatic path is arduous and often leads to dead ends. Diplomatic outcomes are usually tenuous and can be short-lived – as demonstrated by the short life of the original Iran nuclear agreement, negotiated painstakingly under Barack Obama and torn up three years later by Donald Trump. But decades of regime-change attempts that yielded lackluster results at best should make the US hesitate before going down that road again. Some may hope for internal regime change – an uprising like the color revolutions. But uprisings have not produced stability in most recent cases, and there is no guarantee they would produce a regime in Iran any more conducive to American and Israeli security than today's ayatollahs. And the more the people rise up, the more a regime like this will crack down. Chaos – in other words, no regime at all – is a likely result. Other leaders and pundits may intend to walk the Trump administration ever closer to the regime-change strategies of George W Bush. A full-scale invasion might eliminate Iran's nuclear weapons programs, but it would be unmatched in scope and consequences since the second world war. Any hope of success would require the US to prepare to pay a hefty price in blood and treasure. None of this is to deny the serious problem that Iran and its nuclear ambitions present, nor the role that coercion must play in containing it. But decision-makers must not focus single-mindedly on Iran's nuclear program. They must ask deeper questions. What are America's real interests in this? How does the character of the Iranian regime affect the lives of ordinary US citizens who simply want to live in peace? How would a forced change of regime affect the character of America's own democracy, especially if it is carried out without congressional approval by a president who has played fast and loose with the constitution? How will it affect the people of the region? Will they view the US as a liberator or just another one of history's empires, determined to possess their resources and control their lives? Given the US habit of regime change, to avoid these questions would be as irresponsible as it would be dangerous for the nation and the world. Chris Chivvis is a senior fellow and director of the American statecraft program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
