Mousavian: Full Damage To Iran Nuclear Sites Unknown
President Trump says the US will meet with Iran next week, while casting doubt on the need for a diplomatic agreement on Tehran's nuclear program. President Trump continues to insist that US strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities had obliterated them. Seyed Hossein Mousavian, Former Iranian Ambassador to Germany spoke to Bloomberg's Horizons Middle East and Africa anchor Joumanna Bercetche on the extent of damage to these sites. (Source: Bloomberg)
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CNN
10 minutes ago
- CNN
For North Korea, Iran's fate reinforces nuclear strategy
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CNN
11 minutes ago
- CNN
DOGE-driven cuts could weaken administration's ability to handle Iran conflict
The US military's strikes in Iran over the weekend prompted a swift response from across the federal government to react to any fallout, but current and former officials say the administration's DOGE-driven cuts to a host of agencies have made it harder to grapple with the conflict and prepare for potential retaliation. At the federal agencies that handle cybersecurity, hundreds of departing staffers have heightened concerns about US vulnerabilities to cyberattacks coming from Iran or its proxies. Staffing shortages at the Federal Emergency Management Agency have raised fears about domestic preparedness inside the agency. At the FBI, some agents who were shifted into assisting immigration enforcement efforts are returning to focus on the agency's counterterrorism mission. At the State Department, career officials with decades of experience in the region have departed or been forced out of their roles. 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'There is significant concern that Iran will try to engage in either cyber or kinetic, asymmetric tactics in response to this conflict,' said John Cohen, the former acting undersecretary for intelligence and analysis and counterterrorism coordinator at the Department of Homeland Security, who led the effort at DHS under the Obama administration to develop response plans to threats from Iran. The Iran strikes came after the first months of Trump's second term saw the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency force deep staffing cuts across government, including resignations and layoffs of more than 100,000 federal workers and the attempted dismantling of several federal agencies, though many of the reductions are still being litigated in court. In addition to cuts, the Trump administration has also shifted priorities, focusing much of its domestic security thus far on securing the border. 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Since the start of the second Trump administration, hundreds of cybersecurity personnel across multiple federal agencies have left, or made plans to leave, the federal government. That includes people who were fired, took the 'deferred resignation' program or chose to leave for other reasons. There is concern among current and former US officials that the upheaval has disrupted the regular pace of briefings and coordination between cyber officials and critical infrastructure firms. The bulk of the DOGE-led cuts have been at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), a part of DHS charged with protecting non-military networks from hacking. 'The government generally and CISA specifically has lost a lot of great cyber talent, and we're going to feel that,' Jeff Greene, who until January served as CISA's executive assistant director for cybersecurity, told CNN. 'These losses will impact our defensive capabilities somewhere. 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Mike Simpson, an Idaho Republican, said he didn't think that the government reductions overall would be harmful to the government's Iran response. 'Anytime you go in and try to reduce the size of a government program, there's going to be kickback. It's not anybody's fault,' Simpson said. 'I don't think that hurts us. We can actually handle this stuff. We can actually walk and chew gum at the same time. But is it disrupting? Yeah. And it is disrupting to employees.' The Trump administration's shift of hundreds of law enforcement agents to immigration enforcement potentially also complicates its response to threats from Iran, former officials say, even if some of those shifts have been reversed in recent days. Officers from agencies including the ATF, FBI and US Marshals Service paused some of their existing work and focus on immigration. 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US agencies tasked with responding to incidents on domestic soil, conducting diplomacy and projecting soft power overseas are also dealing with personnel reductions. Staffing cuts and internal turmoil at FEMA are fueling concerns about the agency's ability to respond if tensions with Iran trigger emergencies at home, several current and former agency officials told CNN. In recent years, FEMA developed plans to address threats from foreign adversaries, particularly after Russia's invasion of Ukraine. But those efforts, the sources said, have stalled as key leaders and frontline staff have left the agency and resources have dwindled. With the military focused on operations overseas, FEMA plays a key role in managing domestic crises — including terror-related and cybersecurity incidents — protecting the US population and ensuring the federal government remains operational. But the agency has faced months of upheaval, marked by a wave of departures, plummeting morale and mounting uncertainty about its future direction. As FEMA's pool of experienced personnel shrinks and resources become more limited, doubts are growing about its ability to fulfill its critical mission. Staffing cuts at the Mount Weather Emergency Operations Center — one of the nation's most vital emergency response facilities — are compounding these worries, sources told CNN. The State Department, meanwhile, has no deputy assistant secretary for Iraq and Iran. There is no longer a confirmed US ambassador in Qatar or Jordan and no confirmed assistant secretary of state for the Middle East. Former State Department officials say experts in diplomacy are essential when you get into the nitty gritty of complicated issues like an Iranian nuclear deal, something Trump still says he wants. 'A solid, verifiable, legally sound agreement is going to require experts in science, law, negotiation, nuclear policy, and international structures,' said Alexandra Bell, a former Biden administration deputy assistant secretary in State's Bureau of Arms Control, Deterrence and Stability. 'If you want deals, if you want to find diplomatic solutions, you need diplomats and you need to not be terrorizing them.' One congressional source said that most foreign democracy programming was cut under DOGE, but the administration is not answering questions about the status of a longstanding civil society program in the Middle East specifically that promotes democracy and the free flow of information into closed societies like Iran. A senior State Department official responded to CNN's request for comment, saying that department officials from previous administrations had 'no credibility' on Iran. At Voice of America, a government-funded news organization that's led America's efforts to broadcast information around the world for decades, most of the staff were put on leave in March after Trump signed an order to drastically shrink its parent, the US Agency for Global Media. There are now ongoing lawsuits to try to block the cuts. Following Israel's military campaign in Iran, the USAGM temporarily brought back VOA Persian employees to broadcast in Farsi. But about half of those employees were then part of widespread layoffs at Voice of America announced on Friday, one day before the US military strikes in Iran, according to VOA journalists. Kari Lake, a senior adviser for USAGM who is leading the effort to dismantle it, testified at a House hearing Tuesday that VOA successfully broadcast Trump's Saturday speech in Farsi. 'We are still broadcasting in Farsi,' she said. 'Sometimes a lean and mean and a smaller staff makes it easier to get things done.' But VOA journalists told CNN that the attempts to broadcast Trump's speech that night were chaotic because of the layoffs, and there were delays in publishing it translated into Farsi online. The Farsi translation of Trump's speech on social media lost audio roughly a minute in. 'It was a disaster,' said one VOA journalist, who requested anonymity to speak candidly without retribution. Patsy Widakuswara, VOA's White House bureau chief and a lead plaintiff in one of the VOA lawsuits, said that TV production that night for the Farsi broadcast was hampered by the lack of support and technical staff. 'Everything that's needed to support a good broadcast, they were not there,' she said. 'This is a lost opportunity, where we're not putting out the narrative that we would usually put out, which is factual, comprehensive, balanced.' Rep. Don Bacon, a Nebraska Republican, told CNN that cutting of Farsi radio was 'short-sighted.' 'That would be one clear example that they shouldn't have done,' Bacon said.
The Hill
12 minutes ago
- The Hill
The Memo: Trump fights to hold on to narrative of Iran win
President Trump is punching back at critics and doubters as he tries to bolster his claim that the U.S. bombing of Iran was a full success, strategically and politically. Trump and his allies have reacted furiously to media reports about an early assessment from the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), which contended that Iran's nuclear program had likely been set back by only a few months by the U.S. bombing. This assessment is a far cry from the claims made by Trump and by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Trump said the campaign had left Iran's nuclear facilities 'fully obliterated.' The Israeli prime minister has said the Iranian program was 'brought to ruin.' The issue is important to Trump for domestic political reasons as well as on the global stage. He had been under an unusual amount of pressure because of the crosscurrents within his Make America Great Again (MAGA) coalition on the issue of U.S. forces getting directly involved in the assault on Iran. Figures like Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) have argued vociferously that Trump has risked getting the U.S. sucked into yet another war in the Middle East — even as more hawkish Republicans like Sen. Lindsey Graham (S.C.) contend that maximalist American support for Israel could transform the region. Those fights got so intense that a number of influential figures on the online right have been hurling insults at each other. The tensions have also led to highly unusual moments, like the usually hyperloyal Greene writing on social media that Trump is 'not a king' — even as she insisted there was no rupture in her support for the president. Earlier this week, Trump seemed to have threaded his way through this complicated landscape. The brief but significant U.S. strikes — in which B-2 warplanes dropped 14 massive bunker buster bombs on Iran — held out the potential of demolishing Iran's capacity to enrich uranium, while also foreclosing the possibility of American forces ending up in a prolonged conflict. The bombs were dropped on target, the damage was said to be total and the planes returned to their Missouri base without incident. To that extent, it was the antithesis of the disaster then-President Jimmy Carter suffered in 1980, when a bid to rescue American hostages in Iran ended ignominiously when helicopters failed in the Iranian desert and eight U.S. troops were killed. Trump's political victory appeared to be capped when he announced a ceasefire between Israel and Iran. He has taken to referring to the phase begun by Israeli strikes on Iran as the '12-Day War.' But if — a big 'if,' to be sure — the DIA assessment is correct, it has the capacity to change the narrative at a stroke. If the setback inflicted on the Iranians could be overcome within months, it would suddenly look as if Trump had taken a very large risk for an unsatisfyingly small reward. It would also open the door to questions about whether the U.S. would feel the need to carry out further sorties into Iranian territory. This may be one reason why Trump is so angry that the DIA's evaluation has been made public. In one social media post on Wednesday, he contended that the two news organizations that led on the story, The New York Times and CNN, had 'tried to demean the great work our B-2 pilots did.' Trump went on to complain about reporters and asserted, 'You would think they would be proud of the great success we had, instead of trying to always make our country look bad.' 'TOTAL OBLITERATION!' he concluded. Secretary of State Marco Rubio put considerable emphasis on what he said was the destruction of a 'conversion facility' in the city of Isfahan. Rubio contended this facility had been effectively erased — 'we can't even find where it is, where it used to be, on the map' — and that, without it, there was no way for Iran to develop a nuclear weapon. The weak spot in this argument is that much of the attention before the U.S. raid was on a different Iranian facility in Fordow. It was the Fordow enrichment plant that, being built into a mountain, was supposed to require the use of bunker buster bombs in the first place. Now, some reports suggest Fordow may have had its entrances cut off by the bombing, but without the destruction of the facility itself. This, in turn, affects the whole rationale that undergirded the U.S. decision to get involved. Advocates of the bombing argued that punitive action would cause the Iranians to abandon any ambitions they have for a nuclear bomb, for good. But it's possible that the Iranians could draw precisely the opposite lesson: that Israel and the U.S. had felt emboldened to attack because Iran is not a nuclear power — unlike other American adversaries like North Korea and Russia, for example — and therefore it needs to develop nuclear weapons with maximum speed. Such a quest would be made easier if the core structure of some of its nuclear facilities have survived, if it was able to move enriched uranium to other locations before American bombs fell, or if it has secret facilities that have evaded international attention. It is of course possible that the DIA assessment is simply wrong. Trump allies point to an Israeli intelligence assessment that found more serious damage was done. In a social media post late on Wednesday afternoon, Trump promised an 'interesting and irrefutable' Pentagon news conference on Thursday morning, at which he said Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and members of the military would speak. Roughly an hour prior to Trump's post, CIA Director John Ratcliffe released a statement saying the agency believed that Iran's nuclear program had been 'severely damaged.' A statement from such a staunch Trump ally won't quiet the doubters. But Trump will be eagerly hoping it's true. The Memo is a reported column by Niall Stanage.
