Tulsi Gabbard, the US director of national intelligence, delivered a concise verdict during congressional testimony this March: the intelligence community “continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and supreme leader Khomeini [sic] has not authorized the nuclear weapons program that he suspended in 2003”.

As he rushed back to Washington on Tuesday morning, Donald Trump swatted aside the assessment from the official that he handpicked to deliver him information from 18 US intelligence agencies.

“I don’t care what she said,” said Trump. “I think they were very close to having one.” 

Trump’s assessment aligned him with Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, who has warned that Iran’s “imminent” plans to produce nuclear weapons required a pre-emptive strike from Israel – and, he hopes, from the United States – in order to shut down the Iranian uranium enrichment program for good.

It also isolates Trump’s spy chief, whom he nominated specifically because of her skepticism for past US interventions in the Middle East and of the broader intelligence community, which he has described as a “deep state”.

Gabbard sought to tamp down on a schism with Trump, telling CNN that Trump “was saying the same thing that I said in my annual threat assessment back in March. Unfortunately too many people in the media don’t care to actually read what I said.”

But as the Trump administration now appears closer than ever before to a strike on Iran, Gabbard has been left out of key decision-making discussions and her assessments that Iran is not close to a nuclear breakout has become decidedly inconvenient for an administration now mulling a pre-emptive strike.

“UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!” Trump wrote in a social media post on Tuesday. The US has dispatched another carrier group, KC-135 refueling tankers and additional fighter jets to the region. Those assets have been sent to give Trump “more options” for a direct intervention in the conflict, US media have reported.

Click here to read the full article in The Guardian.

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Featured image is a screenshot from Tulsi Gabbard’s X video post

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