Secretary of State Marco Rubio refused to say on Sunday whether the United States actually had intelligence that Iran was building a weapon of mass destruction before bombing the Gulf country’s nuclear sites ― dismissing any such assessment as “irrelevant” to the Saturday night attack that will very likely lead to wider conflict.
Rubio was one of several Trump administration officials to oversee the attack titled “Operation Midnight Hammer,” in which the U.S. bombed three key nuclear sites in Iran as part of Israel’s war on the longtime foe. The Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman said that the attack caused “extremely severe damage and destruction” to the sites before acknowledging that a complete assessment determining the extent of the damage will take more time.
Appearing Sunday on CBS News’ “Face the Nation,” the secretary of state described Iran as having “weaponization ambitions” ― leading host Margaret Brennan to press whether U.S. intelligence had specifically shown that Iran’s supreme leader already ordered nuclear weaponization.
“That’s irrelevant,” Rubio said, to which Brennan pushed, “But that is the key point in U.S. intelligence assessments, you know that.”
Brennan was referring to a March assessment by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, in which she testified to Congress that Iran was not building a nuclear weapon and that Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei had not “authorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003.”
President Donald Trump on Friday dismissed his own intelligence chief’s March assessment as “wrong,” with the White House last week saying Iran only needs the green light from Khamenei to create a weapon within weeks.
After a back-and-forth with Brennan, Rubio acquiesced by saying it “doesn’t matter if the order was given” by Khamenei, pointing instead to assessments made by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), a United Nations-backed nuclear watchdog.
“Forget about intelligence,” the secretary of state said. “What the IAEA knows [is] they are enriching uranium well beyond anything you need for a civil nuclear program. So why would you enrich uranium at 60% if you don’t intend to one day use it to take it to 90 and build a weapon? Why are you developing [Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles]?”
Brennan said she’s not disputing that information, citing the IAEA’s censure of Iran earlier this month for failing to comply with its obligations under the nonproliferation agreement, including watchdog investigations into undeclared nuclear material. The host re-upped her question of whether there was U.S. intelligence that Iran was specifically ordered to proceed with nuclear weaponization prior to the airstrikes.
“We have intelligence that they have everything they need to build a nuclear weapon,” Rubio maintained. “And that’s more than enough.”
