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.”
