Washington (Somalia Today) – US intelligence has concluded that Iran made no effort to rebuild the uranium-enrichment capacity destroyed in American and Israeli strikes last year, the top US intelligence chief told lawmakers on Wednesday.
The assessment by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard significantly undercuts a central element of President Donald Trump’s public justification for the ongoing Middle East war, now entering its third week.
Appearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee, Gabbard offered a sobering and mixed picture of the conflict’s aftermath.
She said the June 2025 military campaign had obliterated Iran’s enrichment programme and that Tehran had not tried to restore that highly sensitive capability in the months since.
However, she warned that the Islamic Republic’s leadership remains firmly in place, despite suffering catastrophic personnel losses, and will likely seek to rebuild its conventional military forces over time.
In written remarks submitted to lawmakers, Gabbard was unequivocal about the status of Tehran’s nuclear ambitions.
“As a result of Operation Midnight Hammer, Iran’s nuclear enrichment program was obliterated,” she wrote.
“There has been no efforts since then to try to rebuild their enrichment capability.”
Gabbard did not read that specific conclusion aloud during her televised opening statement. But when a Democratic senator pressed her on it, she did not disown the assessment, saying she simply lacked time to read her full prepared testimony.
Her written submission leaves little doubt that it reflects the formal, unified position of the 18-agency US intelligence community.
Shifting justifications
The intelligence finding sits awkwardly with the White House’s shifting public arguments for the current military campaign.
After the June 2025 strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities, Trump declared that the United States had completely dismantled the country’s atomic infrastructure.
But after launching the current, wider war alongside Israel on February 28, the president repeatedly argued that Tehran had once again moved dangerously close to acquiring a nuclear bomb, framing the offensive as a necessary pre-emptive strike against an imminent threat.
That claim has been hotly disputed by international observers.
The UN nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and numerous independent non-proliferation experts have not supported the assertion that Iran was on the verge of producing a weapon in the days before the latest conflict.
Operation Midnight Hammer targeted the core of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure.
The strikes decimated the commercial-scale underground enrichment plant at Natanz, the deeply buried facility at Fordow, and the vital uranium conversion complex at Isfahan.
It marked the most direct and consequential US military action against Iran’s atomic programme in history.
While IAEA chief Rafael Grossi has previously said Iran could theoretically resume limited enrichment if it had dispersed surviving equipment, Gabbard’s testimony confirms that no such reconstitution took place.
Political paradox
The glaring gap between the intelligence assessment and the president’s rhetoric fuelled fierce criticism from Democrats during Wednesday’s hearing.
Opposition lawmakers questioned whether the White House had deliberately exaggerated the urgency of the Iranian threat to bypass congressional oversight before the first bombs fell.
Gabbard’s role in defending the administration’s case carries deep political sensitivity.
As a former Democratic congresswoman, she built a national profile as a fierce critic of US military intervention, often warning against drawing the country into another major Middle East conflict.
Democratic Senator Michael Bennet seized on that contradiction during the hearing, accusing the administration of abandoning its own “America First” anti-war platform.
“President Trump said, we are not the police of the world. He ran on that,” Bennet said. “Now he’s turned us into the world’s policeman, into its jury, into its judge, into its executioner.”
The administration’s defence drew support from CIA Director John Ratcliffe, who also testified.
Ratcliffe argued that while Iran had engaged in indirect diplomacy with Washington before the war, Tehran showed no real intention of honouring those negotiations and continued to pose a direct, multi-front danger to US interests.
The tense hearing came just one day after Joseph Kent, the head of the National Counterterrorism Center, resigned in protest over the conflict.
Kent, a combat veteran, argued that Iran posed no imminent threat and accused Israel of using a “misinformation campaign” to pressure Trump into the war, making him the first senior official to step down over the offensive.
Regime still intact
Moving beyond the nuclear question, Gabbard’s testimony made clear that US intelligence views the surviving Iranian state as a potent, long-term adversary.
She told senators that Iran has suffered devastating damage from weeks of relentless strikes, including the assassination of its longtime supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Yet the Islamic Republic continues to function.
The intelligence community assesses the regime in Tehran to be “intact but largely degraded” because of the systematic dismantling of its leadership and military capabilities.
That language presents a notably more cautious view than the optimistic projections offered by some Israeli and US officials, who have publicly portrayed the decapitation strikes as a rapid catalyst for regime collapse.
Instead, US intelligence believes Tehran’s governing system is severely weakened, but fundamentally unbroken.
Gabbard warned that the surviving regime will likely launch a massive, years-long effort to rebuild its conventional armed forces, with ballistic missiles and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) likely to be top priorities.
