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Hegseth and Caine briefing and Trump as the spin doctor [1]
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Date: 2025-06-26
Hegseth and Caine press briefing (YouTube).
Hegseth started off the news conference by spending 10 minutes saying the press spends all their time trying to make Trump look bad by reporting and criticizing every little thing. He also made some comments about Trump's success at the NATO summit and how Trump got members to agree to using 5% of their GDP, up from 2%. That extra 3% is actually going to be for additional help for Ukraine.
Then he said the news media tries to find wedges and spin and that they completely missed the historic 5% NATO change. "But searching for scandals, you miss historic moments." "Because it was about President Trump, the press corps doesn't want to write about it."
"Decimating. Choose your words, obliterating, destroying, Iran's nuclear capabilities."
He described how the preliminary assessment said it would take weeks to do a real BDA, Battle Damage Assessment, properly, and yet here he is less than a week later claiming that we now know.
He brought up the Israeli and IAEA reports, like they know any better, and criticizes the New York Times, MSNBC and CNN for not reporting that. Well, they did, but with the caveat that this also is conjecture. It is. Hegseth rattles off a bunch of he said, she said, from others saying that the Iranian nuclear facilities had been badly damaged and set their program back years.
He called the leak of the early BDA, Battle Damage Assessment, as being biased by someone with an agenda.
Gen. Caine disseminated the real information. There were two individuals that have lived and breathed and examined the buildings being built, and fortification of Fordow, for 15 years. They were obviously consulted before the strike. The 50 minute briefing focused primarily on the attack on Fordow, and the base that was attacked by 14 Iranian missiles, 13 shot down, was described by Caine with the readiness of the Patriot missile batteries.
B-2 cockpit : Source: Yahoo! News via The Mighty
What was entirely new information besides the two experts on Fordow, was that there was a concrete cap that had been put on top of the ventilation shafts. There are two ventilation shafts. The first GRU-57 blew the concrete cap away and then five more bombs went down the ventilation shafts.
The concrete cap was put on two days before the attack and what was seen as trucks were vehicles carrying the concrete and workers to the site. I'm skeptical that the cap was built in two days. Concrete takes 24-48 hours to set, but if it's any kind of thickness that would have been needed, it could take a lot longer. If the concrete caps were over the ventilation shafts earlier, how did people breathe? Or was it like a shell over it? Is the story of the cap building a deflection that there were trucks moving out the HEU?
If there was one bomb that took off the cap, and then five more bombs that went down that hole, why are there 3 holes at each location, and not just two big ones? Why are there not 5 or 6 holes in each location at Fordow? This is the confusing part. The visual evidence doesn't seem to match up with General Caine's description. Hopefully the question will be asked and answered by Caine or Hegseth or maybe a real battle damage assessment, because this was a press briefing only.
Trump spent all day yesterday trying to drill "obliterated" and "obliteration" into our brains, calling for Natasha Bertrand of CNN to be fired and more.
Then he had to be the cheerleading squad and rumor snuffer.
The last one, where all the reporters should be fired because they have "evil intentions," is downright unhinged. So is the first post from last night.
The other spin is that we really don't know where the HEU, highly enriched uranium is.
You've got the head of Iran's nuclear program, Mohammed Islami, saying that Iran will pick up right where it left off. This implies that they have the HEU and another facility with centrifuges elsewhere. Could there be a facility so secret Israel and the US don't know about? There were 12 days being attacked by Israelis where they could have moved the HEU. If not from Fordow, then from Natanz and Isfahan.
The Iranians seem confident. That's either reality or spin. At the briefing the quotes from other agencies say the Iranians are set back by years. If the HEU was moved, months. So, if there is another facility, and they have the HEU, they can pick up right where they left off. Going over 5% enrichment is suspect because there is no peaceful purpose for it. They were at 60% or more. Building the bomb needs 90%. Our intelligence said they were not building a bomb. Israelis said they were. Why the HEU?
This was just a press briefing, not a full-blown battle damage assessment. It was a public relations effort demanded by Donald Trump. Trump's brain is so rattled that he took any criticism of information coming out about the bombing raid and it's effectiveness, that he spun that around to being unpatriotic because it demeaned the B-2 pilots. Not one news report I read ever said anything of the sort about the pilots.
The question is, will we get that full battle damage assessment when they think they have a accurate one? Until then we've got Donald Trump being a spin doctor as well as Hegseth. The only one who seems competent to give out information is General Caine.
I really hope that all of my worries are for naught. That the Iranians confidence is also a spin.
I just can't figure out the six holes.
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