(Dobbs) Nobody "Tried To Demean" The B-2 Pilots

What journalists reported was, some intel says Iran's nuclear program wasn't "totally obliterated."

Have you seen—seen, read, or heard— anyone in the mainstream news media “demeaning” the pilots who flew B-2s halfway around the world last weekend to drop bunker buster bombs on Fordow, Iran’s most fortified nuclear site? Anyone? The answer is no, because no one has.

But that doesn’t stop Donald Trump from spitting out more dirt, spinning out more lies, to undermine the media. Particularly in a post yesterday on his website following the NATO summit in the Netherlands, where he targeted CNN and The New York Times: “They tried to demean the great work our B-2 pilots did, and they were wrong in doing so. These reporters are just BAD AND SICK PEOPLE.” At his post-summit news conference he went on to generally label journalists who reported on assessments of the strikes that didn’t match his, “scum.” He said one particular correspondent at CNN should be “thrown out like a dog.”

Let’s get one thing straight right away: what a handful of enterprising journalists did report— not just at CNN and The Times but at the Associated Press and The Washington Post and ABC News and many others— is that although President Trump insisted that the strikes “totally obliterated” Fordow and thus Iran’s nuclear program, maybe they did but maybe they didn’t. Maybe at best they brought an end to Iran’s nuclear ambition but maybe at worst, they only set it back by a matter of months.

The verdicts are mixed. Assessments from different sources run the spectrum— remember, everyone is still at a fairly early stage in figuring out just how bad the damage is. Israel’s military chief of staff, following on a report by his nation’s atomic energy commission, says the strikes were "not a localized blow, but a systemic one,” which set Iran’s ambitions back by years. The United Nations’ International Atomic Energy Commission says the strikes “severely damaged several” of Iran’s nuclear installations but its director general warned, “No one is in a position to assess the underground damage at Fordow.” An outlier has been the United States Defense Intelligence Agency, the main intel source of the Pentagon. Its initial “battle damage assessment” by the U.S. Central Command said the core components of Iran’s program were damaged but not destroyed.

There is one more factor to put in the mix. Late yesterday the Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard— who angered Trump earlier this month when she testified that Iran was not building a nuclear weapon— changed her tune and said in a post on X, “New intelligence confirms what @POTUS has stated numerous times: Iran’s nuclear facilities have been destroyed.” Also yesterday the CIA director, John Ratcliffe, said that a “body of credible evidence” shows that Iran’s program has been “severely damaged.” Now think about how savagely Donald Trump has trashed his own agency chiefs in the past when their assertions have contradicted his. He trashed his FBI directors— James Comey for the Russia investigation, Christopher Wray for the Mar-a-Lago search for secret documents. He called his first secretary of state Rex Tillerson “dumb as a rock.” He called his first defense secretary James Mattis “the world’s most overrated general.” Earlier this month after Gabbard’s testimony about Iran, he trashed her, saying, “I don’t care what she said. She is wrong.” Just yesterday he ranted about Fed Chief Jerome Powell because he isn’t lowering interest rates, contemptuously calling him "an average mentally person, low IQ for what he does.” So the question is, although Gabbard and Ratcliffe might truly believe what they said yesterday, how likely is it that if they don’t, they would publicly offer assessments that fly in the face of Trump’s? Not likely if they want to keep their jobs.

It is the spectrum of assessments that news organizations and news correspondents, the ones that Trump targeted, have reported. They did not demean the B-2 pilots. The president told reporters at his post-summit news conference, “You should be proud of those pilots and you shouldn’t be trying to demean them. Those pilots flew at great risk.” He said the B-2 crews were “devastated” by the journalists’ reports. If he’s telling the truth about that— and given his genetic disposition to lie, the odds are against it— they should not be. Nobody raised questions about their skills, nobody raised questions about their bravery.

And they did not demean the unparalleled power of the United States of America. What they reported was, nobody outside Iran itself knows precisely how deep and robustly reinforced the Iranian site was, and, since the bunker buster bombs have never before been used, nobody can conclude precisely how deep they actually went. Journalists reported the facts, including the fact that early assessments by the Pentagon did not conclude “total obliteration.”

They also reported that while Trump claimed to know that Iran wasn’t able to salvage almost 900 pounds of enriched uranium from Fordow before the air strikes because “We think we hit them so hard and so fast, they didn’t get to move,” there are two inconvenient facts that could lead to a different conclusion. One is, just two days before the U.S. attacked, satellite surveillance showed a long line of cargo trucks parked on the periphery of the installation. The day after the attack, there was no sign of them. If not to carry away Iran’s uranium stockpile, why else were they there?

The other is, evidently no radiation has been detected emanating from Fordow since the strikes. If the enriched uranium never got moved, and if the bombs reached all the way down into the tunnels where it was stored, why didn’t any radiation escape?

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, probably unintentionally, undermined the president’s own assertions about what we really know. Standing with Trump at the news conference after the summit, he tried to make the point that at this stage, the news media, even the agencies making assessments, couldn’t possibly know what it looks like below the surface of Iran’s fortified facility. "If you want to make an assessment of what happened at Fordow,” he told reporters, “you better get a big shovel and go really deep because Iran's nuclear program is obliterated.”

Yes, Secretary Hegseth, at least part of that is right, anyone who wants to know needs a great big shovel. But that raises a new question: if the Israelis haven’t been down there yet, if the Americans haven’t been down there yet, how can the president be so sure? We can make reasonable assumptions but all we really know so far is, satellites show damage on the surface. They don’t show damage deep down. When a reporter asked Trump about the Defense Intelligence Agency’s initial assessment, the president replied, “They didn’t see it. All they can do is take a guess.” As if he isn’t taking a few guesses himself. He even told the news media, “Issue the report when you know what happened.” He’s the only guy who doesn’t have to live by his own rules.

The answer to almost every question is, maybe we did, maybe we didn’t. Maybe we did totally obliterate Fordow, maybe we did totally obliterate Iran’s whole nuclear program, or maybe we didn’t. Maybe we did destroy their stockpile of enriched uranium at Fordow, maybe we didn’t. Personally I hope the answer in each case is yes. Personally I believe that just the scope of our attacks, on the heels of Israel’s, had to set Iran back for quite some time. But the point is, we don’t know yet.

That doesn’t make the journalists who reported on assessments by reliable sources that were less than optimistic— including the Pentagon’s own intelligence arm— “scum.” It makes them reporters.

Which, in this conflict between the president and the press, leaves only one piece of scum in this story. You’ll have to decide who it is.

Over more than five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He also co-authored a book about the seminal year for baby boomers, called “1969: Are You Still Listening?” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 39-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.

You can learn more at GregDobbs.net