In Trump’s Case for War, a Series of False or Unproven Claims

(I think at this point the plan is thus: get Israel to launch a strike on Iran in order to bait them into retaliating and then once that happens, Israel or some irregular warfare asset of ours will launch a drone attack on a U.S. vessel using old, repurposed Iranian drones, possibly collected and repaired after the 12-day war last year. They can then say Iran attacked us, killed some service men and women (or contractors most likely) and that would motivate the American people, along with a very incurious mainstream media, to go to war with Iran. But that's just a guess.)

from the NYT

As they made their public case this week for another American military campaign against Iran, President Trump and his aides asserted that Iran has restarted its nuclear program, has enough available nuclear material to build a bomb within days, and is developing long-range missiles that will soon be capable of hitting the United States.

All three of these claims are either false or unproven.

American and European government officials, international weapons monitoring groups and reports from American intelligence agencies give a far different picture of the urgency of the Iran threat than the one the White House has presented in recent days.

Iran has taken steps to dig out the nuclear facilities hit during strikes last June by Israel and the United States, and it has resumed work at some sites long known to American spy agencies. But the officials said that there isn’t evidence that Iran has made active efforts to resume enriching uranium or trying to build a mechanism to detonate a bomb.

The stockpiles of uranium that Iran has already enriched remain buried after last year’s strikes, making it nearly impossible for Iran to build a bomb “within days.”

Iran has a large arsenal of short- and medium-range ballistic missiles capable of hitting Israel and American military bases in the Middle East, but American intelligence agencies believe Iran is probably years away from having missiles that can hit the United States...

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