On the menu today: Believe it or not, we’re almost halfway through the year. The director of the International Atomic Energy Agency tells Face the Nation that the U.S. attack inflicted “a very serious level of damage” on the Iranian nuclear program. Meanwhile, Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson runs a clinic on how to not win friends and influence people. Elsewhere, U.S. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard continues to not get invited to the sorts of events you would think she would attend. And an update on what I’ve done in the past week. Read on.
The IAEA Assessment of Iran’s Nuke Program
Rafael Mariano Grossi, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, discussed the state of Iran’s nuclear program on Sunday on CBS News’ Face the Nation; the interview was taped Friday:
I think you can pick and choose any adjective to characterize this, but you will see that there is an agreement in describing this as a very serious level of damage. It can be, you know, described in different ways, but it’s clear that what happened in particular in Fordo, Natanz, Isfahan, where Iran used to have and still has, to some degree, capabilities in terms of treatment, conversion and enrichment of uranium have been destroyed to an important degree. Some is still standing. So there is, of course, an important setback in terms of those — of those capabilities. This is — this is clear. And now the important issue — the important thing is, what are the next steps? Now the characterization of the damage, I think we can, you know, speculate, and still, until, of course, the Iranians themselves will have to go there and sift through the, you know, rubble and look at what is the exact degree of the damage. At some point, the IAEA will have to return. Although our job is not to assess damage, but to re-establish the knowledge of the activities that take place there, and the access to the material, which is very, very important, the material that they will be producing if they continue with this activity. This is contingent on other, you see, everything is connected. This is — this is contingent on negotiations which may or may not restart, so — so what we see this here, I think we have a snapshot of- of- of a program which has been very seriously damaged, to quote Dr. Araghchi. And now what we need to focus on is on the next steps. [Emphasis added.]
“Dr. Araghchi” is Abbas Araghchi, the Iranian foreign minister:
Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, said on Thursday that the country’s nuclear facilities had sustained “significant and serious damages,” the first official acknowledgment of the extent of the damages caused by U.S. strikes on three nuclear sites.
The Atomic Energy Organization of Iran was still “surveilling the damages and losses,” Mr. Araghchi said in an interview with Iran’s state television. But, he added, “I have to say, the losses have not been small, and our facilities have been seriously damaged.”
Is Iran’s nuclear weapons program so destroyed that we never have to worry about it again? No. Iran has more than 90 million people, two uranium mines, and depending upon how you measure, either the 25th or the 37th-largest economy in the world. If they pour all their resources into developing a nuclear weapon, they can regain lost ground. Of course, developing a nuclear weapon in secret is difficult, and the U.S. has demonstrated it can blow up whatever the Iranians attempt to build.
When three sites get hit by 14 GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrators and roughly 60 other precision-guided weapons including Tomahawk missiles, it’s going to do a considerable amount of damage.Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Dan Caine, describing the operation during a briefing Thursday:
All six weapons at each vent at Fordo went exactly where they were intended to go.
A bomb has three affects that causes damage: blast, fragmentation and overpressure. In this case, the primary kill mechanism in the mission space was a mix of overpressure and blast ripping through the open tunnels and destroying critical hardware. The majority of the damage, we assess based on our extensive modeling, was a blast layer combined with the impulse extending from the shock. Imagine what this looks like six times over.
A point that I want to make here, the joint force does not do BDA [battle damage assessment]. By design, we don’t grade our own homework. The intelligence community does. But here’s what we know following the attacks and the strikes on Fordo. First, that the weapons were built, tested and loaded properly. Two, the weapons were released on speed and on parameters. Three, the weapons all guided to their intended targets and to their intended aim points.
Four, the weapons functioned as designed, meaning they exploded. And we know this through other means, intelligence means that we have, that we’re visibly — we are visibly able to see them. And we know that the trailing jets saw the first weapons function, and the pilots stated, “This was the brightest explosion that I’ve ever seen. It literally looked like daylight.”
Later, Grossi told the BBC that the damage of the electrical installation was “very important in the sense that one of the underground facilities there, halls where centrifuge cascades are still installed.”
“Our assessment is that with this sudden loss of external power, in great probability the centrifuges have been severely damaged, if not destroyed altogether,” he added.
Centrifuges are fragile, finely balanced machines which spin uranium hexafluoride gas at extremely high speeds using rotors.
A small problem — such as a power cut — can send a centrifuge spinning out of control, with parts smashing into each other and damaging a whole cascade.
Grossi also said there was radiological and chemical contamination at the site, but that the level of radioactivity outside had remained unchanged and at normal levels.
When CNN’s Natasha Bertrand ran a report about the Defense Intelligence Agency’s early assessment, declaring “the centrifuges are largely ‘intact,’” a whole lot of people pushed all their chips to the center of the table and rhetorically bet that the mission had been a failure. They bet wrong.
One of These Justices Is Not Like the Others
The dynamics within the Supreme Court are more Dan McLaughlin’s beat, but this widely noticed dissent from Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson in Diamond Alternative Energy v. EPA, where Jackson was in the 7-2 minority, is worth our attention:
“I worry that the fuel industry’s gain comes at a reputational cost for this Court, which is already viewed by many as being overly sympathetic to corporate interests. . . . For some, this silence will only harden their sense that the Court softens its certiorari standards when evaluating petitions from moneyed interests, looking past the jurisdictional defects or other vehicle problems that would typically doom petitions from other parties. This Court’s simultaneous aversion to hearing cases involving the potential vindication of the rights of less powerful litigants — workers, criminal defendants, and the condemned, among others — will further fortify that impression.”
(Implied in this argument is the notion that the Supreme Court should consider public opinion and its reputation and popularity when reaching decisions and which cases to consider, in addition to the Constitution and precedent and the law.)
Needless to say, Supreme Court watchers on the left were thrilled by Jackson publicly expressing concern that others — let’s face it, her like-minded progressives — believe the court is now just a tool for big corporations to get what they want.
Over in the New Yorker, Ruth Marcus approvingly declares, “The newest Justice is increasingly willing to condemn the actions of the conservative majority, even when that means breaking with her liberal colleagues.”
Writing in the New Republic, Matt Ford wrote, “A fiery dissent from the newest justice warns that the Supreme Court is doing grievous reputational harm to itself by playing favorites with ‘moneyed interests.’”
In Slate, Mark Joseph Stern swooned, “Jackson did not merely critique the methodology; she also implied that [Justice Neil] Gorsuch practices it in bad faith, enshrining his ‘policy preferences’ under the ‘disguise’ of statutory interpretation. Indeed, she expanded this rebuke to an undefined ‘majority’ that relentlessly imposes its ‘desired outcome’ on the nation. It is telling that even Sotomayor refrained from joining this passage.”
Indeed, it is awfully telling. Do disputes like this indicate that Justice Jackson is “declaring her independence” (the New Yorker), “done playing nice” (Slate), or trying to “save the Supreme Court from itself” (the New Republic)?
Or is a sign that she’s off on an island with an interpretation of the law that is so far off from the written text that not even Elena Kagan or Sonia Sotomayor (on one of her high-profile dissents this term) agree with her? Does Jackson think that Kagan “softens her standards when evaluating petitions from moneyed interests”?
If a conservative/strict constructionist/textualist justice dissented from the rest of the court like this, and implied that his or her colleagues were biased in favor of a particular type of litigant, would it get a warm enthusiastic reception from publications like the ones listed above? Or would it be perceived as evidence that the justice has a judicial worldview far from the mainstream and resorts to baseless accusations of bias when stuck in a frustrating dissent?
Mind you, all of this was written before the Court’s issuance of its decision in Trump vs. Casa Inc., where Justice Amy Coney Barrett sounded utterly infuriated with the logic, or lack thereof, in Jackson’s dissent:
JUSTICE JACKSON, however, chooses a startling line of attack that is tethered neither to these sources nor, frankly, to any doctrine whatsoever. Waving away attention to the limits on judicial power as a “mind-numbingly technical query,” she offers a vision of the judicial role that would make even the most ardent defender of judicial supremacy blush.
We will not dwell on JUSTICE JACKSON’s argument, which is at odds with more than two centuries’ worth of precedent, not to mention the Constitution itself. We observe only this: JUSTICE JACKSON decries an imperial Executive while embracing an imperial Judiciary.
JUSTICE JACKSON skips over that part. Because analyzing the governing statute involves boring “legalese,” post, at 3, she seeks to answer “a far more basic question of enormous practical significance: May a federal court in the United States of America order the Executive to follow the law?” Ibid. In other words, it is unnecessary to consider whether Congress has constrained the Judiciary; what matters is how the Judiciary may constrain the Executive. JUSTICE JACKSON would do well to heed her own admonition: “[E]veryone, from the President on down, is bound by law.” Ibid. That goes for judges too.
For those wondering if Justice Jackson really referred to an aspect of the case as “legalese,” her dissent begins:
To hear the majority tell it, this suit raises a mind-numbingly technical query: Are universal injunctions “sufficiently ‘analogous’ to the relief issued ‘by the High Court of Chancery in England at the time of the adoption of the Constitution and the enactment of the original Judiciary Act’” to fall within the equitable authority Congress granted federal courts in the Judiciary Act of 1789?. But that legalese is a smokescreen.
Tulsi Gabbard Humiliation Watch
Headline on my column in the Post, December 13: “Tulsi Gabbard is going to hate the DNI job.”
Amid a political battle over what the intelligence shows, the White House is expected to send four of its top national security officials to brief lawmakers: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, CIA Director John Ratcliffe and Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, administration officials said.
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who testified in March that U.S. intelligence agencies assessed that Iran was not building a nuclear weapon, will be notably absent.
So she wasn’t invited to the big pre-war Camp David meeting, twice in a week the president said on camera that she’s wrong in her assessment or that he doesn’t care what she says, and now she’s not being sent to brief Congress. But other than that, everything’s going great!
(Senator Tom Cotton has introduced legislation that would cut the staff of the office of the Director of National Intelligence by 60 percent, but Cotton’s staff says the proposal preceded Gabbard’s appointment.)
ADDENDA: Thanks to Noah Rothman, Dominic Pino, and Audrey Fahlberg for filling in while I was away.
I had jokingly urged my colleagues to have a quiet news week while I was away at the shark-infested beaches of Hilton Head Island. The U.S. striking Iran’s nuclear facilities was big enough to get me to post to the Corner during my vacation, as was the New York City Democratic establishment betting everything on Andrew Cuomo, and losing it all.
Also, as you might suspect, grocery stores are not known for high profit margins, New York City imposes sales taxes on quite a few types of food, and labor costs more in the city than almost anywhere else because it has the fourth-highest minimum wage in the country at $16.50 per hour; Zohran Mamdani intends to raise that to $30 per hour.
Still, despite criticism from the likes of me, Mamdani is picking up positive coverage from “Al-Khandiq,” a news website linked to Lebanese Hezbollah. Whether or not he endorses them, they certainly seem to endorse him. The editorial writes, “From this role, Mamdani could build significant public and media influence, potentially propelling him to: Member of U.S. Congress, potential vice-presidential candidate, Secretary of State, Justice, or Homeland Security.” Mamdani would be ineligible for the presidency if he were ever named a vice-presidential candidate; he was born in Kampala, Uganda, in 1991 and became a U.S. citizen in 2018. (If you have an eight-year-old child or grandchild who was born in the United States, that child has been a U.S. citizen longer than Mamdani has.)
Over at that other Washington publication I write for, I examined Lindsey Graham’s bill to toughen sanctions on Russia, which has at least 80 cosponsors. Look, I want to hammer Russia as much as anybody, but I don’t think imposing a 500 percent tariff on any country that is purchasing Russian energy is going to get us where we want to go. Besides the fact that this would amount to the second declaration of a global trade war in a couple of months, there’s the little detail that we’re still importing at least small amounts of Russian uranium for our civilian nuclear plants.