The corrected testimony

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has been accused of altering her written Senate testimony on Iran. According to reports, her original statement said US intelligence had concluded that Iran attempted to rebuild its uranium enrichment capabilities after they were bombed in June 2025. That information directly contradicts Trump's insistence that Iran was "close to building a nuclear weapon" and therefore posed an imminent threat.

The distinction matters. Attempting to rebuild enrichment capacity is not the same as being close to having a nuclear weapon. The first is an expectable activity from any state whose strategic infrastructure has been destroyed. The second is the justification Washington used to launch the war. Gabbard told the Senate that Iran's enrichment programme was "obliterated" in last June's strikes. If it was obliterated in June, and what existed in February was an attempt at reconstruction, the window between "reconstruction" and "bomb" is measured in years, not months.

It is the kind of discrepancy that in another era would have triggered an investigation. It comes after Joe Kent's resignation, in which he said there was no intelligence of an imminent threat. Together, the two revelations suggest the intelligence basis for the war was, at best, insufficient, and that the public presentation was more alarmist than the data warranted. Iraq 2003 taught that wars built on questionable intelligence have consequences lasting decades. Whether anyone in Washington remembers that lesson remains to be seen.