Aloha and Namaste, everyone, and welcome to Impolitic with John Heilman, a puck and

Odyssey joint featuring lively, in-depth conversations with the people who cruise the quarters of power

in America, sculpting and shaping the ebb and flow of our politics and culture.

More than one week after the U.S.

struck Iran with bunker-busting bombs and Donald Trump declared that Iran's nuclear program had been,

quote, completely obliterated, there are still way more questions concerning that military operation

than there are solid, substantial, or credibly substantiated answers. How much damage did our airirstrikes actually do to Iran's breakneck sprint to go nuclear?

How far back did we set those efforts by days, by weeks, by months, by years?

Who knows?

Dinaran managed to move much or all of its cache of enriched uranium in the days before the bombs fell,

and if the enriched uranium was moved,

exactly where was it moved? And, finally, is the U.S. effectively, if not officially, at war with Iran

today? Or is there a plausible theory under which the world's reigning superpower can drop

bombs on one of its foremost adversaries in a key geostrategic theater aimed at crippling that adversary's

capacity to wage war against one of America's foremost allies in that theater and still maintain

that we are somehow not in a state of full-on bellicosity.

Answering those questions was made all the more difficult last week by a Trump administration

that reacted with fury when the press reported on a leaked preliminary intelligence assessment from within the administration.

The president singling out a CNN journalist and saying that she should be fired for doing her job.

Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, suggesting that the fourth estate's role wasn't to seek and report credible information on the success of the U.S. airstrikes, but instead to praise our soldiers and, quote, wave an American flag.

And the White House also making it known that from now on it plans to limit the classified intelligence it shares with Congress in order, in theory, ostensibly, purportedly,

to curtail the possibility of that information leaking. To talk all this over, we have with us on

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