I Rewrote the Latest Washington Post News Report on Trump's Iran Bombing Run

Because the Post sanewashes, and because I can, and because, why not?

For some reason, The Washington Post didn’t paywall a recent story about the Mad Clown’s Iran adventure. This gave me an opportunity to annotate/rewrite the story they released about it.

Screenshot of Washington Post article with necessary strikeout; fair use claim

As you can see by the screenshot, American intelligence services intercepted private Iranian communications that expressed surprise at the limits of the damage done to their nuclear enrichment program by American bombs.

Although I’m happy that they released the story, The Washington Post remains a Bezos production, which means that journalists who may be otherwise inclined are forced into sanewashing their way through these difficult times.

I was also surprised to see the tagline “Democracy Dies in Darkness” still floating at the top of their report. I guess Bezos is so wrapped up in his $45 million nuptials party in Venice that he hasn’t had a chance to directly intervene. Ruminato, of course, was one of the few major media outlets to report on the Bezos fab wedding of the century:

That Time Inflatable Alligators Blocked a Jeff Bezos Wedding

What follows are my edits and annotations to the WaPo article. To accomplish this task, I had to reach into my personal wayback machine to the days when I was a young journalism student long before I decided that line of work wasn’t for me (instead, I found myself in the much more prestigious advertising biz).

Put on your sanewashing glasses, and let’s go for a ride.

The Annotated News Report

By John Hudson and Warren P. Strobel

The United States obtained intercepted communication between senior Iranian officials discussing this month’s U.S. military strikes on Iran’s nuclear program and remarking that the attack was less devastating than they had expected, said four people familiar with the classified intelligence circulating within the U.S. government.

Hey! So far, so good!

The communication, intended to be private, included Iranian government officials speculating as to why the strikes directed by President Donald Trump were not as destructive and extensive as they had anticipated, these people said. Like some others, they spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence.

Really, that’s not so bad, either. I’m even starting to get genuinely excited.

The intercepted signals intelligence is the latest preliminary information offering a more complicated picture than the one conveyed by the president, who has said the operation “completely and totally obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program.

Oh, oops. There we go. Let’s rewrite this Ruminato-style, shall we? Key changes are in bold:

The intercepted signals intelligence is the latest preliminary information offering strong evidence that the president was lying when he claimed the strikes “completely and totally obliterated” the Iranian nuclear program.

The next couple of paragraphs should be struck from the story. Everyone knows about the lies from the administration, especially from the mouth of Lying Barbie, Karoline Leavitt.

The Trump administration did not dispute the existence of the intercepted communication, which has not been previously reported, but strenuously disagreed with the Iranians’ conclusions and cast doubt on their ability to assess the damage at the three nuclear facilities targeted in the U.S. operation.

“It’s shameful that The Washington Post is helping people commit felonies by publishing out-of-context leaks,” said White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt. “The notion that unnamed Iranian officials know what happened under hundreds of feet of rubble is nonsense. Their nuclear weapons program is over.”

We don’t need to keep repeating their lies for them, do we?

Let’s move on. This time, I’ll mix strikethroughs with direct edits (in bold) into the story’s next excerpt:

Analysts broadly agree that the strikes involved immense U.S. firepower, including 30,000-pound bunker buster bombs and Tomahawk cruise missiles, that severely damaged the nuclear facilities in Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan. This involved B-2 bomber pilots sitting in their cockpits for 37 hours straight in a genuine test of human endurance.

But the extent of the destruction and how long it may take Iran to rebuild have been hotly debated amid reports that Iran moved its stockpiles of highly enriched uranium before the strike and that the explosions only sealed off the entrance to two of the facilities but did not collapse their underground buildings, thus leaving them largely intact.

Just strike this next paragraph completely. Why even ask them when you know they’ll reflexively lie? But if you must ask, have the editorial fortitude to disregard the answer if it is outrageously inane or is just more sycophantic repetition:

When asked about the intercepted communication, a Trump administration official said the Iranians were “wrong because we’ve destroyed their metal conversion facility. We know that our weapons were delivered precisely where we wanted them to be delivered and they had the effect that we wanted.”

Again, I’ll add some strikethroughs and direct edits (in bold) to the following excerpt:

During classified congressional briefings last week, CIA Director John Ratcliffe told claimed to lawmakers that several key nuclear sites were completely destroyed, including Iran’s metal conversion operations, a U.S. official said. The Such a facility, which is key to building a bomb’s explosive core, would take years to rebuild if destroyed, the official said. Ratcliffe also said that, despite evidence to the contrary, the U.S. intelligence community assesses that the “vast majority” of Iran’s enriched uranium is “likely buried at Isfahan and Fordow.” This claim has not been substantiated outside of the Pentagon.

You can also dismiss what a spokesperson says, whether it has been repeated ad nauseam or not, when their comments are so blatantly stupid that they shouldn’t be repeated. So fine. Ask. But don’t repeat the answer when it’s pure propaganda. I’m striking this out, too:

After The Post sought comment from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, a senior U.S. intelligence official said that “one slice of signals intelligence on its own does not reflect the full intelligence picture.”

“A single phone call between unnamed Iranians is not the same as an intelligence assessment, which takes into account a body of evidence, with multiple sources and methods,” this official said.

With this next excerpt, I’m back to some important editing:

Intercepted phone calls, emails and other electronic communications, known as signals intelligence, are among the most powerful tools in U.S. spy agencies’ arsenal and often make up the majority of intelligence in Trump’s daily intelligence briefing in slide presentations and other multimedia formats that don’t involve reading, which his staffers acknowledge he is either incapable of or refuses to do. But signals intelligence also has limitations, as overheard snippets of conversations sometimes lack context and must be paired with other information for a fuller picture of events.

My one true journalism mentor in college had one big pet peeve. He called it editorializing, and he would flunk people who tried to do it for the college newspaper. He was a great teacher, so all I can say about my next suggested change is, “Sorry, Abe, we live in a different era:”

Concern about the President’s mental health continues to mount as he has become increasingly Trump has been furious about news coverage that has deviated from his false claims about the bombing mission, which preceded a ceasefire between Iran and Israel ending 12 days of hostilities.

“The Democrats are the ones who leaked the information,” he lied wrote on Truth Social, referring to a preliminary assessment from the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency that Trump’s intervention likely set back Iran’s nuclear program by months, not years. In another unhinged rant, he wrote, “They should be prosecuted!” Calls for psychiatric tests continue to be unheeded by a subservient GOP caucus.

I see no reason to add this next paragraph to the story, so I’m striking it, too. It’s just a crazy uncle rumination:

Trump also cast doubt on reports that the uranium stockpile was moved, saying during a prerecorded interview with Fox News that was scheduled to air Sunday: “I don’t think they did, no. It’s very hard to do; it’s very dangerous to do. … They didn’t know we were coming until just then.”

The next is just basic reporting. No changes needed:

The Defense Intelligence Agency finding was based on information available roughly 24 hours after the strike and concluded that some of Iran’s centrifuges, used to enrich uranium that could be used in a nuclear weapon, remain intact.

Once again, we are left with the question of why they felt the need to include the next paragraph. Are Washington Post editors concerned that Trump’s version of events isn’t getting enough airtime? Strike it. Strike it all:

The Trump administration has criticized some media outlets for failing to note that the DIA report, which it deems “low confidence,” cautions that a full battle damage assessment requires “days-to-weeks to accumulate the necessary data to assess effects on the target system.”

However, the administration has not waited to assert its own sweeping conclusions that the strikes have set back Iran’s program by “years.” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who briefed reporters on the operation Thursday alongside the Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, Gen. Dan Caine, said Trump “directed the most complex and secretive military operation in history — and it was a resounding success.”

If I were an editor for a major corporate mainstream rag, I’d be unable to mention Hegseth without an extended discussion of his drinking habits and his neo-nazi tattoos, but that’s just me. It also helps explain why I’m never on the short list of Pulitzer nominees.

The article finally turns to the opposition, well after most readers have moved on to another article in their reading queue. In Journalism 101, students were once taught something called “pyramid style writing,” which involves a pyramid of importance. The most important stuff is at the top. The story includes progressively less important information as the reader continues into the meat of the story.

The reason for this is related to the print era, when newspapers were under tight printing deadlines. Copy editors needed to be able to slice an article wherever they wanted to make a story fit into a layout, and they needed to do it fast. The easiest way to do that was to simply snip the story somewhere, beginning from the bottom. That way, they didn’t have to worry about the actual editing process. Snip. Snip. Done.

That style of writing remains at most publications, and so, now, one of the Congressional bulwarks against the regime, Democratic Senator Chris Murphy, finally gets his chance to chime in. I would have included his comments a lot sooner, but for simplicity, I left it in where it was originally written, but I struck out the unnecessary preceding short paragraph:

On Capitol Hill, disagreements about the effectiveness of the strikes remained after the Trump administration’s classified briefings to lawmakers last week.

“I walk away from that briefing still under the belief that we have not obliterated the program,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut) told reporters. “The president was deliberately misleading the public when he said the program was obliterated. It is certain that there is still significant capability, significant equipment that remain.

His quote has much more authority when you remove the preceding paragraph, don’t you think? He continues:

“You cannot bomb knowledge out of existence — no matter how many scientists you kill,” Murphy added. “There are still people in Iran who know how to work centrifuges. And if they still have enriched uranium and they still have the ability to use centrifuges, then you’re not setting back the program by years. You’re setting back the program by months.”

And now, I must use an F-bomb, so if you’re sensitive to that, my apologies.

Anyway, fuck Lindsey Graham. He lost the right to speak out one day, many years ago, when he played golf with Trump and overnight became a fan. Until we know what Trump said to him on that fateful day, he doesn’t get to speak to us:

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina), a close ally of Trump, said “obliteration” was a “good word” to describe the strikes, which he said set back the program by years. But he acknowledged that Iran’s capabilities could be restored.

“The real question is, have we obliterated their desire to have a nuclear weapon?” Graham told reporters. “I don’t want people to think that the site wasn’t severely damaged or obliterated. It was. But having said that, I don’t want people to think the problem is over, because it’s not.”

Doublespeak from a former critic who mysteriously, during a 24-hour period, became a sycophant. Don’t quote that farcical fool for any reason, ever.

You can read the rest of the article here, where it was not paywalled at the time of this writing:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/06/29/trump-iran-nuclear-damage-intercepted-call

Notes

Ruminato correspondents are reporting that the Mad Clown’s reaction to The Washington Post report was to throw a Mickey D’s Big Mac against the wall and scream, “I don’t like ketchup on my sammiches!”

The Washington Post also included (because of course it did) an AI summary of reader comments:

What readers are saying

The comments overwhelmingly express skepticism and disbelief regarding the Trump administration's claims about the U.S. strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities. Many commenters accuse President Trump and his administration of habitual lying, with some suggesting that Iranian assessments of the damage are more credible than those from the U.S. government. There is a strong sentiment that the administration's statements lack credibility, and several comments mock the hyperbolic language used by officials like Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Overall, the comments reflect a deep mistrust in the administration's narrative and a belief that the damage from the strikes was exaggerated.

This summary is AI-generated. AI can make mistakes and this summary is not a replacement for reading the comments.

What a world we live in.

Thanks for reading!

Please restack if you want to help fight media bias and sanewashing.