US Has Bombed Iran - Where Do We go From Here

[ti-amie]

So, the United States has bombed Iran.

Unfotunately - Mr Delay said that this is one and done but Iran will have a major say in what will happen

I can't be sympathetic to America when Iran gets back at it.

So much for Tiny never starting a war.
What Owen said.

Can we get a separate thread on the current event starting with Dry comments that US has bombed Iran and all posts pertaining to that

[ti-amie]

‘There Is No Intel’: Trump’s Attacks on Iran Were Based on Vibes, Sources Say
Following Trump’s attacks on Iran, an admin official tells Rolling Stone, “The intelligence assessments have not really changed”
By Andrew Perez, Asawin Suebsaeng
June 22, 2025

After President Donald Trump’s decision to strike three Iranian nuclear facilities on Saturday, administration officials are barely bothering to pretend the unprecedented — and potentially calamitous — attacks were motivated by new intelligence suggesting Iran was on the brink of having nuclear weapons.

Just months ago, Trump’s Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard testified to Congress, in her opening statement, that the U.S. intel community “continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon” and had not reauthorized its nuclear weapons program.

While Trump recently publicly disputed Gabbard’s testimony, according to two administration officials with knowledge of internal deliberations in recent weeks, the president’s decision to strike was not driven by any new U.S. intelligence on Iran.

“There is no intel,” says one of the officials, who were granted anonymity to discuss sensitive matters. “Nothing new, that I’m aware of… The president is protecting the United States and our interests, [but] the intelligence assessments have not really changed from what they were before.”

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), who sits on the Foreign Relations Committee, confirmed Saturday night that American intelligence assessments on Iran have not changed. “I was briefed on the intelligence last week. Iran posed no imminent threat of attack to the United States,” he wrote on social media. “Iran was not close to building a deliverable nuclear weapon.”

White House spokesperson Anna Kelly says, “This is false and lazy ‘reporting’ designed to undermine President Trump’s highly successful operation to dismantle Iran’s nuclear capabilities.”

Trump’s attacks on Iran constitute an act of war — and could set off a new, long-term conflict with potential to grow into something much larger. Unlike a previous time an American president preemptively initiated a war in the Middle East, when George W. Bush plunged America into a disastrous war in Iraq, he and his team spent roughly a year building a case of lies and propaganda to sell to a public that was already broadly supportive of post-9/11 military action.

The second Trump administration skipped the pretense, opting to speed-run the U.S. into conflict, at a time when public polling shows that the idea of war with Iran is spectacularly unpopular with the American people.

In his address to the nation Saturday evening, Trump said, “Our objective was the destruction of Iran’s nuclear enrichment capacity and a stop to the nuclear threat posed by the world’s number one state sponsor of terror.”

Trump did not claim on Saturday that he launched the attacks because Iran was close to having a nuclear weapon — as he had suggested earlier in the week. “I think they were very close to having one,” the president said Tuesday, as he disputed Gabbard’s testimony to Congress.

The Trump administration has since attempted to recast Gabbard’s comments before Congress, because, after she said Iran was “not building a nuclear weapon,” she had added: “Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile is at its highest levels and is unprecedented for a state without nuclear weapons.”

Gabbard posted on X on Friday, “The dishonest media is intentionally taking my testimony out of context and spreading fake news as a way to manufacture division. America has intelligence that Iran is at the point that it can produce a nuclear weapon within weeks to months, if they decide to finalize the assembly.”

“As the president and White House officials have said many, many times, U.S. intelligence showed Iran had all it needed to build a nuclear weapon,” Kelly says. She points to a statement earlier this month from U.S. Central Command chief Gen. Michael Kurilla, who asserted that Iran’s “current [uranium] stockpiles and the available centrifuges across several enrichment plants are sufficient to produce its first 25 kg of weapons-grade materials in roughly one week and enough for up to 10 nuclear weapons in three weeks.”

The attacks on Iran represent both a major escalation and a rapid shift in posture toward Iran. Not long ago, Trump was working to negotiate a nuclear agreement with Iran — a development that was somewhat ironic given Trump had withdrawn from Barack Obama’s Iran deal in his first term as president.

Across the federal government, senior officials and policymakers aren’t pretending that Trump’s claims of an imminent nuclear threat are built on anything but vibes, whether intentionally manufactured or not.

During a press conference Sunday morning, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was asked whether the U.S. had new intelligence suggesting Iran had been attempting to build nuclear weapons.

“I would just simply say that the president’s made it very clear he’s looked at all of this — all of the intelligence, all the information — and come to the conclusion that the Iranian nuclear program is a threat,” Hegseth said.

Appearing on Meet the Press on Sunday, Vice President J.D. Vance was asked whether Trump had moved to attack Iran based on U.S. intelligence or rather intel provided by Israel, which has been attacking Iranian nuclear and military sites, officials, and scientists since June 13.

“Of course, we share intelligence with a lot of agencies, British, Israeli and so forth, but it was our intelligence that motivated us to act,” Vance said, before quickly pivoting.

“The thing that I would really emphasize is the way in which the Iranians seem to be stonewalling us,” he said. “That was not, by the way, our consensus back in March of this year, we saw the Iranians making some concessions. We thought the conversations were actually productive. By mid-May, everybody in our intelligence community and the president’s senior team looked at ourselves and said, the Iranians are not being serious. … If you believe, as we did, that the Iranians are rushing towards a nuclear weapons program while simultaneously refusing to negotiate, how can we do anything but take serious action against this program?”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio was pressed on Face the Nation on Sunday to say whether the U.S. had seen intelligence showing that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had ordered the country to make nuclear weapons.

“That’s irrelevant,” Rubio said, saying it didn’t matter if such an order was given. “They have everything they need for a nuclear weapon,” he added.

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/p ... 235369641/

[ti-amie]

Iran reportedly moves to shut Strait of Hormuz after US attacks
The Iranian parliament backed a measure to close the critical shipping route in response to U.S. airstrikes on nuclear sites in Iran, state media reported

June 22, 2025 5:33 pm CET
By Jacob Parry

Iran's parliament endorsed a measure to close the Strait of Hormuz, a critical global transit chokepoint, in response to overnight U.S. airstrikes on Iranian nuclear sites, Iranian state media reported Sunday.

Iran's state-owned broadcaster Press TV reported that the legislature had reached a consensus to close the strait. The final decision rests with Iran’s Supreme National Security Council and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, it said.

The channel, which separates Iran and Oman, is a vital gateway for petroleum shipments from Persian Gulf countries.

The strait connects the Persian Gulf to the open ocean and is one of the world’s most critical oil chokepoints. About 30 percent of global seaborne oil shipments pass through the narrow passage, a vulnerability that has become a growing concern amid spiraling regional tensions.

The parliamentary endorsement comes directly after the U.S. launched strikes on Iran's Fordo, Natanz and Isfahan nuclear facilities.

The American attack, dubbed Operation Midnight Hammer, involved a series of strikes on key Iranian nuclear facilities. It was launched to “neutralize” Iran’s ability to develop a nuclear weapon, U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told a press conference on Sunday.

U.S. President Donald Trump, in his message to the nation on Saturday evening, proclaimed the attacks a “spectacular military success.” Iran’s key nuclear enrichment facilities had been “completely and totally obliterated,” he said.

https://www.politico.eu/article/iran-re ... s-attacks/

[ti-amie]

U.S. calls on China to prevent Iran from closing Strait of Hormuz and disrupting global oil flows
Published Sun, Jun 22 20252:29 PM EDT Updated 6 Min Ago
Spencer Kimball
@spencekimball


Satellite image of the Strait of Hormuz, a strategic maritime choke point with Iran situated at the top with Qeshm Island and the United Arab Emirates to the South. Imaged 24 May 2017.
Gallo Images | Getty Images

Key Points
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio called on China to prevent Iran from blocking the Strait of Hormuz in retaliation for U.S. airstrikes.

About 20% of the world’s oil passes through the Strait of Hormuz.

China is Iran’s biggest oil customer and maintains friendly relations with the Islamic Republic.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Sunday called for China to prevent Iran from closing the Strait of Hormuz, one of the most important trade routes for crude oil in the world.

“I encourage the Chinese government in Beijing to call them about that, because they heavily depend on the Straits of Hormuz for their oil,” Rubio said in an interview on Fox News. China is Iran’s most important oil customer and maintains friendly relations with the Islamic Republic.

Iran’s foreign minister warned earlier Sunday that the Islamic Republic “reserves all options to defend its sovereignty,” after the U.S. bombed three key nuclear sites over the weekend.

Iranian state-owned media, meanwhile, reported that Iran’s parliament backed closing the Strait of Hormuz, citing a senior lawmaker. However, the final decision to close the strait lies with Iran’s national security council, according to the report.

An attempt to block the narrow waterway between Iran and Oman could have profound consequences for the global economy. Some 20 million barrels per day of crude oil, or 20% of global consumption, flowed through the strait in 2024, according to the Energy Information Administration.

Oil prices could shoot above $100 per barrel if the strait is closed for a prolonged period, according to Goldman Sachs and consulting firm Rapidan Energy. JPMorgan analysts view the risk of Iran closing Hormuz as low because the U.S. would view such a move as a declaration of war.

Rubio said it would be “economic suicide” for Iran to close the strait because the Islamic Republic’s oil exports pass through the waterway.

Iran is the third-largest oil producer in OPEC, pumping 3.3 million barrels per day. It exported 1.84 million bpd last month, with the vast majority sold to China, according to data from Kpler. About half of China’s waterborne crude oil imports, or 5 million bpd, comes from the Persian Gulf, according to Kpler.

“It would be a self-inflicted wound: cutting off the Strait would stop the flow of its crude exports to China, halting a key revenue stream,” Matt Smith, lead oil analyst at Kpler, told CNBC.

The U.S. secretary of state said Sunday that the U.S. retains options to deal with Iran trying to close strait.

“It would hurt other countries’ economies a lot worse than ours,” Rubio told Fox News. “It would be, I think, a massive escalation that would merit a response, not just by us, but from others.”

The U.S. Fifth Fleet is stationed in Bahrain and tasked with protecting maritime trade in the Persian Gulf. Oil market participants generally believe the U.S. Navy would swiftly vanquish any attempt by Iran to block the Strait of Hormuz. But some analysts warn that the market is underestimating the risk.

“They could disrupt, in our view, shipping through Hormuz by a lot longer than the market thinks,” said Bob McNally, founder of Rapidan Energy and former energy advisor to President George W. Bush.

Shipping could be interrupted for weeks or months, McNally said, rather than the oil market’s view that the U.S. Navy would resolve the situation in hours or days.

The U.S. would ultimately prevail but “it would not be a cakewalk,” McNally told CNBC.

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/06/22/us-call ... ormuz.html

[Owendonovan]

OK Marco, pull China into this you idiot.

[ti-amie]

OK Marco, pull China into this you idiot.

Do you think the Chinese have stopped laughing long enough to say no? This is like when your sibling makes a mess while you were minding your own business and when your parents ask "who did this" your sibling starts sobbing hysterically and says that you did it.

[ti-amie]

U.S. Officials Concede They Don’t Know Whereabouts of Iran’s Uranium Stockpile
Rafael Mariano Grossi, the director of general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said he believed Tehran’s stockpile of near-bomb-grade nuclear material had been moved before the strikes.

By David E. Sanger

June 22, 2025, 6:28 p.m. ET
A day after President Trump declared that Iran’s nuclear program had been “completely and totally obliterated” by American bunker-busting bombs and a barrage of missiles, the actual state of the program seemed far more murky, with senior officials conceding they did not know the whereabouts of Iran’s stockpile of near-bomb-grade uranium.

“We are going to work in the coming weeks to ensure that we do something with that fuel and that’s one of the things that we’re going to have conversations with the Iranians about,” Vice President JD Vance told ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday, referring to a batch of uranium sufficient to make nine or ten atomic weapons. Nonetheless, he contended that the country’s potential to build a weapon had been set back substantially because it no longer had the equipment to turn that fuel into operative weapons.

In a briefing for reporters on Sunday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of staff, Dan Caine, avoided Mr. Trump’s maximalist claims of success. They said an initial battle-damage assessment of all three sites struck by Air Force B-2 bombers and Navy Tomahawk missiles showed “severe damage and destruction.”

Satellite photographs of the primary target, the Fordo uranium enrichment plant that Iran built under a mountain, showed several holes where a dozen 30,000-pound Massive Ordnance Penetrators — one of the largest conventional bombs in the U.S. arsenal — punched deep holes in the rock. The Israeli military’s initial analysis concluded that the site, the target of American and Israeli military planners for more than 26 years, sustained serious damage from the strike but had not been completely destroyed.

But there was also evidence, according to two Israeli officials with knowledge of the intelligence, that Iran had moved equipment and uranium from the site in recent days. And there was growing evidence that the Iranians, attuned to Mr. Trump’s repeated threats to take military action, had removed 400 kilograms, or roughly 880 pounds, of uranium enriched to 60 percent purity. That is just below the 90 percent that is usually used in nuclear weapons.

Rafael Mariano Grossi, the director of general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said by text that the fuel had last been seen by his teams of United Nations inspectors about a week before Israel began its attacks on Iran. But he said on CNN that “Iran has made no secret that they have protected this material.”

Asked by text later in the day whether he meant that the fuel stockpile — which is stored in special casks small enough to fit in the trunks of about 10 cars — had been moved, he replied, “I do.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/22/us/p ... =url-share

No paywall - gift article

[patrick]

While the US is getting blasted, Israel is smiling like a kid in a candy store as Bibi manipulated Mr. Delay in bombing Iran.

[skatingfan]

Iran is launching a missile attack at a US air base in Qatar.

[Jeff from TX]

And apparently in Iraq.

[ti-amie]

[ti-amie]

June 23, 2025, 8:19 p.m. ETJust now
Ronen Bergman

While Israel has not yet confirmed President Trump’s cease-fire announcement, Israeli Air Force jets — possibly anticipating that such a declaration will be made soon — are striking dozens of targets in Tehran and other parts of the country according to two Israeli defense officials.


Live Updates: Trump Says Cease-Fire Is Imminent; No Word From Iran or Israel
The president’s assertion on social media came hours after an Iranian missile attack on the largest American military installation in the Middle East, and days after U.S. strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities.

Updated
June 23, 2025, 7:40 p.m. ET39 minutes ago
Farnaz FassihiJonathan SwanRonen BergmanAaron Boxerman and Adam Rasgon

Here’s the latest.

President Trump said on social media on Monday that Israel and Iran had agreed to a cease-fire after more than a week of missile strikes on each other and a weekend attack on Iranian nuclear facilities by American bombers. There was no immediate confirmation of a deal by Israel or Iran.

Mr. Trump’s assertion came hours after Iran launched missiles at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, the largest American military installation in the Middle East, retaliating for U.S. strikes on Iranian nuclear sites though taking steps to limit the damage.

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/06/23 ... =url-share

Gift Link

[ti-amie]

U.S. scrambles to determine impact of strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites
Donald Trump says Iran’s nuclear program was obliterated, but questions remain about Iran’s capability and the location of hundreds of pounds of highly enriched uranium.

June 23, 2025 at 8
8:52 p.m. EDT 41 minutes ago

By Karen DeYoung and Alex Horton
President Donald Trump has proclaimed that the U.S. bombing of Iranian nuclear enrichment facilities was an unmitigated success.

“The sites that we hit in Iran were totally destroyed, and everyone knows it,” he wrote in a social media post Monday.

U.S. strikes on Iran may have been a tactical win, with all three targets hit and all planes safely returned home. But defense officials and nuclear experts are still trying to determine whether the strikes achieved their stated strategic goal of eliminating Iran’s nuclear program, even as Trump declared late Monday afternoon that Iran and Israel had agreed to end their war.

“Final battle damage will take some time, but initial battle damage assessments indicate that all three sites sustained extremely severe damage and destruction,” Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in a Sunday morning Pentagon briefing.

Under Defense Department guidelines, it could take days or even weeks for the U.S. military to complete a formal battle damage assessment, or BDA, primarily by using overhead surveillance to collect information from the sites of the blasts. But experts caution there are limits to what information can be gathered.

Hearing directly from Iranians discussing the damage, either through human intelligence gathered by sources in Tehran’s government or electronic interception of those conversations, would be among the best ways to assess the effects, although they are also among the most difficult methods.

“In lieu of highly vetted source intelligence, there is no real way to conduct any thorough” BDA, said Wes Bryant, who served as a targeter in Air Force Special Operations.

The thousands of sophisticated uranium enrichment centrifuges at the underground Fordow site were probably significantly damaged, even if they were not directly hit, given the use of deep-penetration bombs and the “extreme vibration-sensitive nature of the centrifuges,” Rafael Grossi, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, told IAEA governors at an emergency meeting Monday in Vienna.

But “at this time, no one — including the IAEA — is in a position to have fully assessed the underground damage” at Fordow, Grossi said. The agency won’t know, he added, until its inspectors still in Iran are able to return to the facility.

More important is what happened to the more than 900 pounds of uranium the IAEA says Iran has already enriched to near-weapons grade, enough to make more than a dozen bombs. Some was stored at an underground site near Isfahan, according to the IAEA, which was hit with submarine-launched U.S. cruise missiles.

“Why am I not impressed?” Jeffrey Lewis, a nuclear and nonproliferation expert at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, wrote in a lengthy post on X. The enriched uranium “was largely stored in underground tunnels. … Despite extensive Israeli and US attacks [on] the facility, there does not seem to have been any effort to destroy these tunnels or the material that was in them.”

Earlier IAEA reports indicated that some of the enriched material may have been moved to other, undeclared locations. Iran is also believed to have additional equipment, outside of the bombed Isfahan conversion site, to convert enriched uranium hexafluoride gas into metal that can be used for constructing nuclear weapons.

Iran has dozens of sites associated with its nuclear program, which it has insisted is only for peaceful and civilian activities such as power generation and research. The day before Israel started its attacks this month, the government in Tehran said it had constructed a new facility outside Natanz that could be used to build new centrifuges. That site is even deeper underground than the enrichment facility at Fordow, built a few hundred feet into a mountain and thought to be the limit of what U.S. “bunker buster” bombs could reach.

“The point is they have material that they have made at other facilities,” Lewis said in an interview. “We don’t know what became of that.”

Lewis and others suggested that the United States was aware of the limitations of a military attack on the widespread Iranian nuclear program and was more interested in showing Tehran that Washington was prepared to use force to stop it.

“It is a loss for the Iranians,” Lewis said of the destruction at Fordow, Isfahan and Natanz, “but it is not anything like the scale of the attack you would mount if the goal was really to eliminate the program.

“This problem has delayed them, and undoubtedly there must be things that have been destroyed that they now have to reconstitute,” he said, but the rebuilding could probably be done in no more than a year.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said over the weekend that Iran’s nuclear program, thought to be months or a year from producing a nuclear weapon, had now been set back two or three years.

Trump said in the immediate aftermath of the strikes that they had completely “obliterated” Iran’s program, a word also used by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Vice President JD Vance told NBC’s “Meet the Press” that “we destroyed the Iranian nuclear program.”

Later in the same interview, Vance tempered his assessment, saying he was “not going to get into sensitive intelligence about what we’ve seen on the ground there in Iran. But we’ve seen a lot, and I feel very confident that we’ve substantially delayed their development of a nuclear weapon.”

Speaking to Fox News on Monday evening after Trump’s ceasefire announcement, Vance repeated that Iran’s nuclear program had been completely destroyed and was no longer capable of producing a nuclear weapon.

However the White House decides to measure success, the military — always a stickler for procedure — has a detailed system for an official battle damage assessment.

“I think the BDA is still pending, and it would be way too early for me to comment on what may or may not still be there,” Caine said Sunday.

Gauging the effect of strikes is often done using surface imaging from satellites, drones or aircraft that can help analysts determine to what degree enemy equipment and facilities were affected. That task is much more challenging when the targets are subterranean and deep inside hostile territory. The bombs dropped on the Fordow site burrowed through the mountainside and exploded on a delayed timer, collapsing dirt and rock that conceal the full extent of the damage.

One technology known as lidar, for “light detection and ranging,” can help produce three-dimensional maps of an environment by measuring the time it takes laser pulses to return to a sensor affixed to an aircraft or drone. It has been used to peer through foliage and reveal ruins in the Amazon.

In the case of Fordow, a high-altitude surveillance aircraft equipped with the technology can help analysts review ground disturbances and subtle terrain changes. “The composition of dust and debris ejected from the munition entry points and material that rushed out of the earth beneath them may also provide clues to the impacts,” said Bryant, the Air Force targeter.

Terrain modeling software can also help predict the scale of damage by analyzing information about the munitions used, rock and soil composition, and what is known about the structures, he said, although those estimates can be imperfect.

Complicating the effort is the lack of precedent: The strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities marked the first wartime use of the 30,000-pound Massive Ordnance Penetrator munition. The focus on targeting enemy structures underground is a relatively new Pentagon initiative, with several offices across the Defense Department taking interest in the capability.

One corner of that effort, the Hard Target Research and Analysis Center, was created in the months after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, as al-Qaeda militants took refuge in caves and tunnels in Afghanistan. The work has taken on new importance with adversaries such as China and North Korea turning to subsurface facilities to protect against bombs and surveillance. Underground infrastructure used by Hamas in Gaza may also be adopted by other militant groups.

A senior Israeli official said in the aftermath of the U.S. attack that his government’s hope is that the threat of additional U.S. involvement will lead Tehran to negotiate a deal to fully denuclearize.

Regardless of a possible ceasefire, “if the Iranian regime decides to go on without an agreement and to try to rebuild again,” the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss ongoing operations, “they should understand that it won’t be a huge challenge for us to get there again and destroy it again.”

Souad Mekhennet contributed to this report.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national ... ssessment/

[ti-amie]

"No signs of off-site radiation or contamination in the wake of U.S. attacks on three of the country's nuclear sites. If their uranium stockpile was there, it could be measured. Now he announces a ceasefire - but neither country will confirm it..."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national ... link-share

[ti-amie]

In a photo produced and distributed by the White House, President Donald Trump is seen with members of his Cabinet, including White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles; Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Vice President JD Vance; and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in the Situation Room of the White House on June 21. The photo has been digitally altered. According to the Associated Press, some papers on the table have been blurred by the source. (White House/Getty Images)

They wanted to counter the pic below.


U.S. President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden, along with members of the national security team, receive an update on Operation Neptune Spear, a mission against Osama bin Laden, in one of the conference rooms of the Situation Room of the White House, May 1, 2011. They are watching live feed from drones operating over the bin Laden complex. Seated, from left to right, are: a person with black hair (only part of the head is visible); Vice President of the United States Joe Biden, President Obama, Brigadier General Marshall B. "Brad" Webb, USAF, Assistant Commanding General, Joint Special Operations Command; Denis McDonough, Deputy National Security Advisor; Hillary Rodham Clinton, Secretary of State; and Robert Gates, Secretary of Defense. Standing, from left to right, are: Admiral Mike Mullen, USN, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Tom Donilon, National Security Advisor; Bill Daley, Chief of Staff; Tony Blinken, National Security Advisor to the Vice President; Audrey Tomason, Director for Counterterrorism; a person in a beige shirt (only part of the shoulder is visible); John Brennan, Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism; James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence; and a person in a black suit with a white tie, similar to the one seen here. A classified document in front of Hillary Clinton has been obscured by the White House. Photographer's note: "Much has been made of this photograph that shows the President and Vice President and the national security team monitoring in real time the mission against Osama bin Laden. Some more background on the photograph: The White House Situation Room is actually comprised of several different conference rooms. The majority of the time, the President convenes meetings in the large conference room with assigned seats. But to monitor this mission, the group moved into the much smaller conference room. The President chose to sit next to Brigadier General Marshall B. “Brad” Webb, Assistant Commanding General of Joint Special Operations Command, who was point man for the communications taking place. With so few chairs, others just stood at the back of the room. I was jammed into a corner of the room with no room to move. During the mission itself, I made approximately 100 photographs, almost all from this cramped spot in the corner. There were several other meetings throughout the day."
Pete Souza - White House Flickr Feed