The Trump admin doesn’t want you to know the real damage this war has had on our military bases. This is a COVER UP. They are erasing the war from the photographic record while it is still happening.
This is what the Trump administration is hiding right now. According to NBC News reporting confirmed by the American Enterprise Institute, Iran struck more than 100 targets across 11 US military bases in the Middle East, including bases in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Iraq, and the UAE.
The damage is conservatively estimated at $5 billion.
That's just buildings and runways. It does not include radar systems, weapons systems, aircraft, or equipment that was damaged or rendered unsalvageable. The actual cost is much higher.
So the White House asked the satellite companies to stop showing what happened.
Planet Labs, the private satellite company that has been documenting the war from orbit, sent an email to its customers on April 4 confirming the request. What started as a 96-hour delay, then a 14-day delay, has now been turned into an indefinite blackout retroactive to March 9.
The American public is being walked away from the photographic evidence of what its own military took.
Here's what those photos showed before the blackout. The Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar lost a major communications dome. Two radomes at the US Navy's 5th Fleet base in Bahrain were destroyed by missile and drone fire.
THAAD missile defense radars in Jordan and the UAE were hit. Communications equipment at multiple sites was rendered inoperable. An E-3 Sentry surveillance plane was destroyed in Saudi Arabia by an Iranian drone.
A dozen MQ-9 Reaper drones, two MC-130 tankers, helicopters, and at least one fighter jet were lost. An Iranian F-5 fighter jet struck Camp Buehring in Kuwait in the first days of the war, marking the first time in years that an enemy fixed-wing aircraft has hit an American military base.
Pete Hegseth told reporters in March that Iran's missiles "wouldn't make it to their targets." He said: "There's almost nothing they can militarily do about it." That's what the Secretary of War said.
NBC reports a notable number of missiles made it through.
Republican lawmakers are now complaining that even Congress isn't getting the truth. "No one knows anything," a Republican congressional aide told NBC. "And it's not for lack of asking." When the people who appropriate the money don't know what was destroyed with it, that's not operational security.
That's a cover-up.
Add this to what The Intercept reported last week: the Pentagon is also undercounting American casualties. 15 wounded service members were quietly removed from the official count.
A signals officer who died in Kuwait isn't on the casualty list. Sailors injured in a fire on the USS Gerald R. Ford were left out entirely.
Trump is hiding the scale of the war from Congress, from the public, and from the satellite companies he can't fully control. Five billion dollars in damage. 11 bases. 13 dead troops the Pentagon admits. Nearly 400 wounded and probably more.
And the White House response is to ask the satellite companies to look the other way.
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