The US president is more willing to listen to Israel than his predecessors were and is also deeply suspicious of the CIA

When Donald Trump ordered the US military to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities over the weekend, the debate among intelligence officials, outside experts and policymakers over the status of Tehran’s nuclear program had largely been frozen in place for nearly 20 years.

That prolonged debate has repeatedly placed the relatively dovish US intelligence community at odds with Israel and neoconservative Iran hawks ever since the height of the global war on terror.

Trump underscored his skepticism of the experts when he recently told reporters that “I don’t care” about the US intelligence community’s latest assessment that Iran still wasn’t building a bomb.