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Wars of choice, a plethora of changing tariffs and sanctions on countries across the world, and a historically high number of executive orders characterize the first year of Donald Trump’s second presidential term. And all this has been accomplished by the executive branch with minimal pushback from the legislative branch.

Congress has over time ceded more and more power to the executive branch. Over the last year, this process has reached a level where the assertion that the legislature comprises a “coequal” branch of the United States government seems more a punch line of a joke than an expression of reality.

In a Tuesday Washington Post article, Liz Goodwin provides details of the withering of the exercise of congressional power in Trump’s second term. Commenting on the situation now in Congress, Goodwin wrote, “While lawmakers once jealously guarded their constitutionally endowed power over spending, trade and war — regularly checking the executive — Republicans in the 119th Congress have cast themselves as helpmeets to the president instead.”

A problem for Republicans in Congress who have chosen to just look on as the president does whatever he wishes is that the president has grown increasingly unpopular among voters. For a significant number of these Congress members, their status as Trump’s “helpmeets” may cause them to fail in their reelection efforts. Their departure, along with the decision of some of their Republican colleagues to forgo uphill reelection campaigns, could lead to increased assertion of congressional authority after a new Congress convenes in January.

Original article: ronpaulinstitute.org

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Сorporate media of all stripes have rushed to support the U.S./Israeli attack on Iran, throwing objectivity and accuracy by the wayside in order to manufacture consent for regime change.

On February 28, the U.S. and Israel launched a joint attack on Iran, bombing cities across the country, assassinating its supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, and openly stating their goal was overthrowing the government.

Despite this, media have gone out of their way to present the actions as the U.S. protecting itself, describing them as “defensive strikes,” and to frame Iran as the aggressor. “Iran chooses chaos” ran the headline of the New York Times’ newsletter, portraying the Islamic Republic as the primary actor.

The Free Press used similarly Orwellian concepts. “War is Iranians’ best chance at peace,” presenting U.S./Israeli crimes as an act of mercy on its long-suffering population.

Meanwhile, under the new leadership of self-described “Zionist fanatic” Bari Weiss, CBS News has transformed itself into a mouthpiece for the Israeli Defense Forces, interviewing IDF Brigadier General Effie Defrin, and uncritically presenting Israel’s war as “aimed at preventing a wider global threat.”

Across the West, corporate media have employed the same tactics of using the passive voice and not naming the perpetrator when describing U.S./Israeli aggression. A perfect encapsulation of this was the BBC’s headline, “At least 153 dead after reported strike on school, Iran says,” that made it sound as if the children died in a lightning strike or a labor dispute, rather than that they were bombed by hostile foreign powers.

Israeli casualties were given more sympathetic coverage than their Iranian counterparts, while media regularly toned down the language used to describe Israeli actions to make them sound more reasonable, and did the opposite with Iran. The Washington Post, for example, wrote (emphasis added) “Israel urges evacuation of south Beirut suburbs; Iran threatens revenge on U.S. over warship.” Thus, Israel was treated as making a good faith attempt to reduce civilian casualties, while the Iranian response to their ship being attacked and sunk in international waters was presented as menacing.

Another common tactic of delegitimization media use is to describe the Iranian as a “regime” (e.g., Bloomberg, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, CNN, NBC News). The word “regime” immediately discredits a government, and cues the reader to oppose it. The phrase “Israeli regime” is virtually never used, unless in a quote from Iranian officials.

Earlier this week, large numbers of Israeli troops re-invaded southern Lebanon. Media attempted to find ways to present the operation as legitimate, including euphemistically using the phrase “cross over into Lebanon” to describe the invasion, or even blaming Hezbollah for the violence. CNN, for instance, wrote that, “Hezbollah is dragging Lebanon into the war on Iran,” and that “Hezbollah just restarted the fight that Israel was waiting to finish,” thereby flipping the realities of who was attacking whom.

There have also been a number of fawning profiles of Israeli leaders. “Benjamin Netanyahu’s long career was built on conflict avoidance—then, October 7 transformed and radicalized him,” wrote The Atlantic. In Britain, the coverage from some quarters was even more positive. “Netanyahu is the great war leader of our age” The Daily Telegraph stated, describing the prime minister as a “genius.”

The Daily Telegraph’s Monday front page headline read “Britain backs war on Iran,” with a picture of diaspora Iranians cheering on the bombing of their country. The reality, however, is far less jingoistic. A YouGov poll published the same day found that only 28% of U.K. citizens support U.S./Israeli actions, with 49% expressing their opposition to them. Nevertheless, BBC anchor Nick Robinson suggested, on air, that protests against the U.S./Israeli attacks should be banned across the U.K.

This sort of mentality should come as no surprise, given BBC leadership’s stated positions on Israel. The corporation’s Middle East editor, Raffi Berg, is a former CIA operative and Mossad collaborator who has a signed letter of recommendation from Netanyahu on his office wall.

Anonymous BBC employees speaking to Drop Site News claimed that Berg’s “entire job is to water down everything that’s too critical of Israel.” They went on to allege that he holds “wild” amounts of power at the British state broadcaster, that there exists a culture of “extreme fear” at the BBC about publishing anything critical of Israel, and that Berg himself plays a key role in turning its coverage into “systematic Israeli propaganda.” The BBC has disputed these claims.

If true, the sort of top-down pro-Israel bias at the BBC closely mirrors that of American outlets. A leaked 2023 New York Times memo revealed that company management explicitly instructed its reporters not to use words such as “genocide,” “slaughter,” and “ethnic cleansing” when discussing Israel’s actions. Times staff must refrain from using words like “refugee camp,” “occupied territory,” or even “Palestine” in their reporting, making it almost impossible to convey some of the most basic facts to their audience.

CNN employees face similar pressure. In the wake of the October 7 attacks, the company’s C.E.O. Mark Thompson sent out a memo to all staff instructing them to make sure that Hamas (and not Israel) is presented as responsible for the violence, that they must always use the moniker “Hamas-controlled” when discussing the Gaza Health Ministry and their civilian death figures, and barring them from any reporting of Hamas’ viewpoint, which its senior director of news standards and practices told staff was “not newsworthy” and amounted to “inflammatory rhetoric and propaganda.”

German media conglomerate Axel Springer, meanwhile – owner of outlets such as Politico and Business Insider – requires its employees to sign what amounts to a loyalty oath to support “the trans-Atlantic alliance and Israel.” The company fired a Lebanese employee who, through internal channels, questioned the requirement.

American newsrooms are also filled with former Israel lobbyists. A MintPress News investigation found hundreds of former employees of Israel lobbying groups such as AIPAC, StandWithUs and CAMERA working in top newsrooms across the country, writing and producing America’s news – including on Israel-Palestine. These outlets include MSNBC, The New York Times, CNN, and Fox News.

There are even ex-Israeli spies writing our news. Another MintPress report revealed a network of former agents of IDF intelligence outfit, Unit 8200, working in America’s newsrooms, including at CNN and Axios.

Therefore, with American newsrooms presided over and staffed in no small part by pro-Israel zealots, it is far from a surprise that their coverage closely mirrors the outlook and biases of Washington and Tel Aviv.

And now, with CNN, CBS News, and TikTok owned by CIA asset Larry Ellison, the IDF’s largest private funder and a close personal friend of Benjamin Netanyahu, we should only expect the propaganda to be dialed up to eleven.

Original article: mintpressnews.com

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The proverb “revenge is a dish best served cold” traces to French (“La vengeance se mange froide”), appearing in English literature by the 19th century. Most Americans do not know the French orign of the proverb… 

It entered popular culture thanks to Star Trek. In Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982), Khan Noonien Singh delivers the line during a tense video call with Admiral Kirk:

Ah, Kirk, my old friend… do you know the Klingon proverb? ‘Revenge is a dish best served cold.’ And it is very cold…

As the war against Iran continues to escalate, Russia finds itself in a powerful position to deal with the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), which has kowtowed to the United States and allowed the US to dominate militarily the Persian Gulf on behalf of Israel, and India, which has taken advantage of their long friendship with Russia to engage in a disgustingly abject act of sycophancy with Israel at the expense of fellow BRICS member Iran. Russia has delivered a firm diplomatic message to both.

During an Ambassadorial Roundtable in Moscow on March 5, 2026, Sergei Lavrov addressed the Ambassadors from the GCC countries, who had come to Moscow seeking Putin’s intervention in shutting down Iran’s military operations in retaliation for the sneak attack by Israel and the United States. The event was supposed to focus on the Ukrainian crisis, digital threats, and international information security, but Lavrov devoted significant time to the escalating Middle East conflict, particularly the US-Israeli military strikes on Iran and Iran’s retaliatory actions affecting Gulf states.

The GCC ambassadors reportedly urged Russia to pressure Iran to de-escalate and halt its missile/drone strikes on or over their territories (e.g., targeting US/Israeli-linked sites). Lavrov responded critically and pointedly rejected a one-sided approach. Lavrov shut them down in an extraordinary display of tough love. I’ve posted the video of his remarks below.

Lavrov began by expressing condolences for civilian casualties and damage to civilian infrastructure in Persian Gulf countries caused by the ongoing conflict. But he immediately challenged the GCC’s selective criticism… He asked whether they had condemned the “US-Israeli war of aggression against Iran” or specific incidents like the reported killing of 170 schoolgirls in Minab by US/Israeli actions). Ouch!

He continued by highlighting their hypocrisy in pushing for pressure only on Iran while not equally condemning the initiators (US and Israel), noting that accepting such a request would imply acceptance of the original aggression.

Lavrov asserted that the ongoing US and Israeli operations were aimed at driving a wedge between Iran and its Arab neighbors (GCC states), noting that these actions were an attempt to sabotage recent positive normalization trends (e.g., Saudi-Iran rapprochement, UAE/Iran engagement).

He advocated for a unified, balanced international response: an immediate cessation of all hostilities (not just Iranian ones), political/diplomatic settlement, and safeguarding legitimate security interests of all Persian Gulf states.

He reminded the Ambassadors that Russia has long promoted a Concept of Collective Security in the Persian Gulf (for over 20 years) and expressed appreciation for GCC efforts in this regard (e.g., trilateral talks in Abu Dhabi). He concluded by calling on the GCC and others to add their voices to calls for de-escalation and against selective UN resolutions (e.g., any Bahrain-proposed draft condemning only Iran). Without issuing a direct threat, Lavrov was putting the GCC on notice that Russia expected them to hold Israel and the United States accountable for the economic disaster that is confronting the GCC.

Then there is India. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s recent trip to Israel was ill-timed, coming three days before Israel and the US attacked Iran. Although India is one of the founders of BRICS, he made a big show of elevating the India-Israel relationship from a “strategic partnership” to a “Special Strategic Partnership for Peace, Innovation, and Prosperity.” Modi signed 16 agreements and announcement of 11 joint initiatives in areas like defense (joint development/production with tech transfer), critical/emerging technologies (led by national security advisors), cyber security (Indo-Israel Cyber Centre of Excellence in India), agriculture, water management, labor mobility (facilitating over 50,000 Indian workers in Israel over five years), culture, education, and more.

Modi, along with Netanyahu, announced the advancement of free trade agreement (FTA) negotiations (first round concluded, next in May; Modi stated a deal would be finalized “soon”). He also reaffirmed India’s strong defense and counter-terrorism cooperation with Israel, including potential transfers like Iron Dome technology. Talk about bad timing. Modi’s obsequious behavior in Israel was a direct insult to the other members of BRICS… Advocating warm relations with a country guilty of genocide has not been well-received by other BRICS members.

The attack by Israel and the United States on Iran, a member of BRICS, has created a potentially catastrophic economic problem of Modi and India. India imports the vast majority of its crude oil needs (around 85-88% of total consumption), as domestic production is limited. India’s total crude oil imports average roughly 5 million barrels per day (bpd) in recent data (early 2026 figures). The Persian Gulf countries (primarily Iraq, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates (UAE), Kuwait, and Qatar; sometimes broadly including other Middle East suppliers) are a major source, especially via the Strait of Hormuz, through which a significant portion of these flows pass. Iran’s de facto closure of the Strait of Hormuz has created an emergency situation for India.

The war against Iran has given Russia tremendous leverage over India. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, in remarks made on March 6, 2026, emphasized that Russia would not disclose specific quantitative data on oil exports to India, citing “too many ill-wishers” and security concerns. This came in response to reports of potential large deliveries (e.g., up to 22 million barrels in a week) amid India’s supply crunch. Peskov also noted the Iran war has significantly boosted demand for Russian energy resources, positioning Russia as a “reliable supplier” of oil and gas.

Russia, instead of leaving India to sleep in the bed it made with Israel, highlighted its readiness to support India, but at a cost. For instance, earlier in March (around March 4), sources indicated Russia was prepared to divert oil cargoes (e.g., ~9.5 million barrels near Indian waters) and potentially raise India’s share of Russian crude imports to up to 40%. Russian Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak mentioned receiving “signals of renewed interest” from India in larger volumes due to the crisis.

Amid the surge in demand for Russia’s Urals crude, Russia hit India with a firm, but diplomatic, reminder of the cost of betraying a friend. Prior to the attack on Iran, Russia sold oil to India with deep discounts ($10-13 below Brent pre-conflict). While promising to help India compensate for its loss of Persian Gulf oil, Russia inoformed Modi that India would have to pay a premium of $4-5 over Brent for March/April deliveries. This reflects market forces rather than explicit “assurances” of continued discounts; some reports frame it as Russia treating it more as “business” without prior friendship-based concessions.

I am speculating here, but I think Modi is going to reconsider the agreements he made with Israel… Especially if the Strait of Hormuz remains closed for six months or more. What do you think?

Original article:  sonar21.com

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Elizabeth Vos on the social-media suppression of information that could help U.S service people refuse to join the U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran as fears grow that Trump will send ground troops into the conflict.

As the U.S. and Israel’s deeply unpopular war with Iran enters its second week, social media platform X is censoring the accounts of people providing information to military servicemembers on how they can refuse to serve. This is particularly relevant as fears have grown that U.S. ground troops may enter the conflict.

The Center on Conscience & War, an 80-year-old nonprofit that, according to its website, “advocates for the rights of conscience, opposes military conscription, and serves all conscientious objectors to war,” was banned on X for 12 hours. The center’s executive director, Mike Prysner, shared a notice that the center received from X which labeled their posts as having “violated X rules” against “illegal and regulated behaviors.”

X has just suspended @CCW4COs for informing service members of their legal rights. pic.twitter.com/joNYvW9E2w

— Mike Prysner (@MikePrysner) March 7, 2026

Prysner wrote: “This is the post @CCW4COs was suspended for, informing service members of their legal right under DoDI 1332.14 to report “failure to adapt” within first 365 days of service and receive an entry-level discharge.”

This is the post @CCW4COs was suspended for, informing service members of their legal right under DoDI 1332.14 to report “failure to adapt” within first 365 days of service and receive an entry-level discharge https://t.co/PLPQslEz6x

— Mike Prysner (@MikePrysner) March 7, 2026

It remains legal to conscientiously object to military service. The only conceivable way that the post could be framed as encouraging illegal or irregular behavior would be to recast such objections as mutiny, which is exactly what pro-Israeli voices on social media have been frantically doing in the last few days.

In response to conservative commentator Candace Owens also encouraging those in the U.S. military to conscientiously object to serving in Iran, pro-Israel journalist Emily Schrader wrote on X:

“This is illegal. She is literally advocating mutiny. Under 18 U.S.C. § 2387 (Advocating overthrow or disloyalty in the armed forces). It is a crime for any person, including civilians, to willfully advocate or attempt to cause:
• insubordination in the armed forces
• disloyalty among service members
• mutiny or refusal of duty
It also criminalizes distributing materials intended to encourage those outcomes.
The penalty can be up to 10 years in prison and fines.”

Other pro-Israel voices like Bill Ackman, the billionaire hedge-fund manager, reposted Shrader’s sentiments.

The social media ban on the Center for Conscience and War came less than 24 hours after its executive director, Prysner, also wrote via social media regarding anecdotal evidence of troops being readied for combat:

“I just spoke with the mother of a service member in this unit. They were given one last call home before having to turn in their phones. He told his mom they were going ‘boots on the ground’ tonight.”

I just spoke with the mother of a service member in this unit. They were given one last call home before having to turn in their phones. He told his mom the were going “boots on the ground” tonight. pic.twitter.com/3OCupSfp9Q

— Mike Prysner (@MikePrysner) March 7, 2026

As noted by The Cradle,

“Mike Prysner … said in posts on X that his office has been overwhelmed with requests for guidance from service members seeking to dodge deployment…. ‘Phone has been ringing off the hook,’ he wrote … adding that many troops had not been told the mission involved combat until the last moment and were initially informed they were heading to training.”

As veteran Greg Stoker said via X: “Service members knowing their rights is a direct threat to both the secular imperialists who own these apps and the rapturous evangelicals trying to bring about Armageddon.”

Service members knowing their rights is a direct threat to both the secular imperialists who own these apps and the rapturous evangelicals trying to bring about Armageddon.

You don’t want to be fighting for either. https://t.co/hMzq96xSir

— Greg Stoker (@gregjstoker) March 7, 2026

Some X users have also been anecdotally reporting the apparent mobilization of troops:

“Spoke to a family member tonight — a Marine stationed in California. He said half\ the troops on base have disappeared in the past couple days and that the situation is chaos with those still remaining.”

Despite official denials that troops on the ground are part of the current plan, President Donald Trump has not ruled out the possibility. Democrats expressed alarm over the possibility following a March 4 classified briefing.

Democracy Now! noted that Sen. Richard Blumenthal said, “I just want to say I am more fearful than ever, after this briefing, that we may be putting boots on the ground.”

Sen. Elizabeth Warren also stated after the briefing:

“I just left a classified briefing on Iran, and here’s what I can say. It is so much worse than you thought. You are right to be worried. The Trump administration has no plan in Iran. This illegal war is based on lies, and it was launched without any imminent threat to our nation. Donald Trump still hasn’t given a single clear reason for this war, and he seems to have no plan for how to end it, either.”

The censorship of an account sharing information for troops regarding how to conscientiously object is particularly relevant now as thousands of U.S. troops are facing the potential for imminent deployment in the escalating conflict with Iran: a war largely unsupported on the home front.

Breaking news: The Army abruptly canceled a major training exercise, officials said, fueling speculation within the Defense Department that soldiers specializing in ground combat and a range of other missions may be sent to the Middle East. https://t.co/1nuTFn8acH

— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) March 6, 2026

According to The New York Times, support for U.S. intervention in Iran is incredibly low, having “ranged from 27 percent in a Reuters/Ipsos poll to 41 percent in a CNN survey, far below the level of public backing that Mr. Trump’s predecessors initially enjoyed when they used force overseas.”

Many see the intervention as a war waged overwhelmingly for Israel, especially in light of broad daylight comments from figures like U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who said:

“The president made the very wise decision: We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action, we knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties.”

Other veteran activists have also been speaking out against the war, and urging servicemembers to refuse to serve. As reported by Breakthrough News, at a Chicago rally on Saturday, veteran Daniel Lakemacher urged U.S. soldiers to “refuse this illegal and immoral war” on Iran.

“To all those who are not yet deployed: Now is the time to resist.”

At a Chicago rally on Saturday, veteran Daniel Lakemacher urges U.S. soldiers to “refuse this illegal and immoral war” on Iran.

The rally was part of a “Stop the War on Iran!” national day of action. The… pic.twitter.com/ukeY6Sci3i

— BreakThrough News (@BTnewsroom) March 8, 2026

This negative sentiment was also voiced by former U.S. Marine Sgt Brian McGinnis, a Green Party candidate for U.S. Senate for North Carolina, who was dragged out of a recent congressional hearing after shouting that “America does not want to send its sons and daughters to war for Israel.”

Sen. Tim Sheehy and police officers reportedly broke McGinnis’s arm as they struggled to remove him from the room. McGinnis was then charged with multiple counts of assault.

Former US Marine Sgt Brian McGinnis as he’s dragged out of Congress:

“No one wants to fight for Israel!”

Sen. Tim Sheehy (R-AIPAC) can be seen helping cops manhandle the veteran

Expect to see much more of this as the Zionist war drags on pic.twitter.com/itHaOkexf2

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) March 4, 2026

The violent repression of a former service member’s speech against U.S. intervention in Iran, like the social media suppression of information that might help military members use legal methods to refuse to serve in that war, demonstrates how desperate the government is to preserve its ability to force Americans to fight for Israel.

The president and his supporters seem increasingly confused when justifying the U.S. involvement to the press. When asked about U.S./Israeli strikes on Iran’s water desalination plants, Trump rambled about beheaded babies and referenced Oct. 7. This behavior is stoking public resistance to the war, including amongst members of the military.

At a time when a dangerous war of America’s own making is escalating dangerously out of control, it cannot be acceptable to censor or render it illegal for members of the U.S. military to have a conscience.

Original article:  consortiumnews.com

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Recent statements suggest the U.S. has more control over India’s energy policy than have been previously acknowledged, reports Betwa Sharma.

The United States has “allowed” Indian refiners to purchase Russian oil for the next 30 days amid concerns over energy shortages because of the war in Iran.

It is expected New Delhi will also “ramp up purchases of U.S. oil,” U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in a post on X on Friday.

Bessent said that the decision was made to “enable oil to keep flowing into the global market” and that it will not “provide significant benefit to the Russian government as it only authorises transitions involving oil already stranded at sea.”

The U.S. is letting India buy Russian oil: it is hard to believe the headline that has been flashing everywhere.

India has always taken pride in strategic autonomy, so the idea that the U.S. is effectively not only approving but also announcing India’s energy purchases to the world is not only a sign of how frayed that autonomy is under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, but also a little humiliating.

It is also not true.

India’s imports of Russian crude continued to decline in early 2026, yet Russia remained the country’s largest supplier. In January, India imported 1.215 million barrels per day (bpd), down roughly 12 percent from December, followed by 1.04 million bpd in February.

And yet to Fox News, Bessent said,

“The Indians have been very good actors. We had asked them to stop buying sanctioned Russian oil this fall. They did. They were going to substitute with US oil. But to ease the temporary gap in oil around the world, we have given them permission to accept Russian oil. We may unsanction other Russian oil.”

It is remarkable, then, that India has remained largely silent as the U.S. repeatedly claims that  India has stopped buying Russian oil, even though Russia continues to be India’s top supplier despite the downturn.

Under Pressure

In the process of keeping Washington happy and avoiding trade tariffs as high as 50 percent, India has significantly diluted relationships with countries like Russia and Iran, partners with whom it shares far older and deeper ties than the U.S., and who have rarely behaved like fair-weather friends or resorted to threats and coercion.

The U.S. strikes on Iran and wider conflict in the Middle East and the Gulf put India in a tough spot.

On the one hand, the Modi government has to continue to avoid upsetting the U.S. by appearing less dependent on Russian oil.

On the other hand, with the disruption of the Strait of Hormuz, through which nearly half of India’s crude oil imports pass, New Delhi may have few alternatives but to rely more on shipments from Russia.

The Strait of Hormuz and the Musandam Peninsula on December 6, 2018. (MODIS Land Rapid Response Team, NASA GSFC / Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain)

In 2025, under U.S. pressure, the Modi government scaled back oil imports from Russia.

By December 2025, Indian imports of Russian oil had fallen to their lowest level in two years. At the same time, OPEC’s share of India’s crude imports rose slightly to 50 percent, up from 49 percent the previous year, while Russia’s share dropped to 33.3 percent from 36 percent in 2024.

New Delhi has been framing all this as simply diversifying its supply sources.

It is also yet to clarify whether U.S. President Trump’s claim that Modi had agreed to stop importing Russian oil as part of the U.S.-India trade deal was true or not.

After India signed the deal last month, which critics and political opponents say heavily favours the U.S. and is especially detrimental to Indian farmers, Washington rescinded the 50 percent tariffs on Indian imports, including the 25 percent levy to deter it from buying Russian oil, and slashed them to 18 percent.

However, recent developments complicate the economic rationale for India to side with the U.S. and distance itself from old partners like Russia and Iran, and to make concessions such as limiting purchases of Russian energy.

Last month, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Trump’s tariff policy introduced by Trump, which had threatened steep duties on several trading partners.

That decision potentially removes a major source of leverage the U.S. had over India.

At present, the Trump administration has imposed a temporary universal tariff of roughly 15 percent under a different law that applies across countries.

At 15 percent, Indian exporters are paying less than the negotiated 18 percent rate, but the tariffs last only 150 days unless the U.S. Congress approves them.

If the situation holds, New Delhi may see little reason to rush into a trade deal with Washington that demands painful concessions and the abandonment of old partners.

Wrong Side of History

Even in the unfolding confrontation involving Iran, the U.S., and Israel, New Delhi appears to have moved much closer to the Western position.

While building relations with Israel and the United States, India carefully maintained ties with Iran. But all that changed last year when, under pressure from the U.S., it withdrew from Chabahar, the Iranian port that India had developed over a decade to access Afghanistan and Central Asia, bypassing Pakistan.

India hasn’t formally joined any U.S.-Israel bloc, but its actions make its leanings clear.

India admits it gave Iranian ship coordinates to the U.S., which sank it with a torpedo.

Modi’s recent visit to Israel was warm and effusive, filled with praise for Israel, yet it made no mention of the atrocities in Gaza, despite India being home to the world’s third-largest Muslim population and historically maintaining strong sympathies for Palestine.

Prime Minister Modi’s departure from Israel for New Delhi on February 26, 2026. (Prime Minister’s office / Government of India / Public Domain)

Despite a significant Shia community, for whom Iran’s Ayatollahs hold spiritual and religious importance, and despite deep cultural, linguistic, and historical ties, New Delhi has largely remained quiet on the U.S.?Israel strikes on Iran, sticking mainly to calls for restraint and diplomacy.

At home, the government has also cracked down on protests and social media posts supporting Iran or criticising Israel, a pattern that echoes the suppression of voices critical of Israel during the Gaza conflict.

The Mystery of the Russian Oil

Announcing the U.S.-India trade deal on his Truth Social platform in February, Trump said that Modi had “agreed to stop buying Russian oil, and to buy much more from the United States and, potentially, Venezuela.”

Modi’s own post on the deal only thanked Trump for the reduced tariff of 18 percent, with no mention of stopping purchases of oil from Russia.

With the Prime Minister and his ministers staying silent and Russia insisting it has no knowledge of any such deal, the big question remains: did India really make this massive concession, flipping decades of strategic autonomy on its head?

Bessent’s claim that India needed a 30-day waiver from the U.S. to purchase Russian oil during the ongoing crisis lends more weight to it.

The Indian government is again silent on Bessent’s claim that it needs Washington’s permission to buy oil from Russia. The Opposition has slammed Modi for the US’s “blackmail” and “condescension”. Modi’s own party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), is hailing it as a success of “India’s strategic oil diplomacy”.

Clear acknowledgement could make Modi look small before his adoring, loyal right-wing base, who see him as a leader who has restored India’s global standing since he and the BJP first came to power in 2014 and went on to win two more national elections.

With a pliant media, Modi can usually maintain his strongman, popular image, laughing and hugging leaders of the most powerful countries and negotiating as an equal.

But the story becomes harder to control when the other side is Trump, who has never been known for diplomatic restraint, and in his second term, he has been even blunter, announcing things on social media — starting with his claim that he stopped the four–day–long India–Pakistan conflict in May 2025.

Even though the comment clearly annoyed New Delhi, not least because it made India look like a smaller power being schooled by a bigger one, Trump has continued to say it.

These humiliations have become routine, such as Trump claiming Modi had supplicantly asked him, “Sir, may I see you, please?,” and yet India rarely reacts publicly anymore.

The silence is partly because India can’t afford to upset the U.S., and partly because, as many other world leaders who’ve faced Trump’s verbal antics have learned, there’s often little point in responding at all.

Original article:  consortiumnews.com

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First let me explain the meaning of the X message and photo that appears above… the cancellation of the training exercise is a key indicator that the Pentagon is going to deploy the some, if not all, of the 82nd Airborne Division to the Persian Gulf. 

Final destination unknown. You may recall an article I wrote on February 18 when I reported that a CENTCOM exercise scripting conference, which was scheduled to begin on Sunday, 22 February 2026, had been abruptly cancelled. Six days later the war started.

The imminent deployment of the 82nd does not mean they are going into battle in the next couple of days. I expect it will be at least two weeks before they reach their base camp. However, this does mean that Trump and Hegseth were not just making an idle comment when they mentioned putting boots on the ground.

Despite the Trump administration’s efforts to downplay US casualties after seven days of war in the Persian Gulf, clues are appearing on the internet that indicate the US has suffered more combat losses than reported. The first clue is this Xhitter (pronounced SHITTER) from Stars and Stripes.

K-Town refers to Kaiserslautern, a US Army base in Germany, which is located 13 miles east of the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center. So what? Well, on March 4, 2026 the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center (LRMC) in Germany—the largest US Department of Defense hospital outside the United States and the primary overseas trauma/evacuation hub for injured service members from Europe, the Middle East, and Africa—sent out a memo announcing the temporary suspension of its labor and delivery services “until further notice.” The memo did not explicitly define the “primary objective,” but LRMC’s core role is treating combat- and training-related injuries. It also is the main medical evacuation point for wounded troops from ongoing operations.

A knowledgeable friend who supervised DOD’s Wounded Warrior Program during the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and worked with personnel at the LRMC, learned today that there is a flood of casualties arriving at the hospital. The numbers are so large that the hospital could no longer continue to spend resources on birthing babies.

Then this picture popped up on Telegram a little bit ago:

It is not a stretch to conclude that Iran’s attacks on the US bases in the Persian Gulf produced more than a few casualties. DOD/DOW is working hard to keep this information from the public. Most Americans do not support the unprovoked war… This is likely to fuel more opposition.

Original article:  ronpaulinstitute.org

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The FBI manufactured plots to convince Trump that Iran sought to kill him, while Israel and its administration allies exploited the president’s deepest fears to keep him on the war path.

“I got him before he got me,” an ebullient President Donald Trump remarked to a reporter when asked about his motives for authorizing the killing of Iran’s Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, on February 28, 2026.

With his off-the-cuff remark, Trump revealed that anxiety about his own assassination at the hands of Iranian agents influenced his decision to initiate a US-Israeli regime change war that has already resulted in American casualties, the bombings of schools and hospitals inside Iran, devastating Iranian retaliatory strikes on US military bases and embassies, and a spiraling global economic crisis.

Trump’s generalized fears of assassination were well-founded. He was nearly killed in Butler, Pennsylvania on July 13, 2024 by a 20-year-old engineering student named Thomas Crooks who managed to fire eight rounds at the former president from a rooftop, slicing his ear and missing his head by a hair’s breadth. Two months later, a drifter named Ryan Routh was arrested after hiding for hours in the shrubbery outside the former president’s Mar-a-Lago estate in West Palm Beach, Florida. Routh had been spotted after pointing an assault rifle toward a Secret Service agent as Trump played golf 400 yards away.

Officials have yet to produce any evidence that Iran played a role in either of these attempts on Trump’s life. Yet since those fateful events, Israel-aligned Trump advisors, Israeli intelligence, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself have gone to extreme lengths in order to tie Tehran to the plots. More shocking still is the fact that the FBI has manufactured a series of assassination plots, successfully convincing Trump that Iran was hunting him on US soil with highly sophisticated teams of hit men.

The man accused of leading the most significant of these operations, Asif Merchant, is currently on trial in a Brooklyn, NY federal court. After the US granted him a visa despite his presence on a terror watchlist, Merchant was in the constant company of an FBI confidential informant who ultimately steered the contrived plot to its conclusion. He never stood a chance of realizing his plans, and did not appear serious about doing so.

Independent journalist Ken Silva puts it succinctly in his forthcoming investigative book, “The Trump Assassination Plots”: “A closer look at the Merchant case reveals that at the very least…it was a highly controlled FBI sting operation that never posed a threat to Trump. More nefariously, records and whistleblower disclosures indicate that Merchant may have been the patsy in a case totally fabricated by the undercover agents.”

Authorities arrested Merchant on July 12, 2024 – just one day before Crooks attempted to kill Trump in Butler. Hours after the failed Butler assassination, FBI agents interrogated Merchant about whether it was in fact Iran that had Crooks under its control.

At that point, Trump was still campaigning to be a “President of Peace. On the campaign stump, he warned that his opponent, Kamala Harris, “would get us into World War III guaranteed.” Trump vowed to resolve the war between Ukraine and Russia in one day, and distanced himself from pro-war Republicans who sought regime change in Iran.

Pro-war elements in Trump’s coterie exercised multiple points of leverage to reverse the president’s anti-interventionist instincts. Ultra-Zionist billionaires supplied vital and well-documented influence over Trump’s policies by keeping his campaign war chest flush. But Trump remained an erratic personality whose petty grievances kept his aides in a perpetual state of uncertainty.

It was only by exploiting Trump’s deepest psychological vulnerability – his fear of an assassin’s bullet – that Israel and its cutouts in his administration were able to secure their influence over the president, keeping him on the warpath against Iran.

The assassination escalation trap

On January 3, 2020, as the commander of Iran’s IRGC Quds Force, Qassem Soleimani, deboarded an airplane at Baghdad International Airport, on his way to peace talks with Saudi officials, a US drone killed him with a Hellfire missile. The strike had been ordered by Trump following a sustained campaign of military escalation against Iranian allies orchestrated by his National Security Council Director John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

As journalist Gareth Porter reported for The Grayzone, by the time Trump authorized Soleimani’s assassination, Netanyahu was planning unilateral strikes on Iran aimed at drawing the US into direct conflict. Trump issued orders to kill the general under sustained pressure by Pompeo and Bolton, two pro-Israel hardliners. Both former Trump officials have lobbied for the Israeli and Saudi-funded Mojahedin El-Khalk (MEK), a cult-like exiled militia that has carried out numerous assassinations of Iranian officials at the behest of Israel’s intelligence services.

By killing Soleimani, Trump set the US on a collision course for all-out war with Iran – just as Netanyahu had hoped. What’s more, the president invited the prospect of violent retaliation against himself and his national security advisors.

So long as Trump feared the specter of IRGC agents lurking behind every corner, it stood to reason that he was more likely to authorize a regime change war on Iran. And so the FBI went to work, concocting a series of plots that helped forge Trump’s belligerent attitude toward Tehran.

Brought to you by the FBI: Iran’s plot to kill John Bolton

The first major Iranian plot arrived in 2022, when the Department of Justice filed charges against an Iranian national, Shahram Poursafi, for supposedly hiring a hitman to kill Bolton. However, the hitman turned out to be an FBI informant, and the plot was largely contrived by the Bureau. Poursafi, for his part, could not be arrested because he lived in Iran.

As journalist Ken Silva reported, the FBI officer who oversaw the manufactured plot to kill Bolton, Steven D’Antuono, was the same official who ran the Detroit field office that relied on paid informants to concoct the 2020 plot by right-wing militia members to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. In a 2025 federal appeal court ruling, the judge acknowledged that defendants in that case “are correct that the government encouraged them to settle on a plan” to kidnap Whitmer. The FBI’s D’Antuono also oversaw the probe into the suspicious planting of pipe bombs at Republican and Democratic Party headquarters in Washington on January 6, 2021. In the course of his failed investigation, he misled Congress about having received “corrupted” evidence.

Though Bolton was never in danger from Iran, the FBI-contrived plot began to fuel paranoia among Trump administration veterans. Pompeo now believed that he too was being targeted by Iranian assassination teams. In his 2023 campaign memoir, “Never Give an Inch,” the former CIA director claimed Poursafi had also paid $1 million to a hitman to kill him.

However, Pompeo provided no additional details on the plot, which was never mentioned in DOJ documents charging Poursafi for attempting to kill Bolton. According to those affidavits, Poursafi sent just $100 to the FBI’s confidential human source before the DOJ concluded its investigation.

Iran’s hapless hitman granted special visa, introduced to FBI informant

In April 2024, as Trump launched his comeback presidential campaign, an itinerant salesman named Asif Merchant arrived from Pakistan to George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston, Texas. He was quickly flagged as a “Qualified Person of Interest” who’d been placed on a Department of Homeland Security watchlist. Agents from an FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) team then discovered through a search of Merchant’s devices that he had visited Iran, where his wife and adopted son lived. Whether they’d received a tip from Israel, which furnishes reams of intelligence to the FBI on foreign Muslim visitors to the US, remains an open question.

According to JTTF documents obtained by pro-Trump reporter John Solomon, Merchant was “released without incident” and designated as “free to travel to desired destination.” In fact, the FBI had granted him a “Special Public Benefit Parole,” which, as Solomon explained, “would allow agents to try to flip Merchant as a cooperator or try to determine why he was coming to the United States and who he might be working with.”

The FBI whistleblower who provided Solomon with the documents on Merchant’s airport interview compared the “Special Public Benefit Parole” to the scandalous “Fast and Furious” program, in which President Barack Obama’s Department of Justice facilitated the delivery of automatic weapons from US gun dealers to Mexican cartels in order to supposedly surveil the gangs’ criminal activities.

Almost as soon as Merchant entered the US, the FBI introduced him to a confidential informant posing as a potential business partner and operating under the alias, Nadeem Ali. The informant had served as translator for the US military during its occupation of Afghanistan.

Though Merchant did not propose any crimes, the FBI wiretapped a meeting between him and the informant, Ali, in a hotel room on June 3, 2024. There, Merchant was taped making a supposed “finger gun” motion while mentioning an unspecified “opportunity.” This grainy minute-long hidden camera recording is presented as the linchpin of the DOJ’s indictment of Merchant.

According to the FBI, Merchant had outlined a highly complex plot which required the hiring of two hitmen, “twenty five people who could perform a protest after the distraction occurred, and a woman to do ‘reconnaissance.”

For the elaborate flash mob-style assassination extravaganza, Merchant was asked by the informant to fork over a mere $5000. The Pakistani visitor had no means of scrounging up the fee, however, raising further questions about the seriousness of the plot. “I did not think I was going to be successful,” Merchant would later state in court.

Virtually penniless, Merchant was forced to gather the cash from an anonymous “associate,” according to the DOJ indictment. Next, the FBI informant took him on a winding journey from Boston to New York City, where he allegedly handed the money to two other FBI informants posing as hit men. The DOJ claims Merchant made plans to fly to Pakistan on June 12, but was arrested in his residence that day.

Merchant interrogated about Butler, kept incommunicado

The following day, 20-year-old Thomas Crooks arrived at a fairground in Butler, Pennsylvania where former president Trump was scheduled to speak. He flew a drone in the air for 15 minutes, surveying the area as he finalized plans to assassinate the candidate. In an odd coincidence, the Secret Service’s anti-drone system was offline all morning and into the afternoon — until roughly 15 minutes after Crooks flew his drone. When Trump took the stage, Crooks climbed atop a slanted rooftop 130 yards away and fired eight shots at the president, missing his head by an inch, until a local police officer fired back. He was killed by a Secret Service sniper who had inexplicably hesitated to fire for a full 15 seconds.

Thirty hours later, FBI agents flew to Houston to interrogate Merchant in his jail cell about a possible Iranian connection to the assassination attempt in Butler. An FBI source told the Washington Post the Bureau “took the extraordinary step of interviewing him without his lawyer to determine whether he knew Crooks.”

The grilling continued even after Merchant was transferred to the maximum security Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn – the same prison where Luigi Mangione, the accused killer of United Healthcare’s CEO, is currently being held. There, he was held under harsh conditions in solitary confinement, unable to interact with anyone but the guards who brought him food and his lawyers because, as then-Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco argued, he might use code words to initiate further assassination plots. “It appeared they thought I was some kind of super spy,” Merchant later reflected.

Not only was Merchant prevented from calling his family in Pakistan, he was blocked from reviewing recordings of conversations he held with undercover FBI informants, as the DOJ had marked them “Sensitive.” In March 2025, his lawyer protested that US Marshals repeatedly refused to allow him to meet with this counsel and review discovery at the courthouse. This, too, was justified on the basis of specious national security grounds.

However, as the journalist Ken Silva discovered, an internal memo by the Bureau Of Prisons Director Colette Peters confirmed that Merchant had no contact with any Iranian intelligence assets in the US. “Law enforcement has not identified any IRGC associates of Merchant operating in the United States who could continue to orchestrate violent acts,” Peters wrote.

Indeed, the only Iranian assassins with whom Merchant appeared to have interacted inside the US were undercover informants working for the FBI.

Merchant “had never been close to realizing” Trump assassination 

During his trial this March 4, Merchant’s lawyer, Avraham Moskowitz, took the highly unusual step of allowing his client to take the stand. Merchant proceeded to present a version of events that contrasted sharply with the account he provided in his initial FBI proffer. For example, the defendant claimed he had been coerced into the plot by an IRGC agent, and went forward with a plan “to maybe have someone murdered” only because he feared for his wife and adopted son back in Iran.

After his arrest by the FBI, Merchant said he engaged in discussions with federal authorities about becoming an informant himself, but they ultimately broke down for unknown reasons.

“I was not wanting to do this so willingly,” he insisted in Urdu, adding, “I did not think I was going to be successful.”

In its coverage of the trial, the New York Times concluded Merchant “had never been close to realizing the vision of his Iranian handler.”

But back in 2024, as word spread of Merchant’s arrest, Israel-adjacent figures in Trump’s inner circle exploited the case to exacerbate the candidate’s anxiety about the Ayatollah’s wrath.

Israel-aligned forces blur Butler with Iran

Just three days after Trump’s campaign was nearly ended by a lone American assassin’s bullet in Butler, officials burrowed within the architecture of the national security state took measures to shift the focus to Iran.

“The Biden administration obtained intelligence in recent weeks about an Iranian assassination plot against former President Donald Trump, and the information led the Secret Service to ramp up security around the former president, according to three U.S. officials with knowledge of the matter,” reported NBC’s Ken Dilanian on July 16, 2024. (Dilanian had been fired from his previous gig at the LA Times after he was exposed for allowing the CIA to review his reports before publication).

The unnamed officials were clearly referring to the plot which the FBI manufactured for Merchant. The revelation not only seemed like a cynical attempt to obscure the reality of the near-assassination in Butler, which was conducted by a friendless American man who had never left the country. It also suggested the FBI had been so focused on concocting Iranian plots on American soil that it ignored the years-long trail of YouTube comments left by the would-be assassin bluntly declaring his intention to kill US politicians and police officers, and his hopes to instigate a civil war.

Though FBI leadership misled the public about the nature of the Butler plot, falsely claiming, for instance, that Crooks was not communicating with others online, they were never able to connect it to Iran. This clearly frustrated Rep. Mike Waltz, a close Trump ally seated on the House committee to investigate the Butler plot.

“These plots from Iran are ongoing. And when Biden says nothing, Harris says nothing, the DOJ tries to bury it, what message does Iran get? They get that we can keep trying to take Trump out and have no consequences,” Waltz fulminated on Fox News in August 2024.

Referencing the FBI-manufactured Merchant operation, Waltz thundered, “You have multiple assassination plots from the Iranians. This Pakistani national was recruiting females as spotters. He had recruited hit men and had made a down payment. He was even recruiting protesters as a distraction.”

By this point, Waltz was on his way to a short stint as Trump’s National Security Council Director, where he would help direct a failed war on Iran’s allies among the Ansurallah movement in Yemen. (Waltz was demoted to US ambassador to the UN after he accidentally included the Atlantic Magazine editor-in-chief and former Israeli prison guard Jeffrey Goldberg in a private administration Signal chat where classified information about US attack plans on Yemen was shared).

Throughout his career, the Israel lobby and Netanyahu’s allies had quietly propelled his rise. As AIPAC CEO Elliot Brandt remarked in private comments exclusively revealed by The Grayzone, Waltz was one of Israel’s “lifelines” inside the Trump administration, as he had been groomed by the Israel lobby since he first ran for Congress.

For Waltz and other Israel-aligned figures close to Trump, connecting the Butler incident to Iran appeared to offer a direct path to conflict with Iran. As an unnamed high-level US official told the Washington Post, if Tehran had been found responsible for Crooks’ attempt to kill Trump, “it would mean war.”

Certain foreign actors were also working to steer the US toward blaming Iran for Butler. In the late summer of 2024, the Justice Department received an urgent alert from abroad which connected Crooks directly to IRGC plots to kill Trump. According to the Washington Post, the tip arrived through a “confidential human source overseas” – almost certainly Israeli intelligence.

After a thorough investigation, DOJ officials decided the tip was not credible. “Nothing credibly connected him to Iranian plots,” one official told the Post.

But in the wake of the shooting in Butler, the constant chatter about looming Iranian threats had indelibly altered Trump’s outlook. Reporters who followed Trump on the campaign trail described a palpable sense of panic from the candidate and his inner circle about IRGC-directed hitmen stalking them at every stop.

“Ghost flights” for Trump triggered by imaginary Iran missile threats

With the Trump campaign already consumed with anxiety, the FBI delivered an alert that sent them spiraling into the depths of paranoia.

According to the Bureau, Iran had placed operatives inside the country with access to surface-to-air missiles. This dubious warning prompted Trump’s already militarized security team to take an extraordinary step. Fearing that Iran would down the famous “Trump Force One” airliner at any moment, Trump was placed on a “ghost flight” owned by his golf buddy, real estate tycoon Steve Witkoff, while the rest of his campaign traveled on the main jet.

Joining Trump on the secret decoy plane was his campaign manager, Suzie Wiles, who would go on to become White House chief of staff, controlling access and the flow of information to the president. Unbeknownst to the public, Wiles had served as a paid advisor to Israel’s Netanyahu during his 2020 re-election campaign, consolidating her role as a key point of contact between Tel Aviv and Trump.

Journalist Ken Silva has revealed that the FBI alert which prompted Trump’s use of a “ghost plane” was based on a cynical deception. As Silva explains in his forthcoming book on the assassination plots surrounding Trump, federal investigators had discovered that Routh, the would-be assassin at Mar-a Lago, had attempted to purchase a rocket launcher, and may have been in contact with Iranian nationals during his time in Ukraine. The Bureau likely massaged that information into the bogus report it provided the Trump campaign, conjuring up imaginary Manpad-toting IRGC operatives to exacerbate the candidate’s fears.

Once he entered the Oval Office, Trump was encircled by Israel-aligned advisors and staunchly committed to the belief that Iran had attempted to eliminate him on the campaign trail. As commander-in-chief of the US military, he was hellbent on revenge.

Netanyahu nudges Trump with Butler plot

On June 15, 2025, days after launching an unprovoked war on Iran, Netanyahu took to Fox News to manipulate Trump into joining the assault. The Israeli leader appeared to know exactly which psychological vulnerabilities to exploit.

“These people who chant death to America, tried to assassinate President Trump twice,” Netanyahu declared, asserting without a shred of evidence that Iran was behind both the Butler assassination attempt and the one at Mar a-Lago.

“Do you have intel that the assassination attempts on President Trump were directly from Iran?” a visibly startled Fox News host Bret Baier asked.

“Through proxies, yes. Through their intel, yes. They want to kill him,” stated Netanyahu with a cocksure gaze.

One week later, Trump authorized a series of US strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities in support of Israel’s military assault. Though Trump arranged a ceasefire soon after the attack, Israel’s influence over his administration – and over his psyche – guaranteed that another, much more violent round of conflict was just over the horizon.

In a graphic promoted by the White House’s official Twitter/X account on July 21, 2025, Trump implied that he had begun to turn the tables on his would-be Iranian assassins: “I was the hunted, and now I’m the hunter,” he declared.

By March 2026, Trump was back to war with Iran. Within four days, the US-Israeli joint assault had predictably expanded into an open-ended regional war following the failure of an opening series of decapitation strikes to induce regime change.

On the afternoon of March 4, the glowering US “Secretary of War” and former Fox News personality Pete Hegseth appeared before a lectern at the Pentagon and vowed to unleash “death and destruction from the sky all day long” over the people of Iran.

As his cartoonishly violent screed built to a crescendo, Hegseth issued a dramatic announcement: “The leader of the unit who attempted to assassinate President Trump has been hunted down and killed. Iran tried to kill President Trump, and President Trump got the last laugh.”

Though Hegseth did not name the figure, an Israeli journalist who functions as one of Netanyahu’s favorite stenographers, Amit Segal, revealed that Israel had assassinated an IRGC official named Rahman Mokadam who was supposedly responsible for directing a plot to kill Trump. But once again, the details of the plot revealed layers of FBI chicanery, confidential informants masked as “co-conspirators,” and a compromised witness.

It was during these remote interviews that Shakeri seemingly claimed he had an IRGC handler who had directed him to kill Trump. But according to the FBI’s criminal complaint against him, that handler’s name was “Majid Soleimani,” not Mokadam.

The FBI agent who interviewed Shakeri clearly recognized his penchant for fabulism, writing that “certain of Shakeri’s statements appear to be true and others appear to be false.” Shakeri had indeed lied throughout his interviews, yet the agent still concluded that “it appears” he was planning to kill Trump. He did not explain why he considered the confession credible, and the allegation about a plot to kill Trump was notably absent from the grand jury indictment filed a month later.

After killing Mokadam on March 4, the Israelis went straight to the president to boast of their supposed achievement – and reignite his anxiety about Iranian assassins.

As Amit Segal noted, “Trump was informed of this in the past few hours by Israel.” In doing so, the Israelis reinforced Trump’s sense that he had been hunted by Iran – and that by fighting their war, he was saving his own skin.

As it had in the past, the White House posted a video on its official Twitter/X account proclaiming Trump’s triumph over Iranian assassins: “I WAS THE HUNTED, AND NOW I’M THE HUNTER.”

Thomas Crooks may have narrowly missed Trump’s cranium in Butler, Pennsylvania, but Israel had found a way into the president’s head.

Original article:  thegrayzone.com

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This is the new George W Bush. Trump is what Bush metamorphoses into when it emerges from its red cocoon. The crazier the US empire gets, the more insane its managers are becoming.

Young people keep asking me if this was what the Iraq invasion was like. I’ve been telling them “Sort of, but this is way dumber and crazier.”

There were fairly intelligent people who bought into the Iraq war propaganda. Many anti-war folk assumed Saddam probably did have weapons of mass destruction — they just didn’t buy into the narrative that war was the answer. There really were interventionists who sincerely believed the war could do good things for the Iraqi people.

This is nothing like that. Only the most shitbrained of morons sincerely believe the narratives supporting the Trumpanyahu administration’s attack on Iran. Mostly it’s just liars and manipulators cynically pretending to believe the stories about nuclear weapons and massacred protesters and bringing freedom and democracy to the Iranian people, because they want Iran to be bombed.

This time they’re not even pretending to care about the will of the American people. They’re not even pretending to care about humanitarian interests or the future of the people they are bombing. They’re just spouting extremely obvious lies that get fact-checked and debunked by the mainstream media in real time, and then murdering people and bragging about it.

The Iraq invasion was an unforgivable mass atrocity of unfathomable evil, but looking back on it you can understand how a person acting in good faith could have been taken in by the post-9/11 hysteria and the uniform war propaganda of the mass media. There was an argument put forward that Saddam Hussein would be replaced with a government that serves the interests of the Iraqi people, and then the US coalition really did stay in the country and build up a new regime to run things. Compared to what we’re seeing now, it’s almost quaint.

This is just open savagery. The US and Israel are pursuing the Libya model with Iran: smashing and decapitating the nation and then leaving the people to pick up the pieces and deal with all the chaos, lawlessness and sectarian conflict that ensues. They intend to plunge a nation of 90 million people into mass-scale strife and potential state collapse or balkanization, and then casually stroll away from the wreckage in cool indifference to the suffering they just unleashed upon the world.

They make no claim to be replacing the Iranian government with a better one. They make no claim to be bringing freedom and democracy to an oppressed people. They’re selling WMD lies and atrocity propaganda, but only in the most half-assed and low-energy of ways, with no interest in whether anyone actually believes them. Mostly they’re just destroying an ancient nation because they can, and looking at the world saying “Yeah we’re thugs. What are you gonna do about it?”

This is the new George W Bush. Trump is what Bush metamorphoses into when it emerges from its red cocoon. The crazier the US empire gets, the more insane its managers are becoming.

Original article: caitlinjohnstone.com.au

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In this catastrophic war of choice, it is Tehran fighting a rearguard action to restore geopolitical sanity. If Iran loses, god only knows where Israel and the US will drag the world next

The admission this week by US secretary of state Marco Rubio, echoed by Mike Johnson, Speaker of the House of Representatives, that Israel forced Washington’s hand in attacking Iran has rightly caused consternation.

Breathing life into something that would normally be treated as an antisemitic trope, Rubio argued that the Trump administration had been left with no choice but to attack Iran because, had it not, Israel would have launched an attack anyway, exposing US soldiers to retaliation.

Rubio stated: “The president made the very wise decision: We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action, we knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties.”

.@SecRubio: “The president made the very wise decision—we knew that there was going to be an Israeli action, we knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we… pic.twitter.com/Jp5rqpRH4T

— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) March 2, 2026

Rubio was using the term “preemptively” in a highly irregular and misleading way.

In international law, aggression is an illegal application of force – the “supreme international crime”, according to the 1950 principles set out by the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal. But there is a potential mitigating factor if the attacking state can show it was acting pre-emptively: that is, it was acting to prevent a plausible, immediate and severe threat of attack.

Rubio, however, was not suggesting that the US acted “preemptively” against a threat from Iran. He meant Washington had acted preemptively to stop its ally, Israel, from setting off a chain of military events that would lead to US soldiers being harmed.

Had the Trump administration really been acting preemptively in these circumstances, the US should have attacked Israel, not Iran.

Paper tiger

But Rubio’s comment begged a further question: Why didn’t Washington simply tell Israel it was forbidden from starting a war against Iran without US approval?

After all, Israel would be incapable of mounting any kind of attack on Iran without the critical support provided by the US.

Israel has had to rely on help from US military bases dotted around the region, as well as the Arab states that host those bases.

The attack would have been quite inconceivable without the backup of a massive armada of US war ships sent to the region by Trump.

Israel can withstand Iranian retaliation only because it gets a degree of protection from missile interception systems provided and funded by the US.

And on top of all that, Israel is regional hegemon only because it gets massive subsidies from the US – worth many billions of dollars a year – to preserve it as one of the strongest militaries in the world.

In other words, Israel would have found it impossible to wage war on Iran alone. It is a paper tiger without the US.

Rubio’s comment suggested one of two possibilities: either that the US, with the strongest military in world history, is under the thumb of the tiny state of Israel; or that Trump has made his own military, the strongest-ever, servile to Israel.

Whichever it is, it is hard to square with Trump’s repeated assertion that he is putting America First.

This point is so glaringly obvious it is presumably the reason why Rubio was forced to walk back his comments the next day. Meanwhile, Trump hurriedly suggested it was he who had forced Israel’s hand to attack Iran, not the other way round.

“If anything, I might have forced Israel’s hand.”

Donald Trump denied that Israel forced him into attacking Iran, contradicting his own Secretary of State and Republican leaders who were saying the opposite just yesterday. pic.twitter.com/ACKj9dqSqr

— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) March 3, 2026

Geopolitical insanity

The more likely truth is not that Israel forced Trump’s hand. It is that he was seduced by Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s false claim that an attack on Iran would be a cakewalk – if they struck at a moment when they could be sure of killing Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei.

Such a decapitation strike, Trump was led to believe, would be a repeat of his Venezuela “success”, when he kidnapped President Nicolas Maduro from Caracas to bring him to trial in New York.

In Venezuela, the flagrant flouting of international law by the US was intended to be the equivalent of pointing a loaded shotgun at the head of Maduro’s replacement, Delcy Rodriguez. Do as we say, or the new president gets it from both barrels.

Netanyahu knew exactly how to sell Trump, still giddy on the noxious fumes of this lawbreaking venture, the idea that he could repeat the exercise in Iran. The ayatollah’s successor would similarly be putty in his hands.

Which is why, in this catastrophic war of choice by the US and Israel, it is Tehran fighting a rearguard action to restore a little geopolitical sanity. If Iran loses, or the US succeeds without paying a fearsome price, god only knows where Israel and Washington will drag the world next.

The world’s fate, in a real sense, is in Tehran’s hands.

What the joint attack on Iran demonstrates most clearly is how much Netanyahu has succeeded over the past quarter of a century in “Israelising” Washington and the Pentagon.

The US has always waged illegal wars of aggression. It has always been more gangster than global policeman. But just because Washington was run by ruthless criminals, it did not mean it was incapable of getting still more deranged, still more psychopathic.

That is what Netanyahu has been working on. And Trump is now giving full rein to the Israelisation of the US. The clues are everywhere.

On Wednesday secretary of war Pete Hegseth – the traditional title of “secretary of defence” presumably sounded too law-abiding – dropped any pretence of being the good guy.

He insisted US forces were acting “without mercy” and that the Iranian regime “are toast”. The US would deliver “death and destruction all day long”.

The previous day he had set out the game plan: “No stupid rules of engagement, no nation-building quagmire, no democracy building exercise, no politically correct wars.”

Hegseth: No stupid rules of engagement, no nation building quagmire, no democracy building exercise, no politically correct wars. We fight to win and we don’t waste time or lives. As the president warned, an effort of this scope will include casualties. War is hell and always… pic.twitter.com/7Zpg2UkcrO

— Acyn (@Acyn) March 2, 2026

This isn’t the traditional rhetoric of US administrations seeking to flaunt the West’s superior values, or claiming to be on a civilising mission to the rest of the world.

This is the rhetoric of colonial arrogance, of the same military medievalism long espoused by Israeli leaders.

Hegseth sounded all too much like General Moshe Dayan, Israel’s defence minister in the 1960s. He famously set out Israel’s overarching military doctrine: “Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother.”

‘Mad dog’ tactics

Before its attack, the US had spent years trying to starve the people of Iran into an uprising, just as Israel blockaded and starved the people of Gaza for some 16 years on the assumption that they would be encouraged to overthrow Hamas.

The strategy failed in both cases. Why? Because it ignored the simplest of facts: that the people being abused are human beings, who will always choose freedom and dignity over degradation and subordination.

Now led by the nose into a humiliating war of attrition with Iran, the US is lashing out like a “mad dog” – just as Israel did in Gaza after it was humiliated by Hamas’ one-day breakout from the concentration camp Israel had created for Palestinians there.

Hegseth’s “no rules of engagement” means the US is now open about the fact that all of Iran has been turned into a free-fire zone, just as Gaza was.

Which explains why one of the first targets of the US and Israeli strikes was a primary school where more than 170 people were killed, most of them children under the age of 12.

According to reports even in the rightwing Telegraph newspaper, US and Israeli attacks have already created an “apocalypse” in Tehran. Essential civilian infrastructure is being targeted, such as hospitals, schools and police stations. Residential areas are being carpet-bombed, and food and medical supplies are rapidly running out.

Rubio has vowed that much worse is to come.

The US has evidently been captured by the depraved logic of the Dahiya doctrine, which Israel developed in its repeated attacks on Lebanon and further refined over two and a half years in Gaza.

Smouldering ruin

The Dahiya doctrine goes much further than simply the idea of asymmetric warfare inherent to attacks by a stronger party on a weaker party.

Under the doctrine, civilian casualties are no longer unfortunate “collateral damage” from strikes against military assets. Rather, the civilian population are treated as no less legitimate targets of attack than military infrastructure.

For Israel, the Dahiya doctrine grew out of an acceptance that there were no meaningful war aims that Israel could achieve in its battles against the Palestinians it ruled over or against Hizbullah’s resistance in Lebanon.

Israel was unsatisfied simply with pacifying the Palestinians. It knew they could not be pacified indefinitely, given that it had no intention of ever arriving at a political settlement with them. The fabled two-state solution was purely for western consumption; it never had any meaningful constituency of support in Israel.

Rather, Israel’s goal was to use overwhelming and indiscriminate violence to terrify the Palestinians into ethnically cleansing themselves from the region, as had partially occurred in 1948.

Similarly, in Lebanon, where the Dahiya doctrine was first developed, the goal was not to reach a political accommodation with Hizbullah through a show of force. Hizbullah had made clear it would never resign itself to watching the Palestinians erased from their homeland.

The goal was to wreak so much pain on Lebanon that other religious sects would turn on Hizbullah and plunge the country into protracted civil war, leaving Israel free to get on with the expulsion – and now genocide – of the Palestinian people.

Under the Dahiya doctrine, Israel implicitly acknowledged that it was not fighting simply against militants but against the wider society from which those militants were drawn. It had to accept that there could be no victory, no surrender, assessed in traditional military terms. So what it had to do instead was leave a smouldering ruin.

Time and again, Israel has used massive firepower on civilian infrastructure and residential areas to break the will of a society – to drive it back into “the Stone Age”, to use the terminology of Israeli generals – so that the population would expend their energies on survival rather than resistance.

This is what Hegseth and Rubio are now declaring as Washington’s war aims in Iran. A wilful, savage demonstration of mass destruction to no purpose other than the demonstration itself.

Rubio declared a return to brutal western colonialism – and Europe applauded.

Read my latest here: https://t.co/v7IUUqY5W9

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) February 19, 2026

Morbid pathology

This is not a winning strategy, military or political. It is not even a failed strategy. It is the morbid pathology of a cult.

Which explains a flood of complaints over the initial days of Trump’s war on Iran from US soldiers about their commanders. There have been at least 110 so far, according to reporting by Jonathan Larsen here on Substack.

In one to the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), a non combat-unit commander told non-commissioned officers that Trump was “anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth”.

The Department of War under Hegseth, an evangelical Christian who believes the West is on a “crusade” against Islam, appears to be riding roughshod over First Amendment rules against proselytizing within the armed forces.

The theocratisation of US armed forces is not new. George W Bush spoke in terms of a “crusade” against terror nearly a quarter of a century ago. But the process appears to have reached a point now that the top ranks of the US chain of command are deeply imbued with an evangelical fervour for war in which Israel plays a central part.

Mikey Weinstein, the president of MRFF and an Air Force veteran who served in Ronald Reagan’s White House, told Larsen his group had been “inundated” with soldiers reporting the “euphoria of their commanders and command chains as to how this new ‘biblically-sanctioned’ war is clearly the undeniable sign of the expeditious approach of the fundamentalist Christian ‘End Times’.”

In “End Times” beliefs, based on the Book of Revelations, a terrible battle between good and evil takes place at Armageddon – a site in present-day northern Israel – which leads to the Messiah’s return to Earth and a Great Rapture in which believing Christians rise up to be with God.

Weinstein added: “Many of their commanders are especially delighted with how graphic this battle will be, zeroing in on how bloody all of this must become in order to fulfill and be in 100% accordance with fundamentalist Christian end-of-the-world eschatology.”

The word of God

Central to these beliefs is the gathering of Jews, as God’s Chosen People, into the Land of Israel – a much larger area than that covered by the modern state of Israel.

For Christian fundamentalists such as Hegseth and a growing number of US commanders, Israel is the catalyst for the End Times.

For very obvious reasons, Israel has been nuturing its ties with the huge numbers of Christian fundamentalists in the US. They are politically active – their vote secured the presidency for Trump – and they treat Israel as a critically important domestic issue rather than a foreign policy matter.

They are eager for Israel to seize wide swathes of the Middle East, and largely indifferent about what that entails for the Palestinians or the other peoples of the region.

This all neatly dovetails with the ideology espoused by Netanyahu and the Israeli military command, which years ago was taken over by the same religious-extremist zealots who lead the violent settler movement that systematically attacks Palestinians in the West Bank and steals their land.

As the Israeli military launched its genocide in Gaza, Netanyahu urged soldiers on by telling them they were fighting the nation of Amalek – the enemy of the ancient Israelites.

In the Bible, God commanded King Saul to carry out the total annihilation of the Amalekites, putting to death every single man, woman, child and infant, as well as all livestock.

As can be seen in the erasure of Gaza, Israeli soldiers accepted their mission quite literally. After all, they were not just carrying out Netanyahu’s orders, but an order from God.

‘Clash of civilisations’

Netanyahu has not relied solely on the sacralisation of indiscriminate warfare by his own and the US army. He has also cultivated a wider, racist, anti-Muslim mood in the US and Europe to smooth Israel’s path as it levels large parts of the Middle East.

He has vigorourly promoted the idea of a “clash of civilisations”, the idea that a “Judeo-Christian West” is engaged in a permanent, joint war against the supposed barbarism of the Islamic world.

The synergy between a US military in thrall to Christian fundamentalism and an Israeli military in thrall to a biblically inspired Jewish supremacism is all too clearly on show now in Iran.

This combined military juggernaut has no interest in safeguarding human rights.

It recognises no distinction between civilian and military targets.

It prioritises its own soldiers’ safety – as enforcers of God’s providence – over the civilians those soldiers are attacking.

And it believes, in crushing the life out of the people of Iran, it is advancing divine will.

This is the true face of the war machine that upholds “western civilisation”. These are the real values the West is fighting for in Iran. The rest is a smokescreen.

Original article:  www.jonathan-cook.ne

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LNG shipping rates have gone from $40,000 to $300,000 per day — a 650% vertical climb in less than a week — and the men who ordered the strikes that caused this are still strutting around the Oval Office talking about “strength.” 

That is not strength. That is the economics of catastrophe unfolding in real time, and it will reach every kitchen table from Tokyo to Turin before anyone in the beltway finishes reading the intelligence brief they probably won’t bother to read anyway.

The Strait of Hormuz — through which roughly 20 million barrels of oil per day transit, representing north of 20% of global seaborne oil trade — has effectively ceased to function as a commercial corridor, and what’s doing the closing is less about Iranian missiles, and more the insurance market, the invisible hand of capital that everyone in Washington claims to worship suddenly delivering its honest verdict on Operation Epstein Epic Fury. Major commercial operators, oil companies and insurers have effectively withdrawn from the corridor, creating a de facto closure comparable in character to the Red Sea disruption — but with far larger volumes at stake. The market has spoken. The war lobby apparently has not listened.

Qatar declared force majeure on gas exports, and sources say it may take at least a month to return to normal production volumes — meaning global gas markets will experience shortages for weeks even in the unlikely scenario the conflict ends today. Read that sentence again slowly. Even if it stopped right now. Even if every bomb stopped falling this afternoon and every missile went cold, the damage is already baked in, the supply chain already severed, the cryogenic infrastructure already in shutdown sequence — because the cryogenic nature of LNG requires specialised storage maintaining temperatures of approximately -160°C, making it impossible to simply store excess production in temporary facilities, and once disruptions occur, restarting operations requires weeks of careful, sequential rehabilitation to avoid thermal shock to the entire system.

Qatar supplies 20 percent of the world’s LNG — and if that’s off the table, countries must scramble for what remains. Japan scrambles. South Korea scrambles. Taiwan scrambles. India, which sources nearly half of its LNG intake from Qatari supply under long-term contracts , scrambles. These are not abstract geopolitical actors — these are the factories that make your semiconductors, the power grids that keep hospitals running, the fertiliser supply chains that feed a billion people, and every one of them is now competing in a spot market that has been stripped of a fifth of its supply overnight. This is what cascading systemic failure looks like before it hits the news cycle.

Dutch TTF futures, Europe’s benchmark gas contract — rose 35% on Tuesday alone, with prices on the week running roughly 76% higher, while the Japan-Korea Marker benchmark reached a one-year high. Europe, still carrying the scar tissue of 2022 when Russia’s war on Ukraine sent the continent into an energy convulsion it spent hundreds of billions surviving, is now staring down a second shock — this one detonated by an ally that drew the target circles, pulled the trigger, and handed Europe the wreckage as a fait accompli — no consultation, no warning, no framework for what follows, just the bill. The shutdown also affects downstream products including urea, polymers, methanol and aluminium , meaning the price destruction moves through industrial supply chains like a slow haemorrhage through every sector that uses energy as an input — which is every sector.

Maersk, Hapag-Lloyd and CMA CGM have all suspended operations through the Strait of Hormuz, rerouting vessels around the southern tip of Africa — adding weeks to transit times and driving costs across the entire container shipping ecosystem. The global just-in-time economy was already running thin margins after Covid, and now it absorbs voyages six weeks longer with insurance premiums at the ceiling and no clear date when any of it normalises. Every delay is a price. The Bangladeshi textile worker whose factory loses power this month didn’t vote for this war. The Filipino seafarer rerouted around the Cape of Good Hope for the third time this year didn’t either. The cost transfers downward with perfect precision — away from the people who made the decision, toward everyone who had no part in it and no protection from it.

Because what is happening is not a regional energy disruption — it is the deliberate removal of approximately one quarter of the world’s seaborne energy supply from the global market, not by accident, not by miscalculation in the margins, but as the direct and foreseeable consequence of a war of choice waged on behalf of a government in Tel Aviv that has now pulled Washington into a confrontation with consequences that will metastasise across every economy on the planet that cannot print its own reserve currency. Countries heavily reliant on imported energy with limited fiscal space — Japan, India, South Africa, Turkey, Hungary, Malaysia — are the most exposed to the shock, while the architects of this disaster enjoy the insulation of domestic shale production and the privilege of pricing oil in their own currency. The Global South will pay the highest price for a war it never voted for, never wanted, and was never once consulted about.

The Covid pandemic cost the world approximately $13 trillion and this will be orders of magnitude worse to a level of economic suicide that would make Darwin roll in his grave. There is no exit ramp here, only the compounding arithmetic of a war of choice whose costs will be distributed with ruthless precision to everyone who had no say in the choosing. It will arrive not as a headline but as a bill — a gas bill in Rotterdam, a power cut in Karachi, a factory closure in Busan, that no emergency fund will fully reach in time. Billions of people across Asia, Africa, and the Global South are now the unconsulted collateral of a war fought for reasons they were never given a vote on and objectives they were never shown. They will survive it, most of them. They will rebuild, and they will remember — with a clarity that no Pentagon briefing, no State Department white paper, and no carefully worded presidential statement will ever extinguish — exactly who decided, and exactly who paid. But the invoice for betrayal will come due and that will dwarf the economic one.

Original article:  islanderreports.substack.com