USA « nuclear-news

Trump rejects leaked intelligence that says strikes did not destroy Iran nuclear programme.

Donald Trump insists nuclear sites in Iran were
“completely destroyed” by US military strikes, despite an intelligence
report casting doubt on their success The leaked damage assessment from the
Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency estimates the attack only set Iran’s
nuclear programme back “a few months”

BBC 25th June 2025,
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/c20xel1e97gt

June 27, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | secrets,lies and civil liberties, USA | Leave a comment

Meet the Israeli fanatic running Ted Cruz’s office

Wyatt Reed·June 23, 2025, The Grayzone

After Ted Cruz’s humiliation by Tucker Carlson, attention has focused on a top staffer of the self-proclaimed “leading defender of Israel in the United States Senate.”

On June 18, former Fox host Tucker Carlson published a video which, though marketed as an interview, was more of a snuff film. Over the course of two hours, Carlson can be seen rhetorically disemboweling his debate opponent, US Senator Ted Cruz, on the politician’s determination to see the US attack Iran on Israel’s behalf.

While Cruz presents himself as a Christian Zionist moved by his own zealotry to support Israel, the politician’s Tel Aviv-driven policy line can also be traced back to his Senior Advisor for Policy and Communications, an Israeli-born Zionist lobbyist named Omri Ceren.

Before overseeing Cruz’s public relations, Ceren managed his foreign policy docket as his national security advisor. Prior to joining the Senator’s staff, Ceren served as the press director for The Israel Project, a Zionist pressure group which was forced to close down after being exposed as a de facto Israeli government front by Al Jazeera’s groundbreaking undercover investigation, The Lobby. Before that, Ceren cut his teeth lobbying for Ivory Coast dictator Laurent Gbagbo, who relied on Ceren as a registered foreign agent lending his marketing expertise to the embattled regime.

Ceren has consistently opposed a nuclear deal with Iran since at least 2015, when he declared that any agreement would simply ensure Tehran was “able to cheat with impunity.” At a talk hosted by the neocon Hudson Institute think tank in 2018, he suggested Washington should continue preaching about “freedom” and encouraging Iranian protesters to pursue regime change while simultaneously maintaining Trump’s ban on Iranians entering the US…………………………………………….

Since the attack, Cruz has posted 14 comments on Twitter/X. 12 of them consisted of breathless statements cheering the bombing or attacks on opponents of the war, whom he branded as “the death to America crowd.”… https://thegrayzone.com/2025/06/23/israeli-fanatic-ted-cruz-office/

June 27, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Religion and ethics, USA | Leave a comment

US didn’t destroy Iran’s nuclear programme: Here’s what new intel says

US President Trump doubles down on his assertion that the Iranian nuclear programme has been set back by decades.

By Al Jazeera Staff, 25 Jun 2025, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/6/25/us-didnt-destroy-irans-nuclear-programme-heres-what-new-intel-says

The United States’ strikes on three key Iranian nuclear sites on Sunday failed to destroy underground facilities, and set Tehran’s nuclear programme back only by a few months, according to an assessment of a confidential American intelligence report.

The “top secret” document prepared by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) – the intelligence arm of the Pentagon – and published by major US news outlets on Tuesday is at odds with President Donald Trump’s claims about the strikes. Trump has insisted that the nuclear facilities at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan were “obliterated” by a combination of bunker busting and conventional bombs.

Trump and his administration’s senior officials are dismissing the intelligence report and calling out the reporting over the DIA’s assessment as “fake news”.

Speaking at a NATO summit in The Hague, the US president said he believed Iran’s nuclear programme was set back by decades.

So, what did the DIA assessment say about US strikes? What has Iran said about the attacks? And how does the intelligence report contrast with the Trump administration’s public claims?

What did the DIA report say?

A preliminary report prepared by the DIA noted that rather than obliterating Iran’s nuclear programme, the US bombings had only set it back by a few months.

Before Israel attacked Iran on June 13, US agencies had noted that if Iran rushed to assemble a nuclear weapon, it would take it about three months.

The DIA’s five-page report now estimates this to be delayed by less than six months, reported The New York Times. As per the early findings, the US strikes blocked the entrances to two of the facilities but did not collapse the underground facilities.

The DIA report also reveals that the US agency believes that Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium was moved before the strikes, which destroyed little of the nuclear material.

Shortly after the US strikes on June 22, Mehdi Mohammadi, an adviser to the chairman of the Iranian parliament, claimed that the authorities had evacuated the Fordow facility in advance. “Iran has been expecting strikes on Fordow for several days. This nuclear facility was evacuated, no irreversible damage was sustained during today’s attack,” Mohammadi had said.

The US president on Wednesday said he doesn’t buy Iranian claims that they moved enriched uranium out of the Fordow nuclear facility. “I believe they didn’t have a chance to get anything out because they acted fast,” said Trump. “If it would have taken two weeks, maybe, but it’s very hard to remove that kind of material… and very dangerous.

“Plus, they knew we were coming,” Trump added. “And if they know we’re coming, they’re not going to be down there.”

CNN first reported on the DIA report, quoting unnamed officials that the US strikes’ effect on all three sites – Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan – was largely restricted to aboveground structures, which were severely damaged.

On Tuesday, the Trump administration told the United Nations Security Council that the US strikes had “degraded” the Iranian facilities – short of Trump’s earlier assertion that the attacks had “obliterated” the sites.

The strikes have reportedly badly damaged the electrical system at the Fordow facility. However, it was not immediately clear how long Iran could take to gain access to the underground facilities and repair these systems.

On Monday, Rafael Grossi, the head of the UN nuclear watchdog IAEA, said that while “no one, including the IAEA, is in a position to have fully assessed the underground damage at Fordow”, it is expected to be “very significant”.

Two people familiar with the DIA’s assessment told CNN that Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium was not destroyed and the centrifuges are largely “intact”.

Some analysts cautioned against drawing final conclusions. Analysts told the Reuters news agency that the extent of damage to the Fordow uranium enrichment facility would not necessarily be revealed if the assessment was based on satellite imagery.

How did the US strike Iranian nuclear sites?

After 10 days of fighting between Israel and Iran, the US had militarily intervened on June 22 by hitting the Iranian nuclear sites.

Fordow is a highly fortified underground uranium enrichment facility reportedly buried hundreds of metres deep in the mountains in northwestern Iran. While Natanz is Iran’s largest and most central enrichment complex, containing vast halls of centrifuges, some underground, Isfahan is a major nuclear research and production centre that includes a uranium conversion facility and fuel fabrication plants.

How did the US strike Iranian nuclear sites?

After 10 days of fighting between Israel and Iran, the US had militarily intervened on June 22 by hitting the Iranian nuclear sites.

The US forces dropped 14 30,000-pound (13,000kg) bunker-buster bombs, while Navy submarines are said to have coordinated strikes by cruise missiles at the Natanz and Isfahan sites.

The GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP) – the most powerful bunker-buster bomb in the US military arsenal weighing nearly 13,000kg (30,000lb) – was used in the strike.

The US intervention was understood to be critical for the Israeli campaign against Iranian nuclear facilities, especially Fordow, due to its depth that kept it out of reach for the Israeli military.

How did the DIA report contrast with Trump’s claims?

In March this year, the US spy chief Tulsi Gabbard had informed Congress that there was no evidence Iran was building a nuclear weapon, and Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei had not authorised the nuclear weapons programme that he had earlier suspended in 2003.

On June 17, as Israel and Iran continued to trade ballistic missiles, Trump was returning to Washington from the G7 summit in Canada, when he snubbed his own administration, including the spy chief Gabbard, saying she and the intel agencies had gotten it “wrong”.

He claimed that Iran was “very close” to having a nuclear weapon. On June 22, the US struck Iranian nuclear facilities. “The strikes were a spectacular military success,” Trump said in a televised address. “Iran’s key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated.”

The next day, Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform, “The damage to the Nuclear sites in Iran is said to be ‘monumental.’ The hits were hard and accurate. Great skill was shown by our military. Thank you!”

On Wednesday, at the NATO summit, he reiterated his stance. “The last thing they [Iran] want to do is enrich anything right now… They’re not going to have a bomb and they’re not going to enrich,” he said at The Hague.

Top officials from his administration, including Vice President JD Vance and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, have repeated the obliteration claims since then.

“Based on everything we have seen – and I’ve seen it all – our bombing campaign obliterated Iran’s ability to create nuclear weapons,” Hegseth said in a statement provided to Reuters.

“Our massive bombs hit exactly the right spot at each target – and worked perfectly. The impact of those bombs is buried under a mountain of rubble in Iran; so anyone who says the bombs were not devastating is just trying to undermine the President and the successful mission.”

How has Trump, the White House reacted?

Trump spent a good amount of time letting off steam on his Truth Social platform after the DIA report dropped.

“THE NUCLEAR SITES IN IRAN ARE COMPLETELY DESTROYED! BOTH THE TIMES AND CNN ARE GETTING SLAMMED BY THE PUBLIC!” Trump wrote in all-caps, referring to the reporting by The New York Times and CNN.

“FAKE NEWS CNN, TOGETHER WITH THE FAILING NEW YORK TIMES, HAVE TEAMED UP IN AN ATTEMPT TO DEMEAN ONE OF THE MOST SUCCESSFUL MILITARY STRIKES IN HISTORY,” Trump said in a post.

The US president also posted a series of apparently bizarre videos, including one of B-2 bombers taking off to a “bomb Iran” song in the background.

Trump is currently in the Netherlands, attending this week’s NATO summit, and reiterated to reporters that the damage from the strikes was significant. “I think it’s been completely demolished,” he said, adding, “Those pilots hit their targets. Those targets were obliterated, and the pilots should be given credit.

“That place is under rock. That place is demolished,” Trump responded to a question on the possibility of Iran rebuilding its nuclear program.

He took further shots at CNN, saying: “These cable networks are real losers. You’re gutless losers. I say that to CNN because I watch it – I have no choice. I got to watch it. It’s all garbage. It’s all fake news.”

He said the intelligence following the strikes in Iran was “inconclusive”. “The intelligence says we don’t know. It could’ve been very severe. That’s what the intelligence suggests.”

“It was very severe. There was obliteration,” he reiterated on Wednesday.

The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, called the DIA assessment “flat-out wrong” and leaked to the press “by an anonymous, low-level loser in the intelligence community”.

“The leaking of this alleged assessment is a clear attempt to demean President Trump, and discredit the brave fighter pilots who conducted a perfectly executed mission to obliterate Iran’s nuclear program,” she said in a statement. “Everyone knows what happens when you drop 14 30,000 pound bombs perfectly on their targets: Total obliteration.”

June 26, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Iran, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

War on Iran Is Fight for US Unipolar Control of World

The plan to use Netanyahu as America’s counterpart to Ukraine’s Zelensky, demanding U.S. intervention with his willingness to fight to the last Israeli, much as the U.S./NATO are fighting to the last Ukrainian, is a tactic that is quite obviously at the expense of strategy.

June 24, 2025 , By Michael Hudson / Geopolitical Economy Report, https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2025/06/22/michael-hudson-war-iran-us-unipolar-control/

Economist Michael Hudson explains how the war on Iran seeks to stop countries from breaking away from U.S. unipolar control and dollar hegemony, and to disrupt Eurasian integration with China and Russia.

Opponents of the war with Iran say that the war is not in American interests, seeing that Iran does not pose any visible threat to the United States.

This appeal to reason misses the neoconservative logic that has guided U.S. foreign policy for more than a half century, and which is now threatening to engulf the Middle East in the most violent war since Korea.

That logic is so aggressive, so repugnant to most people, so much in violation of the basic principles of international law, the United Nations, and the U.S. Constitution, that there is an understandable shyness in the authors of this strategy to spell out what is at stake.

What is at stake is the U.S. attempt to control the Middle East and its oil as a buttress of U.S. economic power, and to prevent other countries from moving to create their own autonomy from the U.S.-centered neoliberal order administered by the IMF, World Bank, and other institutions to reinforce U.S. unipolar power.

The 1970s saw much discussion about creating a New International Economic Order (NIEO). U.S. strategists saw this as a threat, and since my book Super Imperialism ironically was used as something like a textbook by the government, I was invited to comment on how I thought countries would break away from U.S. control.

I was working at the Hudson Institute with Herman Kahn, and in 1974 or 1975, he brought me to sit in on a military strategy discussion of plans being made already at that time to possibly overthrow Iran and break it up into ethnic parts. Herman found the weakest spot to be Baluchistan, on Iran’s border with Pakistan. The Kurds, Tajiks, and Turkic Azeris were others whose ethnicities were to be played off against each other, giving U.S. diplomacy a key potential client dictatorship to reshape both Iranian and Pakistani political orientation if need be.

Three decades later, in 2003, General Wesley Clark pointed to Iran as being the capstone of seven countries that the United States needed to control in order to dominate the Middle East, starting with Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, and Sudan, culminating in Iran.

The U.S. fight for unipolar control of the world

Most of today’s discussion of the geopolitical dynamics of how the international economy is changing is understandably (and rightly) focusing on the attempt by BRICS and other countries to escape from U.S. control by de-dollarizing their trade and investment.

But the most active dynamic presently reshaping the international economy has been the attempts of Donald Trump’s whirlwind presidency since January to lock other countries into a U.S.-centered economy, by agreeing not to focus their trade and investment on China and other states seeking autonomy from U.S. control. (Trade with Russia is already heavily sanctioned.)

As will be described below, the war in Iran likewise has as an aim blocking trade with China and Russia and countering moves away from the U.S.-centered neoliberal order.

Trump, hoping in his own self-defeating way to rebuild U.S. industry, expected that countries would respond to his threat to create tariff chaos by reaching an agreement with America not to trade with China, and indeed to accept U.S. trade and financial sanctions against it, Russia, Iran, and other countries deemed to be a threat to the unipolar U.S. global order.

Maintaining that order is the U.S. objective in its current fight with Iran, as well as its fights with Russia and China – and Cuba, Venezuela, and other countries seeking to restructure their economic policies to recover their independence.

From the view of U.S. strategists, the rise of China poses an existential danger to U.S. unipolar control, both as a result of China’s industrial and trade dominance outstripping the U.S. economy and threatening its markets and the dollarized global financial system, and by China’s industrial socialism providing a model that other countries might seek to emulate and/or join with to recover the national sovereignty that has been eroded in recent decades.

U.S. administrations and a host of U.S. cold warriors have framed the issue as being between “democracy” (defined as countries supporting U.S. policy as client regimes and oligarchies) and “autocracy” (countries seeking national self-reliance and protection from foreign trade and financial dependency).

This framing of the international economy views not only China but any other country seeking national autonomy as an existential threat to U.S. unipolar domination. That attitude explains the U.S./NATO attack on Russia that has resulted in the Ukraine war of attrition, and most recently the U.S./Israeli war against Iran that is threatening to engulf the whole world in U.S.-backed war.

The motivation for the attack on Iran has nothing to do with any attempt by Iran to protect its national sovereignty by developing an atom bomb. The basic problem is that the United States has taken the initiative in trying to preempt Iran and other countries from breaking away from dollar hegemony and U.S. unipolar control.

Here’s how the neocons spell out the U.S. national interest in overthrowing the Iranian government and bringing about a regime change – not necessarily a secular democratic regime change, but perhaps an extension of the ISIS/Al-Qaida Wahhabi terrorists who have taken over Syria.

With Iran broken up and its component parts turned into a set of client oligarchies, U.S. diplomacy can control all Middle Eastern oil. And control of oil has been a cornerstone of U.S. international economic power for a century, thanks to U.S. oil companies operating internationally (not only as domestic U.S. producers of oil and gas) and remitting economic rents extracted from overseas to make a major contribution to the U.S. balance of payments.

Control of Middle Eastern oil also enables the dollar diplomacy that has seen Saudi Arabia and other OPEC countries invest their oil revenues into the U.S. economy by accumulating vast holdings of U.S. Treasury securities and private-sector investments.

The United States holds OPEC countries hostage through these investments in the U.S. economy (and in other Western economies), which can be expropriated much as the United States grabbed $300 billion of Russia’s monetary savings in the West in 2022. This largely explains why these countries are afraid to act in support of the Palestinians or Iranians in today’s conflict.

But Iran is not only the capstone to full control of the Near East and its oil and dollar holdings. Iran is a key link for China’s Belt and Road Initiative for a New Silk Road of railway transport to the West.

If the United States can overthrow the Iranian government, this interrupts the long transportation corridor that China already has constructed and hopes to extend further west.

Iran also is a key to blocking Russian trade and development via the Caspian Sea and access to the south, bypassing the Suez Canal. And under U.S. control, an Iranian client regime could threaten Russia from its southern flank.

To the neocons, all this makes Iran a central pivot on which the U.S. national interest is based – if you define that national interest as creating a coercive empire of client states observing dollar hegemony by adhering to the dollarized international financial system.

I think that Trump’s warning to Tehran’s citizens to evacuate their city is just an attempt to stir up domestic panic as a prelude to a U.S. attempt to mobilize ethnic opposition as a means to break up Iran into component parts. It is similar to the U.S. hopes to break up Russia and China into regional ethnicities.

That is the U.S. strategic hope for a new international order that remains under its command.

The irony, of course, is that U.S. attempts to hold onto its fading economic empire continue to be self-defeating.

The objective is to control other nations by threatening economic chaos. But it is this U.S. threat of chaos that is driving other nations to seek alternatives elsewhere. And an objective is not a strategy.

It is a warning to the entire world to find an escape hatch.

Like the U.S. trade and financial sanctions intended to keep other countries dependent on U.S. markets and a dollarized international financial system, the attempt to impose a military empire from Central Europe to the Middle East is politically self-destructive.

It is making the split that already is occurring between the U.S.-centered neoliberal order and the Global Majority irreversible on moral grounds, as well as on the grounds of simple self-preservation and economic self-interest.

Trump’s Republican budget plan and its vast increase in military spending

The ease with which Iranian missiles have been able to penetrate Israel’s much-vaunted Iron Dome defense shows the folly of Trump’s pressure for an enormous trillion-dollar subsidy to the U.S. military-industrial complex for a similar Golden Dome boondoggle here in the United States.

So far, the Iranians have used only their oldest and least effective missiles. The aim is to deplete Israel’s anti-missile defenses so that in a few weeks it will be unable to block a serious Iranian attack.

Iran already demonstrated its ability to evade Israel’s air defenses a few months ago, just as during Trump’s previous presidency it showed how easily it could hit U.S. military bases.

The U.S. military budget actually is much larger than is reported in the proposed bill before Congress to approve Trump’s trillion-dollar subsidy.

Congress funds its military-industrial complex (MIC) in two ways: The obvious way is by arms purchases paid for by Congress directly. Less acknowledged is MIC spending routed via U.S. foreign military aid to its allies – Ukraine, Israel, Europe, South Korea, Japan, and other Asian countries – to buy U.S. arms.

This explains why the military burden is what normally accounts for the entire U.S. budget deficit and hence the rise in government debt (much of it self-financed via the Federal Reserve since 2008, to be sure).

The need for alternative international organizations

Unsurprisingly, the international community has been unable to prevent the U.S./Israeli war against Iran.

The United Nations Security Council is blocked by the United States’ veto, and that of Britain and France, from taking measures against acts of aggression by the United States and its allies.

The United Nations is now seen to have become toothless and irrelevant as a world organization able to enforce international law. (Its situation is much as Stalin remarked regarding Vatican opposition, “How many troops does the Pope have?”)

Just as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund are instruments of U.S. foreign policy and control, so too are many other international organizations which are dominated by the United States and its allies, including (relevantly for today’s crisis in West Asia) the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), that Iran has accused of having provided Israel targeting information for its attack on Iranian nuclear scientists and sites.

Breaking free of the U.S. unipolar order requires a full spectrum set of alternative international organizations independent of the United States, NATO, and other client allies.

Trump’s attack on Iran

The sound and fury of Trump’s missile attack on Iran’s most famous nuclear sites on June 21 turned out not to be the capstone of America’s conquest of the Middle East. But it did more than signify nothing.

Trump must have listened to the military’s warnings that all game plans for conflict with Iran at this time showed the United States losing badly.

His Trumpian solution was to brag on his social media account that he had won a great victory in stopping Iran’s march toward making an atom bomb.

Iran for its part evidently was glad to cooperate with the public relations charade. The U.S. missiles seem to have landed on mutually agreed-upon sites that Iran had vacated for just such a diplomatic stand-down.

Trump always announces any act as a great victory, and in a way it was, over the hopes and goading of his most ardent neoconservative advisors. The United States has deferred its hopes for conquest at this time.

The fight is now to be limited to Iran and Israel. And Israel already has offered to stop hostilities if Iran does. Iran gave hope for an armistice once it has exacted due retaliation for Israeli assassinations and terrorist acts against civilians.

Israel is the big loser, and its ability to serve as America’s proxy has been crippled. The devastation from Iranian rockets has left a reported one-third of Tel Aviv and much of Haifa in ruins.

Israel has lost not only its key military and national security structures, but will lose much of its skilled population as it emigrates, taking its industry with it.

By intervening on Israel’s side by supporting its genocide, the United States has turned most of the UN’s Global Majority against it.

Washignton’s ill-thought backing of the reckless Netanyahu has catalyzed the drive by other countries to speed their way out of the U.S. diplomatic, economic, and military orbit.

So America’s Oil War against Iran can now be added to the long list of wars that the United States has lost since the Korean and Vietnam wars, Afghanistan, Iraq, and the rest of its adventures leading up to its imminent loss in Ukraine. Its victories have been against Grenada and German industry – its own imperial “backyard,” so to speak.

June 26, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Trump Claims Iran Nuclear Sites ‘Totally Destroyed’—But That Clashes With Vance And Experts

By Ty Roush, Forbes Staff. https://www.forbes.com/sites/tylerroush/2025/06/23/did-the-us-destroy-irans-uranium-supply-or-not-vance-experts-clash-with-trumps-claims/

President Donald Trump on Monday said U.S. strikes “totally destroyed” nuclear facilities in Iran and criticized “sleazebags” in the media for suggesting otherwise—but comments from Vice President JD Vance, military officials and nuclear watchdogs all suggest the damage to Iran’s nuclear program remains unconfirmed.

Key Facts

“The sites we hit in Iran were totally destroyed, and everyone knows it,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, disputing “Fake News” he claims “would say anything different in order to try and demean, as much as possible—and even they say they were ‘pretty well destroyed!’”

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told ABC on Monday the U.S. is “confident” Iran’s nuclear program was “completely and totally obliterated,” noting there is a “high degree of confidence” the locations the U.S. strikes took place is where Iran stored its enriched uranium and that Iran “no longer [has] the capability … to threaten the world.”

International Atomic Energy Agency chief Rafael Grossi appeared to dispute Trump’s claims in a statement earlier Monday by suggesting the agency would need to verify damage to Iran’s underground Fordow facility, including whether the site’s uranium enrichment halls were impacted, though he noted the U.S. strikes likely caused “very significant” damage.

On Sunday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine said an assessment on damage to Iran’s nuclear sites was “still pending,” and Caine claimed it was “way too early for me to comment on what may or may not still be there.”

Vance, in an interview with ABC on Sunday, suggested the U.S. strikes only set back Iran’s potential to weaponize its uranium stockpile and said the U.S. was “going to work in the coming weeks to ensure that we do something with that fuel.”

Jeffrey Lewis, a professor of nonproliferation at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, wrote on X he was “unimpressed” by the U.S. strikes while citing satellite images of the attacks, claiming the U.S. “failed to target significant elements of Iran’s nuclear materials and production infrastructure.”

How Large Is Iran’s Uranium Stockpile?

Iran stored about 400 kilograms (about 881 pounds) of uranium enriched to 60%, near weapons-grade enrichment of 90%, according to Grossi. It’s unclear whether Iran’s uranium stockpile is still this large, Grossi noted, adding IAEA’s inspectors last verified Iran’s stockpile a “few days” before Iran’s conflict with Israel began earlier this month.

Could Iran Rebuild Its Uranium Stockpile?

It’s possible Iran could rebuild its nuclear program, but a timeline for development would depend on how much damage was done to Iran’s nuclear sites, according to the Centers for Strategic and International Studies, a U.S.-based think tank. Recent U.S. strikes would make Iran “more motivated than ever” to obtain nuclear weapons, Rosemary Kelanic, a director at the U.S.-based think tank Defense Priorities, told the New York Times. Some American officials estimated an attack on Fordow set back Iran’s nuclear program by as much as five years, the Times reported.

June 25, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Iran, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

‘Completely & Totally Obliterated’

“Iran’s key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated,” Trump declared Saturday evening.

It is certainly unclear how “the Jewish state” will take it if Iran’s nuclear program has been damaged but remains extant.

The Iraq invasion and the bombing of Iran are acts of desperation — the conduct of a wounded, uncertain nation that went on the defensive when the Twin Towers went down and history arrived on its shores.

By Patrick Lawrence, Consortium News, 23 June 25, https://consortiumnews.com/2025/06/23/patrick-lawrence-completely-totally-obliterated/

I have heard many unhinged speeches by American presidents over the years, but — no risk of exaggeration here — Donald Trump’s as he declared “a spectacular military success” after seven B–2 bombers attacked three nuclear sites in Iran Saturday night is the barmiest of my lifetime.

“The nuclear threat posed by the world’s No. 1 state sponsor of terror?” “The bully of the Middle East?” There was this by way of a plunge into the crowded precincts of American paranoia:

“They have been killing our people, blowing off their arms, blowing off their legs with roadside bombs. That was their specialty. We lost over a thousand people and hundreds of thousands throughout the Middle East and around the world have died as a direct result of their hate.”

And for the good people out in Peoria, a decisive majority of whom, the polls say, oppose American aggression against the Islamic Republic: “I want to just say, we love you, God, and we love our great military.”

Let me remind readers, as rhetoric this base makes it easy to forget: The speaker of these words is the 47^th president of the United States. Yes, the commander-in-chief.

It is difficult to take Trump’s four minutes in front of the microphone late Saturday evening the slightest bit seriously. But we must, precisely because what Trump had to say to his nation was so utterly unserious.

Donald Trump, to put this point another way, turns out to be worse than Donald Trump.

It is natural, for those with some sense of history to compare Trump’s my-God-and-my-military talk with the more craven moments of the McCarthyist 1950s, or with the John Birchers. I say it is more useful to think of that famous remark Karl Rove made during an interview conducted by Ron Suskind a year and seven months after the Bush II regime invaded Iraq.

“Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush” was published in The New York Times Sunday Magazine in October 2004. Suskind identifies Rove, then an adviser to the Bush White House, as “the aide,” but it was soon enough known it was he Suskind had interviewed.

The memorable passage in the Suskind piece is this:

“Guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ … ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

America had by then given Iraqis and the rest of the world a bitter display of what results when a nation purports to conjure realities to its liking. Trump now takes on the same preposterous project, as the ungrounded language cited above indicates.

Bush II failed extravagantly in Iraq, and Trump’s new adventure cannot but come to the same fate.

Creating reality, as if the irreducible foundations of cognition and logic are mere irritants to be set aside, may look like the very zenith of hubristic power. It is not.

The Iraq invasion and the bombing of Iran are to be read as acts of desperation — the conduct of a wounded, uncertain nation that assumed the defensive crouch when the Twin Towers went down in 2001 and history arrived on its shores — history, that process America all along thought was the burden of others.

We must bear this always in mind. Desperation is the mulch wherein recklessness germinates.

“Iran’s key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated,” Trump declared Saturday evening. Does this remind you of anything?

Maybe Bush II’s ridiculous appearance, in a bomber jacket no less after landing on board, to declare on an aircraft carrier off San Diego a few days after the Iraq invasion began, “Mission accomplished?” An infamous bit of staging,

We are already well down from “completely and totally.” By Sunday morning the Pentagon was trading in “severe damage,” catch-all vocabulary such that there is no telling what it means.

Casting further doubt on the state of matters, a digital publication called Amwaj.media reported Sunday afternoon that Washington had advised Tehran in advance of its intent to bomb and indicated the limits of its targeting. Citing “a high-ranking Iranian political source,” Amwaj said this source “also confirmed that the targeted sites were evacuated, with ‘most’ of Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium kept in secure locations.”

Amwaj.media has its head office in Britain and publishes news and comment on West Asia in Arabic, Farsi and English. I cannot verify this report, but I am not at all inclined to discount it. It conforms, certainly, with the Trump regime’s vigorous efforts to stress that it does not seek a full-out war with the Islamic Republic.

“We have no idea where this war will go,” The New York Times declared in the headline atop an opinion piece published in its Sunday editions. “It may appear like a tactical victory less than four hours after the bombs began to fall,” W.J. Hennigan writes, “but projecting any sense of finality about this ordeal is wildly premature.”

This is so by way of facts on the ground, as the expression goes. It is certainly unclear how “the Jewish state” will take it if Iran’s nuclear program has been damaged but remains extant. The Zionist fanatics who started all this seem willing to settle for nothing short of Trump’s “completely and totally.”

But I see finality aplenty when I turn the weekend’s events 180° and consider them from this perspective. Whatever the destruction at Fordow, Isfahan and Natanz by way of the “bunker busters” those B–2s dropped, the damage the Trump regime has done to itself and the nation it pretends to govern is nearly too extravagant to reckon.

Remember “Nous sommes tous Américains,” that celebrated headline atop an editorial Le Monde published shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks? I did not then think the United States had enjoyed the world’s approval so unreservedly for decades.

The slide began two years later, with Bush II’s wanton, unquestionably illegal invasion of Iraq. The policy cliques could not since have squandered the residual good will of the postwar decades more efficiently had they tried.

It was not a question of trying, of course. It has been a question since 2001 of those planning and executing U.S. policy simply not giving a damn what the rest of the world thinks — or wanting even to know what the rest of the world thinks.

Trump just decisively clarified the point, in my judgment. Nothing other than power matters to the Americans now. If this has been true since 2001, Trump makes clear there is no turning back from this: Power is all the United States has left to give the world — or impose upon it.

“There’s no military in the world that could have done what we did tonight, not even close,” Trump declared triumphantly Saturday night. “There has never been a military that could do what took place just a little while ago.”

What a thing to boast of. So hopelessly out of sync with the 21^st century. No, no other military could have done what the American did at the weekend, and no other military would ever be sent on such a mission.

I cannot imagine what some metric of global good will toward America would register now that Trump has led the United States into what looks like another war. If “completely and totally obliterated” were on the dial, the needle would be close.

As widely reported, Trump colluded with the Israelis to deceive Tehran with the suggestion that talks toward a diplomatic settlement of the nuclear question would proceed in Oman two Sundays ago. And as the Iranians prepared for another round of negotiations, Israel launched its attacks the preceding Friday.

Sucker-punching. This now seems part of America’s diplomatic repertoire.

It is hard to believe any American administration would be this craven, but Trump did the same thing again when he stated last week he would take two weeks to give diplomacy a last chance. It was a matter of a few days before the B–2s flew.

When Seymour Hersh predicted this in “What I have been told is coming in Iran,” published in his Substack newsletter last Friday, I confess I thought Sy’s neck was out a touch too far this time. I leave readers to finish the thought.

The Washington policy cliques have been more or less indifferent to statecraft for decades. Diplomacy is for the weak nations, the powerful having no need of it, former U.N. chief Boutros Boutros Ghali wrote insightfully in his memoirs. Trump just burned the bridges diplomats are supposed to build — all of them.

Who — the Russians, the Chinese, the Africans, the Latin Americans, the Europeans, the East Asians, the Indians — who will engage the Americans diplomatically any longer but with deep suspicions, deep reservations, and a profound reluctance to trust? Not to mention a well of contempt.

This is grave far beyond the Iranians, in my view. Contrary to appearances these past 25 years, diplomacy is an essential 21^st century technology. B–2s and bunker busters do not seem so to me. High-technology weaponry is deployed at an ever-rising cost.

Incessant breaches of international law, cavalier abuses of the sovereignty of other nations: This will go on for who knows how long. But Trump and his people and the neoconservatives who appear to control them just went some distance destroying all possibility that the U.S. might participate in the making of a new world order.

This matters nil in Washington now, but such an order materializes as we speak, and the day will come when this foreclosed prospect will be up for regret.

I read something else in Trump’s Saturday night speech. To me it was the culmination of weeks of irrationality, a frenzy of it that led — just as the Israelis hoped it would — to senseless attacks with no logical justification.

There seems to me another kind of finality to what Trump just did. He has destroyed — completely and totally, I fear to say — rational thought as the basis of action in the name of what historians of our time will record as a rear-guard defense of raw power.

A late-phase imperium cannot do what Trump just did and then return to sound deliberations, measured policy, sophisticated statecraft. I do not now see a path to any such return.

America has long been — since 2001, again — on the way into an era of unreality, as we may as well call it. Trump just gave the nation a final shove and slammed the door behind it, to put my point another way.

When the bunker busters fell Saturday night the Trump regime created a reality all right. Look at it. Take a hard look. This is essential if some new direction is to be discovered.

Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, lecturer and author, most recently of Journalists and Their Shadows, available from Clarity Press or via Amazon. Other books include Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. His Twitter account, @thefloutist, has been permanently censored.

June 25, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | culture and arts, USA | Leave a comment

Chris Hedges: War With Iran

By Chris Hedges / Original to ScheerPost, https://scheerpost.com/2025/06/22/chris-hedges-war-with-iran/

War opens a Pandora’s box of evils that once unleashed are beyond anyone’s control. The warmongers who ordered the strikes by U.S. bombers on Iranian nuclear sites have no more of a plan for what comes next in Iran than they had in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya or Syria.

European allies, whom Israel and Trump have alienated with these air assaults, are in no mood to cooperate with Washington. The Pentagon, even if it wanted to, does not have the hundreds of thousands of troops it would need to attack and occupy Iran — the only way Iran might be subdued.

And the idea that the marginal and discredited Iranian resistance group Mujahedeen-e-Khalq (MEK), which fought alongside Saddam Hussein in the war against Iran and is viewed by most Iranians as composed of traitors, is a viable counter force to the Iranian government is ludicrous.

In all these equations the 90 million people in Iran are ignored just as the people of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria were ignored. They will not welcome the United States and certainly not Israel as liberators. They may hate the regime, but they will resist. They don’t want to be dominated by foreign powers.

A war with Iran will be interpreted throughout the region as a war against Shiism. Soon there will be retaliation. Lots of it. It will come at first with desultory missile strikes and then attacks carried out by elusive enemies on ships, military bases and installations. Steadily it will grow in volume and lethality.

The death toll, including among the some 40,000 soldiers and Marines stationed in the Middle East, will mount. Ships, including aircraft carriers, will be targeted. We will, as we did in Iraq and Afghanistan, begin to lash out with a blind fury, fueling the conflagration we began.

Those who lured us into this war know little about the instrument of war and even less about the cultures or peoples they seek to dominate. Blinded by hubris, believing their own hallucinations, they have learned none of the lessons of the last two decades of warfare in the Middle East. A war with Iran will be a self-defeating and costly quagmire, one more nail in the rotting edifice of the empire.

June 25, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics, USA | Leave a comment

Trump claims ceasefire reached between Israel and Iran.

US president congratulates Iran and Israel on truce deal, but neither country has confirmed agreement to end war.

23 Jun 2025, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/6/23/trump-claims-ceasefire-reached-between-israel-and-iran

United States President Donald Trump says that Iran and Israel have agreed to a “complete and total” ceasefire, which will come into effect in the coming hours.

Trump’s announcement on Monday came shortly after an Iranian missile attack on Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, which houses US troops.

“On the assumption that everything works as it should, which it will, I would like to congratulate both Countries, Israel and Iran, on having the Stamina, Courage, and Intelligence to end, what should be called, ‘THE 12 DAY WAR,’” Trump said in a social media post.

“This is a War that could have gone on for years, and destroyed the entire Middle East, but it didn’t, and never will! God bless Israel, God bless Iran, God bless the Middle East, God bless the United States of America, and GOD BLESS THE WORLD!”

Neither Israel nor Iran has confirmed the agreement.

Trump’s statement suggested that Iran would stop firing at Israel hours before the Israeli military ends its operations.

Reporting from Tehran, Al Jazeera’s Tohid Asadi noted that there has not been an official confirmation of the deal more than an hour after Trump’s announcement.

“Just a few minutes ago, we heard the sounds of explosions related to an interception and the activation of the air defence system here across the capital,” Asadi said.

“So the reality on the ground is that we are witnessing the continuation of the Israeli strikes, and that’s paving the way for further retaliatory reactions by the Iranian side.”

Middle East analyst Omar Rahman told Al Jazeera that many details are missing from Trump’s announcement, including whether negotiations would follow the purported ceasefire.

Rahman accused Trump of previous “deception” on behalf of Israel. The US president had re-asserted the US commitment to diplomacy hours before Israel launched its initial attack on Iran.

Last week, Trump said he would decide within two weeks whether to join Israel in the war, only to strike Iran two days later.

Rahman said a major Israeli attack in the final hours, including the possible assassination of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei could blow up the deal.

“If that’s the last operation, would that suddenly end the war? No, of course, not. So, I don’t know what’s in the cards,” he said.

Israel launched a massive attack against Iran in the early hours of June 13, without direct provocation. Israeli officials claimed that the strikes, which killed hundreds of people, were “preemptive” and aimed at the country’s nuclear and missile programmes.

In the first wave of the attacks, Israel killed several Iranian generals.

Iran said the attacks were unprovoked aggression in violation of the United Nations Charter, and responded with hundreds of missiles that left widespread destruction inside Israel.

On Saturday, Trump authorised US strikes on three Iranian nuclear facilities.

Earlier on Monday, Iran launched an unprecedented missile attack at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar in response to the US strikes. Trump dismissed the retaliation as “weak”, suggesting that the US would not respond.

Liqaa Maki, a scholar at Al Jazeera Media Institute, said the US may be able to withstand Iranian attacks on its bases without responding if they do not cause casualties.

“The US, after the important strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities, needs to transform the military achievement into a political one enshrined by an agreement,” Maki told Al Jazeera Arabic after the Iranian attack.

He noted that Iran still has large quantities of highly enriched uranium as well as nuclear know-how.

“So in two to three years, Iran could resume its nuclear activity but without inspections. It could produce a bomb without the world noticing,” Maki said.

The damage that the Iranian nuclear programme has sustained remains unclear. Iran insists that it is not pursuing a nuclear weapon, while Israel is widely believed to have an undeclared nuclear arsenal.

June 24, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics international, USA | Leave a comment

Trump Suggests He Wants Regime Change in Iran

The president previously threatened Iran’s leader, claiming the US knew his location

by Dave DeCamp | Jun 22, 2025, https://news.antiwar.com/2025/06/22/trump-suggests-he-wants-regime-change-in-iran/

President Trump suggested in a Truth Social post on Sunday that he seeks regime change in Iran, contradicting earlier statements from top US officials who denied that was the goal of the US military campaign against the country.

“It’s not politically correct to use the term, ‘Regime Change,’ but if the current Iranian Regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn’t there be a Regime change??? MIGA!!!” the president wrote.

In the morning, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth insisted the US bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities and support for Israel’s attacks on the country have “not been about regime change.” But Trump’s post suggests that regime change is the goal and that the administration’s calls for diplomacy with Iran continue to be a smokescreen.

Last week, President Trump threatened Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, suggesting the US was aware of his location. “We know exactly where the so-called ‘Supreme Leader’ is hiding. He is an easy target, but is safe there – We are not going to take him out (kill!), at least not for now,” he said.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made it increasingly clear that his goal is regime change. He insisted last week that killing Khamenei would “end the conflict” with Iran.

Many observers have pointed to the fact that Netanyahu was a major proponent of the US invasion of Iraq and promised that taking out Saddam Hussein would have a positive impact on the region. “If you take out Saddam, Saddam’s regime, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region,” he told Congress in 2002.

Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz has also threatened Khamenei, saying the Iranian leader “cannot continue to exist.”

June 24, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics international, USA | Leave a comment

Trump’s “Unleashing Atomic Power” is Unhinged

June 19, 2025, https://beyondnuclear.org/trumps-unleashing-atomic-power-unhinged/

Without explanation, on June 16, 2025, President Trump unceremoniously fired Democrat Commissioner Christopher Hanson from the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) as the first senior manager causality initiating a slash and burn attack on commercial nuclear power regulatory oversight. Hanson’s second term of office was to have expired in 2029. Hanson’s abrupt removal follows a barrage of White House Executive Orders by decree of the Trump Administration “to unleash nuclear power” from a federal regulator pilloried by industry and its bipartisan political allies as “risk-averse” and “safety zealots” preventing the rapid expansion of new reactor licensing and extending operating license renewals of deteriorating reactors to an extreme 80 years.

None of these industry lobbied accusations are true. For years, the NRC has in fact been shifting away from prescriptive regulation to “risk-informed” regulation that Beyond Nuclear and other public interest organizations have criticized as “gambling” at the expense of public safety margins to protect nuclear industry profit margins. After all, what is gambling but considering risk to gain monetary reward which in this case is for an inherently dangerous and aging technology.

Following the Energy Policy Act of 2005 (EPAct2005), Congress and President G.W. Bush provided billions of US taxpayer dollars to incentivize a so-called “nuclear renaissance” of new “advanced” reactor construction with federal loan guarantees, new reactor production tax credits, and streamlined new reactor licensing to grease the skid. The Congressional Research Service (CRS) published its 2007 report to Congress “Nuclear Power: Outlook for New Reactors” assessing EPAct2005’s impact to prop up the federal revival and cited the industry pledge to cash in on taxpayer money for 34+ units in new reactor projects. The NRC staff and Commissioners took full advantage of the politics. NRC speeded up its license review process that now combined construction and operating applications (COL) into one convenient licensing hearing while cutting back on the public’s due process. Of those pledges, only two projects for four units [V.C. Summer 2 & 3 (SC) and Vogtle 3 & 4 (GA)] managed to muster the financing and only then by using electricity rate hikes paid by utility customers in advance for construction work in progress.

Here’s the reality check: of those 34+ units, only two units awarded COLs by NRC, Vogtle 3 & 4, that were originally estimated at total completion costs of $14 billion, managed to finish construction seven years behind schedule in 2023 and 2024 at a total construction cost well exceeding $35 billion.

Of the remaining 32 units identified in the CRS report, an additional 12 units were provided COLs by NRC licensing boards to start construction. Only V.C. Summer 2 & 3 started construction that was abandoned mid-construction with $10 billion in sunk cost, again, largely at the expense of its captured ratepayers. The remainder were cancelled, withdrawn or terminated by construction cost-averse utilities. As of March 2025, the NRC reports that five US nuclear power companies still hold NRC-approved COL applications for 8 “advanced” reactor units that have not been acted upon because of the projected uncontrollable construction costs.

The NRC did its part to fast track reactor licensing. It was the utilities that by and large financially chickened out.

Still, to some Commissioners’ credit, it was NRC Democrat then Chairman Christopher Hanson and Democrat Commissioner Jeff Baran who on February 24, 2022 astutely heeded Beyond Nuclear’s and other intervenors appeals filed in response to the dismissal of their request for relicensing hearings on a contention illuminating a glaring “error of law” that was being ignored and ramrodded by the NRC. The NRC relicensing process was simply carrying over its environmental review completed for the “initial” or first 20 years of license renewal (40 to 60 years of operation) into the “subsequent” or second 20 year extension of operations (60 to 80 years) without adequately upgrading its environmental review analysis, more specifically for impacts of “climate change” projected into that future operating period. The piling up a regulatory train wreck of seriously flawed Subsequent License Renewal Applications and bungled regulatory decisions.

The agency and their licensees were repeatedly violating the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) by NRC staff, the Office of General Counsel, numerous Atomic Safety Licensing Boards and the previous Commission to ramrod operating licensing renewals for a second 20 year extension (60 to 80 years) without updating the letter of the law to require environmental reviews to take a “hard look” at the projected extension period and do the analysis on the potential impacts of climate change (sea level rise, increasing intense hurricanes and storms, floods, etc.) on increased severe nuclear accident risk and frequency of nuclear accidents as a result.

In the 2 to 1 vote the seated Commission vote (Hanson and Baran vs. Republican Commissioner David Wright) issued NRC Orders to send the federal agency back to the drawing board to rewrite the Subsequent License Renewal Rule’s Generic Environmental Impact Statement (GEIS) to specifically make it relevant to the 60 to 80 year projected operating time frame. The NRC spent nearly two years in it rewrite of the license renewal rule to comply with NEPA only to remain a stubbornly captured federal agency by industry lobbyists funding and Congress. The rewrite of the GEIS came back without the agency addressing climate change and now claiming that climate change is “out of scope” of reactor operation environmental reviews. Beyond Nuclear and the Sierra Club are currently before the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in request of a judicial review of the NRC’s flagrant and continued violation of NEPA by ignoring climate change impacts on increasingly extreme relicensing periods.

Unfortunately for nuclear safety, Hanson and Baran’s attention to the letter of the law earned them both the enduring scorn and ultimately revenge of the nuclear industry and their devoted political champions.

The energy trade journal Nuclear Intelligence Weekly reported June 6, 2025 that, “[t]he White House campaign to erode the NRC’s independence comes alongside fresh fears that President Donald Trump might fire some or all of the five NRC commissioners.” Meanwhile, Trump’s scandalous Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is now plotting to make deep cuts in NRC staffing levels and divert more attention from public safety margins and environment protection to focus a leaner agency work force on expanding the industry production agenda and gold plated science. Shortly after Hanson’s abrupt dismissal, Trump renominated NRC Chairman David Wright, a Republican whose current term of office as NRC Chairman expires on June 30, 2025, and renewed his post for another 5-year term as one of the Commissioners.

Which raises the question, will President Trump fill the NRC Chair seat once empty with his handpicked Republican nominee to swing the Commission vote back to a 3-2 Republican advantage? The goal being to erase any notions of a “risk-averse” NRC, shutdown the agency’s public transparency and regulatory accountability and dangerously unhinging the national nuclear energy policy.

June 24, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | safety, USA | Leave a comment

US State Department Spokeswoman Says Israel Is Greater Than America.

Caitlin Johnstone, Jun 23, 2025, https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/us-state-department-spokeswoman-says?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=166596495&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

Journalist Ken Klippenstein has drawn attention to an overlooked remark made by State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce last month saying that the United States is “the greatest country on earth, next to Israel.”

“The pride of being able to be here and do work that facilitates making things better for people and in the greatest country on Earth, next to Israel,” Bruce told Jewish News Syndicate. “It’s an honor to be able to make a difference and to be able to speak in this regard with an administration that I love so much and that I feel genuinely represented by.”

It’s like this administration is doing everything it can to vindicate those who accuse it of being Israel First instead of America First.

I feel like we don’t talk enough about the fact that Donald Trump publicly admitted to being bought and owned by the richest Israeli on earth, Republican megadonor Miriam Adelson.

On the campaign trail last year Trump told the Israeli American Council Summit that the first time he was president, Miriam and her late husband Sheldon “would come into the White House probably almost more than anybody, outside of people that work there.” He said they were always after something, “always for Israel,” and “as soon as I’d give them something, they’d want something else.” He named the US recognition of the occupied Golan Heights as part of Israel as one of the gifts he showered the Zionist state with to please the Adelsons, who pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into his presidential campaigns.

It’s hard to focus on Israel’s airstrikes in Lebanon due to Israel’s invasion of Syria, which is hard to focus on due to Israel’s atrocities in the West Bank, which are hard to focus on due to Israel’s genocide in Gaza, which is hard to focus on due to Israel’s war on Iran, which is hard to focus on because of America’s war on Iran.

❖

Top Ten dumbest things we’re being asked to believe about Iran:

1. That the Iranians want to be bombed.

2. That the guy bombing Iran wants peace.

3. That regime change interventionism is a swell idea this time.

4. That anyone who doesn’t want war with Iran hates Jews.

5. That this time the government and the media are telling us the truth about an American war.

6. That this time the neocons are smart and correct.

7. That bombing Iran makes it LESS likely to try to obtain nukes.

8. That Iran is trying to assassinate the US president when all US presidents have the same foreign policy.

9. That Iran (a country that never starts wars) cannot be trusted with nuclear weapons, but Israel (a country that starts wars constantly) can.

10. That attacking Iran benefits Americans.

❖

It blows my mind that there are people trying to argue that Trump does not seek war. What do these idiots think the United States would do if another country started bombing American energy infrastructure?

I’m trying to get an important business deal done, so I firebombed the guy’s house to make him more likely to negotiate with me. I just want peace.

The following things are antisemitic:

– opposing war with Iran

– viewing Palestinians as human

– opposing genocide

– Greta Thunberg

– peace

– journalism

– Ms Rachel

– truth

– critical thinking

– the UN

– Tucker Carlson

– Amnesty International

– Human Rights Watch

– equal rights

It’s hilarious that anyone still takes this “antisemitism” schtick seriously. Oh no there’s a special group of white people who might get hurt feelings if I don’t want to send my kids to invade Iran.

The western world has been on a two-year crash course learning all the reasons why the Muslim world has been correct about Israel this entire time.

It’s kind of nice to be arguing with George W Bush conservatives about US foreign policy again. For the last few years I’ve been getting called a Nazi by western Zionists and a Putin-loving fascist by NATO simps; it’s refreshing to be hated for the hippie moonbat I actually am for once.

June 24, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Israel, politics, USA | Leave a comment

Trump’s attack on Iran is ‘unconditional surrender’ to Israel

Aaron Maté, Jun 22, 2025, https://www.aaronmate.net/p/trumps-attack-on-iran-is-unconditional?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=100118&post_id=166521469&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=ln98x&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

Shunning the US intelligence consensus, Trump and top principals rely on Israeli fraud to bomb Iran.

Since his election in 2016, Donald Trump’s political opponents have portrayed him as a dangerous, unstable fabulist doing the bidding of a malign, nuclear-armed foreign power.

Having returned to the White House this year, Trump is proving his detractors correct on all counts but one: the location on the map. The rogue state that he’s colluding with — at great peril to the planet — is not Russia, as his most vocal detractors alleged, but Israel.

Israel’s June 13^th attack on Iran sabotaged the then-ongoing talks on a new nuclear deal with the United States, and Trump has gone to unprecedented lengths to support its aggression. Trump undercut his own Secretary of State’s claim that Israel had undertaken “unilateral action” by acknowledging that “we knew everything” in advance of what he called a “very successful attack.” Administration officials then disclosed that Trump had previously authorized giving Israel intelligence support for the bombing. Trump then called on Tehran’s 9.8 million residents to evacuate, mused about killing Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and declared that “we” – meaning Israel – “have complete and total control of the skies over Iran.”

After Iran rejected his demand for “unconditional surrender”, Trump imposed a new deadline of two weeks, only to break it three days later by ordering a US military attack on three Iranian nuclear energy sites, including the deeply buried mountain complex Fordo, which he quickly hailed as a “great success.” Just as with Trump’s diplomacy with Iran, his two-week deadline turns out to have been a ruse whose “goal was to create a situation when everyone wasn’t expecting it,” a senior administration official said.

To wage war on Iran, Trump and his allies have employed the traditional Iraq WMD playbook of ignoring or manipulating the available evidence to fear-monger about a foreign state marked for regime change. Unlike the Iraq war, where the fraudulent case for invading was mostly concocted in-house, Trump has outsourced the job to Israel, while not even pretending to care about public opinion or Congressional approval.

Back in March, the US intelligence community assessed that “Iran is not building a nuclear weapon” and “has not reauthorized the nuclear weapons program… suspended in 2003.” According to US officials who spoke to the New York Times, “[t]hat assessment has not changed.” Moreover, the US has found that “not only was Iran not actively pursuing a nuclear weapon, it was also up to three years away from being able to produce and deliver one,” CNN reports, citing four sources.

Whereas Dick Cheney and company went through the trouble of nudging subordinates to fabricate intelligence, including via torture, Trump does not care about seeking their imprimatur. “[M]y intelligence community is wrong,” Trump told reporters on Friday. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt insisted that “Iran has all that it needs to achieve a nuclear weapon,” and, if authorized by Ayatollah Khamenei, “it would take a couple weeks to complete the production of that weapon.” In White House meetings, CIA chief John Ratcliffe has argued that Iran is close to a nuclear bomb and that claiming otherwise “would be similar to saying football players who have fought their way to the one-yard line don’t want to score a touchdown,” according to one US official who spoke to CBS News. (After the Iraq war, a “Slam dunk” basketball analogy is no longer available).

If Trump’s intelligence community is “wrong,” who does he think is right? As US officials told the New York Times, the claims from Trump and his circle “echoed material provided by Mossad,” Israel’s intelligence agency. And whereas some in the government, undoubtedly those close to Trump, “find the Israeli estimate credible”, others believe that “Israeli assessments have been colored by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s desire to gain American support for his military campaign against Iran.” Moreover, according to multiple officials, “[n]one of the new assessments on the timeline to get a bomb are based on newly collected intelligence,” but instead on “new analysis of existing work.” In other words, Trump is sidelining his own intelligence community to trust a “new analysis” that is based on no new information, just the manipulation of a foreign government.

Trump’s disdain for his own agencies is a particular slight to intelligence chief Tulsi Gabbard. “I don’t care what she said,” Trump said this week, referring to Gabbard’s presentation of the US intelligence consensus on Iran in March. “I think they [Iran] were very close to having it.”

Rather than defend the agencies she oversees – and the record she earned challenging previous US-driven regime change deceptions — Gabbard has bent the knee to Trump, and Israel by extension. In a social media post, Gabbard chided “the dishonest media” for taking her March testimony “out of context.” The US, Gabbard now claimed, “has intelligence that Iran is at the point that it can produce a nuclear weapon within weeks to months, if they decide to finalize the assembly.” Gabbard also shared video of that March testimony, without addressing the contradictory fact that it does not include any mention of her newfound claim that Iran has the capability to produce a nuclear bomb “within weeks to months.”

Gabbard is engaging in disingenuous wordplay. If Israel tells America that Iran “can produce a nuclear weapon within weeks”, then yes, American intelligence now “has” that intelligence. That doesn’t mean it is true, or that American intelligence believes it, which it does not. A US official familiar with the available record on Iran tells me that there is no US intelligence assessment concluding that Iran is “weeks” away from building a nuclear weapon. Gabbard is only saying, therefore, that the US intelligence community has received “intelligence” from Israel, without mentioning that the IC does not actually endorse it.

Moreover, pretend for a moment that the Israeli claim is correct. Gabbard’s caveat of “if they decide to finalize” is an acknowledgment that Iran has not decided to build a nuclear weapon. That’s because Iran has said it does not want one, and is willing to commit to that in a binding agreement — the one they were negotiating with the US until Trump and Israel sabotaged it, and not for the first time. In fact, as US intelligence officials have also predicted, Trump’s bombing now increases the likelihood that Iran will pursue the nuclear bomb that it has long foresworn. Iran claims to have moved enriched uranium stockpiles prior to the US bombing, which preserves its capacity to weaponize.

Trump and Israel insisted, in the president’s words, on “unconditional surrender”: capitulation to maximalist US-Israeli demands that Iran end its uranium enrichment program, which it is entitled to have under the Non-Proliferation Treaty; and that it limit its arsenal of missiles. In other words, Trump and Netanyahu demanded that Iran agree to abandon its sovereignty and right to self-defense just as it is under attack from US-backed Israeli aggression; and all while US-backed Israeli mass murder in Gaza and annexation of the West Bank continues unimpeded.

Iranian officials did not surrender. Trump, by contrast, cannot say the same. By enabling its bombing campaign, parroting its deceptions, and now going to war against Iran on its behalf, Trump has already offered an unconditional surrender to Israel — a betrayal that grows more dangerous by the day.

June 23, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Iran, Israel, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Trump Announces ‘Successful’ Attack On Iranian Nuclear Sites

Trump said Iran must quickly make peace or he will authorize larger attacks

by Kyle Anzalone | Jun 21, 2025, https://news.antiwar.com/2025/06/21/trump-announces-successful-attack-on-iranian-nuclear-sites/

President Donald Trump announced on Saturday that the US has completed an attack on three nuclear sites in Iran.

“We have completed our very successful attack on the three Nuclear sites in Iran, including Fordow, Natanz, and Esfahan. All planes are now outside of Iran air space. A full payload of BOMBS was dropped on the primary site, Fordow,” the President wrote on Truth Social. “All planes are safely on their way home. Congratulations to our great American Warriors. There is not another military in the World that could have done this. NOW IS THE TIME FOR PEACE! Thank you for your attention to this matter.”

In an address to the nation, Trump said that Iran’s three main nuclear enrichment sites had been “completely obliterated.” Trump added that if “peace does not come quickly,” the US would conduct larger attacks soon.

Iranian state media downplayed the success of the strike, saying the personnel and nuclear material were removed from the facilities before the attack.

Fox News reporter Jennifer Griffin spoke with a “well-placed source” who did not believe the Esfahan facility was destroyed. “ There is no way they got in that tunnel It’s deeper than [Fordow]- and harder rock,” they explained.

Axios reporter Barak Ravid said an Israeli official confirmed that Tel Aviv was informed of the strike before the operation. He added that Trump had called him following the attack, with the message, “We had great success tonight. Your Israel is much safer now.”

Ravid is an Israeli who served in an Israeli Army intelligence unit.

Trump also called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu after the strike.

Netanyahu posted a video message on social media Saturday night praising Trump’s decision to bomb Iran. “Congratulations, President Trump. Your bold decision to target Iran’s nuclear facilities with the awesome and righteous might of the US will change history.” The Israeli leader continued, “In operation Rising Lion, Israel has done truly amazing things. But in tonight’s action against Iran’s nuclear facilities, America has been truly unsurpassed. It has done what no other country on earth could do.”

Reuters reports speaking with a US official who confirmed B-2 bombers were involved in the attack. Earlier on Saturday, six B-2 bombers departed a US airbase in Missouri, with officials saying they were en route to Guam.

B-2s are capable of dropping the GBU-57A/B MOP, a 30,000-pound bunker-busting bomb, that some US officials believed to be capable of destroying Iran’s Fordow nuclear site.

Fox News host Sean Hannity said that six GBU-57s were used to strike Fordow. The nuclear facilities in Natanz and Esfahan were targeted with 30 submarine-launched Tomahawk missiles.

Shortly after announcing the attack, Trump posted an image from the “Open Source Intel” X account that claimed Fordow is gone. The owner of the account says he is based in Israel.

Following the attack, the Pentagon began warning US troops in the region that the stikes likely put them in danger of Iranian retaliatory attacks. Ken Klippenstein reports obtaining a briefing that said strike on Iran “will likely result in counterstrikes on US bases and facilities” in the Middle East, and “likely activate Iran and other foreign terrorist organizations cells abroad including the US to conduct strikes against US persons and facilities.”

In a post on Truth Social, Trump threatened that any Iranian response “WILL BE MET WITH FORCE FAR GREATER THAN WHAT WAS WITNESSED TONIGHT.”

The American strike follows Israeli requests that the US enter the war it started last week with Iran. Over the past week, Trump appeared convinced that Iran was weeks away from building a nuclear weapon, an intelligence assessment that originated with Israel’s intelligence agency, Mossad. That message was amplified in the White House by CIA Director John Ratcliffe.

June 23, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Iran, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Officials Concede They Don’t Know the Fate of Iran’s Uranium Stockpile.

Both Vice President JD Vance and Rafael Grossi, the head of the
International Atomic Energy Agency, acknowledged questions about the
whereabouts of Iran’s stockpile of near-bomb-grade nuclear material.

New York Times 22nd June 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/22/us/politics/iran-uranium-stockpile-whereabouts.html

June 23, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Iran, Uranium, USA | Leave a comment