Israel furious at Trump over Turkey, Syria to invade Lebanon – w/ Col. Macgregor
Mario Nawfal | June 26, 2026
IRGC says it struck US military positions, warns of broader response
Al Mayadeen | June 27, 2026
Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guard Corps (IRGC) Navy said it targeted US military sites across the region in response to American aggression against Iran’s coastline, warning that any further attacks would prompt a significantly broader retaliation.
In a statement, the IRGC said the strikes came after the United States allegedly carried out air assuaults against Iran’s coastal areas under the pretext of responding to incidents involving navigation in the Strait of Hormuz.
IRGC cites Strait of Hormuz and ceasefire commitments
The IRGC stressed that Washington violated its commitments under the Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding, arguing that Article 5 requires coordination with Iran on maritime monitoring and navigation through the Strait of Hormuz.
The statement also linked the latest developments to continued Israeli violations of the ceasefire in southern Lebanon.
Warning of wider retaliation
The IRGC said navy had delivered an “appropriate response” by targeting US military sites and warned that any repeat of American attacks would be met with a much broader military response.
The force stressed that it remains prepared to respond to future actions targeting Iranian territory or interests.
Earlier, US Central Command (CENTCOM) reported that it launched attacks on Iranian military targets after accusing Tehran of attacking a commercial vessel transiting the Strait of Hormuz, while Iranian media reported explosions near the southern port city of Sirik following warning fire directed at vessels in the strategic waterway.
Russia stops record number of Ukrainian drones overnight – MOD
RT | June 26, 2026
Russian air defenses stopped 660 Ukrainian kamikaze drones overnight, the military said on Friday. The figure was the largest ever reported for the metric, reflecting an escalation of Western-funded strikes inside Russia.
The Russian Defense Ministry normally reports the total number of drone interceptions conducted between 10 PM and 7 AM Moscow time every day. The previous record was 556 in mid-May, while earlier this month the Russian military downed 555 Ukrainian aircraft overnight. Other standout figures since 2025 were in the 300s.
Kiev is ramping up long-range strikes against energy infrastructure as Ukrainian frontline troops suffer setbacks caused by manpower shortages and Russian weapons superiority. Ukrainian officials claim the economic damage will force Moscow to agree to a ceasefire along the current front line, and have threatened to withdraw the offer unless it is accepted soon.
Both sides are developing more affordable ways to intercept long-range drones, such as cheap interceptor aircraft, and are trying to protect their weapons from countermeasures. Ukrainian operations are supported by Western funding, intelligence gathering, and an industrial base that supplies drone components.
Russia maintains that the pressure campaign will not make it abandon its key security goals in the conflict. However, officials have suggested that Ukrainian military logistics in NATO states could be targeted in some way in response to the escalation of the drone war.
Denmark admits ‘no evidence’ for Russian drone hysteria
RT | June 26, 2026
Danish police say they have found no evidence that flying objects which shut down Copenhagen Airport last year were drones, concluding a nine-month investigation into an incident initially treated as an alleged Russian attack.
Danish airports repeatedly suspended flights in September 2025 after reports of suspected drones near the airfields. Copenhagen Airport was forced to halt operations for several hours after objects were reported flying near the runway, disrupting commercial air traffic and triggering a major police investigation.
At the time, Danish authorities claimed Russia may have been behind the incidents, despite presenting no evidence. In May, Russian Ambassador to Denmark Vladimir Barbin said Copenhagen had failed to produce any proof that drones had entered Danish airspace during the alleged incursions.
Police said on Thursday they could neither prove nor disprove that drones had been operating in the vicinity of Copenhagen Airport. “We cannot demonstrate that there was drone activity in and around the airport,” Chief Police Soren Thomassen told reporters. No suspects were identified and the investigation has been closed, he said.
According to Thomassen, there was unexplained activity in the airspace that evening, but none of the evidence gathered over nine months conclusively showed the objects were drones.
Police said they had reviewed witness statements, photographs, videos, CCTV footage, radar data, and extensive records of air and maritime traffic. Despite the exhaustive inquiry, investigators were unable to establish what the objects were.
One radar detected an object traveling at around 100 kph over the Oresund Strait. However, Dutch manufacturer Robin Radar later told investigators that the bird radar installed at Copenhagen Airport was not designed to detect drones.
Danish officials claimed the alleged drone flights were carried out by a “skilled operator.” Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen later escalated the rhetoric, calling the incident a “hybrid attack on critical Danish infrastructure.”
The case had begun to unravel long before Thursday’s announcement. Within hours of the airport shutdown, open-source investigators concluded that a widely circulated video appeared to show a training aircraft rather than a drone, according to Dronewatch portal. An internal memo later reportedly revealed that air traffic controllers had not observed any drones during the incident, while police acknowledged in March that the credibility of a key witness had come under scrutiny.
Earlier this week, investigators also said the first completed police probes into other alleged drone sightings reported across Denmark in the autumn of 2025 had likewise found no evidence of hostile or unauthorized drone activity.
Washington agreement ‘will not pass’: MP Fadlallah
Al Mayadeen | June 26, 2026
The current Lebanese government lacks both constitutional and consensual legitimacy and is in no position to impose its will on the country, a senior Hezbollah parliamentarian said on Thursday, rejecting the framework agreement signed in Washington and dismissed its enforceability on the ground.
In a phone interview with Al Mayadeen following the signing of a framework agreement between Lebanese authorities and “Israel”, Fadlallah called on the Lebanese authorities to “withdraw from the direct negotiation path” and to rescind “all decisions taken against the Lebanese people” in that context.
He dismissed as “baseless” reports suggesting that Lebanon’s position had been formulated in meetings between himself, Major General Hassan Choucair, and Brigadier General André Rahal. He added that what had been circulated “contradicted what was communicated to relevant officials in the Lebanese state” regarding Hezbollah’s rejection of direct talks.
‘Do not rush to deliver good news to your people’: Fadlallah to Netanyahu
Fadlallah addressed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu directly, telling him: “Do not rush to deliver good news to your people.”
He stated that Netanyahu was effectively “negotiating with himself,” describing the current Lebanese government as “constitutionally and consensually illegitimate” and “incapable of imposing dictates.”
“This administration will not be able to enforce the agreement signed in Washington unless it resorts, with US support, to a civil war,” Fadlallah said.
He characterized the Washington deal as “an attempt to derail the Islamabad track” and insisted that “without the resistance, nothing will pass,” vowing that Hezbollah “will not allow the authorities to destroy Lebanon” nor “surrender the country’s fate” to them.
“The important factor is the battlefield, and we own the battlefield; we are the people of the land,” he said.
Iran will not sign any agreement before full Israeli withdrawal
On Iran, Fadlallah stated that Tehran’s position “is clear” and that it “will not sign any agreement before an Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon,” asserting the Lebanese government has given a “gift” to “Israel” that “will have no effect on the ground.”
The lawmaker warned that Hezbollah would “confront any government measure” and would “cling more” to its resistance and its weapons. He affirmed that the group’s opposition is “serious” and would not allow the authorities to “implement their commitments on the ground.”
Addressing Hezbollah’s continued participation in the cabinet, Fadlallah said: “The presence of our ministers in the government has its own calculations, and our presence in it does not mean we approve of its decisions.”
He argued that direct talks with “Israel” violate Article 52 of the constitution, adding: “No individual has the right to cancel the state of hostility toward Israel.”
Fadlallah also stressed that Hezbollah seeks no confrontation with the national army, saying: “We do not want any clash with our national army, which is carrying out its duties to the fullest, and the army will remain, the resistance will remain, and the people will remain.”
He concluded with a direct message to Netanyahu: “You have reached an agreement with one who possesses nothing. The state of hostility toward Israel will remain, and whoever shakes hands with the enemy is complicit in its crimes.”
Iran mocks US for ‘solving’ domestic hunger problem, lecturing others on issue
Press TV – June 26, 2026
Iran has mocked the United States for “solving” its domestic hunger problem by simply stopping reports while lecturing other countries on the issue.
Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei made the remarks in an X post on Friday after US President Donald Trump claimed that Iran has “a hunger problem” and his deputy JD Vance alleged that the country’s unfrozen assets could help “feed” its people.
Baghaei cited a report by the World Hunger Education Service that found more than 47 million people in the United States, including 1 in 5 children, cannot consistently access or afford enough nutritious food to live healthy lives.
He further referred to another report by the NGO Feeding America that said 47 million Americans struggle daily with hunger.
“The ‘solution’ from US authorities? In September 2024, the USDA (US Department of Agriculture) quietly terminated its 30-year-old annual report on household food insecurity — effectively ending the official tracking and acknowledgment of hunger in America,” the spokesman said.
“So, after ‘solving’ domestic hunger by simply stopping the reports, Washington now feels qualified to lecture the world about hunger elsewhere.”
Baghaei added, “Charity begins at home — and it is desperately needed there.”
The latest Household Food Security report released by the US Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service for 2024 revealed that 47.9 million people lived in food-insecure households last year.
One in seven households (13.7 percent) in America experienced food insecurity, or lack of access to an affordable, nutritious diet, in 2024, according to the report. About 14.1 million American children lived in households that experienced food insecurity in 2024, a slight increase from the 13.8 million children reported in 2023.
The findings highlighted a deepening crisis in the US amid cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which enables low-income households to afford more healthy foods and boosts families’ food purchases.
Because the USDA’s 2025 survey data which would have been released in 2026 was canceled, no official government data on hunger for 2026 is available.
However, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York has stepped in to fill the gap. In a report released in May 2026, the New York Fed presented new findings on food insecurity based on its Survey of Consumer Expectations.
The New York Fed survey found a “remarkable increase in food insecurity,” particularly among lower-income, lower-educated households, and households with young children.
The survey noted that between late 2025 and early 2026, the share of households reporting they had to skip meals or had insufficient food rose.
For households earning under $50,000 a year, the rate of those reporting not having enough food or kids missing meals reached 19.7% in early 2026, up from 16% in late 2025.
Nationwide, the share of households with limited or uncertain access to adequate food more than doubled from 4% in June 2020 to 10% in early 2026.
Germany, Israel hold joint naval drill off Haifa amid Gaza genocide
Press TV – June 25, 2026
Germany and the Israeli regime have conducted a joint naval exercise off the coast of Haifa, further deepening their partnership even as the Zionist entity continues its genocidal war against the Palestinian people in Gaza.
According to the Israeli military, a German navy vessel docked at Haifa port ahead of the drill, which the regime described as “a further step towards strengthening professional and operational relations between the two navies.”
German commanders Volker Kubsch and Rico Geisler also held meetings with Rear Admiral Erez Ben Zion, commander of the Haifa Naval Base.
The exercise comes despite mounting international outrage over Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza, where more than 73,000 Palestinians, the majority of them women and children, have been killed since October 2023 in what legal experts and human rights organizations describe as genocide.
Israel launched a genocidal war on Gaza after Palestinian resistance fighters waged the surprise Operation Al-Aqsa Storm against the Zionist entity in response to the regime’s decades-long campaign of bloodletting and devastation against Palestinians.
Just two days ago, a United Nations commission of inquiry strongly condemned Israel for deliberately targeting and killing Palestinian children, concluding that its actions constitute genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity in Gaza, as well as war crimes in the occupied West Bank.
Germany has long been one of the main suppliers of advanced weaponry to the Israeli regime, most notably through its controversial submarine program. These German-built submarines could potentially be equipped to carry nuclear weapons, significantly enhancing the Zionist entity’s offensive capabilities in the region.
The joint drill reflects Berlin’s complicity in Israel’s crimes against the Palestinian people. Despite the horrific images of destruction in Gaza and repeated calls from across the world to halt arms transfers, the German government continues to arm the occupying regime, prioritizing its alliance with Tel Aviv over international law and basic human rights.
This latest military collaboration between Germany and the Israeli regime underscores the deep-rooted Western support for Israel’s genocidal policies.
It also highlights the hypocrisy of Western powers that preach human rights while actively enabling the genocide of innocent Palestinians.
Trump’s war on Iran becomes ‘most unpopular conflict’ in US history
The Cradle | June 26, 2026
An analysis of 153 public opinion surveys across seven major wars has concluded that the US-Israeli war against Iran is the most unpopular conflict in US history, surpassing the Vietnam War’s previous record, Responsible Statecraft (RS) reported on 26 June.
The report indicates that public support for the conflict has plummeted to a net negative 32 percent, dropping below the previous historical low of negative 31 percent recorded during the Vietnam War.
This finding directly contradicts testimony by US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who claimed during an April Senate hearing that the conflict maintained the support of the US public.
The analysis highlights three unprecedented ways that the war on Iran broke historical records in terms of unpopularity.
The first is that the war began with a net negative support from the very start, with the war launching with negative 13 percent public support.
The second is that the war has generated historic disapproval, currently holding the lowest level of public support of any major war in US history.
Finally, the war was defined by constant opposition throughout, making it the first where opponents outnumbered supporters for the entire duration of the fighting.

Researchers noted a significant “support gap” in the data, which utilized historical Gallup polls and recent Economist/YouGov surveys.
While 67 percent of Republicans polled expressed general support for the war, 54 percent of that same group called for a deal to end the war as quickly as possible.
Among the general US public, net support for prolonging the war rather than ending it immediately stood at negative 52 percent.
A recent Strength In Numbers/Verasight poll published on 24 June revealed that 59 percent of US adults back the agreement to end the war on Iran, while only 24 percent opposed it.
Respondents of the survey showed a deep skepticism about the outcomes of the war, with only 18 percent saying that the US has achieved its stated goals.
A Reuters/Ipsos poll released on 23 June revealed that only 24 percent of US citizens believed the war with Iran was worth its costs, while 50 percent said the war was not worth it.
This widespread disapproval has driven US President Trump’s approval rating to around 34 percent, marking an all-time low for his second term.
The Middle East is wringing its hands of Washington. Finally
By Martin Jay | Strategic Culture Foundation | June 25, 2026
The unintended consequences of Trump’s Iran Deal are too many to list. Chief among them is that Trump’s own buffoonery has injected cash and power into the regime in Iran that it could only have previously dreamt of. But the “unconditional surrender” deal has also probably destroyed the petrodollar – leading, most likely, to a faster demise of the US as what was once called a “superpower”, or even sometimes the superpower. Trump’s idiotic outburst of “unconditional surrender” is, of course, the greatest irony of the entire fiasco, given that it is Trump who is on his knees and has given Iran so much simply to open the Straits of Hormuz, simply to bring down the global price of oil.
Yet what happens now in the region, both to Israel and the GCC countries? For Israel, many leading commentators like Alistair Crooke claim that its people are in a state of shock and that it will take some time before they wake up after the party the night before and realise that things got a little out of hand and that a certain process of cleaning up and repair needs to take place. Crooke and others even go further and believe that Israel can no longer continue to indulge itself in the delusional notion of ’Greater Israel’ – i.e. having regional ambitions of hegemony beyond its borders – and needs to recalibrate its goals, starting with the admission that it is not winning its war with Hezbollah in Lebanon. There is a general consensus among analysts that most Israelis are in a state of shock about how the war in Iran was lost, how America itself didn’t and couldn’t deliver on its military promises, and how even the IDF is no match for Hezbollah. This will take some time for them to sink in – that Israel has simply overstretched itself both politically and militarily, and that the reality is that it is in a deep hole and perhaps a solution might be to stop digging.
But a period of sombreness and solace is hardly what Netanyahu has in mind, and it is likely now that he will become a silent enemy of Trump, who needs him to stop fighting in Lebanon. This relationship between Washington and Israel will also come under strain and enter a new period of saliency, which might briefly mean Congress voting to withhold Israel’s funding, to remind Bibi and his coalition partners who really is the superpower (to coin Bill Clinton’s comment once in the White House when Bibi attended a press conference).
What is perhaps even more worrying is the region and how America now retreats. It is inconceivable that US forces will return to the dozen or so military bases in the Gulf, as it is unthinkable that those elites will keep the cash flowing into Wall Street. Indeed, a bundle of $3 trillion USD which Saudi Arabia and the UAE had earmarked for the US AI sector will now not make it, as those countries no longer have the cash flow in their economies, with hotels in Dubai only catering to about 10 percent capacity. Trump’s war literally sent missiles to these new economies, and the Donald cannot complain now that this cash will not make it to the US.
Yet remarkably, Trump is still dreaming. He is still delusional about who he is and what America currently is, and seems to be stuck with his own ideas which feel like they’re from the 1970s rather than 2026. What we are witnessing in the Middle East is the beginning of the end. The loss of the petrodollar and the GCC countries with their fast cash feels like the first domino falling for the old empire, while Trump obsesses with tiny minutiae details which take up time posting on social media late at night. In the last days of the Roman Empire, its emperor was said to have been concerned about “Rome” – but this was not a reference to a crumbling civilisation, but to his pet chicken of the same name. When we see the puerile, juvenile row between the diminutive Georgia Meloni and Trump, there is a sense of déjà vu with Rome. A row on X which Meloni keeps alive for days might be seen as incongruous to the bigger picture of the US and EU falling into the abyss, with the EU being such a dog’s breakfast that even bankrupt Britain wouldn’t even want to re-join it now, despite most Brits in polls conceding Brexit was a failure.
The recent comments by the Saudi foreign minister might signal that KSA and the UAE are looking for a completely different defence set-up which might actually bypass the US altogether. Other countries like Turkey, Pakistan and Egypt are stepping forward and taking on the challenge by themselves, while leading the anti-Israel doctrine. It is rumoured that Bibi complained to Trump recently about Turkey’s tough talking, but Trump told him to forget about even thinking about hitting the NATO country, as it is simply out of Israel’s league – or words to that effect. But Turkey is the new enemy of Israel. That ball has been rolling for some time.
The Starmer legacy the establishment media won’t tell you: Celebrity sex crimes, imprisoning Assange and torture terror
Before Downing Street, Starmer built his reputation at the CPS – where some of Britain’s ugliest scandals were buried, delayed, or erased

RT | June 26, 2026
As Keir Starmer prepares to leave the UK’s highest office after less than two years, the media has lined up to explain why he failed to deliver on the enormous hype he received as opposition leader, and during his initial months in office. A repeated trope has been that Starmer was a “decent man,” but simply not cut out for mainstream politics. However, his record of concealing the UK establishment’s repulsive crimes – be that serial child sex abuse or spy agency torture – shows him to be anything but decent.
What was the reality of Starmer’s CPS role?
Starmer’s spell as director of public prosecutions for the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) has been fundamental to his mythology since before he became Labour leader. It was during this time, according to The Guardian, that “Starmer transformed his reputation from that of a radical lawyer to that of a moderate and cautious administrator.” Missing from this account is any reference to how the CPS under his leadership covered up the crimes of notorious celebrity pedophile Jimmy Savile, while he was still alive.
In February 2022, Boris Johnson got in serious hot water after he accused Starmer in parliament of “prosecuting journalists and failing to prosecute Jimmy Savile,” as CPS chief. Condemnation from the media and UK politicians was universal. Johnson’s personal policy chief, who’d worked for him for 14 years, resigned in protest over the then-Prime Minister’s supposedly libelous statements. Such was the backlash, as pressure grew so severe, that Johnson retracted his comments in a matter of three days.
It was an extraordinarily rare example of the UK establishment moving in unanimous lockstep, to defend a single mainstream politician accused of wrongdoing. The episode was made all the more shocking by Johnson’s statement being literally true. Starmer was CPS chief when the Service made the indefensible decision to not prosecute Savile, and many aspects of that strangely downplayed and ignored scandal implicate the failed prime minister personally.
What did an inquiry say about CPS treatment of Jimmy Savile?
An internal CPS inquiry into the Savile affair was commissioned by Starmer in 2012, after it was revealed in the wake of Savile’s death that police had failed to press charges against him despite numerous witnesses credibly accusing the UK’s “national treasure” of sexually abusing and raping them when they were young girls. The inquiry found a CPS “reviewing lawyer” told investigating officers early on he “would not be inclined to prosecute these cases because they were ‘relatively minor’.”
The CPS lawyer also didn’t ask the police basic questions about the case. The inquiry report found his attitude troubling. “I would hope that any prosecutor would regard a sexual assault as being in and of itself serious,” the author stated. They found instead that “these particular assaults were far from trivial,” and “represented a course of conduct against vulnerable women and girls” by Savile, over many years. Consequently, the investigator had “reservations about the way in which the prosecutor reached his decision.”
Instead of refusing to pursue the case, the CPS had a duty “to ‘build’ a prosecution,” which its lawyers failed to fulfil. The allegations against Savile were plainly “serious and credible.” The inquiry found that “had police and prosecutors taken a different approach, a prosecution might have been possible.” These conclusions are all the more damning when you consider that all CPS files held on Savile were shredded in October 2010.
Despite these grave criticisms, the investigator concluded, “I have seen nothing to suggest that the decisions not to prosecute were consciously influenced by any improper motive on the part of either police or prosecutors.” Which might be true, if only because all CPS files on Savile were destroyed. The report was therefore “dependent on material provided by the police to show what documents were seen by the reviewing lawyer and the advice which was given.”
The Service allegedly had “no record at all” of the case, which the inquiry claimed was due to CPS records on Savile being “automatically deleted” after a decision to take no action was made, in line with internal policies. However, the Service’s publicly accessible guidelines on “disposal” of evidence clearly state documents on cases where “no proceedings have taken place or where the case was discontinued before trial” must be kept for five years.
What role did Starmer play in Julian Assange’s persecution?
The Savile deletions were not the only example of suspiciously poor CPS recordkeeping under Starmer’s watch. In 2017, it was revealed the Service deleted sensitive email exchanges about Julian Assange with Swedish prosecutors three years earlier – potentially illegally, as a criminal case was ongoing. The communications occurred from 2010 until the WikiLeaks founder sought refuge in Ecuador’s London embassy in June 2012, where he remained for almost seven years, under constant threat of CIA assassination. In 2019 British police forcibly removed him and sent him to Belmarsh, a high-security prison, where we was kept in almost total solitary confinement for five years.
The emails were deleted by a CPS lawyer who had personally advised Swedish police not to visit London and interview Assange as he had requested, on the grounds that he feared extradition to the US from Sweden. “In my view it would not be prudent for the Swedish authorities to try to interview the defendant in the UK,” they wrote in January 2011. This sentence was redacted in emails released under Freedom of Information by the CPS, but not in files provided by Swedish authorities.
Sweden dropped its investigation into Assange in May 2017. Only later was it revealed that the case could have been closed much earlier, were it not for direct CPS intervention. Beyond advising Swedish police not to interview Assange in London, a Service lawyer repeatedly sought to dissuade them from dropping their investigation outright. In August 2012, they wrote to their Swedish counterparts, “Don’t you dare get cold feet!!!”
In October 2013, Sweden’s director of public prosecutions, Marianne Ny wrote to the CPS that due to the passage of time, and lack of evidence against Assange, “we have found us to be obliged to lift the detention order… and to withdraw the European arrest warrant.” Three days later, Ny emailed a clearly affronted CPS, apologizing over the “[bad] surprise” of moving to drop charges against Assange. “I hope I didn’t ruin your weekend,” she added.
“All we can do is wait and see and perhaps be eternally grateful neither of us have to share a room in the embassy with him over Christmas!” the CPS lawyer responded.
Starmer’s personal role in all this has never been adequately clarified, but he visited Washington, DC in 2011, 2012 and 2013 while he was in effective charge of the Assange case, meeting with senior US officials. True to form, all records of Starmer’s trips were quickly destroyed, contrary to CPS protocol.
How did Starmer cover for MI5/MI6 torture?
After 9/11, the CIA launched a global torture program, identifying terror suspects, abducting them and sending them to black sites all over Europe and the Middle East, before torturing bogus confessions out of them to justify the War on Terror. MI5 and MI6 were not only centrally involved in the program; the two agencies ran an autonomous joint operation using “partner” agencies in the Global South to do the torturing itself.
When these activities became public, with legal actions mounting against the state by victims of the torture program and their families, UK police launched an investigation. Vast quantities of incriminating evidence were collected. However, Starmer as CPS chief consistently vetoed bringing offenders, including senior spy agency directors, to trial despite overwhelming cases against them. First, in 2010 he ruled there was “insufficient evidence” to prosecute an MI5 officer who participated in the torture in Pakistan of a UK citizen in 2002.
Police investigations into MI5 and MI6 for torture continued. However, in January 2012 Starmer again decided not to prosecute anyone from these agencies for their role in their unlawful treatment. The next April, Starmer attended the boozy going away party of MI5 chief Jonathan Evans, the first CPS official to ever attend such an event. Evans was a counter-terror veteran who’d served as MI5 director general since 2007, and would’ve been criminally liable if the CPS had decided to prosecute MI5.
Police investigations into the torture scandal weren’t finished though. Documents seized from Libyan security service offices, abandoned in the wake of Muammar Gaddafi’s October 2011 fall, were a treasure trove. This included faxes sent in March 2004 by then-MI6 counter-terror chief Mark Allen to Libyan spies, regarding a terror suspect kidnapped along with his wife in an MI6 operation. The suspect spent six years being tortured in Libyan prisons at the agency’s direction, with MI6 providing his interrogators questions to ask.
Overall, 28,000 pages of evidence on Allen’s involvement in torture were collected by police. In 2014 however, Starmer yet again decided this was “insufficient evidence” to prosecute the MI6 counter-terror chief, and the case was dropped. In return for a lifetime of serving the establishment, and assisting directly in the commission of serious criminality – if only by signing off on coverups and politicized prosecutions of dissidents – Starmer was rewarded with an empty seat in the UK’s highest office, for only two years.
13-18 DAYS: The PRACTICAL DIESEL BUFFER… Does It Preclude Bombing Iran?

By Larry C. Johnson | SONAR21 | June 26, 2026
I am indebted to my new friend who is an energy expert ,and currently working in the Persian Gulf, for explaining why the US is facing a very serious risk of a domestic energy crisis. If ignorance is bliss then I’ve spent my last 71 years happily believing that the conversion of oil to fuel for cars, trucks and planes was a simple process. Boy, was I wrong. The United States is facing a potential crisis surrounding the production of diesel and aviation fuel. According to this person, who has 35 years experience in the oil industry:
The U.S. does not have a month of freely deliverable diesel in a stress event. The headline EIA number shows 106.1 million barrels of total distillate fuel oil stocks and 3.631 million b/d of four-week average distillate product supplied, implying 29.2 days on paper. But that national inventory includes barrels in pipelines, refineries, terminals, regional storage, and operational positions that cannot all be allocated immediately to critical distribution hubs.
Operational estimate: applying a 45%-60% practical deliverability factor to total distillate stocks leaves roughly 48-64 million barrels of usable, allocable diesel-equivalent supply. At 3.631 million b/d, that is approximately 13.1-17.5 days, rounded to 13-18 days.
So let me explain how he reached this conclusion. Think of the diesel buffer as the gap between when supply stops flowing and when the economy starts breaking. Thirteen days is not a comfortable cushion — it’s essentially no cushion at all, because the economy runs on diesel in ways that cannot be deferred.
Diesel is not a lifestyle fuel. It moves every truck on every highway, powers every locomotive, runs every tractor during planting and harvest, and drives every piece of heavy construction equipment. When a family decides gas prices are too high, they drive less. When a freight company decides diesel is too expensive or too scarce, it cannot defer the shipment — the grocery store shelves just go empty. Diesel demand is largely inelastic. The economy cannot negotiate with it the way it can with gasoline.
Let’s use the worst case: 13 days. Thirteen days means that if anything disrupts the supply chain — a refinery outage, a pipeline failure, a crude supply disruption — the effects reach the real economy within two weeks. There is no meaningful time to arrange alternatives. A tanker from a replacement crude source takes longer than 13 days to arrive. A refinery turnaround takes longer than 13 days to complete. The buffer is shorter than the lead time for almost every possible remedy.
The geography makes it worse. The 13-day figure is a national average, which means some regions have more and some have less. The Southeast is particularly exposed, being heavily dependent on the Colonial Pipeline, which is itself a single point of failure that demonstrated its criticality when it was shut down for six days in 2021. Six days is nearly half the total national buffer.
What about aviation fuel? Here is where the two problems collide mechanically, and why it creates a genuine bind rather than just a theoretical tradeoff.
Diesel and jet fuel are not different products from different parts of the refinery. They are competing claims on the same physical fraction of crude oil — the middle distillate cut that comes off the atmospheric distillation column in the same boiling range. Every refinery scheduling decision is, at its core, a daily argument about how to divide that fraction between the two products.
With a 13-day diesel buffer, the refinery cannot let diesel output fall. The economic and political consequences of a diesel shortage materialize too quickly and too severely. Diesel production becomes, in practical terms, the floor that cannot be breached.
Now layer in a wartime demand for military jet fuel. JP-8 is pulled from the same middle distillate fraction. The military’s operational requirements are also non-negotiable — aircraft do not fly on goodwill. So you now have two inelastic demands competing for one fixed supply of middle distillate from each barrel of crude processed.
The refinery’s response to this bind is constrained in every direction:
It cannot simply run more crude. Crude supply itself may be disrupted — this is precisely the scenario the Persian Gulf blockade creates. And even if crude is available, refinery throughput is limited by physical capacity. You cannot run 110% of nameplate capacity.
It cannot shift to lighter crude to get more barrels. Light crude produces proportionally more gasoline and less middle distillate. Running lighter crude when you need diesel and jet fuel makes the allocation problem worse, not better, because you are shrinking the pool of middle distillate that both are fighting over.
It cannot get more middle distillate out of sour crude than the chemistry allows. A barrel of sour crude from the Persian Gulf typically yields around 20–25% middle distillates by volume. That fraction is fixed by the molecular composition of the oil. You can optimize within a range, but you cannot double the yield through operational choices.
Hydrogen becomes a choke point. Making JP-8 from sour crude to military specification requires substantial hydrogen — for sulfur removal, for aromatic ring saturation to meet smoke point requirements, and for freeze point management. Making ULSD from the same sour crude also requires substantial hydrogen — even more, to reach the ≤15 ppm sulfur specification. A refinery’s hydrogen generation capacity is finite. Every cubic foot of hydrogen diverted to jet fuel processing is a cubic foot unavailable for diesel desulfurization. At the margin, maximizing JP-8 production makes the diesel quality problem worse, not just the diesel volume problem.
The certification delay adds time pressure. Switching refinery configuration between maximizing diesel and maximizing jet fuel is not instant. It takes days to a week to restabilize the unit operations and certify the product meets specification. In a 13-day buffer environment, a week of transition time is not a casual cost — it represents a material fraction of the entire safety margin consumed by the act of reconfiguring production.
Under normal peacetime conditions, refineries optimise their middle distillate split based on market prices — jet fuel commands a premium, so they lean toward jet. The diesel buffer stays comfortable and the system works.
The Iran war changes all of that simultaneously in three directions at once:
First, the diesel buffer starts shrinking. Persian Gulf sour crude — even though only 8% of US imports — supplied roughly 17% of the medium-sour grades that US complex refiners prefer for middle distillate production. That quality gap is not easily filled by Canadian heavy or domestic light sweet crude without refinery adjustment. Diesel output drops or becomes more expensive per barrel just as the buffer needs defending.
Second, military JP-8 demand spikes. A naval campaign in the Persian Gulf, sustained air operations, and a mobilised logistics tail consume enormous quantities of aviation fuel. The military doesn’t queue behind civilian demand — it has priority. So the refinery is simultaneously being squeezed from both ends of the middle distillate barrel: the military is claiming more jet fuel from the top, and the diesel buffer is bleeding out from the bottom.
Third, the refinery cannot easily solve this by running harder. As explained earlier, maximising JP-8 from sour crude requires pulling a lighter, narrower distillate cut. This is precisely the action that reduces diesel yield — the heavier tail of the middle distillate that would have become diesel is either lost to the vacuum unit or downcycled to fuel oil. The more aggressively refineries respond to military jet fuel demand, the faster the diesel buffer erodes.
This creates a three-way constraint with no clean solution:
- Protect the diesel buffer → limit JP-8 output → constrain military operations
- Maximise JP-8 for military → draw down diesel buffer → trigger civilian supply cascade before the war ends
- Try to do both → run refineries at maximum utilisation → lose the ability to flex for any further shock, with no margin for equipment failures, maintenance, or a second disruption
The 13-day buffer is what makes this bind acute rather than manageable. With sixty days of diesel inventory, a refinery operator can tolerate shifting the middle distillate split toward jet fuel for several weeks without civilian consequences. With thirteen days, the same shift starts a visible countdown almost immediately. Now do you understand why Donald Trump signed the MoU with Iran?
If the United States decides to renew its bombing campaign of Iran, that would likely trigger the stress event outlined above. Based on that fact I believe that Donald Trump, notwithstanding his threats, will not run the risk of crashing the US economy by bombing Iran again.
