Aletho News

ΑΛΗΘΩΣ

The Changing Face of Regime Change

By Daniel McAdams | Ron Paul Institute | January 19, 2026

The most disturbing lesson from the 2014 Maidan Revolution in Ukraine that has been well-learned by the various intelligence agencies in this business is that the application of extreme violence – especially aimed at law enforcement, other state authorities, and civilians – provides an effective template upon which to further the regime change narrative. Everything can be blamed on “the regime” and thus serve the purpose of the operation.

We have seen this recently in Iran.

When I was on the ground observing the early “color revolutions” in the 1990s in Eastern Europe it was simply about getting warm bodies in the street to wave the correct flags and mouth the NED-approved slogans and to demand a new election, the most recent one having been “stolen.”

Questioning legitimacy of elections was enough at that early stage. Even Western polls suggesting the election result matched the will of the people (as in the 2006 Belarus presidential election and subsequent “Denim Revolution” I monitored on the ground) did not dissuade the protesters. But that was all fun and games compared to what came next.

Now it is about bodies and blood and particularly the most gruesome injuries. This is difficult for any legitimate state authority to defend against, as any application of counter-force only feeds the narrative of a violent regime determined to quell “legitimate” desire for political pluralism.

For a successful regime change in the current conditions there must be maximum bloodshed. And it does not matter whose blood is shed, it can all be blamed on “the regime.” The bots and fake social media accounts under control of intelligence agencies can take care of that part. Amplify atrocities, regardless whence they came.

Heavier bloodshed also feeds the ignorance and voyeurism of the intended Western and (especially) US audiences. “Thar be dragons,” is the rallying cry. Everything beyond our borders is unsophisticated and bestial, while at the same time longing to be exactly as we are.

We saw this clearly in the well-orchestrated attacks against state law enforcement authorities in Ukraine/Maidan in 2014. What would normally have sufficed to return society to order was shown to be woefully inadequate in the face of extremely violent agents on the ground including snipers on the rooftops and “wet works” specialists willing to murder law enforcement with their bare hands. The more violence the better. The more gruesome the better.

Lenin understood it well: “The worse the better.” You must recruit the absolute lowest and most violent dregs of society to carry out the operation. But then that has been the CIA Operations Directorate modus operandi since its founding. Which is why President Truman was desperate to strangle his own baby in the cradle.

Through some serendipity, the extreme violence of the CIA/MI6/Mossad attempted regime change operation we just witnessed in Iran was defeated by technology (likely imported from Iran’s allies) targeting the plan at its weakest point: communications and coordination. Extreme acts of violence against state authorities and average citizens have no value unless coordinated for propaganda purposes.

No less than President Trump himself reduced the entire operation to body counts. So the regime-changers had the incentive to produce more bodies and their recruits on the ground were only too happy to comply.

But something happened: the shutdown of Elon Musk’s ill-advised gift of Starlink to the violent Israel-sponsored extremists was defeated somehow and you had a gang of violent killers with no directions from Langley or Tel Aviv on who to kill next.

And it turns out that no matter what you think about that country six thousand miles away, it is not as easy as the neocons claim to overthrow the government and usher in at the point of a gun “democracy” DC style. With rainbow parades and promises of an atheistic, multi-culti paradise a la – ironically – the ICE resisters in Minnesota or Seattle.

Overseas, the neocon Right becomes the most ideologically insane version of the Minnesota Left: “Iran needs to celebrate multi-culturalism, atheism, and pan-sexuality!”

OK.

In the world of US Middle East regime change hegemony there is no Right or Left. It’s all been contracted out to Tel Aviv, as our tech world has been contracted out to H1B visas. Connect the dots and realize, as the Communists so well realized, what are the correlation of forces for and against you.

Husbanding the entirety of the US global military empire to overthrow the main impediment of Israel’s “Greater Israel” goal to conquer the Middle East is in no way in accord to our own interests or future well-being. On the contrary.

The US embrace of extreme violence – the “Israel model” – overseas can only harm our actual national interest. Embracing the latest iteration of the “regime change” template not only betrays our supposed moral high-ground, it hastens the correlation of forces against dollar hegemony and against the survival of America’s own oligarch class.

Oppose this or get used to being poor, immoral, and dead.

Executive Director of the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity and co-Producer/co-Host, Ron Paul Liberty Report. Daniel served as the foreign affairs, civil liberties, and defense/intel policy advisor to U.S. Congressman Ron Paul, MD (R-Texas) from 2001 until Dr. Paul’s retirement at the end of 2012. From 1993-1999 he worked as a journalist based in Budapest, Hungary, and traveled through the former communist bloc as a human rights monitor and election observer.

January 19, 2026 Posted by | Deception, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

Truth as first casualty: Deconstructing disinformation campaign on Iran riots death toll

By Yousef Ramazani | Press TV | January 19, 2026

Amid the foreign-instigated riots and terrorism that struck Iran in recent weeks, a parallel narrative war also unfolded, centered on the deliberate propagation of wildly inflated and unverifiable casualty figures.

These figures were designed to manufacture global outrage and legitimize calls for American military intervention and yet another aggression against the Islamic Republic.

The discourse surrounding riot-related casualties in the past few weeks has been fundamentally shaped by a coordinated disinformation campaign originating from US-funded organizations operating entirely outside Iran. Central to this campaign was the circulation of sensational death tolls that bore little resemblance to verifiable facts on the ground.

The figure of 12,000 deaths was initially promoted by the New York–based Center for Human Rights in Iran, an organization financially linked to the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a US Congress–funded entity with a well-documented history of interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states.

This claim was presented without transparent methodology, primary data, or independent verification, raising eyebrows both inside and outside the country.

Despite this lack of evidence, the narrative was uncritically amplified by major Western media outlets and online influencers, creating a pervasive – but demonstrably false – impression of mass violence. Iranian officials consistently rejected these claims, presenting forensic evidence of manipulated datasets and instead reporting a death toll in the hundreds, the majority of whom were security personnel and civilians killed by armed rioters with foreign backing.

The subsequent escalation of these figures to even more implausible numbers – such as claims of 52,000 dead – underscores the persistence of a hybrid warfare strategy aimed at demonizing Iran while obscuring or outright excusing the violence committed by its adversaries.

Genesis of a false narrative: Center for Human Rights in Iran and its backers

The primary source of the sensational 12,000-fatality claim was neither an Iranian authority nor a verifiable international body, but the Center for Human Rights in Iran, an organization headquartered in New York. Despite its name, the group operates entirely outside Iran and has no physical presence or investigative capacity within the country.

An examination of its leadership and funding reveals a clear political orientation inconsistent with impartial human rights monitoring. The chair of its board is Minky Worden, an American activist with a documented history of spearheading anti-China advocacy campaigns, including efforts to politicize the Beijing Winter Olympics.

Financially, the organization relies heavily on grants from the National Endowment for Democracy in Washington, D.C. The NED is a privately managed but publicly funded institution that receives annual allocations from the US Congress through the State Department budget.

Historians, observers, and former intelligence officials have long characterized the NED as a transparent successor to activities once conducted covertly by the Central Intelligence Agency, particularly the funding of political opposition groups and media outlets under the banner of “democracy promotion.”

The NED’s record includes extensive involvement in “regime-change” efforts across Eastern Europe, Latin America, and West Asia – regions that have consistently featured in American foreign policy campaigns.

Amplification network: From NED grantees to global headlines

The unfounded casualty figure did not remain confined to a single organization. It was rapidly injected into the global media bloodstream through a tightly networked ecosystem of interconnected groups.

Other NED-funded entities, including the Human Rights Activists News Agency and the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center, echoed and cross-cited the same unsubstantiated statistics.

Operating largely from the US, these organizations function within a closed loop of mutual citation, manufacturing the illusion of multiple independent confirmations.

This echo chamber was then leveraged by major Western media outlets, including BBC Persian, Voice of America, The Washington Post, and ABC News, which incorporated the figures into their reporting.

Typically, these outlets attributed the numbers vaguely to “human rights groups” or “activists,” effectively laundering the information and granting it a veneer of credibility without conducting any independent verification. This failure is particularly striking given the well-documented funding sources and political objectives of the originating organizations.

Crucially, much of this coverage omitted the context that these groups are financially and ideologically aligned with the very governments actively seeking to pressure, isolate, and destabilize the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Iranian rebuttal and exposure of fabricated evidence

Iranian government officials and domestic media mounted a comprehensive, forensic rebuttal to the widespread disinformation campaign. The judiciary’s spokesperson and the head of the Supreme National Security Council categorically denounced the claim of 12,000 deaths as “psychological warfare” and a “complete fabrication.”

They publicly challenged the originators of the figure to provide a single verifiable name, death certificate, or precise locational detail to substantiate their alleged casualty lists, a challenge that was never answered.

Cyber units affiliated with Iranian media conducted technical analyses tracing the viral dissemination of the figures to known bot networks operating from locations in the United States, Israeli-occupied territories, and Albania.

Further investigations revealed that purported “martyr lists” were riddled with fraud: hundreds of duplicate entries, names of individuals who had died decades earlier during the Holy Defense war, and even names copied directly from public cemetery records in other countries.

The case of Saghar Etemadi became emblematic of the deception. Widely declared a “martyr” by external outlets, she was later confirmed by the Iranian judiciary and by her own family to be alive and receiving medical treatment for injuries sustained during a riot.

Iranian reports emphasized that the actual death toll, resulting from terrorist acts carried out by foreign-backed armed rioters, numbered in the hundreds. A significant proportion of the victims were police officers, Basij forces, and civilians deliberately targeted by violent saboteurs.

Escalation to absurdity and the weaponization of atrocity propaganda

The disinformation ecosystem demonstrated its capacity for rapid and unchecked escalation.

From the initial claim of 12,000 deaths, narratives soon proliferated across social media platforms and activist circles alleging 52,000 fatalities and more than 300,000 wounded.

These figures, divorced from any conceivable reality, serve a deliberate psychological and political function. They are designed to induce global emotional shock, overwhelm critical scrutiny, and portray the Iranian state as uniquely and exceptionally undemocratic

This narrative fulfills a dual geopolitical purpose, according to experts. First, it seeks to manufacture consent for foreign intervention, intensified sanctions, or diplomatic isolation by invoking a humanitarian pretext. Second, it functions as a tool of distraction and moral laundering.

By creating a false equivalence, or even attempting to eclipse, the documented casualties inflicted by the Israeli regime in Gaza, the campaign aims to redirect global outrage and obscure the horrendous crimes of Washington’s and Tel Aviv’s allies.

Influencers and online networks aligned with the Israeli regime aggressively promoted the fabricated Iranian casualty figures in an effort to undermine the global Palestine solidarity movement and digitally overwrite the extensive evidence of Israeli war crimes.

Underlying architecture: NED as a US “regime-change” instrument

The role of the National Endowment for Democracy is central to understanding the structural foundations of this disinformation campaign. Leaked documents and historical analyses reveal the NED as a key instrument of US foreign policy, operating as a conduit for government funds to support political movements aligned with American strategic interests abroad.

The organization was established following congressional scrutiny of CIA covert operations. One of its founders, Allen Weinstein, openly acknowledged that “a lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”

The NED’s activities extend far beyond Iran. It has been a principal funder and organizer of so-called “color revolutions” in Eastern Europe and has been formally designated an “undesirable organization” by Russia for interference in domestic affairs. Its involvement in Hong Kong and Xinjiang has prompted sanctions from China.

In the Iranian context, the NED has for decades funded an array of exile media outlets, advocacy groups, and cultural figures, with the explicit aim of cultivating an alternative political leadership.

A leaked 2024 proposal revealed NED plans to funnel State Department resources into an “Iran Freedom Coalition” composed of US neoconservatives and selected exile figures, exposing the direct link between humanitarian narrative construction and overt regime-change ambitions.

A perennial pattern of narrative warfare

The manipulation of casualty figures during the 2025–2026 unrest is not an isolated episode, but part of a recurring tactic in the long-running hybrid war against the Islamic Republic of Iran.

The pattern is consistent and predictable: a US-funded NGO, operating safely from New York or Washington, releases an unverifiable and sensational claim. A network of affiliated organizations and social media assets amplifies it, after which mainstream Western media repackages it as credible reporting.

The objective is never truth, but the construction of a carefully engineered perceptual reality serving strategic interests. This reality is designed to demonize independent states, legitimize coercive policies, and erase or minimize the crimes of allied regimes.

The Iranian experience, from the myth of 12,000 deaths to the even more fantastical claim of 52,000, stands as a stark case study in the weaponization of information in the 21st century.

In this domain, the battlefield is not only the street, but global consciousness itself, and the most powerful weapons are often not missiles, but meticulously crafted falsehoods.

January 19, 2026 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

What a War on Iran Would Really Look Like — Beyond the Regime-Change Fantasy

By Robert Inlakesh | The Palestine Chronicle | January 19, 2026

While the corporate media and social media influencers run non-stop regime change propaganda, replete with unverified statistics, fabricated claims, and the denial of objective reality, it is important to cut through this and ask the more important question: What will a regime change war on Iran look like?

The following analysis must be first prefaced by stating that the unrelenting wave of regime change propaganda currently being disseminated with the implicit intent of manufacturing consent for war is, in essence, no different from the claims and rhetoric used over decades to justify various other wars of aggression.

Last year, Israel attacked Iran in a blatant violation of the United Nations Charter, and was later followed by the United States, which also participated in illegal aggression. Although it should be noted that using the metrics of International Law is at this stage redundant, as it has been rendered null and void by the US-Israeli alliance since October 7, 2023.

In the immediate aftermath of last June’s 12-Day-War, US-based pro-war think-tanks ranging from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD) all the way to the Atlantic Council, all began scheming about what the next round should constitute and its intended outcomes. Meanwhile, on July 7, Axios News cited its sources claiming that Israel was already seeking a greenlight for a new attack and that it believed the US would grant it.

Fast forward to December 28, 2025, when peaceful protests erupted in Iran over government mismanagement of the worsening economic crisis, caused by Western economic sanctions. The very next day, December 29, former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett posted a video talking about a mass anti-government uprising, which had not yet happened. His message was accompanied by countless old videos and AI-generated footage depicting such a rebellion.

As this was happening, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was visiting US President Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago, where, according to several media reports, he was requesting an American attack on Iran and had received everything he had asked for. At the beginning of January 2026, violent elements suddenly emerged, and protests calling for the fall of the government began.

On January 8, 9, and 10, the situation dramatically escalated as Iran shut off the internet across the country. The footage revealed that the largest crowds participating in the riots and protests numbered only in the tens of thousands, yet numerous rioting groups emerged throughout the country.

The Western media and pro-Israeli social media influencers had by this time constructed their own narratives that deemed what was happening a “revolution” of “millions across Iran” and that peaceful protesters were being slaughtered for standing up for their freedom.

Without going into the fine details, it suffices to say that what we see portrayed in the corporate media about Iran is a reflection of a parallel universe. There is a total denial of any nuance, an inability to accept mass pro-government demonstrations that were bigger than the riots that occurred, a refusal to air the countless videos of armed militants on the streets and mass destruction caused by rioters.

Instead, Iran is an “evil regime” that is “slaughtering its own people” for absolutely no reason beyond that they are peacefully protesting for their freedom. There is also a particular focus on women’s rights when it comes to this propaganda. Even those who accept that over 160 members of the Iranian security forces were killed, including some who were beheaded and set on fire, still uphold that a peaceful revolution occurred. One that they all claimed would topple the government in days or weeks.

You need only look back over the past decades to see the same regime change scripts in action. The Colonial Feminism employed to justify these wars of aggression has been apparent throughout, especially in the case of Afghanistan. Yet, after 20 years of war and 2 trillion dollars in taxpayer dollars later, it was clear that the US’s longest war had nothing to do with “liberating the women of Afghanistan”.

Bear in mind also that atrocity propaganda can come from so-called trusted sources, especially when used to drum up support for such a major foreign policy objective as overthrowing the Iranian government. For example, Amnesty International gave credit to totally fabricated claims that Iraqi soldiers had thrown babies out of incubators in the lead-up to the First Gulf War.

Former Libyan President Muammar Gaddafi was also accused of “killing his own people” as the justification for NATO intervention, while it was claimed that peaceful protesters sought to achieve democracy. Then came a tirade of totally fabricated statistics and outlandish stories, none of which the corporate media dare challenge.

Every time it’s the same cycle, a totally fictitious narrative is constructed as a means of justifying a kind of “humanitarian intervention”, after which everyone will later acknowledge much of it was exaggerated or outright false. Then, anyone challenging this is labelled a “regime puppet” and called names to delegitimise their arguments. Disgruntled members of that nation’s diaspora are also employed to come up with sob stories and advocate regime change, a cheap identity politics trick.

What Will A War On Iran Look Like

A war with Iran could go in many different directions, depending on a large number of variables and how countless actions factor into decision-making on all sides. Therefore, the first point of entry into this brief analysis should be the reality inside Iran and separating this from the fictional depictions provided by the corporate media.

Iran is not Venezuela, nor is it Syria. The Islamic Republic of Iran, for a start, possesses military capabilities that are beyond any other player in West Asia, with exceptions of the Israelis and Turkish militaries. Even in these cases, they do not possess the volume of ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, or drones that Iran has mass-manufactured.

What Tehran lacks in terms of the latest in technological development, it makes up for with its offensive missile and drone arsenal, enabling it to hit the Israelis and US bases across the region. These capabilities are now tried and tested on the battlefield.

On the ground, Iran has its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) along with its regular army. The conservative estimates put the total active personnel of the IRGC at around 190,000 men strong, while the regular army is said to have 420,000 active duty members. In addition to this, there is a volunteer paramilitary force known as the Basij, which is said to be able to mobilise over a million fighters if needed.

The Iranian military is well trained, well armed and is constantly running exercises designed to combat insurgencies and foreign invasion forces. Iran’s terrain is also mountainous and vast, meaning that even in the event that mistakes are made, there is room for them to then regain lost ground. All previous US war games estimated that an invasion of Iran in the early 2000’s would have been a disaster for American forces. This was before the Iranians developed militarily in the way they have over the past decade or so.

Millions of Iranians who have demonstrated they will come to the streets in order to protest in solidarity with their government is also a strong sign of the base of support behind the current government. Although survey data is scarce, a large portion of the Iranian population is indeed socially conservative and believes in the religious doctrine of the Islamic Republic.

Another element to consider here is that the Iranian opposition has no real leader. The son of the Shah has a very small base of support inside Iran and is widely regarded as no more than an Israeli puppet. Then we have the Iranian minorities, who have managed to coexist much better under the Islamic Republic than the former Shah’s rule, as the Shia religious system does not rule for the Persian majority alone and does not have the same ethno-supremacist tendencies as previous Iranian leaderships.

On top of Iran’s own forces, there are also its regional allies. These include Ansarallah in Yemen, the Iraqi Hashd al-Shaabi, the Afghan Fatimeyoun, Pakistani Zeinabiyoun, the entire Palestinian resistance, and Hezbollah in Lebanon. These are the main players, but there are also various other groups that they have partnered with.

There is also a question mark surrounding what role China will play in support of Iran, while it is expected that Russia will also provide some kind of assistance. Beijing, in particular, cannot afford the fallout of losing Iranian oil and has already signed an economic partnership deal with Tehran.

Understanding all, there are clearly various cards that the Iranians have to play, and the idea that the government would simply fall without a fight and that its leadership would flee is pure fantasy. Several scenarios could play out given a war opens, including the following:

  1. Iran initiates a preemptive series of strikes.
  2. The US bombs Iran symbolically and tries to fight a limited conflict.
  3. An Israeli-US total regime change plot is hatched.

To address the first way this could unfold, it may be possible that, given the failure of the riots to create major fractures in the Islamic Republic’s system and drag the country to civil war, the US and Israelis may be trying to bait Iran into attacking first. The reason for this would be so they are able to gauge how broad the confrontation will be from the opening round of strikes and then adjust their own offensive from there. This kind of conflict would likely be limited.

The next option would be a US air campaign designed to deal a blow to Iran, with the hope that it could also lead to a change of events that results in regime change, but primarily to send a message and extend the conflict to another round. Such an exchange could end up getting out of hand, depending upon how both sides choose to retaliate against each other’s actions, yet the goal would be to avoid a long war.

If these kinds of 12-Day-War style rounds are to keep occurring each year or so, then this would greatly favour Iran. This is the case as Iran replaces its stockpiles infinitely quicker than the US and Israel.

Then there is the worst-case scenario, an all-out regime change war. Whether this arrives through a series of waves of attacks, both from the air and using militants on the ground, or through a tit-for-tat escalation that leads to it, expect enormous death and destruction on all sides.

There can be no disputing the US military edge here from the air, although an air campaign alone will not topple the government. If this happens, the worst-case scenario will be that the US will strike Iran repeatedly, perhaps alongside Israel’s attacks, assassinating political and military leaders, taking out weapons depots, missile launch sites, infrastructure targets, government buildings, and cultural sites. If Iran is unable to effectively defend from such an assault, it should be expected that it will take around 4 days to get on its feet.

This being said, such an assault would likely radicalise the population and make them double down. If the US and Israel succeed at assassinating Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei, then we should expect an unprecedented war that may even extend beyond the region. More than being the Iranian Supreme Leader, he is also a Shia Spiritual leader, meaning his role transcends that of a leader of a country. It would be the equivalent of assassinating the Pope.

Iran itself has several options: to pound American bases, strike US aircraft carriers, launch much larger waves of ballistic missiles into Israel, and at this point, it is likely its allies would have mobilised. The Iranians themselves could shut down the Persian Gulf by locking the Gulf of Hormuz, inflicting a global economic crisis.

Hezbollah, Ansarallah, the Hashd al-Shaabi, Zeinabiyoun, Fatemeyoun, and Palestinian factions could all then participate in an all-out war, one from which there is no turning back. For the Shia in particular, their ideology is not one of backing down in these situations; they will very likely interpret such circumstances as their equivalent to the battle of Karbala, where the Prophet of Islam’s grandson Hussein was martyred.

If this becomes an all-out battle, everyone will take the gloves off, and the only way the Israelis will likely prove capable of escaping is to begin using nuclear weapons, which may not even work.

Although the doomsday scenario is possible, it is likely the war will end before it gets to that stage, and although all of Iran’s allies may participate this time, it would appear the US would like to refrain from entering a long, unpopular, and unwinnable war of aggression. The Trump administration likes quick wars that don’t take much time and runs away when things don’t go their way, as we saw with their attack on Yemen.

It should be expected that the Israelis and their Western allies throw the kitchen sink at Iran in an attempt to manufacture civil war, also. So far, the Syriaization of Iran has failed, but this isn’t to say they will give up on implementing such an agenda.

All of this is to say that regime change in Iran is not a simple matter of committing a few airstrikes; it is an ideologically driven State with mass support and a large number of allies willing to fight on its side. Therefore, the likelihood of the Islamic Republic of Iran falling in a few days or weeks is outlandish to say the least.

– Robert Inlakesh is a journalist, writer, and documentary filmmaker. He focuses on the Middle East, specializing in Palestine. He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.

January 18, 2026 Posted by | Militarism, Wars for Israel | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Latest US-backed regime change operation in Iran hits the wall

By Samuel Geddes | Al Mayadeen | January 17, 2026

Having bombed the country in 2025, “Israel” and the US seemed to think that provoking street violence would have more success at collapsing the Iranian state. Instead, it fizzled almost instantly.

We have been here at least half a dozen times in the past two decades. Street protests in Iran over an internal economic, social or political issue emerge, gather a degree of momentum in urban areas and the Western propaganda system declares that the protests have “shifted” from their initial focus, to calls for the repudiation of the Islamic Revolution and the end of the political system it created. European and American politicians issue their empty statements of solidarity with the Iranian people and unilaterally decide that the Islamic Republic has “lost its legitimacy,” that its fall is simply a matter of “when,” not “if.” We have seen this narrative played out often enough to recognize it never survives contact with the real world.

The source of the persistent delusion that the Islamic Republic is about to fall comes not only from the Euro-American elite class wishing it to be so, but also from its deferral to the “analysis” of segments of the diaspora whose own political objectives are detached from reality.

Whether it is protests over the government’s handling of the economy, energy blackouts, or the water crisis, most external observers are incapable of viewing each individual issue through any lens other than that of regime change.

This time around the US and Israelis, in coopting the protests to destabilize the country through street violence, have not even bothered to hide their involvement. It has also not helped the West’s case that it is now feigning “humanitarian concern” for the rights of Iranian citizens while it has spent more than two years facilitating the ongoing slaughter and starvation of Gaza’s population. Any observer following both issues can detect the dissonance and conclude what is motivating the frantic calls to escalate the situation into military intervention. That is, the desire to crush a state and society that has resisted Western dominance for more than four-and-a-half decades.

The brazenness of the West’s affected concern for the well-being of the Iranian public is particularly galling in light of the sanctions. If Iranians’ living standards were really of any concern to Washington, London or Brussels, they would start by unconditionally ending their economic strangulation in effect against the country. The truth is that the suffering and misery engendered by the sanctions is entirely the point. As well as stifling the development of an independent state outside the globalized-Western economy, the siege is specifically intended to make living conditions unbearable for the average Iranian so that they are incentivized to undermine the Islamic Republic. The continuation of the sanctions is a barely disguised punishment of the Iranian public for not pursuing the West’s geopolitical goal of regime-change for them.

Were it not glaringly obvious to the Trump administration before the latest unrest, it surely is now that the exiled political diaspora most actively pushing for the fall of the Islamic Republic through Western military action are entirely incapable of political organization. Even the least crazed fan of the defunct Pahlavi dynasty is pathologically hostile to the terrorist personality cult of the MEK, as much as they are to the Islamic Republic itself. There simply is no political alternative, to say nothing of whether it even has any domestic support, waiting to replace the Islamic Republic.

Flush from the “success” of his abducting Venezuelan president Maduro, Trump seemed temporarily convinced he might have a similar option here, to carry out a meaningless military stunt for which he can take credit and declare “victory.” His problem is that there is no level of open military action against Iran that would allow him to do this without igniting a regional war that destroys the global economy.

This realization, if he has come to it, would explain his backtracking on the red lines he set, that any executions would trigger US attacks. If a controlled, stage-managed performance is his goal, as it almost always is, then the confrontation with Iran leaves him with no viable option but to back down.

The absence of any realistic military option has now seen both the US and Europe revert to their standard tactic; the intensification of the sanctions they have used to punish the Iranian people. Trump’s latest declaration of a 25% tariff on any country trading with Iran is his way of giving himself an off-ramp, for now, from a crisis that is largely of his making.

January 17, 2026 Posted by | Wars for Israel | , , , , , | Leave a comment

“Real men go to Tehran” — The Zion-Con fantasy of regime change in Iran

By Junaid S. Ahmad | MEMO | January 16, 2026

“Anyone can go to Baghdad. Real men go to Tehran.”

It is difficult to imagine a sentence that more perfectly distils the arrested adolescence of American neoconservatism. Equal parts locker-room bravado and imperial hallucination, the phrase belongs to the same intellectual ecosystem as Rambo sequels, Tom Clancy paperbacks, and the enduring belief that history naturally submits to men armed with air superiority and a television-ready talking point.

The slogan has circulated for decades among Washington’s most aggressively incurious minds. Iraq was merely the appetizer. Tehran was always the entrée — the Everest of regime change, the final boss in a video game played by men who have never once paid the price of defeat.

Iran is not different merely because of its size, its population, or its terrain — though the Zagros Mountains are far less forgiving than the streets of Fallujah. Iran is different because it has refused, stubbornly and at enormous cost, to internalise the post–Cold War catechism: accept American primacy, subcontract your sovereignty, and call the arrangement “integration into the international order.”

For the ‘Zion-Cons’ — Zionist neoconservatives — this refusal is not simply strategic defiance. It is psychological heresy.

The theology of regime change 

Neoconservatism is not a foreign-policy framework. It is a belief system. Like all theologies, it comes equipped with sacred texts, sanctioned demons, and end-times fantasies. Iran occupies a unique place in this cosmology: simultaneously an ideological abomination and a geopolitical temptation too intoxicating to abandon.

The Islamic Republic represents everything neocon thought cannot tolerate — an independent regional power immune to Western legitimacy rituals, rooted in a civilizational memory more than a millennium older than Washington itself. That it is also openly hostile to Israel, and persistently aligned with Palestinian resistance, elevates Iran from problem to obsession.

This obsession is always framed as concern. Concern for democracy. Concern for women’s rights. Concern for regional stability. Yet the concern follows a suspiciously selective pattern. It spikes when Iranian women protest. It flattens when women in Gaza are buried beneath concrete and shrapnel. It demands sanctions in the name of “helping the Iranian people” while celebrating the annihilation of Iran’s middle class as a strategic achievement.

This is not hypocrisy. It is architecture.

Sanctions are not a failed alternative to regime change; they are its slow-motion variant. When bombing proves politically inconvenient, starvation becomes policy. When diplomacy threatens stabilisation, diplomacy must be sabotaged. Engagement is dangerous precisely because it works. The objective is not reform. The objective is obliteration.

Israel’s strategic mirage

For Israel’s security establishment, Iran is the final unresolved obstacle in a region otherwise disciplined into submission. Egypt neutralised. Syria pulverised. Iraq shattered and held together with duct tape. Lebanon perpetually destabilised. Only Iran remains intact and intolerably autonomous.

The idea that Israel’s posture toward Iran has ever been defensive borders on parody. The fear is not that Iran will strike tomorrow; it is that Iran will exist coherently ten years from now.

This explains the fixation on Iran’s air defences, its scientists, its infrastructure. The logic is brutally simple: a state that cannot defend itself cannot act independently. A state that cannot act independently can eventually be wrecked, partitioned, and remade.

But here the fantasy collides with reality. Iran is not Syria. It is not Libya. It is not Iraq circa 2003 — hollowed out by sanctions and ruled by a dictatorship so despised that collapse felt like relief. Iran, like all societies, contains fractures and rivalries. But fragmented societies do not automatically disintegrate. Quite often — especially under existential threat — they consolidate. External assault does not reliably dissolve states. Sometimes it forges them.

The opposition mirage

Every regime-change project requires a hero. In Iran’s case, while ritualistic nods are made toward protesters with genuine grievances, the starring role is awkwardly reserved for an exile aristocracy whose Twitter/X followings vastly exceed their domestic relevance.

Reza Pahlavi is marketed like a Silicon Valley prototype: sleek, Western-approved, and permanently “almost ready.” His appeal thrives in think tanks, donor salons, and Israeli conference halls. Inside Iran, his name provokes neither mass devotion nor visceral hatred — just indifference at best, uncontrollable laughter at worst.

This is the core contradiction of Washington’s Iran policy: regime change without revolution; installation without legitimacy; democracy without the inconvenience of mass politics.

The resulting strategy is perversely elegant in its cynicism — wait for collapse while ensuring no alternative survives long enough to govern.

Civil war option

What follows regime collapse? Zion-Con discourse treats the question like a software update users will sort out later. Something, it is assumed, will emerge. Something manageable. Something vaguely liberal.

History offers no such reassurance

Iran’s disintegration would not yield a liberal republic — and it is not meant to. It would yield precisely what Zion-Cons privately welcome: centrifugal violence, ethnic fragmentation, militia economies, refugee flows that would make Syria look like a rehearsal dinner. Kurdish separatism. Baloch insurgency. Nuclear insecurity. The scenario reads less like a transition plan than a controlled demolition spiralling out of control.

For Washington and Tel Aviv, this is not a deterrent. It is an acceptable – perhaps even desirable – outcome. A broken Iran is preferable to a strong one, even if the shards cut indiscriminately.

The masculinity problem

“Real men go to Tehran” is not merely rhetoric. It is theatre. It reflects a masculinity crisis at the heart of American empire — a compulsion to prove relevance through violence because legitimacy has evaporated.

Short wars. Clean optics. Cinematic strikes. The problem with Iran is that it refuses to follow the script. There is no “Mission Accomplished” banner waiting in the Persian Gulf. There is only attrition, retaliation, and the dawning realisation that power is not a substitute for strategy.

The endgame nobody admits

The scarcely concealed truth is that regime change in Iran is not primarily about Iran. It is about preserving Zionist hegemony in the region. An Iran that survives sanctions, absorbs pressure, and refuses submission is contagious. It teaches others that defiance is survivable.

That lesson is intolerable

So, the fantasy endures. The slogans recycle. The men who went to Baghdad insist they are wiser now — just before deliberately repeating the same catastrophe, only on a grander scale.

But Tehran is not a sequel. It is a reckoning. And this time, the audience will not be so forgiving.

January 16, 2026 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Wars for Israel | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Venezuela Has Right to Have Relations With China, Russia, Cuba, Iran – Acting President

Sputnik – 16.01.2026

Venezuela has the right to relations with all countries of the world, including China, Russia, Cuba, and Iran, and will exercise this right in compliance with international norms, Venezuelan Acting President Delcy Rodriguez said on Thursday.

Venezuela’s Acting President Delcy Rodríguez said the country’s energy dialogue with the United States is not new, but stressed that it is now taking place amid “aggression and a fierce threat.”

“Venezuela has the right to relations with China, with Russia, with Cuba, with Iran — with all the peoples of the world,” Rodríguez said while presenting the government’s 2025 annual report.

She said Caracas is shaping energy cooperation based on “decency, dignity and independence,” rejecting both internal and external constraints aimed at influencing Venezuela’s foreign policy.

January 16, 2026 Posted by | Economics | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

US Sending Troops to Middle East Over Trump’s Threats Against Iran – Reports

Sputnik – 16.01.2026

WASHINGTON – The United States is sending troops to the Middle East over the consideration of potential strikes on Iran by President Donald Trump, Fox News reported on Thursday, citing military sources.

At least one US aircraft carrier is moving toward the region amid the growing tensions, the report said.

“US military assets are preparing to move to the Middle East, likely to include at least one aircraft carrier and additional missile defense systems that will operate from air, land and sea,” Fox News’ Chief National Security Correspondent Jennifer Griffin said on air.

However, it is unknown whether it is USS Abraham Lincoln, which is currently operating in the South China Sea, or one of the two carriers that left US bases earlier this week, the report added.

President Donald Trump has been presented with military options and favors any action being “swift and decisive,” while avoiding a wider regional war, according to the report.

Iranian state media, cited by Fox News, issued a warning to Washington: “You hit. We hit.”

January 16, 2026 Posted by | Militarism, Wars for Israel | , , , | Leave a comment

The anti-Iran human rights bazaar

By Karim Sharara | Al Mayadeen | January 16, 2026

Mainstream media’s reliance on US-funded “Iranian human rights” NGOs reveals a recycled regime-change pipeline, where anonymous activists are used with opaque finances to treat propaganda like facts.

“2,000 protesters killed, activists say.”

My, my, it seems anonymous activists are really all the rage in Western media, with this headline being parroted (in multiple forms, no doubt). Because if it’s in The Guardian, BBC, and CNN, among others, it has to be “true”, particularly when it’s Iran they’re talking about.

But really, journalistic integrity is about citing sources, and if these “unbiased”, “professional”, and “objective” outlets are good at anything, it’s choosing the proper organizations to cite, which are in no way affiliated with suspect sources.

After all, it’s not suspect if it’s the CIA or the US federal government, right?

Human Rights Activists in Iran (HRANA)

Take HRANA, for instance, which is THE go-to “agency” cited by Western media.

Arrest figures? HRANA.
Death tolls? HRANA.
Names of the arrested? HRANA.
Claims of repression cited by Reuters, AP, the BBC, CNN, and The New York Times? HRANA.

According to its website, “Human Rights Activists in Iran (also known as HRAI and HRA) is a non-political and non-governmental organization comprised of advocates who defend human rights in Iran. HRAI was founded in 2005.”

Contrary to the name, the Human Rights Activists in Iran organization is not, in fact, in Iran, but rather operates from the comfort of Virginia, in the United States. Kind of like when you buy Brussels sprouts expecting something European but then find out they were “imported” from California.

HRANA also makes this claim: “Because the organization seeks to remain independent, it doesn’t accept financial aid from either political groups nor governments.”

Oddly enough, no Western media source has disclosed that HRANA is being funded by the NED (National Endowment for Democracy), which was established to keep CIA funding covert, according to its co-founder Allen Weinstein, who had said, “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”

HRANA was founded by Keyvan Rafiee in 2006, in Virginia, and according to tax filings dating back to 2012 (when Rafiee only got $59,000 in tax-exempt donations) he is now raking in a comfortable $1 million dollars in donations.

In total, Rafiee has taken $10.7 million from 2012 to 2015, no doubt from “good Samaritans” donating funds to his Patreon.

CHRI

The Center for Human Rights in Iran (CHRI), much like HRANA, is also being cited by mainstream media as a credible source, amassing “over 7,000 international media citations in 2022,” according to its own website. Also like HRANA, it identifies itself as an “independent, nonpartisan” nonprofit organization (seems like it’s a mantra they all use).

With nonprofit being the keyword here, Hadi Ghaemi, CHRI’s founder and executive director, gave himself more than $200,000 in compensation from US taxpayer money just last year for his tiring work in advancing human rights, almost double the $105,000 he received in 2013.

It’s noteworthy that Ghaemi had claimed in 2009 that he had never received any sort of funding from the US government or NED, speaking in particular regarding his work for United4Iran, another organization he founded.

From 2012 to 2024, CHRI, registered as Campaign For Human Rights Inc and tax-exempt since 2011, has received $16.3 million, also in tax-exempt donations. However, because of the lack of transparency regarding the organization’s finances, the source of the funding could not be ascertained.

Tavaana

One of the most active organizations among Iranian dissident groups is Tavaana. On its website, it brands itself as “Iran’s premier civic education and civil society capacity building initiative.” You’d think to yourself it’s based in Iran until you’re hit quite boldly in the next sentence with “Launched in 2010 with a seed grant from the Bureau for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor (DRL) at the US Department of State.”

Going through tax files related to Tavaana will net you nothing; that’s because the taxes are filed under the name “E Collaborative For Civic Education,” Tavaana’s parent organization, which has been tax-exempt since 2011. The tax filings show that the organization received grants totaling $250,000 in 2011, which quickly skyrocketed to a high of $1.9 million in 2014. In total, from 2011 to 2024, Tavaana received a total of $15.9 million in donations.

Looking at the scope of activities it’s involved in, and how its online courses are about sharing articles similar to eHow on circumventing internet restrictions in Iran, it’s difficult to see where those millions of dollars went… Either that or they were contracted to write the most expensive compilation of e-brochures.

According to a NED booklet authored by Sherry Ricchiardi for NED’s Center for International Media Assistance (CIMA) and published on March 13, 2014, “The Tavaana project’s parent organization, the E-Collaborative for Civic Education, has received support from the National Endowment for Democracy, the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the United States Agency for International Development.”

“Program Manager Layla Attia listed some of the project’s accomplishments, including 29 e-courses and 47 webinars on such topics as women’s rights, digital safety, gay rights in Islam, social entrepreneurship, democratic institutions, and power searching on Google. Participants connect securely from Iran to anonymous e-classrooms, and so far none have reported being compromised, according to Attia.”

Imagine being an American and finding out that $100,000 of your tax dollars was spent to teach “power searching on Google.”

Tavaana’s co-founders are Akbar Atri and Mariam Memarsadeghi. Atri has largely been inactive on social media since 2018, but Mariam Memarsadeghi paints a different tale. She is an avid supporter of “Israel”, as seen in her bio, which features an Israeli flag, and has even called for US and Israeli strikes on her own country, the last time being just a few days ago:

Perhaps more interestingly, she is also an avid monarchist, who advocates giving power to a man whose sole claim to fame is being born with a saffron spoon in his mouth and who has gone on record saying he doesn’t know what he’ll be going back to, if he ever returns to Iran, suggesting he may live between the US and Iran because he has spent his entire life in the US.

This is the same man who thought showing pictures of himself doing yoga would somehow give him better optics.

One prominent Iranian dissident, Ruhollah Zam, who was involved in directing anti-Iran operations (including teaching rioters how to make homemade weapons through his Amad News Telegram channels), and later captured and repatriated in an intelligence operation, has also gone on record years ago telling people in a video call that he’s seen the late shah’s son practising inspecting troops in front of his bedroom mirror.

Iran Disinformation Project

One short-lived project started directly with US State Department funding was the Iran Disinformation Project, after, according to The Guardian, “it was found to be trolling US journalists, human rights activists and academics it deemed to be insufficiently hostile to the government in Tehran.”

Once @IranDisinfo began targeting mainstream journalists for not being radically anti-Iran, buzzers went off, and their funding was cut. “The bulk of the work by @IranDisinfo has been in line with the scope of a project with the Department of State. We have, however, identified recent tweets that fall outside the scope of the project to counter foreign state propaganda or disinformation,” one State Department spokesperson said.

The tweets in question were then deleted, but funding was not restored. The page can still be seen on Twitter, inactive since 2019.

Boroumand Center for Human Rights in Iran

One of the most effective organizations funded by the National Endowment for Democracy is the Boroumand Center for Human Rights in Iran, co-founded by dissident sisters Ladan and Roya Boroumand. Its board of directors features prominent neocon-turned-something-or-other Francis Fukuyama (post-neocon liberal institutionalist is what my search tells me he is, and for some reason, that’s an actual thing), and prominent Iranian celebrities, such as Nazanin Boniadi.

In 2024, NED presented its “partner” Roya Boroumand a medal “in recognition of her leadership and dedication to the promotion of human rights and democracy in Iran.”

In particular, the NED statement read: “Roya along with her sister Ladan Boroumand, a former Reagan-Fascell Democracy Fellow at NED, have dedicated their lives to upholding human rights in Iran.”

From 2011 to 2024, the Boroumand Center received $13.5 million in tax-exempt donations in the US. Before that, information suggests that it was bankrolled by contributions from foundations, such as the influential right-wing Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars each year per donor.

The Boroumand Center has also collaborated with and received funding from George Soros’ Open Society Foundations.

Curiously, the Center’s What We Do page reads: “Our goal is to prepare for a peaceful and democratic transition in Iran and build a more just future.”

One would think that people who are so avid to preserve democracy and democratic practices, even being honored with prestigious awards for their work, would do better than to amplify a call for the firing of Iranian academics in the US asking questions about the Mossad’s involvement in the riots, particularly ones as distinguished as Hamid Dabashi.

On Jan 12, Ladan Boroumand also amplified a post by Iranian dissident Omid Shams in which he discussed how an attack on Iran can be justified under “humanitarian intervention”.

It seems that a recurring theme of Iranian dissidents abroad is how hard they all cheer for strikes on their own country, but none have taken it as far as Masih Alinejad, who seems to have spearheaded the opposition, much to the chagrin of many dissidents who call her an opportunist.

Through her work in VOA Farsi (VOA meaning Voice of America, because it’s an American network), which is directly funded by the State Department, through which Alinejad has called for strikes, regime change, sanctions, and all manner of actions by the US against her country, she has catapulted into the frontlines of the opposition. She has also received hundreds of thousands of dollars in payments for her work with VOA Farsi.

A regime-change ecosystem

So the next time you’re told, very solemnly, that “2,000 protesters were killed, activists say,” it may be worth asking a dangerous question: which activists, funded by whom, operating from where, and with what openly stated political objectives?

Because what emerges here isn’t an ecosystem of independent human rights advocacy, but a tightly interlinked industry of regime-change NGOs, generously financed by US government cutouts, recycled endlessly through Western newsrooms that treat “Virginia-based Iranian activists” as a substitute for on-the-ground verification.

Maybe the real miracle isn’t that these figures are uncritically repeated, but that after Iraq’s WMDs, Libya’s humanitarian war, Syria’s “moderate rebels”, and every other CIA-flavored moral crusade, we’re still expected to gasp in awe when someone from the mainstream has “trust me bro” for a source.

January 16, 2026 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , | Leave a comment

Report: Kurdish Fighters Have Been Entering Iran From Iraq and Clashing With the IRGC

By Dave DeCamp | The Libertarian Institute | January 14, 2026

Turkish intelligence has warned Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) that Kurdish fighters have been entering Iran from Iraq amid protests inside Iran, Reuters reported on Wednesday.

An unnamed senior Iranian official speaking to the outlet said that the IRGC has been clashing with armed Kurdish fighters dispatched from both Iraq and Turkey. The Kurdistan Freedom Party, or PAK, a Kurdish Iranian separatist group mainly based in Iraq, has been claiming that its armed wing has been conducting operations against Iranian forces.

On Tuesday, the PAK claimed its forces launched an attack on an IRGC base in western Iran. The Reuters report and claims of Kurdish attacks come as Tehran is accusing the US and Israel of arming “terorrists” inside Iran who have attacked Iranian security forces.

The US has a significant presence in Iraqi Kurdistan, including a military base and an $800 million consulate compound that it opened in December. The Israeli Mossad is also known for having a presence in the area, and Iran claimed that it attacked a Mossad base in Iraqi Kurdistan in 2024.

The Mossad has a long history of covert operations inside Iran, and a Farsi-language X account affiliated with the Israeli spy agency suggested it had operatives on the ground in Iran when the protests first broke out. “Let’s come out to the streets together. The time has come. We are with you. Not just from afar and verbally. We are with you in the field as well,” the account said on December 29.

Israel’s Channel 14 has reported that “foreign actors” have armed protesters in Iran and said that’s the reason why hundreds of Iranian security personnel have been killed.

“We reported tonight on Channel 14: foreign actors are arming the protesters in Iran with live firearms, which is the reason for the hundreds of regime personnel killed,” Channel 14 reporter Tamir Morag wrote on X on Tuesday. “Everyone is free to guess who is behind it.”

January 14, 2026 Posted by | Deception, Wars for Israel | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Trump’s Options in Iran Limited By Military Buildup in Latin America

By Kyle Anzalone | The Libertarian Institute | January 14, 2026

President Donald Trump has a more limited range of options for attacking Iran now than he did in June. The US has moved military assets out of the Middle East in recent months, including moving an aircraft carrier strike group to the Caribbean.

Since the US and Israel’s war against Iran last year, the US has moved two aircraft carrier strike groups out of the Middle East. The USS Nimitz is now at a US port, and the USS Ronald Regan is in Latin America.

An advanced American air defense system that was deployed to the Middle East in June is now back in East Asia. Politico notes, “The Trump administration also has been eating away at dwindling US weapons stockpiles with the fast pace of military operations in the Red Sea, Iran and Venezuela.”

Trump has made several pledges to back Iranian protesters and attack Iran. The lack of available military resources in the region could limit Trump’s operations for attacking Iran, although the US still maintains the capability to strike the Islamic Republic.

Over the past decade, the pace of US military interventions has spread across the globe. Under President Joe Biden, the US flooded weapons to Ukraine and Israel. President Donald Trump has bombed seven countries. Additionally, the US used a significant portion of its arsenal of interceptors to defend Israel from Iranian retaliation in June.

January 14, 2026 Posted by | Militarism | , , | Leave a comment

Former Head of Israeli Military Intelligence Directorate: There’s a ‘very significant influence operation by the US’ in Iran

The Dissident | January 14, 2026

Recently, the Israeli newspaper Maariv interviewed the head of the Military Intelligence Directorat in Israel from 2018-2021, Tamir Hayman, who revealed that the United States currently has a “Significant Influence Operation” on the ground in Iran.

In the interview, Hayman said, “If the question is, is there zero operation right now? The answer is no, because there is already an operation. There is currently a very significant influence operation by the US” referring to the current unrest happening in Iran.

He added, “The sequence of news that is received from within Iran, rumors that are coming, videos that are coming, there are many things that are happening that have no explanation. It could be a coincidence, and it could be something else. Simply put, an influence effort is an effort that operates primarily in the cyber realm, and in the realm of local disruption and subversion, and there are some.”

Along with this, Tamir Hayman, acknowledged that U.S. sanctions were the cause of the economic issues that in Iran that sparked the initial protests in Iran which are apparently being exploited by American and Israeli intelligence, saying, “there is the attempt, as we heard tonight from Trump, that this is a path of negotiation with the Americans, that this is really the only thing that can save the Iranian economy, the lifting of sanctions”.

This comment comes at the same time that Tamir Morag, the Diplomatic Correspondent for the Netanyahu-linked Channel 14 in Israel, reported that “foreign actors are arming the protesters in Iran with live firearms, which is the reason for the hundreds of regime personnel killed.”

American and Israeli officials have been fairly open about the fact that Israeli intelligence is currently operating on the ground in Iran, with the former Secretary of State and CIA director, Mike Pompeo saying, “Happy New Year to every Iranian in the streets. Also, to every Mossad agent walking beside them” and the Israeli Heritage Minister, Amichai Eliyahu saying, “When we attacked in Iran during ‘Rising Lion’ we were on its soil and knew how to lay the groundwork for a strike. I can assure you that we have some of our people operating there right now”.

But now, Tamir Morag has revealed that there are “very significant influence operations by the US” in Iran, which include “operates primarily in the cyber realm, and in the realm of local disruption and subversion” and according to Tamir Morag, apparent operations to arm protestors in Iran to kill Iranian government officials.

Referring to the protests in Iran, the U.S. government connected private intelligence firm Stratfor, wrote, “the United States may also try to intervene, such as by covertly helping to organize the protesters”, something that is apparently already underway through American “influence operations”.

January 14, 2026 Posted by | Economics, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Iran protest-riots can only achieve US-Israeli intervention, ‘shadow CIA’ concludes

By Max Blumenthal | The Grayzone | January 13, 2026

Stratfor, the “shadow CIA” which contracts for US intelligence and advises US-backed opposition movements, published an important assessment of the protest-riots in Iran this January 7.

Stratfor concluded that the ultimate utility of the unrest is to create an opening for a US-Israeli bombing campaign:

“While unlikely to collapse the regime, the ongoing unrest could open the door for Israel or the United States to conduct covert or overt activities aimed at further destabilizing the Iranian government, either indirectly by encouraging the protests or directly via military action against Iranian leaders.”

The private spying contractor explained that the external, US-backed Iranian opposition is too fractious and weak to affect change inside Iran, and that the institutions of the Islamic Republic remain united. Therefore, the only impact the protest-riots can achieve is to ease the path for a military campaign by the US and Israel.

Stratfor’s assessment ends by predicting that “renewed military strikes on Iran would also likely put an end to the current protest movement by leading instead to a wider display of Iranian nationalism and unity, a pattern observed after U.S. and Israeli strikes in 2025.”

This is one of the more sober pieces of analysis of the unrest in Iran to emerge from any US intel-aligned outfit. However, with CIA director and “Mossad stenographer” John Ratcliffe controlling Trump’s Iran briefings alongside White House chief of staff and former Netanyahu campaign advisor Suzie Wiles, the president may not have the benefit of such clarity.

January 13, 2026 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Wars for Israel | , , , | Leave a comment

« Previous Entries     Next Entries »