Your tax dollars at work
By Kevin Barrett | American Free Press | June 5, 2026
On May 18, Israeli commandos attacked 54 civilian boats carrying food and medical supplies to Gaza. The boats were near Cypress, nearly 300 miles from Gaza, in international waters.
The Israelis fired at the boats and kidnapped 428 unarmed humanitarian activists. Those people were never charged with any crime. How could they be? When kidnapped, they were exercising their right to sail in international waters. It was the Israelis who were committing the crime of maritime piracy, which carries a penalty of 20 years’ imprisonment.
But piracy and kidnapping were just the initial crimes. Sexual assault, rape, and torture followed. It began almost as soon as the Israeli pirates boarded the victims’ boats. According to Dropsite News, “The flotilla says at least 12 sexual assaults were documented aboard the vessel alone, including anal rape and forcible penetration with a handgun.”
The kidnapping victims were subjected to sadistic sexual abuse in the form of strip-searches accompanied by sexual taunting and groping. Many were raped. Participants described “rubber bullets fired at close range, tasers used on the face and upper body, stun grenades thrown into groups of detainees (and) prolonged stress positions under permanent bright light.” The activists were brutally beaten, emerging with “broken ribs (and) fractures to the torso, shoulders, and back.”
The kidnappers took their victims to the Israeli port of Ashdod for “further beatings, sexual humiliation, prolonged interrogations, and torture.” Israel responded to the media outcry and formal diplomatic protests from twelve governments, including Spain and Italy, by having extremist minister Itamar Ben-Gvir film himself participating in the abuse of the kidnapped civilians. After Ben-Gvir proudly posted his torture selfies on social media, even the US, UK, and Canada protested. Facing universal condemnation, the Israelis finally released their victims four days after the kidnapping, sending most of them on deportation flights to Turkey.
The kidnapped and tortured activists pointed out that the four days of hell they experienced were nothing compared to what Palestinian prisoners endure every single day. They called attention to the fact that Israel is currently imprisoning more than 400 Palestinian children, and that almost three-quarters of the children kidnapped by Israel report experiencing sexual violence or abuse.
Israel’s crimes against the flotilla activists were shocking but not surprising. Israel, after all, is a nation that trains dogs to rape prisoners, as reported by The New York Times. It is a nation with a “right to rape” movement that makes national heroes of prison guards who sodomize people to death. In his article “Israel Is the Global Rape Capital” Elias Akleh describes how “Sadistic sexual rape seems to be an endemic character of the whole Israeli society, making Israel the rape capital of the world, where sexual abuse and rape are not restricted against Palestinians only, but against Jewish Israeli girls in general.”
In 2011 psychologist Avigail Moor of Tel-Hai College conducted a scientific poll on whether it’s okay to rape your acquaintances. She found that 61% of Israeli men and 41% of women did not consider forced sex with an acquaintance to be rape.
All of this is just the proverbial tip of an iceberg of evidence that Israel is a nation of sadistic sex criminals. Depraved, violent, sadistic sexual abuse is even part of Israeli Orthodox Jewish religious rituals, as reported by the Jerusalem Post (6/3/2025). Social media is full of pictures posted by Israeli soldiers who murder Palestinian women, dress up in their victims’ bras and underwear, and take selfies.
In relatively normal societies, it is estimated that two per cent or less of the population consists of clinical psychopaths, while 98% are non-psychopathic. Among the Israeli Jewish population, it seems, that ratio is reversed. Polls show that the vast majority of Israeli Jews support the genocide of Gaza, which has featured the murders of tens of thousands of innocent women and children, most of whom have been slowly crushed to death beneath the rubble of their own houses.
None of these crimes could happen without the roughly ten trillion dollars of support Israel has received from American taxpayers. That money has been bestowed on the Dog Rape Nation by our politicians, who are bribed or blackmailed by Israeli agents like Jeffrey Epstein, himself a shining example of Jewish-Israeli sexual psychopathy.
Epstein described himself as “Donald (Trump’s) closest friend for ten years.” But it gets worse. In his 20s, Trump was the protegé of Jewish-Zionist gangster Roy Cohn, a sadistic homosexual pedophile who, according to journalist Anthony Summers, ran an Epstein-style blackmail operation that filmed powerful men, including J. Edgar Hoover, abusing little boys.
And it isn’t just Trump. Our whole political class is compromised. Just look at how they vote on Israel-related issues.
The USA desperately needs a serious, French Revolution style housecleaning.
See Also:
RT | June 5, 2026
America’s position on the Ukraine conflict has become almost indistinguishable from that of the EU, making US President Donald Trump’s stated ambition to mediate an end to the fighting hollow, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has told RT.
Trump repeatedly blamed the conflict between Russia and Ukraine on his predecessor, Joe Biden, and claimed that he could bring it to a swift conclusion while campaigning in 2024.
However, recent statements by members of his administration suggest a different course, Lavrov said on Thursday in an interview on the sidelines of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum.
“Biden’s war has become Trump’s war,” the Russian foreign minister said.
Speaking to Congress this week, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said efforts to facilitate Russia-Ukraine talks were complicated “because, frankly, we’re not an impartial mediator.” He cited the continuation of the sanctions on Russia and sales of US weapons to Ukraine.
“After we agreed to the United States proposal in Anchorage [in August 2025], Washington began to shift its position. Instead of advancing those same proposals in its dealings with Ukrainians, it is now pretending that the parties should sort things out themselves. This is not a very consistent position,” Lavrov said.
“It is the West that cannot be trusted to keep its agreements. Its approach is: ‘I’ll promise something now, then stall for time.’ If the US had truly advanced its own initiative, I think… the fighting would already have stopped.”
According to Lavrov, the only major difference between Trump’s policy and that of Biden and the EU is that his administration resumed direct talks with Russia. Dialogue is important, he said, but it must be matched by action on commitments already made. … Full video interview
By Henrick Karoliszyn, DSW | The Defender | June 3, 2026
Two National Institutes of Health (NIH) researchers are charged with conspiring to smuggle biological materials, including deactivated monkeypox virus samples, into the U.S. from Africa. The researchers also allegedly lied to federal authorities about what they were carrying, according to a criminal complaint unsealed Tuesday in federal court in Detroit.
Vincent Munster, Ph.D., a Dutch citizen and chief of the Virus Ecology Section at NIH’s Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Hamilton, Montana, and Claude Kwe Yinda, Ph.D., a Cameroonian research fellow, are charged with conspiracy to smuggle goods into the U.S. and making false statements to federal investigators.
Both men work at a Biosafety Level 4 laboratory, the highest level of containment used for research involving dangerous pathogens.
According to federal prosecutors, the researchers arrived at Detroit Metropolitan Airport on Jan. 25 after traveling from the Democratic Republic of Congo, where a monkeypox outbreak was ongoing.
Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers questioned the pair about a large black case they were carrying. Prosecutors allege the men told officers the case contained diagnostic and testing equipment, but investigators later determined it held 113 vials stored in Styrofoam coolers.
Testing of a portion of the samples found deactivated monkeypox virus in 17 vials, chickenpox virus in one vial and human DNA in two others.
“These NIH experts apparently broke our laws by smuggling viral pathogens on a packed commercial airplane from an outbreak in the Republic of Congo,” U.S. Attorney Jerome F. Gorgon Jr. said in announcing the charges. “Let that sink in.”
Federal authorities stressed that the case centers on alleged violations of importation and disclosure requirements. Prosecutors did not accuse the defendants of intentionally releasing pathogens or harming the public.
FBI Detroit Special Agent in Charge Jennifer Runyan said the allegations demonstrate that scientific credentials do not exempt researchers from federal statutes.
“No researchers should believe their positions, credentials, or professional status place them above the law,” Runyan said.
Marcus L. Sykes, special agent in charge of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General, called the alleged conduct “a breach of the public’s trust” and said unauthorized transport of biological materials “could have placed the public at risk.”
The complaint alleges Munster “adamantly denied” carrying biological samples and at one point told investigators that any necessary documentation was on his laptop. “I do this all the time,” he said, according to an FBI affidavit. Authorities said Munster did not produce the documentation he claimed to have.
Neither defendant responded to emails requesting comment.
Congressional inquiry into past research ties
Munster has previously been mentioned in congressional oversight inquiries involving COVID-19 research.
A 2024 letter from Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), then ranking member of the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, to then-NIH Director Monica Bertagnolli said committee investigators had reviewed documents they believed showed collaboration among researchers affiliated with NIH, EcoHealth Alliance, the University of North Carolina and the Wuhan Institute of Virology on SARS-related coronavirus studies.
The letter cited Munster as a participant in the work alongside EcoHealth Alliance’s Peter Daszak, Ph.D., University of North Carolina virologist Ralph Baric, Ph.D., and Wuhan Institute of Virology scientist Zhengli Shi, Ph.D.
The correspondence did not make a finding of wrongdoing but said the materials “indicate” involvement in coronavirus research projects under congressional review.
Richard Ebright, Ph.D., a molecular biologist at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, said the letter raises additional questions about Munster’s past medical ties.
“If the letter is correct, Munster’s record likely includes the unlawful importation and false claims incidents for which he was arrested, but also a share in culpability for causing COVID,” Ebright said.
‘Experimental laboratory approaches’
In a LinkedIn post earlier this year, Munster referenced an article about transmission of the monkeypox (also referred to as mpox) virus “translating our work in the Republic of the Congo towards experimental laboratory approaches.”
Munster and Yinda also co-authored a paper published earlier this year in The Lancet warning that the spread of monkeypox was becoming a “global threat.”
They said cases detected in multiple regions suggested ongoing international spread and called for expanded surveillance, stronger contact tracing and further research into how efficiently the virus transmits and whether sustained community spread is possible outside Africa.
NIH ‘cooperating fully with law enforcement’
The NIH has not commented on the charges, but the agency said it would assist legal authorities in the case.
“This matter is currently under investigation, and NIH is cooperating fully with law enforcement and appropriate authorities,” the agency said in a statement.
The charges emerge amid reports of an employee at Rocky Mountain Laboratories potentially being exposed to Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever (CCHF) in late 2025.
Federal officials said the leak was contained and posed no risk to public health, while some legal experts told The Defender these instances were “surprisingly common.”
Munster and Yinda are scheduled to appear in federal court in Montana. If convicted, they face up to five years in prison.
Henrick Karoliszyn, DSW, is an investigative reporter for The Defender.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
By Andrew P. Napolitano | Ron Paul Institute | June 4, 2026
America’s longest current criminal prosecution is in its 15th year, on its fifth judge, and still has no trial date.
The defendants are Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and four alleged mass murder co-conspirators. Mohammed is the second person that the government has characterized as the ringleader of the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. Originally, the feds had labeled Osama bin Laden as the ringleader. Yet, rather than charging and arresting bin Laden, in order to keep him quiet it sent a team of Navy Seals to his home in Pakistan to murder him and his wife and their children.
After that, the feds labeled Mohammed as the orchestrator of 9/11 even though that, by the time of bin Laden’s death, Mohammed had been in US custody for eight years. During that time, he was brutally tortured by CIA officers and other US civilian agents.
His torture was truly repellant. He was waterboarded 183 times. He was hanged by his wrists while naked and in well-lit walk-in refrigerators such that he was freezing and denied sleep for days. His head was smashed repeatedly against wooden walls. His rectum, through which he was fed, was so brutalized that he bled for months, often ingesting into his intestines his own blood and fecal material.
At the end of three years of these criminal attacks at foreign sites operated by cooperating intelligence agencies with the torture administered by Americans, he told his torturers what he thought they wanted to hear. Then he was transferred to the US Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where he has remained since 2007.
Upon his arrival at Gitmo, a different set of interrogators took over. The video tapes of his hundreds of torture sessions were destroyed but not the transcripts of his confession. The purpose of the second round of interrogations was to elicit another confession by agents who could testify to a judge that they did not torture him, and that his confession to them was not coerced.
Though some of these interrogators at Gitmo were FBI agents, no one read him his Miranda warnings, advising him of his right to silence, to counsel and to the legal implications of anything he told his new interrogators. Mohammed made admissions to this second group of interrogators substantially similar to those he made to his torturers.
The government, which once denied but now admits to the torture, nevertheless was prepared to argue that his second confession was voluntary. Then, the feds had a change of heart. And, two years ago, his lawyers entered into plea negotiations, at the request of the government because the military lawyers and their Department of Justice legal colleagues concluded that they could not ethically defend torture in an American courtroom.
Federal law, the federal rules of criminal procedure, the canons of legal ethics and state bar licensing authorities all prohibit lawyers from using coerced testimony in a courtroom.
The government and all defense lawyers entered into a plea agreement that provided for full public confessions, a public confrontation by family members of 9/11 victims during which the defendants agreed to reply truthfully to their questions, and, of course, life in prison at Gitmo.
The Army general in the Pentagon in charge of all Gitmo prosecutions — herself a former military judge — approved the plea agreement, as did the military trial judge, and all five defendants.
Then, the Biden administration Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin fired the general who approved the plea agreement and revoked the Pentagon’s approval. A federal appeals court upheld his revocation. At that point, Mohammed was on his fourth military judge and his fifth team of prosecutors.
After the court affirmed the Pentagon’s change of heart, the military judge who had approved the plea agreement retired. The current and fifth judge has presumably read the 44,000 pages of documents and transcripts that 15 years of litigation has generated as he announced last week that he will rule on the admissibility of the second round of confessions this summer.
The present judge, who did not preside over any of the hundreds of hours of proceedings in the case, including those during which the horrific tortures described above were related in an American courtroom, must now decide if the second confession was voluntary. Though the government now admits that the first confession was not voluntary, its relevance here is not the words Mohammed told his torturers but the degradation of his mental faculties due to the egregious tortures such that the second confession was also not voluntary.
Was Mohammed so conditioned to the power of his interrogators that his will was attenuated?
The standard of proof that the government must meet to get the second confession admitted is voluntariness beyond a reasonable doubt and to a moral certainty. That’s the same high standard for proving guilt in all American courts. If the feds fail to meet this standard to the satisfaction of the judge, the case will proceed to trial without the jury hearing the confession.
This is a two-edged sword for the government. If the confession is read to the jury, then the defendants and their experts can relate to the jury all the horrific things the government did in order to produce the confessions. But if the confession does not come into evidence, then the jury will not hear of the tortures unless there is a conviction and the torture testimony is presented in mitigation of punishment.
What we have here is a lawless system of brutality. Torture and all it produces is a profound violation of natural rights, the Constitution’s guarantee of due process, as well as federal law. Even practitioners of this medieval behavior have acknowledged it produces unreliable statements. It is the tool of monsters.
On the eve of America’s 250th anniversary, we are asked to accept government at its worst; one that the Framers thought they had prohibited and one to which the governed never consented.
To learn more about Judge Andrew Napolitano, visit https://JudgeNap.com.
COPYRIGHT 2026 ANDREW P. NAPOLITANO
DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM
By Freddie Ponton | 21st Century Wire | June 5, 2026
While Washington’s media class was loudly hyperventilating over Section 224 of the defense bill, the brazen attempt to weld the U.S. and Israeli militaries into a single high-tech fighting force, a far more consequential power shift was quietly advancing through the Senate with almost no resistance.
Section 622 of S. 4615, the Intelligence Authorisation Act for Fiscal Year 2027, is not some routine bureaucratic tweak. It is a calculated, multi-year project to permanently embed Israeli strategic priorities into the bloodstream of American intelligence.
Where Section 224 focuses on tanks, jets, and joint weapons production and AI, Section 622 targets the invisible nervous system that often matters more: raw intelligence flows, surveillance capabilities, cyber operations, data streams, and regional early-warning networks. And it has moved forward with almost zero public debate.
The bill doesn’t politely encourage closer ties. It mandates them. It orders the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) to aggressively expand intelligence sharing with Israel across cyber threats, sanctions evasion, missile and drone attacks, non-state actors, and air-and-space domains. It then extends this integration to the Arab states that signed the Abraham Accords, effectively building a U.S.-backed, Israel-centred intelligence bloc across the region.
This is a five-year strategic lockdown, with Congress demanding annual reports tracking “seamless integration” of Israel into regional air and missile defense architectures, full interoperability of technology networks between the U.S., Israel, and Abraham Accords partners, and detailed catalogs of every remaining legal, technical, policy, counterintelligence, and security barrier still in the way. At this stage, one could assume that lawmakers aren’t overseeing the relationship; they’re issuing marching orders to keep deepening it.
To block any future president tempted to pull back, the bill installs heavy procedural padlocks. Section 622 prohibits any suspension, reduction, or material limitation of intelligence cooperation with Israel except in the narrow case of a “specific and identifiable national security concern,” with mandatory 15-day advance notice to Congress. Another section in the same bill adds a second tripwire, naming Israel (alongside Ukraine and Taiwan) as one of the privileged few countries that trigger immediate congressional alarm bells if support is ever curtailed.
The double standard is glaring. In Section 620, Congress carefully wrote an explicit off-ramp for Ukraine, allowing intelligence support to be limited in cases of human rights violations, atrocities, or breaches of the laws of armed conflict. For Israel, they wrote nothing of the sort. No human-rights conditions. No equivalent brake. Only extra layers of statutory armor. This was not haste or oversight but a deliberate hierarchy in which Israel First is now codified in law.
The bill doubles down on the fusion elsewhere. It expands private-sector intelligence pipelines, shields those exchanges from FOIA and public scrutiny, rolls back reporting requirements on privacy, civil liberties, and oversight risks, and accelerates artificial intelligence tools for targeting and surveillance. All of this while Israel’s notorious private surveillance industry stands ready at the receiving end.
Chief among them is NSO Group and its infamous Pegasus spyware — military-grade malware repeatedly deployed against journalists, human rights defenders, dissidents, and political opponents. The Pegasus Project, Amnesty International, Citizen Lab, and others have documented its use on targets ranging from associates of Jamal Khashoggi to reporters and activists worldwide. In 2025, a U.S. court ordered NSO Group to pay more than $167 million in damages to WhatsApp for unlawfully hacking over 1,400 devices. Congress is widening the pipes that feed into this ecosystem while simultaneously weakening transparency and accountability.
The timing sharpens the cynicism. These binding commitments are being locked in just as Bill Pulte, a Trump loyalist pulled from housing finance with zero intelligence experience, has been installed as acting Director of National Intelligence. The architecture is being built, the guardrails are being removed, and the keys are handed to someone chosen for loyalty rather than expertise.
Section 224 and Section 622 together reveal the full picture. One noisy fight over military fusion, one stealth operation over intelligence fusion. Both push the same way, tightening integration, raising barriers to reversal, and triggering a tilt that puts Israeli security and regional dominance ahead of independent American judgment.
This is not standard alliance maintenance. It is legislative entrenchment of a one-sided special relationship at a moment when the costs, risks, and moral hazards have never been more urgent. Critics like Lara Friedman of the Foundation for Middle East Peace have sounded the alarm for good reason.
If this is what “America First” looks like in practice, the fine print exposes something much closer to Israel First, hard-coded into U.S. statute, insulated from democratic accountability, and engineered to survive any future attempt at course correction.
Tales of the American Empire | June 4, 2026
• China Will Not Invade Taiwan • US Navy Insanity in Japan • The Mythical Chinese Military Threat • We Were Almost Entirely Wrong About China • The American War on China Daniel Davis / Deep Dive – June 4, 2026
By Kelley Beaucar Vlahos | Responsible Statecraft | June 4, 2026
A House committee summarily struck down an amendment to strip a measure from the massive annual defense policy bill that would provide Israel “a higher level of military-industrial integration” with the U.S. than Washington has “with any other country in the world.”
Pro-Israel voices on the House Armed Services Committee argued that reports about Section 224 — that Congress was trying to integrate U.S. and Israeli military systems as a way to entrench aid without proper oversight — were disingenuous and wrong.
In fact, members claimed that these were “existing initiatives” and that Section 224 “actually improves oversight and accountability of these programs by designating a single official responsible for them,” according to Chairman Mike Rogers, (R-Ala.)
Not quite true, said the Quincy Institute’s Ben Freeman, who broke the initial story of Section 224 for RS last week. “Members of Congress supporting the proposal laid out caricatures of critiques against Section 224. And when they did actually talk about the provision itself they spread half-truths and outright inaccuracies about how far this provision will go to integrate the U.S. and Israeli defense sectors.”
According to Freeman, as reported in these pages, Section 224 would lay the groundwork for:
… bilateral research and development, co-production of weapons, joint ventures, licensing agreements, and seemingly every manner of U.S.-Israeli military-industrial complex cooperation. The U.S. and Israel already work together heavily on missile defense, but this provision would greatly expand coordination to seemingly every area of defense tech, including AI, quantum, autonomous systems, directed energy, cyber, biotech, and many more. It also proposes “network integration” and “data fusion.” In other words, the U.S. military’s data could soon be the Israeli military’s data.
Critically, it would shift the annual $3.8 billion the U.S. now gives Israel (a 10-year memorandum of understanding soon up for renewal) to these programs and partnerships, i.e. “co-production” and other “fusion” deep inside Pentagon procurement and acquisitions process, where sunlight is rare and often fleeting. A perfect solution — which is, by the way, endorsed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — to the dwindling American support for Israel’s wars and U.S. military assistance for them.
In his remarks on Section 224, Khanna spoke vociferously against what he saw as a blank check at a time when a majority of Americans say they do not want to send more military aid to Israel.
“The American people are tired of the arrogance and insolence of Prime Minister Netanyahu telling America what we should do. The entire country of Israel has a GDP that is less than a single town in my district, yet somehow Netanyahu thinks he could tell the American people what we should do,” he charged.
“I am for Team America. I am for the interests of this country, and I believe that’s what Donald Trump ran on. That includes American interests against any foreign country,” Khanna said. “We should have American sovereignty and make it clear that we strike 224. If we want to give aid to Israel, if we want to sell them weapons, that should be a vote for the entire Congress.”
Unfortunately for Khanna, the majority on the committee did not agree. According to several members, not only is Israel the only friend we have in the region, it helped us create new technologies and capabilities, and we would only benefit from a deeper relationship.
“This is a win-win relationship. We have Silicon Valley, Israel has Tel Aviv, and it’s like Silicon Valley number two. We have gained so much technology advantages from our partnership with Israel, and vice versa,” declared Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb). “They gain as well, and this is what we’re trying to do, is create that synergy. They support our foreign policy, they’ve been the most supportive of us in the U.N. They’re the only democracy in Middle East, and so I’ll oppose the amendment.”
Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-Texas) warned that American national security would be at risk if such synergy didn’t occur. After “the bad actors” of the world go after Israel they will then “exercise their free will against us,” he charged.
Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.) took the line that the reports about Section 224 were overblown. “It’s not a new framework at all. We have three existing programs right now where we do military cooperation with Israel to develop technologies. Those programs already exist,” he said.
“This amendment … suggests some other areas where maybe we should look at opportunities, and as the chairman noted, we had somebody now appointed to coordinate those programs.”
He said he, too, was “frustrated with Netanyahu’s leadership” and Israel’s support for a “war with Iran that has strengthened Iran and weakened our position,” but he disagrees that Section 224 “is Congress just bowing to what Netanyahu wants — this is to our benefit.” In fact, such sharing should occur with Ukraine, too, he added.
Rep. Sara Jacobs (D-Calif.) was the only other member who spoke out in favor of Khanna’s amendment, pointing out that current laws prohibit transfers of weapons to countries committing war crimes and violating international law, but Section 224 makes no such provisions, and takes oversight away, despite what some of her colleagues were arguing on Thursday.
She raised the issue of Israeli-owned Pegasus spyware, which was blacklisted for its use against Americans. “Two administrations from both parties left it on that list, and that same company is right now trying to buy its way into the American market, fusing our defense and technology sectors together permanently,” she said.
A proposal “with no conditions in the exact area where we have already been burned (Section 224) is reckless on its own terms, and it would do it through a must-pass bill with almost no oversight and with none of the human rights conditions that govern the rest of security assistance.”
Next steps: Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) says he will work with Khanna to strip the language from the final House NDAA. If the parade of voices that insist Israel must have this relationship with the U.S. military is any indication, it will be a hard road ahead.
Kelley Beaucar Vlahos is the Editor-in-Chief of Responsible Statecraft.
By Kyle Anzalone | The Libertarian Institute | June 4, 2026
Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Seyed Mojtaba Khamenei said that the US and Israel had suffered a humiliating defeat.
In a statement published on Thursday, Khamenei said the US and Israel’s “system of domination” has suffered a historic defeat. He explained that Washington and Tehran had shifted to targeting Iranian society through psychological warfare.
“The vile enemy, having suffered defeat at the hands of your brave sons in the armed forces, and having experienced a profound and meaningful humiliation — both on the military battlefield and in the streets.” The statement continued, “Which has visibly caused countries to drift away from it, has now focused its hybrid war on two points: breaking the people’s endurance and creating errors in the calculations of the country’s officials.”
Khamenei’s remarks came after President Donald Trump expressed that he wanted to meet with the Iranian leader. In an interview with the New York Times released on Wednesday, Trump said that he is “getting along quite well” with Khamenei. The President added, “I’d like to meet him. I’d love to meet everybody.”
It’s unclear whether Trump’s remarks are rooted in reality, as the US and Iran have not engaged in direct meetings but have instead exchanged messages through Lebanon. Additionally, Khamenei’s father was assassinated on the first day of the war.
Notably, Trump suggested that Khamenei is running Iran. The President told the New York Post that Khamenei has “absolutely” been involved in talks and other Iranian leaders have a lot of respect for him.” Trump continued, “They say he is approving, because that’s the way it has been for a long, long time. His father and then him, I guess it’s a succession. But we seem to be getting along quite well.”
US officials previously suggested that Khamenei was incapacitated, and the government was fractured. Trump claimed the Iranian leader was “not doing well” and “missing a lot of parts.”
The rare statement from Khamenei comes as the ceasefire appears on the brink of collapse.
By Adam Dick | Ron Paul Institute | June 4, 2026
On May 25, I wrote about how the Republican leadership of the United States House of Representatives had put off until the House would return from recess in June a vote on ending the Iran War. It had appeared that the war termination resolution would win a majority vote on the House floor
Here is an update. On Wednesday, with the House having come back into session this first week of June, the vote on the Iran War resolution took place. The resolution passed by a vote of 215 to 208. Breaking down the vote in a Reuters article, Patricia Zengerle wrote:
The four House Republicans who voted for the war powers resolution were Representatives Tom Barrett of Michigan, Warren Davidson of Ohio, Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania and Thomas Massie of Kentucky.
No Democrats voted against it. Seven House members did not vote.
House members were able to use the War Powers Resolution to force consideration of the Iran War termination resolution contrary to the wishes of House leadership.
But, before supporters of a noninterventionist US foreign policy celebrate too much, they should read on in Zengerle’s article to where she reports that also on Wednesday House members moved toward escalating US involvement in the Ukraine War, using another procedural mechanism to bypass leadership. She wrote:
Separately on Wednesday, the House approved a procedural motion that clears the way for a vote on the Ukraine Support Act, which would provide security aid to Ukraine as it fights a Russian invasion. The act reached the floor only after a petition reached a 218-signature threshold last month to move ahead.
Six Republicans and one independent who normally votes with Republicans voted in favor of the Ukraine measure.
With House Democrats appearing uniformly against one war and for another, it is hard not to see their views on the respective wars as political — vote against the Iran War because it is “President Trump’s war” and for the Ukraine War because it is “President Biden’s war.” (In truth, well over a year into Trump’s presidency, the Ukraine War that he had promised to end quickly has become clearly Trump’s war as well.) The same reasoning would seem to apply in reverse to the Republican leadership’s efforts to prevent votes on both matters. The “People’s House” is a disgrace.
Press TV – June 4, 2026
The Islamic Revolution Guards Corps has stated that no peace will be established in the region without the withdrawal of Israel from occupied territories in Lebanon, as it condemns ongoing Israeli attacks on Lebanese civilians.
In a statement issued on the recent events in Lebanon on Thursday, the IRGC declared that international condemnations and expressions of disgust from countries and nations around the world have had no effect on the behavior of Tel Aviv’s “bloodthirsty rulers.”
“The arrogant American regime, under the pretext of establishing peace, has only increased crime and genocide through its interventions,” the statement read.
The IRGC described the Israeli army as “cowardly and incapable,” stating that it tries to compensate for its battlefield defeats by killing civilians and destroying homes, hospitals, and schools.
“This racist regime, despite unlimited support from America and European countries, has not even been able to win the hearts of the people of a single occupied village during its shameful existence,” the statement said.
“Its skill is merely ruling over burned lands, and every day we witness the destruction of the homes of the oppressed people of Palestine and Lebanon at the hands of this aggressor regime,” it further said.
The IRGC asserted that the Lebanese nation will not allow the occupying regime to achieve through a forced agreement what it could not achieve through war, even with the support of the “child-killing American regime.”
“Our primary condition for accepting a ceasefire in the regional war has been a ceasefire on all fronts, including Lebanon,” the statement said.
The IRGC stated that the enemy must urgently halt its attacks on the Lebanese people, immediately withdraw from occupied Lebanese territories back behind international borders, and recognize Lebanon’s territorial integrity.
“The Lebanese nation is the pride of the Ummah and a symbol of the honor of the region’s peoples. We will support them with all our being. No peace will be established in the region without withdrawal from the occupied territories of Lebanon,” it said.
On Monday, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he had ordered strikes on the Dahiyeh area, a predominantly Shia district in Beirut’s southern suburbs, and issued evacuation orders covering the entire area.
In response, Iran’s central military command warned that if Israel carried out its threat to bomb southern Beirut, Iranian forces would retaliate against the northern occupied territories.
Iran’s Foreign Ministry also said Tehran was ready to help Lebanon resist the “illegal aggression,” adding that a Lebanon ceasefire is “an integral part of any ceasefire and any final agreement” with the United States.
Shortly after Iran’s warning, US President Donald Trump said on social media that he had intervened, claiming he had held a “very productive conversation” with Netanyahu that prevented further escalation.
He also said he had reached an understanding with Hezbollah through senior representatives, stating that the resistance group had agreed to halt attacks in exchange for Israel refraining from strikes.
A Pakistan-brokered ceasefire between Tehran and Washington, which also covers Lebanon, has been in place since early April, though Israel has continued carrying out daily attacks on the Arab country in violation of the truce.
Iran has repeatedly said that any ceasefire must be comprehensive, covering all fronts, including Lebanon, and has warned it will not tolerate continued Israeli attacks on the country.
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Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
Press TV – April 13, 2016
Fifteen of the 9/11 “hijackers” from Saudi Arabia were CIA agents working for the United States government, which was seeking to destroy the Middle East for Israel and to double the American military budget, says Dr. Kevin Barrett, an American academic who has been studying the events of 9/11 since late 2003…. continue
Aletho News If Americans Knew No Tricks Zone
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