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What Is Defensive Medicine?

An Essay on Why Your Doctor’s Recommendation May Have Nothing to Do with You

Lies are Unbekoming | June 15, 2026

The 38 Percent

A prospective study at a Level I trauma center in the United States examined 1,097 consecutive CT scans and asked the ordering physicians to identify, for each scan, the reason it was performed. Four hundred and sixteen of those scans (38 percent) were ordered primarily to protect the physician from a possible lawsuit, not because the clinical situation required imaging. The defensively ordered scans exposed patients to an average of 8.8 millisieverts of ionizing radiation per person. Of those defensive scans, 2.2 percent changed how the patient was managed. The remaining 97.8 percent produced no clinical benefit. What they did produce was radiation exposure to patients, charges to insurance, and legal cover for the ordering physicians.¹

The 2.2 percent represents roughly nine patients out of the 416 defensively scanned whose course of care shifted because of the scan. Those nine exist. They are the cases on which defensive practice rests its moral claim. The trade their existence requires, however, is one no consenting patient would knowingly accept: irradiating roughly forty-five people to alter the management of one, with the population-level cancer burden falling on the forty-four whose management did not change. “Management change” is also not a synonym for benefit; it includes precautionary medication, further imaging, and surveillance protocols that themselves produce iatrogenic harm. The defense of the 2.2 percent does not survive contact with the math.

Extrapolated nationally, defensive CT imaging alone is estimated to add approximately $501 million annually to American healthcare expenditure, a figure that covers only CT scans and only in the United States.¹ A 2025 paper in JAMA Internal Medicine projects that the 93 million CT scans performed in the United States in 2023 will eventually produce approximately 103,000 cancers across the lifetimes of the people who received them, accounting for roughly 5 percent of all new annual cancer diagnoses in the country.²

A subset of those cancers will arise from scans ordered to protect not the patient but the physician. The patient will never know they were exposed for that reason. By the time the cancer arrives, decades after the scan, the link between the encounter and the disease is no longer recoverable.

Defensive medicine is the operating principle that produces this arrangement. The practice is documented in peer-reviewed literature, in physician self-reports, and across the cost-accounting of the institutions that profit from it. The patient sitting across the desk from the doctor is rarely aware the principle exists. The doctor knows. What this essay describes is what happens in the consulting room as a result of that asymmetry of awareness.

What It Actually Is

The phrase “defensive medicine” is not a critic’s label. It is the term physicians use themselves, in their own surveys, to describe diagnostic and treatment decisions made primarily to avoid legal liability rather than to benefit patients. The practice has been studied for more than four decades, appearing in peer-reviewed journals, in confidential surveys conducted by professional societies, and in geographic analyses showing that physicians in high-liability states order more diagnostic tests than physicians in states with malpractice tort reform.³

A 2005 study published in JAMA surveyed physicians in six high-risk specialties in Pennsylvania. Ninety-three percent reported practicing defensive medicine, and 43 percent reported using imaging technology in clinically unnecessary circumstances. The authors noted that defensive practice was reported across all specialties studied and was not confined to physicians with prior malpractice claims.⁴ The behavior described was not the conduct of a deviant minority. It was the operating culture of the specialties surveyed.

Researchers distinguish two registers. The first, positive defensive medicine, involves ordering tests, procedures, or consultations that the physician believes are unlikely to benefit the patient but that protect against accusations of inadequate diagnostic effort. The second, negative defensive medicine, involves declining to treat patients perceived as carrying higher litigation risk regardless of their clinical need. Both registers redirect clinical decisions away from the patient’s medical interest and toward the physician’s legal exposure.

The point is not the existence of defensive medicine but its normalization. Concealment from patients is not required because the practice is invisible by default. The patient cannot tell, sitting in the consulting room, whether a test was ordered to investigate their symptoms or to insulate the doctor against a hypothetical plaintiff’s attorney. The recommendation looks identical from the patient’s chair.

From the patient’s vantage point, what is visible is a competent professional, with medical training the patient does not have, who has determined that this particular test is required. What is invisible is whether that determination was made for reasons entirely indifferent to the patient’s medical situation.

The One-Way Ratchet

The legal system creates the conditions that produce defensive medicine, and it does so through a single asymmetry. Physicians face liability for under-diagnosis and almost none for over-diagnosis.

A man whose physician declines to order a PSA test, and who is later found to have advanced prostate cancer, has a malpractice claim. The claim may or may not succeed, but it is the kind of case malpractice attorneys take and insurance carriers settle. A man whose physician ordered the PSA test, who returned an elevated reading, who underwent a transrectal biopsy, who developed post-procedure sepsis from bowel bacteria driven into the bloodstream by the needle, who survived the sepsis but was left with persistent erectile dysfunction and urinary incontinence following a radical prostatectomy for a low-grade cancer that autopsy data suggests would have killed him only if he lived to ninety, that man has no claim. In most cases, he is grateful. His cancer was “caught early.” He was never shown the autopsy data on indolent prostate cancers, never told that 16 percent of American men receive this diagnosis but only 3 percent die from it, and is unaware that his cascade of harm originated in a screening decision medical evidence does not actually justify.⁵

The doctor who ordered the unnecessary test produced durable, measurable harm. The legal system records no exposure for that doctor. The doctor who did not order the test, and whose patient happened to be the rare one whose cancer was missed, faces a lawsuit regardless of whether ordering the test would have changed the outcome. From inside the legal architecture, the safest course is always to test more, because the asymmetry between under-diagnosis liability and over-diagnosis liability mandates it.

Studies of physician behavior confirm the prediction empirically. Doctors in high-liability states order significantly more diagnostic tests than doctors in states with malpractice reform. The variation tracks the legal climate, not the underlying disease burden.³ When Texas enacted comprehensive tort reform in 2003, defensive testing patterns in the state shifted measurably, although the magnitude and durability of the shift remain contested.³ The literature is consistent on the underlying point. Physician behavior is responsive to liability exposure, and the response is toward more testing rather than less.

This is the one-way ratchet, moving in a single direction over time. Settled malpractice cases raise the practical threshold of caution. New appellate decisions enlarge the set of investigations a prudent physician must order to satisfy the standard of care. The countervailing pressure that should exist from the harms produced by overtesting does not exist, because those harms generate no legal exposure for anyone.

From the patient’s vantage point, none of this is legible. The ratchet appears as escalating recommendations for tests, scans, and follow-up procedures. The patient assumes the escalation reflects an improving understanding of their personal medical risk. It does not; it reflects an evolving legal climate that has nothing to do with the patient’s biology.

The Standard of Care as Liability Shield

The medical profession refers to “the standard of care” as if it were a quality benchmark, a threshold below which clinical performance becomes inadequate. The standard of care in legal practice is something different. It is a defense position. Meeting the standard is what a malpractice defense attorney needs to establish to defend a doctor against a claim. The phrase describes legal adequacy, not clinical excellence.

The structural problem follows from how the standard is defined. The American Society of Anesthesiologists Closed Claims Project, the specialty’s primary instrument of self-examination for half a century, contains data that makes this explicit. When anesthesia care was judged by peer reviewers as appropriate, meeting the standard of care, payment was still made in more than 40 percent of malpractice claims. When care was judged substandard, payment was more likely but not certain.⁶

The standard of care, in other words, does not predict patient outcomes. It does not even reliably predict legal outcomes. What it predicts is the defensibility of a physician’s practice in a malpractice proceeding.

The circular logic closes off accountability at the definitional level. If the standard of care is what the majority of practitioners do, and the majority of practitioners do not obtain pre-operative cognitive baselines before general anesthesia in elderly patients, do not disclose post-operative cognitive dysfunction risk before consent, and do not select anesthetic agents based on the mechanistic evidence suggesting that some agents are worse than others for cognitive outcomes, then none of these omissions constitute substandard care. The standard is self-referentially defined by the mean of existing practice. The mean of existing practice cannot, by definition, be substandard.⁷

Harm that occurs in conformity with standard practice is not negligence. Negligence requires deviation from standard practice. Standard practice is what most practitioners do. What most practitioners do is whatever protects them most reliably from claims, which is whatever the standard of care currently is. The loop closes on itself.

The result is a body of harm that the accountability system cannot see by its own architecture. The Closed Claims Project, for all its methodological rigor, measures only what generates a claim. Acute, visible, legally contested events register: death, brain damage, esophageal intubation. The reduction in respiratory-related anesthetic deaths between 1985 and 2000 followed exactly this mechanism. The harms were acute and visible, pulse oximetry made them detectable in real time, malpractice exposure existed, the insurance system promoted the monitoring standard, and uptake was rapid.⁶ Chronic, diffuse, legally uncontested events do not register in any meaningful volume. Post-operative cognitive dysfunction, the slow cascade of overdiagnosis triggered by routine screening, the accumulation of pharmaceutical harm over decades: these generate no claims. They produce no signal in the accountability system the specialty uses to identify and correct its harms.

The Closed Claims architecture, the standard of care doctrine, and the malpractice insurance system together form a coherent legal-administrative apparatus whose function is to defend physician behavior against external challenge. Protecting patients from the iatrogenic consequences of defensive practice was never within the apparatus’s design brief, and it does not perform that protective function in practice.

The Cascade

What patients experience inside the defensive system is rarely a single unnecessary test. It is a sequence of tests, each triggered by the previous, each individually defensible, none of them collectively defensible.

Consider a fifty-year-old executive who opts in to a whole-body CT scan offered by a private screening clinic. The scan reveals a small lung nodule. The nodule is asymptomatic and almost certainly benign, since incidental findings of this kind appear on roughly 25 percent of all CT scans.⁸ The clinic recommends a follow-up CT in three months to assess for growth. The follow-up shows the nodule unchanged but identifies a small adrenal mass in the same imaging field. A PET scan is recommended to characterize both findings. The PET scan is negative for malignancy but introduces ambiguity about a mediastinal lymph node. A bronchoscopy is performed to sample tissue. The pathology returns benign scar tissue. The bronchoscopy is complicated by a pneumothorax requiring chest tube placement. The chest tube placement is uneventful. The executive returns to work three weeks later, having paid approximately $14,000 out of pocket, with no disease detected, no condition improved, and a measurable cumulative radiation exposure that did not exist before the cascade began.

The pattern is not exceptional. Incidentalomas trigger an average of $1,100 to $3,500 per patient in additional testing, with no associated improvement in mortality.⁸ Lung cancer screening trials found that one-third of patients had false-positive findings after two scans, and that one in fifteen underwent unnecessary invasive procedures as a result.⁸

The PSA cascade follows the same architecture in a different organ. An elevated PSA reading, which can result from prostatitis, benign prostatic hyperplasia, recent ejaculation, a urinary tract infection, or simply a larger-than-average prostate, triggers a transrectal biopsy. The biopsy punctures the bowel wall and introduces fecal bacteria into otherwise sterile tissue. Post-procedure sepsis is a documented complication, with antibiotic-resistant E. coli identified as the most commonly cultured organism, and hospitalization rates have risen alongside global antibiotic resistance. The 2022 GRAM Report published in The Lancet attributed approximately 1.3 million annual deaths worldwide to what it terms antimicrobial resistance, identifying E. coli as the most significant contributing organism.⁹ Tuncel and colleagues found that 41 percent of men reported erectile dysfunction at one month post-biopsy, with 15 percent still affected at six months.¹⁰ Cardiovascular events increase by a relative risk of 1.3 in the first year after diagnosis. Suicide risk rises by a relative risk of 2.6, with the highest risk in the first week.¹¹ These complications do not appear on the consent form.

The thyroid cascade follows the same architecture in a different specialty. A postpartum woman is screened for thyroid dysfunction. Her labs are abnormal during the transient hypothyroid phase of postpartum thyroiditis, a condition that typically resolves within twelve to eighteen months without intervention. She is started on levothyroxine and told she will need it indefinitely. The ultrasound performed to evaluate her thyroid identifies nodules, which are common and usually benign. The nodules require monitoring. Monitoring reveals minor changes. The changes prompt biopsy. The biopsy is indeterminate. A partial thyroidectomy follows. The woman who had a self-resolving postpartum condition is now missing part of her thyroid, on lifelong hormone replacement, and entered as a chronic patient in the disease registry.¹²

No single doctor along the cascade feels responsible for the cumulative outcome. Each one acted on the previous finding, documented their reasoning, and met the standard of care for their step in the sequence. Stopping the cascade at any point would have required a particular doctor to accept the legal risk of letting an uncertain finding go uninvestigated, and that doctor would be the patient’s doctor, not the patient. The asymmetry of where risk lands is the engine of the cascade. Legal risk is borne by the physician’s career, clinical risk by the patient’s body.

The cascade is the natural product of an accountability system that punishes physicians for missed diagnoses but not for downstream harms. It is what the system is structurally calibrated to produce. From the patient’s chair the cascade looks like a sequence of reasonable medical decisions; from the physician’s, the same sequence looks defensible at every step. The two perspectives never meet, and the gap between them is where the iatrogenic harm accumulates.

What the Doctor Will Not Say Out Loud

The defensive arrangement depends on a structural information asymmetry. A patient cannot make an informed decision about a recommended test if the test’s purposes, risks, and statistical performance are not disclosed. The published data are consistent across multiple settings and countries: this information is not disclosed.

Among American academic medical centers, only 15 percent routinely inform patients about radiation risks before CT scanning. By contrast, 84 percent of the same institutions discuss the risk of contrast reactions, which is a less significant long-term risk for most patients.¹³ Only 9 percent of surveyed sites inform patients about non-radiation alternatives to CT that might avoid radiation exposure entirely.¹³

The communication gap has been measured directly. In one emergency department study, 78 percent of physicians reported that they routinely discussed CT radiation risks with patients. Twenty percent of patients in the same encounters recalled being told.¹⁴ Both groups were describing the same conversations.

In 1999, Federman and colleagues published a study in Effective Clinical Practice examining whether informed consent actually occurred before PSA testing. Of the men who had received PSA tests, 31 percent were unaware their physicians had ordered the test. Of those who were aware, only 47 percent recalled any discussion of risks and benefits.¹⁵ Some men were tested without their knowledge. The study is more than twenty-five years old. Subsequent investigations show that the pattern has not changed. A qualitative analysis of men’s lived experience after PSA-driven diagnosis found that patients felt inadequately prepared and unsupported from the point of screening through biopsy and treatment decisions, and that the harms of overdiagnosis and overtreatment were rarely explained.¹⁶

The Australian and New Zealand College of Anaesthetists publishes a position statement on informed consent (document PS26(A)) that sets out what the specialty formally requires of its practitioners. The standard is specific: patients must be provided with information that a reasonable person in their position might wish to know and to which they might attach significance. The document includes the threshold that risks should be disclosed when “an adverse outcome is rare but the detriment severe, and an adverse outcome common but the detriment slight,” states explicitly that a surgical consent form does not constitute informed consent for anesthesia, and notes that time pressure does not eliminate the requirement for genuine consent.¹⁷

Applied to a documented condition such as post-operative cognitive dysfunction in elderly surgical patients, measurable in approximately one in four at one week after general anesthesia and one in ten still impaired at three months, with no known treatment, the ANZCA standard produces an unambiguous conclusion. The risk satisfies both disclosure thresholds, the detriment is significant, and the standard requires that the disclosure be made. Disclosure does not occur in clinical practice in the overwhelming majority of cases.¹⁸

The disclosure standard exists in writing. The disclosure itself does not occur in the consulting room.

The reason is not that physicians lack knowledge of these risks. The relevant studies appear in journals to which the practicing physicians subscribe and which they cite in their own work. The information has accumulated for more than two decades in some cases, more than seventy years in others. The reason disclosure does not occur is simpler than ignorance. Disclosing risks creates two adverse consequences for the physician. First, some patients decline the recommended intervention, which reduces the procedure rate and exposes the physician to liability if the rare missed diagnosis occurs. Second, patients who proceed and experience the disclosed complication have documented grounds for claiming they were misinformed about the relevant probabilities if the disclosure was incomplete. The path of least legal resistance is a generic, time-pressured consent process that satisfies the formal documentation requirement without producing a genuinely informed decision.

The consent form records that the patient was informed; the evidence shows they were not. Both statements are simultaneously true within the legal and clinical architecture as currently structured.

The Trapped Clinician

A complete account of defensive medicine has to address what is happening to the doctor inside the structure, because reducing the practice to physician greed or laziness misses what the evidence shows. Most doctors who order defensive tests are not behaving unethically by the standards of the system they trained in. They are responding rationally to the incentive structure they are embedded in.

That structure has several layers. The first is education. American medical training increasingly emphasizes adherence to clinical practice guidelines, many of which are written by panels with substantial financial ties to the manufacturers of recommended products. A widely cited analysis published in the BMJ found that the majority of panelists on the National Cholesterol Education Program guidelines had current or recent financial ties to pharmaceutical companies whose products the guidelines would mandate.¹⁹ Roughly two-thirds of American medical school department chairs hold financial relationships with industry of some kind.²⁰ A physician trained to follow guidelines that emerged from such panels is trained to order more tests, prescribe earlier, and intervene more aggressively, and to consider this evidence-based medicine.

The second layer is employment. Physician practice in the United States has shifted dramatically from independent practice to employment by health systems. The employed physician is subject to productivity metrics that reward volume: number of patient encounters per day, number of procedures per quarter, billing per visit. A physician who orders fewer tests, sees patients longer, or recommends conservative observation is not rewarded, and in many systems is penalized. Performance reviews and bonuses turn on whether the physician’s practice patterns align with institutional throughput targets, which are set to amortize the cost of expensive imaging equipment and staffed procedural suites.²¹

The third layer is time. A primary care visit in the American system is typically scheduled for fifteen to twenty minutes. That visit is meant to address whatever the patient came in for, plus all the screening reminders generated by the electronic medical record: colonoscopy overdue, bone density scan overdue, mammogram overdue, annual physical overdue. The path through this consultation that minimizes liability and maximizes billing is to order the indicated screenings, prescribe what the algorithm suggests, and move to the next patient. The path that protects the patient requires more. It requires taking time to ask whether each screening is appropriate for the particular person sitting in the chair, discussing harms as well as benefits, and documenting an informed refusal where indicated. That work adds twenty to thirty minutes of unbillable time to a visit that the system already says is too long.

The fourth layer is the broader commercial logic. A 2018 Goldman Sachs analyst report titled The Genome Revolution, written by Salveen Richter, included a section addressing the financial implications of curative therapies. The question, posed in writing within an investment research document published by one of the largest investment banks in the world, was direct: “Is curing patients a sustainable business model?” The report’s analysis indicated that one-time cures produce short revenue arcs, while chronic disease management produces long ones.²² The economic logic surrounding the physician, including the institutions that employ them, the products they prescribe, and the diagnostic technologies they order, is calibrated to manage disease rather than to cure it. The defensive medicine arrangement is consistent with this calibration. A patient subjected to a cascade of testing and treatment generates recurring revenue. A patient told that observation is reasonable does not.

None of this absolves the doctor. The structural pressures are real and explain why the system produces the outcomes it does, but the patient sitting across the desk is still being subjected to risks they have not been told about. A doctor who orders a defensively motivated CT scan, who fails to disclose its radiation risks, who refers an incidentaloma for follow-up imaging that initiates a cascade, is participating in iatrogenic harm whether they intend to or not. The structural account explains how the participation occurs without absolving the physician of having participated.

The honest version of the consultation would be something close to the following. I am going to order this test primarily because I will face legal exposure if I do not, and missing the rare cancer it might detect would be a career-ending event for me. I have no good way to predict whether the test will produce useful information in your case. If it produces a false positive, I will refer you for further investigation, and the cascade that follows may harm you. You can decline the test, and I will document your decision.

That consultation does not take place. Conducting it would expose the arrangement as it actually operates, and the arrangement depends on the patient’s continued belief that the recommendation reflects clinical necessity rather than legal self-preservation.

There is a question every doctor reading this should be willing to ask themselves before their next clinic. Of the tests, procedures, prescriptions, and referrals I will recommend today, how many would I recommend if there were no liability exposure attached to declining to recommend them? The honest answer, for most physicians in most American practices, would substantially shrink the volume of recommended interventions. That difference is the iatrogenic harm. The volume of intervention that exceeds what would be recommended on purely medical grounds is the volume the patient is being asked to absorb on the doctor’s behalf.

What to Do in the Consulting Room

The structural problem is not solved at the individual level. A single patient cannot reform American medical training, the employment structure of physicians, or the asymmetry of the legal system. What a single patient can do is recognize the arrangement, refuse to participate in the parts of it that produce harm, and document the refusal.

Three questions interrupt almost any cascade at the point of entry.

The first is what happens if we wait? Most diagnostic decisions are not emergent. The doctor will typically describe a worst case, because the legal exposure forces them to describe a worst case, but the relevant question is what happens in the average case if observation is chosen over intervention. For most screening tests, the answer is that nothing happens. The natural history of the condition, in the absence of detection, would not have caused symptoms or harm within the patient’s lifetime. The cascade was triggered by the test, not by the underlying disease.

The second is what are the alternatives? Most diagnostic algorithms admit multiple paths. Ultrasound and MRI can substitute for CT in a wide range of clinical situations; active surveillance is a documented option in many cancers where biopsy is reflexively recommended; lifestyle modification has demonstrated effects in conditions for which pharmaceutical intervention is the default. The default path is rarely the only path. It is the path of lowest legal exposure for the physician, which is not the same thing as the path of lowest harm for the patient.

The third is is this required, or recommended? “Required” is almost never the correct answer. The patient who receives a flat recommendation often assumes the test is mandatory. It is not. It is recommended. The distinction matters because a recommendation can be declined.

Declining is the operative skill. Pressure converges on the patient from multiple sources to maximize the rate of test acceptance: electronic medical record reminders for “overdue” screenings, clinic staff who raise the issue at every visit, automated reminder letters, partner and family pressure, the doctor’s recommendation itself, and the patient’s own fear of missing something serious. None of these constitutes medical necessity. They constitute the operating environment of a system that profits from compliance.

Specific phrases work. I have reviewed the evidence on this test and decided the harms outweigh the benefits for someone in my situation. Please note my informed refusal in my record. I understand you recommend this. Can you tell me the number needed to screen and the overdiagnosis rate? I would like to make an informed decision. *I am not declining medical care. I am declining this specific test based on the published evidence. I would like to discuss what, if anything, I should monitor instead.*²³

The documented refusal protects the patient and, by an arrangement the system rarely advertises, also protects the doctor. A patient who has formally declined a recommended test, with the refusal documented in the medical record alongside the doctor’s recommendation and the discussion of evidence, has produced exactly the consent process that the system claims to require. The doctor’s liability exposure for the refused test is substantially reduced because the patient now owns the decision. The patient’s exposure to the iatrogenic harms of the unnecessary test is eliminated because the test does not occur.

This outcome is available to any patient who insists on it. The system does not offer it spontaneously because it is the system’s least profitable configuration.

Closing

The trauma center study identified 416 patients out of 1,097 who received CT scans ordered for reasons that had little to do with their medical condition. Each of those patients sat through the procedure believing the scan had been ordered because the doctor’s clinical judgment required it. Each absorbed, on average, 8.8 millisieverts of ionizing radiation. A small percentage of them will develop cancers from that exposure decades from now, and by that point the link between cause and effect will be unrecoverable. None of the doctors who ordered the scans will be sued, none of the institutions that performed them will be sued, and the eventual cancer patients will not know which encounter caused the disease. If they did know, the standard-of-care defense would close the case before it began.

What is happening in the American consulting room, and increasingly in clinical encounters across every country that has adopted the American model, is a form of risk transfer. The legal risk that the physician would otherwise carry is transferred to the patient in the form of unnecessary radiation, biopsies, cascades of investigation, lifelong prescriptions, and the diminished autonomy of being managed rather than cared for. The transfer is invisible from the patient’s chair because it is denominated in a currency the patient cannot read.

The standard of care functions as a liability defense rather than a clinical benchmark, and the consent form that accompanies it operates as an administrative shield rather than a record of genuine disclosure. A defensive test recommended on these foundations is calibrated to the doctor’s legal exposure first and to the patient’s clinical situation second. The cascade that follows a positive result is not the pursuit of the patient’s recovery; it is the completion of a documentation chain demonstrating that the system did everything it was supposed to do.

You can decline. The right to decline is the last patch of ground in the consulting room that the system has not yet enclosed. The document the doctor wants you to sign is consent to a process calibrated for everyone except you. The document you can produce, a written and dated refusal of a specific recommended intervention with your reasoning attached, is the only piece of paper in the room that says what it claims to say.

How I’d Explain This to a Six-Year-Old

Pretend your school has a rule. If you fall down at recess, even just a little bit, the teacher has to send you to the nurse. Not because the teacher thinks you are hurt. The teacher knows you are fine. But if the teacher doesn’t send you and your knee turns out to be a bit bruised, your mom might call the principal, and the principal might get cross with the teacher.

So you go to the nurse. The nurse looks at your knee. To be safe, the nurse takes a picture of inside your leg with a special machine. The machine uses a tiny bit of bad stuff that goes into your body. Just a little. Not enough to hurt today. But every time the machine takes a picture of you, a little more bad stuff goes in, and after lots of pictures the little bits add up.

The picture shows your knee is fine. The nurse already knew that. But the picture also shows a tiny spot somewhere else that is probably nothing. To be safe, the nurse sends you for more pictures. The more pictures show another small thing. Now you are scared. Your mom is scared. Nobody can stop, because if they stop and the small thing turns out to be something, the nurse and the doctor and the school could get into trouble.

You came in with a scraped knee. You leave with three pictures of your insides, a worried mom, and a bit of the bad stuff inside you. Nothing was wrong. Nothing got better. All the grown-ups feel safer, because they did everything they were supposed to do.

That is what happens to grown-ups at the doctor every day. There is a name for it. The name is defensive medicine. It means the people taking care of you are mostly trying not to get into trouble themselves, and those two things, looking after you and not getting into trouble, almost never point the same way.

Here is the thing nobody tells you. You can say no. When the grown-up says “I think we should do this test,” you are allowed to ask, “what happens if we wait?” You are allowed to say, “no thank you, not today.” You are allowed to leave with a scraped knee and nothing else.

References

The prospective study at a Level I trauma center identifying 38 percent (416/1,097) of CT scans as defensively motivated, with associated radiation exposure of 8.8 mSv per patient and a 2.2 percent management-change rate, is documented in Unbekoming, The Screening Trap, v1.0, 2026, chapter on CT scan overuse. The $501 million annual estimate for defensive CT imaging in the United States is drawn from the same source, which synthesizes figures from Mello MM, Chandra A, Gawande AA, Studdert DM. “National Costs of the Medical Liability System.” Health Affairs 2010;29(9):1569–1577.
Smith-Bindman R, Miglioretti DL, Lacson R, et al. “Projected Lifetime Cancer Risks From Current Computed Tomography Imaging.” JAMA Internal Medicine 2025. The study projects approximately 103,000 future cancers from the 93 million CT scans performed in the United States in 2023.
On geographic variation in physician test-ordering tracking liability climate: Kessler DP, McClellan M. “Do Doctors Practice Defensive Medicine?” Quarterly Journal of Economics 1996;111(2):353–390; Kessler DP, McClellan M. “How Liability Law Affects Medical Productivity.” Journal of Health Economics 2002;21(6):931–955. On the specific effect of Texas tort reform (enacted 2003) and subsequent damage cap analysis: Paik M, Black B, Hyman DA. “The Receding Tide of Medical Malpractice Litigation: Part 2, Effect of Damage Caps.” Journal of Empirical Legal Studies 2013;10(4):639–669.
Studdert DM, Mello MM, Sage WM, et al. “Defensive Medicine Among High-Risk Specialist Physicians in a Volatile Malpractice Environment.” JAMA 2005;293(21):2609–2617. The study surveyed physicians in six high-risk specialties in Pennsylvania; 93 percent reported defensive practice, and 43 percent reported imaging used in clinically unnecessary circumstances.
National Cancer Institute, “Prostate-Specific Antigen (PSA) Test,” cancer.gov. The 16 percent lifetime probability of diagnosis and 3 percent probability of mortality figures are the standard reported values. Autopsy data on indolent prostate cancers: Bell KJL et al. “Prevalence of incidental prostate cancer: A systematic review of autopsy studies.” International Journal of Cancer 2015;137(7):1749–1757.
American Society of Anesthesiologists Closed Claims Project data summarized in Unbekoming, Before You Go Under, v1.0, 2026, chapter on the consent gap and the standard of care. Original source: Domino KB, Posner KL, Caplan RA, Cheney FW. “Awareness during anesthesia: a closed claims analysis.” Anesthesiology 1999;90(4):1053–1061. Additional Closed Claims data on standard-of-care judgments and payment patterns from the ASA Closed Claims Project as documented through the early 2000s.
The circular logic of standard-of-care doctrine and the self-referential definition of negligence-by-deviation is analyzed in detail in Unbekoming, Before You Go Under, v1.0, 2026, chapter on the closed claims ceiling. The argument applies generally across surgical specialties.
Incidentaloma rates and associated downstream costs documented in Unbekoming, The Screening Trap, v1.0, 2026, drawing on Berland LL, Silverman SG, Gore RM, et al. “Managing incidental findings on abdominal CT: white paper of the ACR incidental findings committee.” Journal of the American College of Radiology 2010;7(10):754–773. Lung cancer screening false-positive rates: Croswell JM et al. “Cumulative incidence of false-positive results in repeated, multimodal cancer screening.” Annals of Family Medicine 2009;7(3):212–222.
GBD 2019 Antimicrobial Resistance Collaborators. “Global burden of bacterial antimicrobial resistance in 2019: a systematic analysis.” The Lancet 2022;399(10325):629–655. The report attributes approximately 1.3 million deaths directly and 5 million deaths in association with antibiotic-resistant bacterial conditions.
Tuncel A, Toklu H, Belenli O, et al. “The impact of transrectal prostate needle biopsy on sexuality in men and their female partners.” Urology 2008;71(6):1128–1131.
Fang F, Keating NL, Mucci LA, et al. “Immediate risk of suicide and cardiovascular death after a prostate cancer diagnosis.” Journal of the National Cancer Institute 2010;102(5):307–314. Discussed in Unbekoming, The Screening Trap, v1.0, 2026, and in Unbekoming, The PSA Trap, 2026.
Postpartum thyroid cascade documented in Unbekoming, Medicalized Motherhood, edition 1.0, 2026, chapter on postpartum screening. See also Stagnaro-Green A et al. “Guidelines of the American Thyroid Association for the diagnosis and management of thyroid disease during pregnancy and postpartum.” Thyroid 2011;21(10):1081–1125, for the conventional clinical pathway.
Lee CI et al. “Diagnostic CT scans: assessment of patient, physician, and radiologist awareness of radiation dose and possible risks.” Radiology 2004;231(2):393–398. The 15 percent / 84 percent and 9 percent figures are widely cited and appear in subsequent surveys of academic medical centers.
Caoili EM et al. “Patients’ knowledge and perception of CT scan radiation risks.” American Journal of Roentgenology 2014;202(3):W232–W237. The 78 percent / 20 percent physician-patient recall gap is documented in emergency department settings and is broadly consistent across studies of CT consent.
Federman DG, Goyal S, Kamina A, et al. “Informed consent for PSA screening: does it happen?” Effective Clinical Practice 1999;2(4):152–157.
Hersch JK, Nickel BL, Ghane A, et al. “Resisting recommended treatment for prostate cancer: a qualitative analysis of the lived experience of possible overdiagnosis.” BMJ Open 2019;9(5):e026960.
Australian and New Zealand College of Anaesthetists. PS26(A) Position Statement on Informed Consent for Anaesthesia or Sedation. Melbourne: ANZCA; 2021. The thresholds and standards quoted are from the publicly available document.
Post-operative cognitive dysfunction (POCD) prevalence figures and the disclosure gap are documented in Unbekoming, Before You Go Under, v1.0, 2026, drawing on Li LY, Staffaroni AM, Whitlock EL. “Subjective Cognitive Complaints and Anecdotal Descriptions of Postoperative Cognitive Decline: Missing Pieces of the Postoperative Neurocognitive Disorder Puzzle.” Advances in Anesthesia 2024;42(1):27–40; and Moller JT et al. “Long-term postoperative cognitive dysfunction in the elderly: ISPOCD1 study.” The Lancet 1998;351(9106):857–861.
Lenzer J. “Majority of panelists on cholesterol guidelines have current or recent ties to drug industry.” BMJ 2004;328(7452):8. See also Abramson J, Wright JM. “Are lipid-lowering guidelines evidence-based?” The Lancet 2007;369(9557):168–169.
Campbell EG, Weissman JS, Ehringhaus S, et al. “Institutional academic-industry relationships.” JAMA 2007;298(15):1779–1786. The two-thirds figure for medical school department chairs holding industry relationships is widely cited and is documented in Unbekoming, The Architecture of Deception, v1.0, 2026.
Casalino LP et al. “External incentives, information technology, and organized processes to improve health care quality for patients with chronic diseases.” JAMA 2003;289(4):434–441. The broader literature on the shift toward physician employment and productivity-based compensation in American health systems is extensive.
Goldman Sachs Equity Research, Salveen Richter. The Genome Revolution. Industry note, April 2018. The “sustainable business model” question and the report’s analysis of revenue arcs for curative therapy are widely cited; the document was subsequently the subject of multiple public commentaries. Discussed in detail in Unbekoming, Chronic Conditions, v1.0, 2026.
Specific patient phrases for documented refusal adapted from the patient toolkit in Unbekoming, The Screening Trap, v1.0, 2026.

June 16, 2026 Posted by aletho | Deception, Timeless or most popular | United States | Comments Off on What Is Defensive Medicine?

CDC Awards Pfizer $1.24 Billion for COVID Vaccines for Kids and Adults

By Henrick Karoliszyn, DSW | The Defender | June 12, 2026

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) recent decision to award Pfizer $1.24 billion for COVID-19 vaccines has renewed debate over the government’s continued investment in mRNA technology.

The contracts, awarded on June 1, include about $735.7 million for pediatric COVID-19 vaccines and nearly $505.3 million for adult doses for fiscal year 2026-2027.

Critics say the funding reflects a continued commitment to vaccines associated with high rates of serious injuries and deaths, and a lack of adequate safety testing and monitoring.

Public health experts argue the investment is necessary to protect vulnerable populations and prepare for future outbreaks.

The latest contracts come as mRNA technology expands beyond COVID-19.

A recent review in Human Vaccines & Immunotherapeutics found that mRNA-based therapeutics were identified in more than 550 registered clinical trials. The authors reported that more than 90% of the projects involved mRNA vaccines and that most products remain in early-stage testing before broader adoption.

‘Unnecessary and often harmful injections’

The procurement of monetary resources signals that federal officials intend to continue investing heavily in mRNA technology despite declining public demand and ongoing controversy over vaccine safety monitoring, critics say.

Jeffrey Tucker, president and founder of the Brownstone Institute, told The Defender there was “no scientific justification” or “market demand” for the latest mRNA vaccine funding.

“This raises a serious question concerning how these captured agencies really work,” Tucker said. “We are talking about vast amounts of tax dollars flowing to support unnecessary and often harmful injections.”

“This is $1.24 billion for what is essentially a cold in minor children,” said Children’s Health Defense Chief Scientific Officer Brian Hooker.

Daniel O’Connor, publisher of TrialSite News, which covers global biomedical and clinical research, told The Defender Americans “better start asking the hard questions.”

“If demand is falling, safety questions remain contested and many reporting vaccine injuries say they’ve been left behind, why is Washington committing another $1.24 billion to vaccine procurement instead of first providing a transparent accounting of need, benefit, risk, and responsibility?”

‘COVID-19 has not disappeared’

Public health experts disagreed, saying their support of vaccinations is supporting the prevention of future pandemics.

Dr. Krutika Kuppalli, an associate professor in the Department of Internal Medicine at University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, in Dallas, told The Defender that the monetary installments will help stave off another public health crisis because “COVID-19 has not disappeared.”

“While the emergency phase of the pandemic is over, the virus continues to cause significant illness, hospitalizations and deaths each year,” she said. “This investment reflects the reality that vaccines remain one of our most effective tools for preventing severe disease, particularly among those at highest risk. Maintaining access to updated vaccines is an important part of ensuring the country remains prepared for future COVID-19 surges.”

Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease specialist and professor at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee, said the contracts will ensure “continuing availability of safe and effective COVID vaccines through the next two years.”

“COVID vaccines have repeatedly been demonstrated to provide protection against the most severe manifestations of COVID infection: hospitalization, intensive care unit admission and death,” Schaffner said. “This is particularly applicable to those persons at increased risk of becoming seriously ill: persons age 65 and older, anyone with a chronic medical condition, persons who are immunocompromised and persons who are pregnant.”

However, some studies suggest claims that the COVID-19 vaccines saved millions of lives are based on flawed models and incorrect calculations.

Legality of funding in question

The contracts also raise questions about federal vaccine spending.

Under the CDC’s Vaccines for Children (VFC) Program, the federal government agrees to buy and provide free vaccines through negotiated contracts for eligible children.

Current CDC price schedules list Pfizer COVID-19 vaccines at roughly $69 to $91 per dose, depending on the formula, while Moderna doses range from about $78 to $83.

Dr. Robert Malone, a pioneer and expert in mRNA vaccines, however, questioned the legal authority to use federal funding for the Pfizer contracts because the purchase wasn’t approved by the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP).

“Use of VFC funds requires ACIP authorization,” he said. “But there is no ACIP.”

Earlier this year, U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy issued an injunction blocking many of the recent ACIP appointments made under U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

The injunction stemmed from a lawsuit filed by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) against Kennedy and the U.S, Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). The AAP accused Kennedy of violating procedures when he fired previous ACIP members and replaced them.

The ruling effectively paralysed ACIP and cast doubt on the legitimacy of its membership structure.

Requests for comment from ACIP went unanswered.

‘We are a long way from reckoning’

The CDC has maintained that authorized COVID-19 vaccines underwent extensive safety review and that the benefits outweigh known risks.

However, during a Capitol Hill meeting this week, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) referred to reported COVID-19 vaccine injuries as the “biggest government scandal in my lifetime.”

“What about all the injection-injured?” he said. “Until this government and this administration acknowledge those injuries, acknowledge the harm caused by these injections, and I would say federal health agencies also acknowledge the harm done by childhood vaccines, we are a long way from reckoning.”

In April, Johnson released a report revealing that Biden-era health officials rejected a state-of-the-art statistical tool for detecting COVID-19 vaccine safety signals — and instead deliberately continued using a broken method because they didn’t want to “feed in to [sic] anti-vaccination rhetoric.”

During an April 29 hearing, Johnson revealed that a longtime U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) medical officer, Ana Szarfman, M.D., Ph.D., repeatedly warned colleagues that the agency’s approach to safety monitoring could miss serious safety signals due to a problem known as “masking.” Masking occurs when other vaccines obscure risks tied to a specific product.

Johnson said FDA officials brushed aside Szarfman’s warnings.

The CDC, HHS and Pfizer did not immediately respond to requests for comment regarding the contracts.

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.

June 16, 2026 Posted by aletho | Corruption, Science and Pseudo-Science | CDC, Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, United States | Comments Off on CDC Awards Pfizer $1.24 Billion for COVID Vaccines for Kids and Adults

Radio Free Europe, the Cold War ‘Weapon’ Congress Still Funds

By Patrick Pillow | The Libertarian Institute | June 16, 2026

“Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty were critically important weapons in the free world’s competition with Soviet totalitarianism—and without them the Soviet bloc might even have not disintegrated.”

This was the assessment of Zbigniew Brzezinski, former national security advisor to President Jimmy Carter and one of the most influential foreign policy strategists of the Cold War era.

Brzezinski’s description is notable not only because of who said it, but because of how he described the organization. He did not characterize Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty as merely a U.S.-funded news organization but instead, referred to it as a “weapon” in a geopolitical struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union.

More than three decades after the Cold War ended, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty remains in operation—and Congress is now considering a major increase in its funding.

As Americans continue to grapple with rising prices and persistent inflation, Washington DC’s attention has increasingly shifted toward foreign policy priorities rather than domestic economic concerns. When foreign spending does enter the public conversation, it is often through provisions buried deep within legislative text and only briefly summarized in committee reports, with limited public attention.

One recent example is the Ukraine Support Act, sponsored by Representative Gregory Meeks (D-NY). The bill continues ongoing U.S. funding for Ukraine as the war with Russia enters its fourth year, and like most large foreign aid packages, it contains a wide range of provisions.

Among them is Section 108, which authorizes $250 million in funding for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) for 2026 alone. The language describes this funding as necessary to bring the organization to its “full capacity” in combating “conspiracy theories” and “Russian disinformation.” To understand this framing, it helps to look at the organization’s origins.

When it was originally founded in the 1950s, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty was created to broadcast alternative reporting into countries behind the Iron Curtain. It received its first significant funding from both the U.S. Congress and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and has since been described as one of the CIA’s largest successful covert action projects.

Among the organization’s initial goals was a focus on “destroying the Soviet government’s monopoly of information,” during the Cold War. This included early attempts to create a “crisis of confidence” in Soviet leadership.

Over time, that structure evolved, but the organization remained. Today, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty operates in more than twenty countries, with a reported weekly audience of 47.6 million, more than 1,700 staff members, and over 9 billion video views in 2023. Its operations now include Radio Farda in Iran, Radio Azadi in Afghanistan, and services in the Balkans—regions of significant U.S. foreign policy interest.

What was once a Cold War-era broadcasting organization has become a global, publicly funded media operation with a clear geopolitical focus. According to congressional funding records and budget summaries, RFE/RL has received roughly $140–$150 million annually since 2023. The 2026 authorization increases prior funding levels by over 60%, with the stated goal of combating what Washington describes as “disinformation.”

The organization itself is almost entirely publicly funded. In a March 2025 court declaration, RFE/RL president Stephen Capus stated that roughly 99% of the organization’s funding comes from congressional appropriations through the U.S. Agency for Global Media, while around 1% comes from private donations or other sources.

When funding was briefly disrupted in 2025, Capus called the interruption a “massive gift to America’s enemies,” pointing specifically to governments like Russia, China, Iran, and Belarus as among those who would “celebrate the demise” of the organization.

Supporters of RFE/RL note that the relatively small cost—especially compared to overall defense and foreign aid spending—is justified by its strategic value. With independent media remaining a key tool for challenging state-controlled narratives abroad, think tanks such as the Hudson Institute have described RFE/RL funding as a “pittance in terms of U.S. government spending,” with a particular focus on countries like Russia, China, and Iran.

As a whole, RFE/RL sees itself as more than just an independent news organization. In an FAQ section on its website the group notes that the organization is also working to serve U.S. foreign policy objectives and U.S. national security interests.

Still, this leaves unresolved the question about whether communication organizations abroad should be treated as a permanent feature on the domestic spending ledger.

At a time when the U.S. economy continues to face inflationary pressure and the stock market experiences significant volatility, the question remains what tangible benefit U.S. citizens receive from this use of tax dollars.

Whether Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty is viewed as a valuable instrument of American influence or an outdated relic of the Cold War, Congress is now preparing to increase its funding substantially.

June 16, 2026 Posted by aletho | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | United States | Comments Off on Radio Free Europe, the Cold War ‘Weapon’ Congress Still Funds

Araghchi: Israeli occupation of Lebanese land a violation of MoU

Al Mayadeen | June 16, 2026

In a televised statement, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi affirmed that, from Iran’s perspective, the two parties to the Memorandum of Understanding are the United States and “Israel” on one side, and Iran and Hezbollah on the other.

He also said, contrary to Trump’s overnight statement, that the MoU would be signed on Friday.

Speaking at the opening of a meeting with ambassadors, chargés d’affaires, and heads of foreign and international missions in Tehran on Tuesday, Araghchi stressed that the end of the war in Lebanon is an inseparable part of the complete end of the war, noting that ending the war on Lebanon also includes ending the occupation of Lebanese territory.

Araghchi said that, from now on, any military attack by “Israel” on Lebanon, as well as the continuation of the occupation of Lebanese territories, will be considered a violation of the MoU.

According to Araghchi, the heads of the two delegations from the US and Iran will first sign the memorandum of understanding on Friday before the inaugural round of formal negotiations begins.

Tehran, he said, aims to build on the understandings reached and translate them into a tangible economic opening.

Implementation mechanism amid deep-seated mistrust

The Iranian foreign minister also said that the negotiation agenda and the mechanism for implementing the anticipated understandings will be formulated in light of the prevailing lack of trust in the United States stemming from previous experiences marked by breaches of commitments and failures to uphold obligations.

“Naturally, we do not squander any opportunity in foreign policy, but at the same time, we do not pin our hopes on any opportunity,” Araghchi said, underscoring Tehran’s cautious and pragmatic approach to the forthcoming negotiations.

Meanwhile, US President Donald Trump claimed overnight Monday that a memorandum of understanding with Iran has been signed and that the Strait of Hormuz will be completely reopened by Friday, speaking to reporters upon his arrival in Evian, France, ahead of the G7 summit.

The formal signing ceremony is scheduled for Friday in Geneva, with Vance confirmed to attend.

June 16, 2026 Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, Wars for Israel | Hezbollah, Iran, Israel, Lebanon, United States, Zionism | Comments Off on Araghchi: Israeli occupation of Lebanese land a violation of MoU

Hezbollah fighters confront intruding Israeli forces in southern Lebanon

Press TV – June 16, 2026

Fighters from the Lebanese Hezbollah resistance movement have confronted an Israeli military convoy as it was attempting to infiltrate into southern Lebanon despite an Iran-US agreement that includes complete cessation of Israeli assaults on Lebanon.

Hezbollah said in a statement on Monday that its fighters, employing rockets and drones, obstructed an Israeli unit comprising an excavator and two Merkava tanks that was moving forward near the town of Kfar Tebnit, close to the southern city of Nabatieh.

In a subsequent statement later in the day, Hezbollah said, “The enemy army has reorganized its forces in the vicinity of the crossing area by deploying an armored contingent consisting of five Merkava tanks and four vehicles.”

“The combatants of the Islamic Resistance have targeted them with rocket barrages and artillery shells, and clashes are continuing.”

It came after an Israeli drone struck a vehicle in the same region, killing its driver. The air raid marked the first fatal strike since the announcement of the agreement.

Hebrew-language media outlets, meanwhile, reported “a serious security incident” for Israeli soldiers positioned in southern Lebanon.

The outlets added that Israeli rescue helicopters are trying to transport the injured troopers to hospitals in the northern part of the occupied territories.

There were no immediate reports about the number of casualties that the Israeli army suffered as a result of the incident.

Israeli media outlets also reported that a soldier fighting in southern Lebanon committed suicide last night due to mental distress from military offensives.

This comes as the Israeli military is witnessing a continuous and alarming rise in soldier suicides, a trend linked to widespread post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) stemming from Israel’s prolonged and repeated aggressions on multiple fronts.

According to figures published by the Haaretz daily newspaper, at least six active-duty soldiers and three non-active reservists died by suicide in April alone.

‎Earlier this year, the newspaper recorded 22 soldier suicides in 2025, a 15-year high.

A new poll by Israel’s public broadcaster KAN shows that a majority of Israeli settlers believe that the Zionist regime has failed to secure victory in any war since October 2023.

June 16, 2026 Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | Hezbollah, Israel, Lebanon, United States, Zionism | Comments Off on Hezbollah fighters confront intruding Israeli forces in southern Lebanon

The Straight of Hormuz is Open for Iranian Business… Oil is Moving and Iran is Getting Paid

By Larry C. Johnson | SONAR21 | June 16, 2026

Let’s give Donald Trump credit for one thing… He kept his word and lifted the US blockade on Iranian ships and Iran is going to town with its oil tankers moving in and out of the Persian Gulf through the Strait of Hormuz.

This does not mean that the MOU with Iran, which is supposed to be signed in Geneva on Friday, will hold, but it is a step in the direction of de-escalation. So the question we ought to ask is why did Donald Trump blink and accept the proposal that Iran proffered way back in April?

I think there are several reasons, but the principal one is that the US is running out of oil, which means Trump will not be able to artificially suppress the price of gasoline. US strategic oil reserves have fallen to their lowest level since 1983, reports CNN. The decline comes amid continued drawdowns to mitigate the impact of the conflict with Iran. Reserves have dropped to 340.3 million barrels, last seen during the Reagan administration, which was still building the stockpile. US daily consumption is 20 to 21 million barrels in 2026, which means the reserve can supply 17 days of gasoline, which falls on July 1st.

Donald Trump may be in mental decline, but he still retains enough smarts to understand that an oil shortage and soaring prices of gasoline in July is politically untenable.

Another factor is that US installations and aircraft in the Persian Gulf took a helluva beating last week. The US attacks on Iranian installations in the Strait of Hormuz on June 9 and 10 provoked a fierce Iranian response that hit targets in Iraq (CIA-bases supporting the Kurds), Kuwait (the Ali Al Salem airbase, Camp Buehring in northeastern Kuwait, as well as a makeshift operations center near the civilian port of Shuaiba), the Prince Saud Airbase adjacent to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and the Mowaffaq Al Salti Airbase in Jordan. The attacks were devastating and reportedly employed some new Chinese missiles supplied to Iran.

Then there is the pressure from Gulf Arabs to end the attacks on Iran. Iran, backed by China, Russia and Pakistan, engaged in intense diplomacy with Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

The UAE, who has been a thorn in the side of Iran and Saudi Arabia and has been identified as an ally of Israel, sent a delegation to Iran on 9 June. Reuters reported that the UAE had agreed to release billions of dollars for Iran — two regional sources put the figure at $10 billion (including more than $3 billion already delivered), while two other sources put it at $20 billion, with the funds agreed in exchange for Iran halting attacks on the UAE. However, the UAE’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs categorically denied those reports, stating the allegations were “entirely false and unfounded” and that no frozen Iranian funds had been released, transferred, or facilitated through the UAE. What is undisputed is that the UAE sent a high-level delegation to talk to the Iranian government.

A high-level Qatari delegation arrived in Tehran on Wednesday, June 10, to hold talks on bilateral relations, regional developments, and diplomatic efforts to end the conflict between Iran and the United States. The delegation arrived at midday and the visit came after Trump accused Iran of stalling and said Tehran must now “pay the price.” AFP, citing an informed diplomat, reported the Qatari negotiating team had traveled to Tehran following consultations with American officials to help narrow remaining differences between the two sides.

A senior Pakistani source with access to information about Pakistan’s role in mediating the talks between the US and Iran, reported that Pakistan, with the encouragement of China and Russia, was making progress in its talks with the Saudis and the Qataris to stop hosting US military bases in their respective countries. These talks coincided with Saudi Arabia denying the US the use of its airspace to attack Iranian targets during Project Freedom.

Will the deal be signed on Friday? I remain skeptical simply because of the enormous Zionist backlash being visited on Donald Trump by angry Israeli officials and US politicians beholden to AIPAC. However, as I write this Monday night, the deal appears intact.

Why hasn’t Donald Trump released the text of the MOU? Two possible explanations (and I’ll be interested in what you think is the most plausible): 1) There are still areas of disagreement between Iran and the US and they are still trying to work out a compromise, 2) Trump does not want to provide the details beforehand fearing that the Zionist backlash could derail the Friday signing ceremony in Geneva. The diplomatic roller coaster is running full blast… It will be a wild ride until Friday.

Video interviews

June 16, 2026 Posted by aletho | Wars for Israel | Iran, Middle East, United States, Zionism | Comments Off on The Straight of Hormuz is Open for Iranian Business… Oil is Moving and Iran is Getting Paid

Biden’s Closed Circle on Russia

An excerpt from ‘The Great Betrayal’

By James W. Carden | The Realist Review | June 14, 2026

Joe Biden’s presidency may ultimately come to be seen as a cautionary tale. Here was a president who showed little interest in entertaining arguments that might have contradicted his most deeply held assumptions.^[1] And there were precious few within the upper ranks of the administration who might have attempted to do so, after all, only policy hands and political operatives who had come up through the ranks of the Clinton and Obama administrations or had longstanding ties to the citadels of the foreign policy community were invited into the fold.^[2]

The message BidenWorld sent early on was that heterodox voices, even tepid ones, were not welcome. Consider the case of a respected expert on Russian affairs, Dr. Matthew Rojansky, who was then serving as the director of the Kennan Institute at the Congressionally-funded Woodrow Wilson Center. Rojansky had been denied a position on the Biden NSC because he was viewed as “soft” on Russia. Administration officials feared that appointing Rojansky would, as a contemporaneous report by Politico put it, “signal a conciliatory U.S. policy toward Moscow.”^[3] The incident had echoes of the 2009 Freeman affair, when a foreign lobby (Israel’s) mobilized its allies in the media and on Capitol Hill to block an appointment it deemed threatening to its agenda. This time around, another foreign lobby (Ukraine’s) slammed the door on Rojansky. From the start, Biden’s White House was a closed circle—new names, new faces, and new thinking were not welcome.

The parallel one reaches for to best describe the inner workings of the Biden White House is that of the Reagan White House. Back then, a chief executive of questionable sentience relied on a tight circle of political operatives to run the day-to-day operations of the White House. During Reagan’s first term, that job fell to a “Troika” consisting of Chief of Staff James Baker, Counselor to the President Ed Meese, and Deputy Chief of Staff Mike Deaver. Meese did policy, Deaver was the image-maker. Baker was in charge of everything else. Joe Biden had a Troika of his own: White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain, Counselor to the President Steve Ricchetti, and Deputy Chief of Staff Bruce Reed. Klain and Ricchetti were longtime centrist Democratic operatives. Reed was the policy wonk. No friend of progressives, Reed came up through the ranks as a centrist policy adviser to Senator Al Gore in the 1980s. He later served as a domestic policy adviser to President Clinton.

On the foreign policy side of the ledger, what was old was new again. Like Presidents Carter and Clinton—and his erstwhile Democratic rivals Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders—Biden embraced a vision of the world divided between democracy and authoritarianism. While the script had been slightly updated since the end of the Cold War, the story was a familiar one: The US and its NATO allies were now said to be threatened by an “authoritarian axis” led by Xi Jinping of China and Vladimir Putin of Russia. The axis is also said to include Iran, North Korea and other revisionist powers. Discussions regarding our putative “friends” and “allies” that also happen to be authoritarian (Saudi Arabia, Turkey) or ethno-nationalist (Israel, Ukraine) are usually excluded from the schema. In December 2021, Biden hosted a ‘Summit for Democracy’ that brought together leaders from over 100 countries in support of a rather amorphous strategy to “defend” democracy—a cause that Biden claimed was “the defining challenge of our time.”

More thoughtful men than Biden saw things rather differently. George Kennan, for one, felt that there was nothing “more egocentric than the embattled democracy.” The problem, as Kennan correctly foresaw, was that an embattled democracy will tend “to attach to its own cause an absolute value which distorts its own vision to everything else. Its enemy becomes the embodiment of all evil. Its own side is the center of all value.”^[4] While Kennan wrote those words in 1961, it would be hard to find a better description of the politics of the New Cold War. The main deliverable of Biden’s “democracy” conference was the creation of a Presidential Initiative for Democratic Renewal, which, at a cost of nearly half-a-billion dollars to US taxpayers, would seek to promote “democracy, fight corruption, and defend human rights worldwide.”^[5]

As with so many of the ideas and programs championed by the Democratic establishment since the end of the Cold War, the “autocracy vs. democracy” paradigm borrowed liberally from the neocon playbook. Biden’s old friend, the late Senator John McCain, had long called for the creation of a global “League of Democracies.” Speaking at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution in 2007, McCain said the new league would, “form the core of an international order of peace based on freedom.” It would be able to “bring concerted pressure to bear on tyrants in Burma or Zimbabwe, with or without Moscow’s and Beijing’s approval.^[6] McCain’s proposal might just as easily have come from the pen of Samantha Power. As with the men and pigs at the conclusion of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, when it comes to the neocons and the Democratic elite, it is now impossible to say which is which.

***

The Great Betrayal: How The Democrats Became The Party of War, hailed by Professor Richard Sakwa as “a brilliant, timely, and important achievement,” is available now from OR x Nation Books.

NOTES:

^[1] For example, no dissent on matters relating to Israel was welcome; see: https://www.commondreams.org/news/biden-silencing-dissent-gaza. For reporting on Biden’s tyrannical streak, see, for example, https://thebrunswicknews.com/president-biden-has-notorious-temper-yells-curses-frequently-in-private-report/article_107fcc8f-b3f8-5dad-a447-083dbde1eaa1.html

^[2] Including The Brookings Institution, The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, The German Marshall Fund, The Center for Strategic and International Studies, The Center for American Progress, The Center for a New American Security, and The Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies.

^[3] https://www.politico.com/news/2021/04/19/biden-russia-expert-483000

^[4] For Kennan, see: https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2021/12/17/hang-up-the-magical-thinking-and-try-strategic-empathy-on-for-size/

^[5] On the Democracy Summit and Biden’s remarks, see: https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2021/12/23/summit-for-democracy-summary-of-proceedings/

^[6] For McCain’s remarks, see: https://www.hoover.org/sites/default/files/uploads/inline/docs/McCain_05-01-07.pdf

June 16, 2026 Posted by aletho | Book Review, Progressive Hypocrite, Russophobia | United States | Comments Off on Biden’s Closed Circle on Russia

Did the 9/11 Hijackers Really Fly the Planes?

@IC911Justice

Full video:

9/11 Flight Simulator Study Preliminary Results | Dr. Piers Robinson

June 15, 2026 Posted by aletho | False Flag Terrorism, Timeless or most popular, Video | 9/11, United States | Comments Off on Did the 9/11 Hijackers Really Fly the Planes?

Time for Trump to Tell Benjamin Netanyahu to Go Away!

Netanyahu always says “What you own belongs to me”

By Philip Giraldi • Unz Review • June 14, 2026

In addition to the regular lethal American and Israeli attacks on Iran, last week alone the Israeli military killed 13 Gazans and 13 Lebanese. Gaza is now 70% Israeli occupied, contrary to what was agreed upon in the ceasefire arrangement, as is much of south Lebanon. More than 1,000 Gazans have been murdered by Israel since the temporary ceasefire was declared in October 2025. And one might add to the toll the constant aggression in south Syria, where Israel is creating an army base presence to be followed by settlers that creeps ever closer to the capital Damascus. It is an encroachment that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his band of war criminals intend to turn into a component of “Greater Israel” together with Gaza and Lebanon.

Armed Jewish settlers are meanwhile devastating what remains of the Palestinian West Bank, destroying farms and livelihoods as well as entire villages. Taybeh, the last Christian village, was made uninhabitable last week after weeks of raids killing livestock, poisoning water and cutting down olive trees. If a Palestinian tried to intervene he was beaten and in some cases killed. Churches and Mosques on the West Bank are routinely desecrated and non-Jews in religious attire or trying to enter a holy site are frequently spat upon particularly in Jerusalem. The Israel Defense Force (IDF), meanwhile, regularly stands by and watches the displays of wanton brutality and does nothing. Lest there be any confusion regarding what is coming, the Knesset has now authorized $51 million to build more than 60 new completely illegal settlements on Palestinian land in the occupied West Bank.

What all these places have in common apart from the cruel Israeli hand is that the United States, often in the form of Trump personally, has been a guarantor of the ceasefires as well as the source of the so-called but utterly dysfunctional Board of Peace, has done nothing to stop the slaughter. Rather, it is continuing to provide Israel with weapons, money and political cover. It is therefore complicit in the war crimes. Here at home, Trump is promoting the Israeli program by supporting the criminalization of anyone who speaks up against the crimes against humanity being committed by his “best friend” Bibi, choosing to destroy freedom of speech rather than allowing any exposure of Israel’s crimes. This is reminiscent of June 8^th 1967, when Israel attacked the USS Liberty, killing 34 American crewmen and injuring 172 more. A cover-up followed to protect Israel, coordinated by President Lyndon B Johnson, a hideous excuse for a human being who would likely have found it pleasant to have a chat about “values” with Trump.

If there is one thing that is most definitely true it is that the United States gains absolutely nothing in either the national interest nor in the well being of the average American from the bondage to Israel and Netanyahu. If opinion polls mean anything, the public in the US has figured that out and has turned sharply against the Jewish state and now favors both the Palestinian cause and the drive to end the totally meaningless war against Iran. That means that it is past time for the United States to cut the tie that binds with Israel and look to its own interests. That is necessary even if Congress and President Donald Trump continue to push in the opposite direction to complete their subjugation by the Israelis, which now includes a planned fusion of the US and Israeli defense and intel bureaucracies.

If we have learned anything from all of the above and more, there is one thing true about the President Donald Trump administration and that is its particular incompetence at foreign relations, i.e. how it deals with other nations, and, by extension, how it mismanages national security. Part of the blame surely belongs to Trump himself as he has little or no empathy for other human beings unless they are either capable of doing him harm or profiting him personally, as do Netanyahu and the Jewish billionaires. And he also has a tendency to change direction spontaneously and without much concern for the actual issues that might be important to his audience. All that matters is whatever he happens to think will make him look good at any given moment, which recently has manifested itself as plastering his own name on public buildings. Responding to a recent journalist’s question about the rising inflation rate, he answered that he “Loved the inflation!” It was like saying “Goodbye midterms!”

Witness for example how on Thursday last week Trump announced in the morning that he would be attacking Iran that night to seize its major oil export facility on Kharg Island as part of a plan to cripple the country’s ability to sustain energy shipments. By 2 o’clock in the afternoon, however, he had called off the planned attack due to his perception that the US and Iran are now on the verge of an agreement to end the fighting and settle the various issues that have created the conflict in the first place. The mediating Pakistani Prime Minister did, for what it’s worth, confirm a possible peace agreement on Friday even though knowledgeable observers immediately commented that the claim was unsustainable as no negotiations were actually going on between parties and Iran has denied any such progress over key issues. As of Saturday, nothing was confirmed but Trump again asserted that there would be a “signing” of a “memorandum of understanding” as a first step to a peace agreement on Sunday, presumably to coincide with his birthday. Most observers however continue to argue that a weak-kneed and vulnerable Trump, though desperate to disengage from a disastrous Iran war, is only staying with it due to intense pressure from Israel and its domestic US lobby which may be prepared to employ “Epstein” blackmail on the president to maintain American participation in the conflict. If Trump were even to consider withdrawing from his ring of fire around Iran Israel would immediately take whatever steps are necessary to blow-up the agreement and resume fighting, be it by way of a false flag to drag the US back in or possibly exploiting the “Iran has a nuke” lie.

So it would be wise to accept that Donald Trump is a ship without a rudder and interactions with most of the Middle East will continue to be driven by Israel while bilateral talks elsewhere with major players like Russia and China appear to have dried up completely. Appointing real estate billionaires Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner as personal presidential representatives, both of whom are inexperienced and ardent Zionists, certainly did not improve prospects for what passed for negotiations with anyone. No one can trust Trump.

Israel’s reach far exceeds the country’s size and real power. A recent “friend” of Trump is Argentine Prime Minister Javier Milei, who, surprise-surprise, is also a great friend of Israel, having made the usual obeisance trip to the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem during a State Visit to Israel shortly after being elected. Raised a Catholic, Milei reportedly wanted to convert to Judaism but decided not to as its “no work on Saturday” rule would have interfered with serving as prime minister. Not content with taking all the Middle East, Israel’s Jews are also looking farther afield. Patagonia in Argentina has reportedly been particularly targeted by Israeli buyers with the assistance of the Milei regime which helped get around environmental restrictions. Israelis are also buying up numerous properties in Cyprus as well as in Greece, nearby states which would be convenient as refuges if Israel finally provokes one too many of its neighbors and it finds itself on the receiving end of a nuke. Benjamin Netanyahu’s resident American spy Jonathan Pollard reportedly has mentioned both Turkey and Egypt as “next” to feel the wrath of Zion after Iran is finished off. Either army could easily defeat the chickenshits in the Israeli army who are better at raping and torturing than they are at fighting.

But one story that has caught some attention illustrates clearly the Israeli manic desire to steal other peoples’ property, most particularly land, no matter what it takes to carry out the theft. As is always the case, they are not held accountable for their criminality by Donald Trump who has his own soft spot for stealing the property of others and chooses to cut corners, witness the grandiose plans for a Trump Riviera luxury development on the beachfront of Gaza. And then there are the current shenanigans on an island off Albania which is being multi-billion dollar “developed” by daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner using United Arab Emirates (UAE) cash to become a major resort for the rich and famous. Kushner got the money as a benefit derived from his family connection and fortunately a lot of Albanians are mad as hell about the deal that was struck and are demonstrating!

But the story out of the United States and Canada as well as over the weekend in London tops many of the Trump/Israeli tricks due to its sheer audacity and criminality. Amnesty International UK is demanding the British government stop a real estate event scheduled to take place in London that includes companies openly advertising the sale of land in Israeli settlements in the illegally occupied West Bank.

The ‘Great Israeli Real Estate Event’ is a traveling roadshow that has held events in Canada and the United States and has now been planning for the sale in London on Sunday. The events are organized by Israeli real estate firm called My Home in Israel. It sells land to prospective buyers through a team of US-based real estate agents with the sales normally taking place in synagogues or other Jewish-owned and operated buildings. There have inevitably been protests against the sales in cities like Los Angeles and New York, where the “lots” have been promoted to the local Jewish communities. The lots being sold include considerable sections located in illegal settlements on the Palestinian West Bank, land that has been stolen from its owners. The Amnesty International report published last week in opposition to the London show exposed Israel’s state-led ethnic cleansing campaign in the West Bank – “documenting the displacement of at least 5,910 Palestinian Bedouin and herding community members since 2023, the demolition of over 3,400 homes and structures in [Palestinian West Bank] Area C, and an unprecedented surge in state-backed settler violence and land grabs.”

So there you have it, whatever Israel wants Israel takes without any concern for those who die or lose their homes in the process. And the United States government sits by and watches as Netanyahu spins lie after lie. Well, enough is enough. America is hated almost as much as Israel for its behavior and if it continues there will be severe consequences. Time to show Netanyahu the door and tell him and his supporting cast of AIPAC and Jewish billionaire buddies to get the hell out.

Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is https://councilforthenationalinterest.org address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.

June 15, 2026 Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Wars for Israel | Canada, Iran, Israel, Middle East, UK, United States | Comments Off on Time for Trump to Tell Benjamin Netanyahu to Go Away!

Israeli officials: ‘Security zones’ to remain in Lebanon, Syria, Gaza

Al Mayadeen | June 15, 2026

Israeli War Minister Israel Katz said the Israeli army will continue to hold so-called “security zones” in Lebanon, Syria, and Gaza indefinitely, asserting that what he described as border security requirements take precedence over any political or diplomatic arrangements.

He stated that the policy is being pursued in coordination with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, adding that the IOF would remain deployed in these areas without a defined timeline.

According to Katz, the stated objective of maintaining these zones is to prevent what he described as threats from armed groups operating near the borders.

He said Israeli forces would remain in the “security zones” in Lebanon, Syria, and Gaza in order to protect Israeli settlements and border areas, framing the deployments as a defensive necessity to mask its colonial nature.

“We will not compromise on the vital interests of Israel’s security and the protection of our citizens, and we will not leave the security zones,” Katz said.

He also stated that this position had been communicated to US President Donald Trump, US War Secretary Pete Hegseth, and other senior officials.

Netanyahu signals rejection of withdrawal from Lebanon

Separately, Israeli media cited officials close to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as saying that he informed Trump that “Israel” does not intend to withdraw from Lebanon under any emerging understandings linked to regional negotiations.

According to these reports, Israeli forces will remain in their current positions in southern Lebanon and continue what Tel Aviv describes as operations aimed at preventing threats from Hezbollah.

Netanyahu also reportedly rejected any linkage between developments on the Lebanese front and broader US-Iran diplomatic arrangements, insisting that “Israel” would not be bound by agreements affecting its military posture.

Internal political backing for hardline stance

Israeli political figures across the governing coalition expressed support for maintaining occupation deployments in Lebanon and other theaters.

“Israel’s” Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich was quoted in Israeli media as arguing that any attempt to connect the Lebanese and Iranian fronts should be resisted, while also emphasizing the importance of preserving military deterrence without direct confrontation with Washington.

Other ministers, including Itamar Ben-Gvir, reportedly stated that any US-brokered agreement with Iran would not be binding on “Israel”, asserting that Tel Aviv would continue to determine its own security policy independently.

Energy Minister Eli Cohen and Transport Minister Miri Regev also stressed the need to maintain what they described as clear deterrence while avoiding unnecessary escalation with the US administration.

June 15, 2026 Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Wars for Israel | Gaza, Israel, Lebanon, Palestine, Syria, United States, Zionism | Comments Off on Israeli officials: ‘Security zones’ to remain in Lebanon, Syria, Gaza

Israel Fails to Sabotage Islamabad Accord… At Least for Now

By Larry C. Johnson | SONAR21 | June 14, 2026

Well, when news broke that Israel had bombed the southern suburb of Beirut on Sunday afternoon, the Iranians started gearing up for promised retaliation only to be dissuaded by a Donald Trump bribe. Iran and the US reportedly were closing in on an agreement based on Iran’s 14-point plan when the Israeli strike in Lebanon threw everything into chaos. Iran quickly started ramping up for a renewed missile strike on Israel, but Donald Trump rump reportedly offered Iran financial incentives to not attack Israel.

Iranian media outlet Mehr reported that a 14-point memorandum of understanding between the US and Iran calls for the release of $24 billion in frozen Iranian assets during a 60-day negotiation period, with half of that — $12 billion — required to be made available to Iran before negotiations even begin. The MOU also reportedly includes immediate and permanent cessation of war on all fronts including Lebanon, a US commitment not to interfere in Iran’s internal affairs, lifting of the naval blockade within 30 days, and reopening of the Strait of Hormuz under Iranian arrangements.

Trump essentially offered Iran a bribe to not attack Israel. Hedeclared on Truth Social that the US deal with Iran was “now complete,” authorizing the toll-free reopening of the Strait of Hormuz and the immediate removal of the US.naval blockade, instead of waiting 30 days. He also agreed that Iran could receive the $12 billion as soon as the ceasefire agreement was signed on Friday.

With that change, the Supreme National Security Council of Iran confirmed the achievement of an agreement between the United States and Iran:

“The Islamic Republic of Iran, under the leadership of its martyred leader, has completed its success over the American-Zionist enemy and, under the guidance of the Supreme Leader of the system (may God protect him), with the support of the entire nation and the diligent efforts of Islam’s warriors, after a difficult and intensive several months of negotiations and based on the resolution of the Supreme National Security Council, finalized the text of the Memorandum of Understanding regarding negotiations to end the war (negotiations in Islamabad) between Iran and the United States on the evening of June 14.

According to the agreements reached, the war and military operations on all fronts, including Lebanon, will end immediately and forever from tonight, and the naval blockade against Iran will be immediately and fully lifted. The signing of this Memorandum of Understanding will be officially carried out on Friday, June 19. Negotiations for the final agreement will be postponed until the other party fulfills its obligations in accordance with the Memorandum of Understanding. The Islamic Republic of Iran highly values the efforts of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan and the government of Qatar.”

But before you start popping champagne corks you must understand that Trump administration officials — mostly unnamed — are painting a different picture of the agreement. For example, asenior U.S. official rejected Iran’s claim that it would receive $12 billion in frozen assets unconditionally before the start of the 60-day negotiations, describing the assertion as “a spin,” Axios reports:

This is completely not true. This is a pay-for-performance deal, and no frozen funds will be released without the Iranians implementing their commitments,” the official said.

The point is simple… Major differences remain between the US and Iran regarding the details of the proposed MOU. Even if those details are eventually ironed out and a letter signed on Friday with both sides confirming their mutual agreement to the 14 prinicipals spelled out in the final MOU, this will mark the start of a negotiations process that will last at least two months, if not longer. And, at any time in the succeeding days, a US or Israeli violation of the MOU will likely lead Iran to renew its attacks on Israeli and/or US military targets.

June 15, 2026 Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Wars for Israel | Iran, Israel, Lebanon, Middle East, Palestine, United States, Zionism | Comments Off on Israel Fails to Sabotage Islamabad Accord… At Least for Now

Araghchi: US Responsible for Implementing MoU with Iran

Al-Manar | June 15, 2026

Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi has stressed the US’ responsibility regarding the implementation of the MoU with Iran as well as a complete halt to the Israeli regime’s attacks against Lebanon.

Araghchi made the remarks in his separate phone calls with Turkish, Iraq, and Egyptian counterparts Hakan Fidan, Fuad Hussein, and Badr Abdelatty.

He reviewed the process and provisions of the Islamabad understanding and lauded the positions and role of Turkey, Iraq, and Egypt in supporting the establishment of a ceasefire, reducing tensions, and diplomatic efforts to achieve stability and security in the region.

All sides emphasized the continuation of close consultations on regional developments and strengthening diplomatic efforts to maintain peace and stability.

Iran and the United States, after announcing a ceasefire on April 8, 2026, began negotiations with the mediation of Pakistan to definitively end the war.

The text of the memorandum of understanding that was signed, the foundation of which was Iran’s 14-point proposals at the very beginning of the ceasefire, was reviewed multiple times over the past 60 days in the capitals of the two countries.

Despite all the pressures, the violation of the ceasefire, and the repeated changes of position by the United States, Iran persisted in its stances.

After signing the MoU text, the two countries will put a series of intensive negotiations on their agenda over the next 60 days in order to reach a comprehensive agreement on the disputed issues.

June 15, 2026 Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Wars for Israel | Iran, Middle East, United States, Zionism | Comments Off on Araghchi: US Responsible for Implementing MoU with Iran

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