Aletho News

ΑΛΗΘΩΣ

Trump eager for off-ramp in war on Iran, but Netanyahu has him trapped: Former official

By Alireza Kamandi | Press TV | April 29, 2026

Donald Trump is eager to find an off-ramp, declare “victory,” and end the war against Iran – but Benjamin Netanyahu is not, leaving Trump trapped, says a former chief of staff to the US Secretary of State.

In an interview with the Press TV website, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson – former chief of staff to Colin Powell from 2002 to 2005 – said that as tensions with Iran simmer following the recent US-Israeli war against the country, a complex picture is emerging of a Washington administration caught between tactical necessity and political traps.

He said the central question surrounding the White House’s strategy is whether the Trump administration is using the lull in hostilities to rebuild its military capacity.

“There is an ongoing effort to replace critical munitions, expedite repair of warships in maintenance, and alert and prepare more land forces for possible action,” he said, adding that this logistical surge extends to Tel Aviv, where efforts are underway to replenish munitions and call up more reservists.

As for the Trump administration’s self-declared “maritime blockade” of Iranian ports, the timeline is elastic, Wilkerson said, adding that the US can sustain the pressure indefinitely, but only as long as necessary to secure an agreement with Tehran on what constitutes the end of war.

“However, this is where the internal rift becomes critical. President Trump is eager to find an exit, to declare ‘victory’, and to end the conflict, but Netanyahu is not. So, Trump is trapped,” he said.

The former official noted this dynamic suggests that the duration of the blockade depends heavily on the outcome of upcoming Israeli elections and who ultimately emerges as the winner there.

For now, the US finds itself locked into a maritime strategy whose off-ramp is controlled by Israel with conflicting war aims, he told the Press TV website.

When asked how long Israel could sustain a war against Iran without direct US military intervention, the answer was stark: “Not very long—probably less than a month.”

The reason is not a lack of will, but sheer logistics, he stated.

“The supply of fuel, oil, munitions, and even material not available because of the deterioration of Israel’s economy, would be non-existent,” he remarked.

Wilkerson emphasized that the most profound geopolitical consequence of the US-Israeli strikes on Iran will be felt thousands of miles away, in Asia and the Persian Gulf states.

Asian nations are already reassessing their military cooperation with Washington.

“The perception of the United States as a stabilizing, reliable anchor is fracturing. For the Persian Gulf monarchies that have long relied on the US security umbrella, and for Asian powers concerned about energy security and trade routes,” he noted.

On events unfolding inside the US and the recent shooting during the White House correspondents’ dinner, he said these things happen in the Empire, but more frequently with Trump, as he is “a very controversial president.”

“One wonders as well if one or two of the attempts were not staged, such as the one in Pennsylvania and the one on the golf course. Staged to build sympathy for a president who loves the limelight and being ‘loved’,” he stated.

He attributed the violence to a deeply fractured US administration and the American Empire.

“A great many people loathe Donald Trump, believe him directly involved in the Epstein scandal, and do not care for his style of ‘leadership’, plus, wars overseas tend to come home, i.e., violence in war creates violence at home,” he told the Press TV website.

April 29, 2026 Posted by | False Flag Terrorism, Wars for Israel | , , , | Comments Off on Trump eager for off-ramp in war on Iran, but Netanyahu has him trapped: Former official

Nuclear Apartheid: Iran’s Rise Exposes the NPT Fraud and the West’s Israel Exception

By Freddie Ponton – 21st Century Wire – April 29, 2026

The fight over Iran’s vice presidency at the 2026 NPT Review Conference looked procedural only if one ignored the history that walked into the room with it. The United States, the United Kingdom, speaking for France and Germany, Australia, and the United Arab Emirates objected to Iran’s appointment, yet Iran kept the post after a Non-Aligned Movement nomination and no blocking vote was forced, exposing a basic fact that now hangs over the treaty system. The United Arab Emirates did not merely object but formally and unequivocally disassociated itself from Iran’s election, while citing Tehran’s continuous violations of its safeguards obligations.

That moment is crucial because it revealed a shrinking gap between Western power and Western authority. The states that still dominate military alliances, financial coercion, and media narratives could denounce Tehran in New York, but they could not turn denunciation into institutional compliance, and they could not persuade the wider diplomatic field that their understanding of non-proliferation deserved automatic deference. What looked like a dispute over one vice presidency was in fact a public measure of a much deeper revolt against selective enforcement.

The bargain they broke

The deeper story begins in 1995, when the NPT was indefinitely extended on the basis of a broader political package that included the Resolution on the Middle East. That resolution called on all states in the region that had not yet done so to join the treaty and place their nuclear facilities under full-scope IAEA safeguards, and the UN Secretariat background paper explicitly records that the resolution was an essential element of the outcome on which indefinite extension was secured.

The 2010 Review Conference reaffirmed that point in unusually clear language. It said the 1995 resolution remained valid until its goals were achieved, recalled the importance of Israel’s accession to the treaty and the placement of all its nuclear facilities under comprehensive safeguards, and endorsed concrete steps toward a 2012 conference on a Middle East zone free of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction. The conference never delivered what it promised, and Algeria’s 2026 working paper now states bluntly that Israel’s stance helped render the 1995 resolution “devoid of substance,” while the UN Secretariat paper records that many states saw the failure of implementation as seriously undermining the treaty itself.

The Israeli exception

That is why so much of the Global South reads the current crisis through Israel rather than through Iran alone. The UN Secretariat background paper states in neutral terms that all states of the Middle East except Israel are parties to the NPT and that all states in the region except Israel have undertaken to accept comprehensive IAEA safeguards, giving documentary form to the asymmetry that the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) and Arab states have been protesting for decades.

NAM’s own recent language is harsher because the political implications are harsher. At the 2024 IAEA General Conference record, Uganda speaking on behalf of NAM warned that a selective approach undermined the viability of the safeguards regime, expressed great concern over Israel’s acquisition of nuclear capability, and called for a total prohibition on nuclear-related transfers and assistance to Israel, while the April 2026 NAM statement to the UN Disarmament Commission again demanded that Israel renounce nuclear weapons, accede to the NPT without precondition or delay, and place all its facilities under full-scope safeguards.

That continuity was reaffirmed in the Kampala Declaration, which carried the same line through 2025 and closed the institutional bridge to the April 2026 NAM position. For the movement, this is not a side file or an ideological hobbyhorse. It is the living proof that the rules are preached as universal and applied as political.

The South’s quiet revolt

Once that history is acknowledged, the so-called silence of NAM and many Global South states on Iran’s vice presidency stops looking like ambiguity and starts looking like discipline. They did not need to issue sentimental declarations of love for Tehran in order to refuse a Western effort to re-police multilateral legitimacy, because the issue before them was larger than Iran’s image and deeper than one nomination. It was whether the same powers that had tolerated, normalized, or materially shielded the Middle East’s only non-NPT nuclear exception would now be allowed to decide who is morally disqualified from procedural office inside the treaty system.

That is why the resistance was institutional rather than theatrical. After dismissing the objections as baseless and politically motivated, Iran disassociated itself from the election of the United States as vice president, and according to one contemporaneous account, from Australia’s as well, turning the confrontation into a mirror held up to the old order. The 2025 report of the sixth session of the conference on a Middle East zone free of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction said Israel’s refusal to join the NPT and submit all its facilities and activities to comprehensive safeguards undermined the credibility of the non-proliferation regime and imposed additional burdens on regional states, while the same report condemned attacks on Iran’s safeguarded nuclear facilities as a grave threat to the credibility of the NPT and the integrity of the entire IAEA safeguards regime.

In that setting, refusing to let Washington, London, Paris, Berlin, and Canberra define the boundaries of legitimacy was not indulgence toward Iran, but a defense of sovereign equality against a one-sided nuclear order.

What their objection revealed

The objections from the United States, the E3, and Australia therefore boomeranged. They were intended to isolate Iran, but they instead illuminated the moral exhaustion of a bloc that speaks in the language of non-proliferation while presiding over an order in which disarmament obligations are endlessly deferred, nuclear sharing and modernization continue, and Israel’s opaque arsenal remains politically protected from the universality routinely demanded of others. The analysis from the European Journal of International Law (EJIL) long ago captured the pattern by showing how NAM kept international attention on Israel’s nuclear status and how double standards around Israel helped fuel resistance inside the regime, and the documents gathered since then show that this reading did not fade but hardened.

Australia’s place in this picture is revealing precisely because it is less central than Washington or the E3 and yet moved in lockstep with them against Iran’s vice presidency. That choice placed Canberra inside a camp that could still object loudly but could no longer command consent, and it tied Australia to a diplomatic posture that much of the Global South now experiences as selective guardianship rather than principled stewardship. The same is true of the E3, whose claim to defend the treaty sounds increasingly thin when the documentary record shows decades of unfinished obligations on the Middle East file and continued Western insistence that the burden of credibility falls primarily on disfavored treaty members rather than on the region’s protected exception.

A treaty stripped bare

What emerged in New York, then, was not simply a quarrel over Iran. In fact, we all witnessed the exposure of a treaty order whose founding compromise on the Middle East has been repeatedly postponed, diluted, and evaded, until many of the states asked to keep faith with the system now see the system itself as compromised at the core. The 2026 UN Secretariat paper, the 2026 Algeria submission, the April 2026 NAM statement, the 2024 IAEA record, and the 2025 IAEA safeguards resolution all converge on the same underlying reality that Israel’s non-accession, unsafeguarded status, and continuing exceptional treatment have become inseparable from the crisis of NPT credibility.

That is why Iran’s vice presidency is so significant, because it marks the point at which a large part of the non-aligned world stopped pretending that the greatest danger to the treaty’s legitimacy begins and ends in Tehran, and instead used procedure to register a quieter but more consequential judgment that the deeper non-proliferation crisis lies in a regime that punishes some, excuses others, and then demands respect for the imbalance it created.

On April 27th, the West could still denounce, but could no longer decide; and that, more than the vice presidency itself, is the message now being sent from the Global South to Washington, the E3, and Australia.

April 29, 2026 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Progressive Hypocrite | , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Nuclear Apartheid: Iran’s Rise Exposes the NPT Fraud and the West’s Israel Exception

“Trump’s presidency is at risk of being destroyed” Col Douglas Macgregor

ANI News | April 28, 2026

April 28, 2026 Posted by | Militarism, Video, Wars for Israel | , , , , | Comments Off on “Trump’s presidency is at risk of being destroyed” Col Douglas Macgregor

Iran has legal right to act in Hormuz, holds US responsible for disruptions: UN mission

Press TV – April 28, 2026

Iran, which is not a party to the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, asserts its legal right to take “necessary and proportionate measures” in the Strait of Hormuz, and holds the United States responsible for any disruptions to maritime transport in the vital waterway, the country’s permanent mission to the United Nations said.

The mission said on Tuesday that US actions in the Strait of Hormuz have severely compromised international maritime safety. The mission made the remarks in two posts on X, a day after Iran addressed at a meeting of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) on Maritime safety.

The mission pointed out that Iran is not a party to the 1982 Convention on the Law of the Sea and therefore does not regard its provisions as binding.

As the principal coastal state, Iran retains the legal authority to implement necessary measures within the Strait of Hormuz to address security threats and to prevent any military or hostile exploitation of this vital passage, it said.

Iran’s mission further noted that the Islamic Republic reserves the right to ensure safe passage in the Strait of Hormuz and to protect its national interests against hostile activities.

It further asserted that the US has engaged in unlawful actions that disrupt maritime transport, such as the imposition of a maritime blockade, the illegal seizure of Iranian vessels, and the detention of their crews.

Such actions not only violate international law and the UN Charter but also constitute acts of piracy.

As tensions escalate in the region, the Iranian government says that the US’s aggressive maritime policies pose a direct threat to international navigation and regional stability.

The Iranian mission further called for accountability regarding US transgressions.

Tensions have been running high over a so-called naval blockade the US has enforced on Iranian ports and ships, as well as American attempts to conduct mine-sweeping operations in the Strait of Hormuz.

Iranian officials have said the blockade is unlawful and a breach of a two-week ceasefire that took effect on April 8 and was again unilaterally extended by US President Donald Trump hours before it was set to expire on April 22.

April 28, 2026 Posted by | Militarism, War Crimes, Wars for Israel | , , | Comments Off on Iran has legal right to act in Hormuz, holds US responsible for disruptions: UN mission

Have the US and Israel killed non-proliferation?

Ashes of Pompeii | April 28, 2026

The United Nations has elected Iran as one of the thirty-four vice presidents of the 2026 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference, proceeding despite formal objections from the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Australia, and the United Arab Emirates. Rather than a mere procedural footnote, this appointment signals a pronounced structural realignment and underscores the increasing diplomatic isolation of Western capitals within multilateral governance.

For decades, nuclear restraint was widely regarded as a stabilizing imperative, a framework endorsed by practically all nations, including Iran, who consistently endorsed this through state doctrine and a longstanding religious fatwa explicitly prohibiting the pursuit of atomic armaments. The Iranian prohibition was the foundation of the JCPOA agreement allowing internation inspection of Iranian nuclear sites. It is important to note that it was the USA who withdrew from the JCPOA agreement and not Iran, and Iran seems to have respected the terms even after this withdrawal.

This is the context for the current situation. Iran has been attacked by the USA and Israel because of the perceived threat that Iran might, despite the inspections and the conclusions of the American intelligence agencies, cross the nuclear threshold. Please note the contrast: Iran was attacked because it might develop nuclear weapons, whereas North Korea enjoys relative security precisely because it has nuclear weapons. That is to say, non-proliferation treaty compliance would seem to correlate with heightened vulnerability.

Whatever one might think of Kim Jong Un, the caricatures propagated regarding North Korea’s leadership as erratic, epitomized by the “Rocketman” epithet, are increasingly untenable when subjected to rigorous strategic analysis. Evaluating outcomes rather than rhetoric, it becomes evident that Pyongyang’s leadership was methodically positioned ahead of other global policymakers. While other regimes face coercive diplomacy or military intervention, North Korea’s deterrent has insulated it from external operations. We can assume other countries have noticed this, that non-proliferation or strategic ambiguity offer far less protection than verified atomic capability.

And this realization is coming at a time when America itself is coming to be seen as more erratic, and potentially a less reliable partner than it was perceived to be in the past. Can America’s allies still feel secure under America’s nuclear umbrella? Is an “America First” America going to risk nuclear conflageration to defend its allies? Many will have calculated that it might not.

Washington and Jerusalem have long justified their confrontational posture toward Tehran by citing the purported threat of an Iranian breakout, even as Israel maintains an arsenal that, though officially unacknowledged, is universally understood by all. If the recent campaigns against Iranian military and energy infrastructure were to be assessed through a deterrence lens, it can be argued that the absence of an atomic shield rendered Tehran strategically exposed. Had Iran possessed a credible second-strike capability, those operations would likely have been deemed too escalatory to execute.

Consequently, the international community can probably anticipate a quiet reassessment of nuclear thresholds. Governments are not yet explicitly announcing an intention to seek atomic weapons, but it does seem evident that more will be seriously considering it, whether because they no longer trust America as ally or because they see that nuclear deterrance has been successful for North Korea. For now, it seems likely that these nuclear intentions will remain under wraps, but who can doubt that, at the very least, multiple feasability studies will have been undertaken across the world.

The strategic calculus advanced by the Trump administration and the Netanyahu government has effectively engineered an environment where non-proliferation is, at best, a diminishing paradigm, and at worst, an existential error for a sovereign state. Therefore, the eventual deployment of tactical or strategic nuclear assets across multiple countries becomes increasingly probable.

The profound irony, of course, is that given the stated justifications for the launch of the US/Israeli war on Iran, that Israel will be a highly plausible future target within the very security vacuum it helped to normalize.

April 28, 2026 Posted by | Militarism | , , | Comments Off on Have the US and Israel killed non-proliferation?

Iran says EU’s insistence on sanctions hastens its ‘embarrassing descent into irrelevance’

Press TV – April 28, 2026

Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson says the EU’s insistence on inhumane sanctions against Iran demonstrates Europe’s double standards and hastens its “embarrassing descent into irrelevance.”

On Monday, European Commission President Ursula Vonder Leyen said at a press brief in Berlin that “it is too early to talk about lifting sanctions on Iran.”

In a post on X late Monday, Esmaeil Baghaei strongly criticized the European Commission president’s insistence on maintaining sanctions against Iran under the guise of human rights, calling the stance hypocritical and disgraceful.

“The EU’s inhumane sanctions on Iran were never about ‘human rights’ — they were designed to trample the basic rights of ordinary Iranians,” Baghaei wrote. “No one is buying this tired moral theater.”

He added that such posturing will not earn Europe or its constituency “an ounce of credibility on the world stage.”

“If anything, it only further demonstrates Europe’s ruling class’ double-standard & hypocrisy, and hastens Europe’s embarrassing descent into irrelevance,” the spokesperson further said.

Iranian officials have consistently condemned EU sanctions, arguing they are not about human rights but are a form of collective punishment designed to harm ordinary citizens and serve the political interests of Western powers.

April 28, 2026 Posted by | Economics, Progressive Hypocrite, Wars for Israel | , , | Comments Off on Iran says EU’s insistence on sanctions hastens its ‘embarrassing descent into irrelevance’

Argentina’s Javier Milei sells out his country for Israel

The Grayzone | April 27, 2026

The Grayzone’s Oscar Leon interviews Argentine journalist Sebastian Salgado about the significance of the bizarre visit this month by President Javier Milei to Israel.

Salgado details the emergence of a project to erode Argentina’s national sovereignty by handing over control of the country’s water to an Israeli company and provide benefits to Israeli expats while selling off the country’s public assets to wealthy investors and multinationals.

Salgado addresses disturbing rumors of a plan allowing for the resettlement of as many as 300,000 Israelis in Argentina, and the growing appeal of the Patagonia region to these outsiders. He argues that Milei’s ultimate legacy will be the balkanization of the country by an economic hit man more loyal to a sectarian ultra-Orthodox religious cult than to his own nation’s interests.

April 27, 2026 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, Video | , , , | Comments Off on Argentina’s Javier Milei sells out his country for Israel

Villains of Judea: Douglas Feith

The shadow architect of the Iraq War

José Niño Unfiltered | April 27, 2026

Few individuals embody the conflict between American national interest and the demands of world jewry as sharply as Douglas Feith. Throughout his career, Feith has operated as a consummate advocate for the Jewish state, positioning himself within the highest echelons of the U.S. government to ensure that American military and foreign policy served as a potent instrument for his own tribal convictions. From his early days in the pro-Israel lobby to his role in architecting the catastrophic Iraq War, Feith’s career is a study in the subordination of American sovereignty to the priorities of the Jewish people.

General Tommy Franks, who commanded the invasion of Iraq, famously said he had to deal with “the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth almost every day” — referring to Feith, as documented in Bob Woodward’s Plan of Attack. Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s chief of staff at the State Department, separately stated: “Seldom in my life have I met a dumber man.” Irrespective of his perceived deficiencies, Feith was able to reach the apex of the national security establishment and fundamentally reshape American foreign policy for the benefit of Israel.

The Zionist convictions Feith brought to the highest levels of American government were not adopted in adulthood but absorbed in childhood.

The Origins of a Zionist Hawk

Douglas Jay Feith was born on July 16, 1953, into a Jewish family in Philadelphia. His background was rooted in Zionist tradition through his father, Dalck Feith, who had been a member of Betar, the Revisionist Zionist youth organization founded by Ze’ev Jabotinsky, active in Poland during the 1930s. Betar was a militaristic movement associated with Jabotinsky’s Revisionist Zionism, a hard-line nationalist strand that rejected the socialist mainstream of the Zionist movement and evolved through the Herut Party into what became the Israeli Likud Party,

Dalck Feith came to the United States in January 1942 and became a businessman, philanthropist, and Republican donor. Douglas Feith grew up in Elkins Park, a Philadelphia suburb, and has acknowledged that his father’s Betar membership and the family’s experience of the Holocaust profoundly shaped his own Zionist convictions.

Feith has publicly described himself as a Zionist — specifically not a Labor or “peace now” Zionist but a right-wing Zionist closely aligned with the Likud tradition. He wrote a 2021 op-ed in the Jewish News Syndicate titled “Why I’m a Zionist,” arguing that support for a Jewish state is entirely compatible with American patriotism. His worldview draws heavily on Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s “iron wall” doctrine, the idea that Arabs will only accept a Jewish state after recognizing they cannot destroy it militarily.

Education and Early Career

This ideological foundation accompanied Feith through an elite educational track and into the upper reaches of the legal profession. Feith graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College in 1975 and magna cum laude from Georgetown University Law Center in 1978, according to his Hudson Institute biography.

He began his public career in 1975 working as an intern on Senator Henry M. “Scoop” Jackson’s Subcommittee on Investigations — the Democratic senator from Washington famous for his hawkish anti-Soviet foreign policy and strong support for Israel. While at Harvard, Feith studied under Professor Richard Pipes, a Polish-born Jewish scholar and anti-Soviet hawk who chaired the CIA’s Team B strategic intelligence exercise in 1976 and later joined Reagan’s National Security Council in February 1981. Feith joined the NSC as a Middle East specialist that same year, working under Pipes.

The Reagan Years

These formative experiences positioned Feith for a direct entry into the national security establishment. Feith joined the government in 1981 as a Middle East specialist on the National Security Council, serving under his former Harvard professor Richard Pipes. The following year, he moved over to the Pentagon to take up duties as Special Counsel to Richard Perle, then Assistant Secretary of Defense. Feith later characterized the role in his own words as covering “UN-related, law of war, and the like” issues that fell to him as the only lawyer in that office. Two years later, in 1984, Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger elevated Feith to Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Negotiations Policy, where he remained until 1986.

One striking and highly contentious chapter unfolded in 1982, when Feith departed the NSC amid an FBI probe into administration officials suspected of leaking intelligence to Israel. Accusations surfaced that he had mishandled classified materials, though Feith never faced prosecution.

The Private Sector and the Pro-Israel Network

Feith soon traded government service for the lucrative side of the defense and foreign-policy world. When Feith left the Pentagon in 1986, he and Marc Zell co-founded Feith & Zell, P.C., a law firm based initially in Israel that lobbied the U.S. government on behalf of the Turkish, Israeli, and Bosnian governments while representing defense contractors including Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman. In 1989, Feith separately established International Advisors, Inc., a lobbying operation whose clients included Turkey.

In 1999, Feith & Zell merged with the Israel-based Zell, Goldberg & Co. to form the FANDZ International Law Group. When Feith returned to government in 2001 as Undersecretary of Defense overseeing Iraq reconstruction, FANDZ was simultaneously running a task force to help companies secure reconstruction contracts in Iraq.

Throughout the 1990s, Feith built an extensive presence in neoconservative and pro-Israel organizations that would later staff the Bush administration’s national security apparatus. In 1997, the Zionist Organization of America honored both Feith and his father at its annual dinner. Dalck received the ZOA’s special Centennial Award “for his lifetime of service to Israel and the Jewish people,” while Douglas received the prestigious Louis D. Brandeis Award.

Feith served as Vice Chairman of the advisory board of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), a think tank promoting close military cooperation between the United States and Israel. He also served as Chairman of the Board of the Center for Security Policy, a think tank founded in 1988 by Frank Gaffney that advocates higher military budgets, missile defense systems, space weapons programs, and hard-line Middle East policies.

Feith was also among the founding figures of One Jerusalem, created in 2001 following the Camp David peace talks, with the mission of “maintaining a united Jerusalem as the undivided capital of Israel.” Other founders and principals included former Israeli diplomat Dore Gold and former Deputy Prime Minister Natan Sharansky.

The Clean Break Document

Feith’s organizational work in this period laid the groundwork for direct policy advocacy on behalf of the Israeli government. The most consequential episode in Feith’s pre-government career was his participation in drafting “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm” in 1996. The paper was produced by a study group led by Richard Perle and organized by the Israel-based Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies for incoming Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. It urged Netanyahu to abandon the Oslo Accords and the land-for-peace framework entirely, called for removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq as an “important Israeli strategic objective,” proposed striking Syrian military targets in Lebanon and possibly in Syria proper, and laid out a new Israeli strategic doctrine grounded in “peace through strength” rather than diplomatic concessions.

Three members of that study group later occupied senior positions shaping Bush administration Middle East policy: Perle chaired the Defense Policy Board, Feith became Under Secretary of Defense, and David Wurmser became Dick Cheney’s top Middle East adviser. Professors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, in their 2006 essay “The Israel Lobby” in the London Review of Books, wrote that the Clean Break paper “called for Israel to take steps to reorder the entire Middle East” and that “Feith, Perle and Wurmser were soon urging the Bush administration to pursue those same goals.”

Under Secretary of Defense for Policy

A second and far more consequential bureaucratic creation soon followed. Appointed on July 16, 2001, Feith served as Under Secretary of Defense for Policy — the third-highest civilian position in the Department of Defense. His portfolio included formulating defense planning guidance, managing DoD relations with foreign governments, representing the Pentagon in interagency deliberations, and advising the President and Secretary of Defense on national security matters.

Early in the Bush administration, Feith created the Office of Strategic Influence, established in November 2001 to conduct information operations targeting foreign audiences, including proposals to plant news items — “possibly even false ones” — with foreign media organizations, according to the New York Times. After the program’s existence became public in February 2002 and generated intense scrutiny, Feith decided to close the office, with Rumsfeld announcing the closure at a February 26 press conference. Rumsfeld later acknowledged that its functions continued through other offices, telling reporters in November 2002: “I’m gonna keep doing every single thing that needs to be done and I have.”

The Office of Special Plans

The most damaging controversy of Feith’s tenure centered on his supervision of the Office of Special Plans, a Pentagon unit that operated from September 2002 through June 2003. The OSP was charged with supplying senior administration officials with raw intelligence about Iraq that bypassed the normal vetting process of the intelligence community.

The unit’s driving purpose was to build the political case for invading Iraq by circumventing both the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency, which had each concluded that evidence for an operational Iraq-al-Qaeda link was weak or nonexistent. Rather than work through the established intelligence consensus process, the OSP fed its conclusions directly to Vice President Cheney’s office and other senior decision-makers. According to Mother Jones, the OSP’s director, Abram Shulsky, “turned cherry-picked pieces of uncorroborated, anti-Iraq intelligence into talking points” that circulated to Rumsfeld and Cheney. The OSP also worked closely with Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress, whose intelligence the broader community had largely discounted.

In September 2002, two days before the CIA completed its own final assessment of the Iraq-al-Qaeda question, Feith briefed senior advisers to Cheney and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, directly attacking the CIA’s credibility and alleging “fundamental problems” with its analysis. The version of the OSP briefing presented to senior White House officials differed from the version shown to the CIA — with a slide citing the CIA’s “fundamental problems” omitted from the version given to the intelligence community, according to the Washington Post’s reporting on the Inspector General’s summary.

In February 2007, the Pentagon’s Inspector General released a landmark report concluding that Feith’s office had “developed, produced, and then disseminated alternative intelligence assessments on the Iraq and al Qaida relationship, which included some conclusions that were inconsistent with the consensus of the Intelligence Community, to senior decision-makers.” The report found these actions “inappropriate” though not “illegal.”

Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI), Chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, did not accept the limitations of that framing. “The bottom line is that intelligence relating to the Iraq-al-Qaeda relationship was manipulated by high-ranking officials in the Department of Defense to support the administration’s decision to invade Iraq,” Levin stated. “The inspector general’s report is a devastating condemnation of inappropriate activities in the DOD policy office that helped take this nation to war.”

Feith seized on the “not illegal” finding to declare he felt “vindicated” by the report, calling it proof that his office had been “smeared for years.” He disputed the Inspector General’s “inappropriate” finding as “bizarre” and “quibbling,” arguing that his office had simply produced “a criticism of the consensus of the intelligence community.”

De-Ba’athification and Its Catastrophic Consequences

The intelligence controversy was only one front of the wreckage Feith’s office produced. Among the most consequential decisions associated with Feith’s tenure were two orders that remade Iraq’s governing and security structures. The Pentagon, under Feith’s direction, drafted the de-Baathification decree that became CPA Order 1, signed by Ambassador Paul Bremer on May 16, 2003, which stripped all senior Ba’ath Party members from government positions.

A separate instrument, CPA Order 2, signed one week later, dissolved Iraq’s military and security forces — affecting 385,000 soldiers, 285,000 police, and 50,000 presidential security personnel. Together, the two orders threw hundreds of thousands of Iraqis out of work and destroyed the administrative and security infrastructure of the Iraqi state. They are now widely considered among the worst strategic decisions of the occupation, having helped ignite the sectarian insurgency that followed.

The Lawrence Franklin Espionage Scandal

The damage caused by Feith’s policy decisions was matched by serious security breaches involving his subordinates. Lawrence Franklin, a veteran Defense Intelligence Agency analyst who worked in Feith’s Near East and South Asia Bureau, was arrested in 2005 and pleaded guilty to espionage-related charges for passing classified information to AIPAC officials Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman, who then relayed the information to Israeli officials and the media. Franklin was sentenced to nearly 13 years in prison, later reduced to ten months’ house arrest. All charges against Rosen and Weissman were dropped in 2009. Although Feith himself was not charged, the scandal reinforced longstanding concerns about the security culture within his office and its relationship to Israeli intelligence interests.

After the Pentagon

After leaving the Pentagon in August 2005, Feith held the position of professor and Distinguished Practitioner in National Security Policy at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service from 2006 to 2008. The appointment drew sharp opposition from the faculty — a letter signed by 35 professors accused Feith of ethical conflicts and of having defended the use of torture — and his contract was not renewed. He subsequently served as a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution before joining the Hudson Institute in September 2008 as a Senior Fellow and Director of the Center for National Security Strategies.

In 2009, Feith became one of several Bush administration officials considered for a war crimes investigation by a Spanish court under claims of universal jurisdiction, headed by Judge Baltasar Garzón.

Ultimately, the Iraq War must not be viewed merely as a tactical or strategic failure of the American state, but as a profound success for the interests of organized Jewry, which Feith serves with unwavering fidelity. By viewing Feith as an agent of the Jewish state rather than a servant of the American public, the true objective of his career becomes clear: the advancement of his own people is his paramount duty, with the welfare of the United States trailing as a distant afterthought.

April 27, 2026 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | , , , , | Comments Off on Villains of Judea: Douglas Feith

US pension fund invests hundreds of millions in weapons firms supplying Israel

The Cradle | April 27, 2026

The Virginia Retirement System (VRS), which manages pension benefits for the US state of Virginia’s public sector workers, holds a staggering $394 million in investments linked to weapons makers and shipping companies supporting Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and wars on Lebanon and Iran, according to a 23 April report released by a coalition of Palestinian advocacy groups.

The report was prepared by the VRS Divest from Weapons & War campaign, the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM), and the People’s Embargo for Palestine. It draws on publicly available financial data and records obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests.

The report presents a detailed accounting of the VRS’s investments in many of the world’s largest weapons makers as part of its $122 billion portfolio.

Lockheed Martin is the VRS’s single largest holding at $94.8 million. The firm produces the F-35 fighter jet and AGM-114 Hellfire missiles. Both have been used extensively by the Israeli military during its more than two-year Genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.

The Virginia pension system is also invested in Boeing, which manufactures precision-guided munitions, known as JDAMs, that are used to kill and maim children in Gaza.

Other investments include General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, Maersk, and Thyssenkrupp, all of which either manufacture or ship weapons for use by the Israeli military in Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran.

“These companies are critical in maintaining the weapons supply to Israel and the resulting massacres of thousands of people across the Middle East,” Bana Husseini, an organizer with the VRS Divest campaign and the Palestinian Youth Movement, told TRT World. 

Husseini and other activists are lobbying the VRS to divest from companies supporting Israel’s military and its genocide and wars. A petition calling for divestment has gathered nearly 4,500 signatures.

However, the pension system has continued to express its support for Israel.

“The VRS has responded by dismissing the campaign’s demands, arresting a firefighter for delivering the petition, inviting a notorious war criminal to their yearly retreat, and further collaborating with war profiteers,” Husseini explained.

Joelle Rudney, a retired teacher from Virginia, told TRT World she was upset to learn her pension was invested “in the bombings of hospitals, schools, and houses in Gaza in attacks that have killed nearly 70,000 people, mostly civilians.”

In response, she has helped lobby the VRS Board of Trustees to divest from the companies supporting Israel’s war crimes.

Casey Rosales, a county public servant who has worked in mental health services, was also angered to learn how her pension contributions are being invested.

“It’s difficult to reconcile the fact that while I dedicate my career to supporting and strengthening communities, the money I earn may be contributing to harm elsewhere,” Rosales stated.

A Virginia public utilities employee said she felt betrayed to learn the money she contributes to her retirement fund is supporting genocide.

“It is profoundly sad that while doing work to help men, women, and children with health care services and resources here in Virginia, my tax money goes to buying and owning shares in companies contributing to genocide,” the employee stated.

“I demand the VRS Board of Trustees divest from these companies and commit to never again invest our future into the manufacturing of death,” the employee told TRT World.

Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza has killed over 72,000 Palestinians, the majority women and children. Tens, if not hundreds, of thousands more will likely die due to the indirect effects of years of Israeli bombing that has destroyed the basic health, electricity, and water infrastructure in the strip and displaced nearly 90 percent of the population.

April 27, 2026 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Militarism, War Crimes | , , , , , , | Comments Off on US pension fund invests hundreds of millions in weapons firms supplying Israel

US bill to grant Americans serving in Israeli army same rights as US troops

MEMO | April 27, 2026

US lawmakers push to grant American soldiers serving in the Israeli army the same legal protections as US troops, in a move without precedent for any other foreign army. The bill would place some 20,000 dual citizens fighting for Israel on a legal par with Americans serving the US.

Details of the Israel first carve out was reported in Military.com. The legislation passing through Congress would, for the first time in American history, treat service in a foreign army as legally equivalent to service in the US armed forces — but only where that foreign army is Israeli occupation army.

House Resolution 8445, tabled by Republican Congressmen Guy Reschenthaler of Pennsylvania and Max Miller of Ohio, would amend Title 38 of the US Code so that Americans who fight for Israel are treated “in the same manner as service in the uniformed services” of the US. Over 20,000 American citizens serving in the Israeli military are expected to benefit if the changes come into effect.

US veterans’ benefits and military protections are, under existing law, tied to service in the American armed forces. The Bill departs from that principle by extending two of the most consequential US protections to Americans fighting for a foreign state. The Servicemembers Civil Relief Act caps interest rates on debt during active service and halts evictions and foreclosures. The Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act compels American employers to hold open the jobs of those called to service.

Under H.R. 8445, an American returning from a tour with the IDF could demand their old job back from a US employer, halt a foreclosure on a US home, and benefit from interest-rate caps on US debt  on the basis of foreign military service.

Americans have served in foreign militaries for as long as the US has existed — in the French Foreign Legion, in the Australian and New Zealand armed forces, and, since 2022, in the International Legion for the Defence of Ukraine. No comparable legislation has ever been seriously advanced for any of those forces. The State Department’s standing position is that Americans who fight abroad do so at their own risk and should not expect support from the US government.

H.R. 8445 is therefore not part of a broader policy trend. It is exclusive to the IDF.

IDF personnel, meanwhile, are already compensated by Israel through stipends, housing assistance, post-service educational grants and access to the national healthcare system, all funded by the Knesset. The Bill nevertheless asks American employers, banks, and courts to treat Israeli military service as if it had been performed for the US.

The legislation is being pursued at a moment when American sentiment toward Israel has shifted decisively in the opposite direction. A Pew Research Center poll published last month found that 60 per cent of Americans now hold an unfavourable view of Israel, up nearly 20 percentage points since 2022. The proportion holding a “very unfavourable” view has tripled in that period.

Among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents, the figure has reached 80 per cent. Even within the Republican coalition championing the Bill, 57 per cent of Republicans aged 18 to 49 hold an unfavourable view of Israel.

Critics have pointed out that American veterans’ protections were built on a simple covenant: those who serve the United States have a claim on the US. Extending those protections to Americans serving a foreign government, and only one foreign government, establishes that the relevant criterion is no longer service to the country, but the identity of the country being served.

H.R. 8445 has been referred to the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs.

April 27, 2026 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Militarism | , , | Comments Off on US bill to grant Americans serving in Israeli army same rights as US troops

What a president, a movie star, a congressman, and a cell phone all dared to say

By Jasim Al-Azzawi | MEMO | April 27, 2026

Richard Nixon was not a man given to moral clarity. But in the privacy of the Oval Office, away from the choreography of statecraft, he spoke with a bluntness that history rarely forgives and seldom forge “Let me explain something about the Jewish lobby in this country. They believe that being for Israel first does not mean that you’re putting America second. But an American president”, he insisted, “has to approach it differently. He’s always got to think first of what is best for America. An American president must make a decision that does not, in effect, give the Israelis a blank check”.

Nixon went further. “Every Jewish prime minister that I have known has enlisted American Jews to bring as much pressure as possible in the political process on American presidents”. These were not the words of a fringe voice or a conspiracy theorist. They were the words of the thirty-seventh president of the United States, speaking in the calculated, unsentimental register of realpolitik.

Marlon Brando, the greatest actor of his generation, arrived at similar conclusions through a different door, not the back corridors of power, but the front lots of Hollywood. When asked why he refused to accept the coveted Oscar award, he was unsparing: “Because of the increasing control of Zionists in Hollywood. They own the studios”, he said. “They shape the stories. They decide who gets heard and who doesn’t. I saw it clearly, and I couldn’t be part of that system anymore”. The actor who had made the whole world feel the weight of a man’s grief or ambition had looked behind the curtain and refused, on grounds of conscience, to keep performing.

Then there is Paul Findley, a Republican congressman from Illinois who served twenty-two years in the House of Representatives and, upon losing his seat, did the thing that defeated politicians rarely do: he told the truth about why. In his landmark 1985 book, They Dare to Speak Out: People and Institutions Confront Israel’s Lobby, Findley documented with meticulous and damning precision how the American Israel Public Affairs Committee — AIPAC — had become the dominant force shaping Washington’s posture toward the Middle East. The lobby, Findley wrote, had developed a near-perfect system for punishing those who deviated and rewarding those who complied. His conclusion was stark: what passed for American policy toward Israel and the Palestinians was not policy at all. It was capitulation, dressed in the language of alliance.

A president. A superstar. A congressman. Three men from entirely different worlds, operating across five decades, arriving at the same uncomfortable coordinate on the map of American power.

For nearly eighty years, that coordinate remained a forbidden zone in mainstream political discourse. The machinery that enforced the silence was formidable: campaign finance, editorial gatekeeping, and the constant threat of the career-ending accusation of anti-semitism.

Legacy media were not merely complicit in the silence; they were, in many ways, its architecture. What Nixon, Brando, and Findley observed about concentrated influence in studios, newsrooms, and legislative chambers was not paranoia. It was a structural description of how certain narratives achieved dominance, and others were quietly buried.

And then came Gaza. And then came the cell phone

No editorial board approved the footage. No network anchor contextualized it before broadcast. No studio executive decided what the audience was ready to see. The images came directly from the rubble of Jabalia, from the corridors of Al-Shifa, from the faces of mothers carrying children in plastic bags. Small children were buried alive under the rubble. Older people are torn limb from limb. Hospitals destroyed. Starvation renders human beings mere bones and skin. The International Criminal Court issued two arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and his Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, who had threatened to cut off food, electricity, and water to an entire civilian population.

The military has a phrase for what happened next: “quantity has a quality all of its own”. The sheer, relentless, unmediated volume of images from Gaza did something that decades of scholarship, congressional testimony, and presidential recordings had failed to do. It broke the monopoly of narrative. The tsunami of images horrified the world and compelled people, especially across Europe and in a growing segment of the American public, to say what had long been considered unsayable: enough. Not in our names. No more arms. No more blank cheques. No more diplomatic cover at the United Nations and in every international forum where Israeli impunity had been shielded from consequence.

The journalist and war correspondent Sebastian Junger once observed that war is always a story told by survivors about the dead. For decades, in the American telling of the Israel-Palestine story, the dead were abstractions, statistics, footnotes, and regrettable collateral. The cell phone abolished that abstraction. It put a face, a name, a cry on every casualty. It made the dead impossible to manage.

We aren’t just seeing a shift in opinion; we’re seeing a shift in the architecture of permission. It’s a rewrite of who can speak, in which spaces, without risking their entire career. The young are leading it. The streets of London, Paris, and Chicago are leading it.

Even within the American political class, there is a whispered consensus that Findley described. We’re hearing the literal break in the silence. The unspoken rule that you must censor yourself before you speak is falling apart.

Nixon feared giving Israel a blank check. Brando feared a culture in which certain stories could not be told. Findley documented the machinery by which both fears were, for decades, well-founded. What they could not have foreseen was the device in every pocket that would, finally, make the silencing incomplete.

The cell phone did not create the suffering in Gaza. But it denied the world the comfort of not knowing.

That denial, it turns out, was what justice needed most.

April 27, 2026 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , , , | Comments Off on What a president, a movie star, a congressman, and a cell phone all dared to say

Talks would resume if US accepts 3-phase framework Iran put forward

Al Mayadeen | April 27, 2026

Iran has informed mediators of a proposed three-phase framework for negotiations and says talks could resume if the United States agrees to the plan, Al Mayadeen’s correspondent in Tehran reported.

The proposal, as described by our correspondent, outlines an initial phase focused on ending US-Israeli aggression and securing guarantees that fighting will not resume against Iran and Lebanon. During this stage, Iran would not discuss any other issues, the report said.

The plan envisions coordination with Oman

If agreement is reached on the first phase, discussions would move to a second stage centered on the management of the Strait of Hormuz. The plan reportedly envisions coordination with Oman to establish a new legal framework governing the strategic waterway.

The third phase would address Iran’s nuclear program, which Tehran would only be prepared to discuss after agreements are reached on the first two phases, according to the report.

This is happening as Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi has departed for Moscow, leading a diplomatic delegation.

Iranian ambassador in Moscow, Kazem Jalal, said earlier that Araghchi is set to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin during his visit to Moscow, where he will hold consultations on the latest developments regarding negotiations and the ceasefire.

April 26, 2026 Posted by | Wars for Israel | , , , , | Comments Off on Talks would resume if US accepts 3-phase framework Iran put forward

« Previous Entries     Next Entries »