Tag: donald trump

Iran must not repeat Libyan mistake of trusting US – ex-Gaddafi minister

Iran should not repeat the mistakes of Libya, which paid a heavy price for trusting the West, the North African country’s former information minister, Moussa Ibrahim, has warned ahead of the talks between delegations from Washington and Tehran.

The first direct meeting between the sides since the US-Israeli attack on Iran on February 28 is expected to take place in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, on Saturday, according to the White House.

The American team will be headed by Vice President J.D. Vance, and will also include special envoy Steve Witkoff and President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Tehran hasn’t announced the lineup of its delegation yet, but reports claim that it could be led by parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf.

In an interview with RT on Friday, Ibrahim – a former cabinet member under longtime Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, who was deposed and murdered in a NATO-backed uprising in 2011 – said that “both parties come to these negotiations with different ideas about peace and conflict.”

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As Trump-Iran Truce Frays, Dem Leaders Pursue Yet Another Round of War Powers Votes

After accusations of cowardly delays, Democratic leaders in the US Congress moved Wednesday toward a vote on yet another war powers resolution aimed at stopping President Donald Trump from waging more unauthorized war on Iran as the tenuous day-old Mideast ceasefire unravels.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) announced Wednesday that Democrats will force a vote on a war powers resolution when upper chamber lawmakers reconvene next week.

“Congress must reassert its authority, especially at this dangerous moment,” Schumer said during a press conference at his New York office. “No president, Democrat or Republican, should take this country to war alone. Not now. Not ever.”

Meanwhile, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) reiterated remarks made during a Tuesday evening interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, in which he said he’s demanding House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) “immediately reconvene the House back into session” so lawmakers can vote on the war powers resolution.

“A two-week ceasefire is insufficient,” Jeffries said. “We need a permanent end to Donald Trump’s reckless war of choice.”

“Assuming it doesn’t happen this week, we’ll go back into session next week and we will present a war powers resolution as soon as it becomes available to us to do so as a matter of privilege on the House floor,” he continued. “All we need are a handful of Republicans to join us.”

“The American people strongly oppose this reckless war of choice and know that we should not be spending billions of dollars to drop bombs in Iran while Republicans and Donald Trump are unwilling to spend a dime to actually make life more affordable for the American people,” Jeffries added.

The GOP-controlled House and Senate have rejected attempts to pass war powers resolutions, with Johnson denying that the US is even at war – a dubious argument used in as far back as the Korean War in order to skirt the constitutional requirement for congressional assent.

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Why Trump’s Cuba Plan Won’t Work

It is clear that the US wants to conduct some kind of regime change operation in Cuba, egged on by Republican and Democratic hawks, though polling indicates it is not popular within the US, Cuba, or the international community. Figures like Marco Rubio have said that Cuba will need to open their economy up, in a nod to when the island was a completely deregulated vassal for US casino companies, ruled by a pro-US brutal dictator, Fulgencio Batista, who was deposed by the Cuban Revolution led by the Castro brothers and Che Guevara.

The US has been applying maximum pressure on Cuba and negotiating like it did in Venezuela to put a new leader compliant to US interests, perhaps even one of the Castros, reportedly.

The Trump administration says it is getting closer to a “deal” as Venezuela has stopped its partnership with Cuba and Mexico has, according to the White House, stopped sending oil shipments. However, Mexico is still sending some oil and aid, Russia is sending more, and China has also sent help. China’s sustained attacks on the Cuban campaign have brought it diplomatic capital. The narrative of a collapsing support network for Havana is wishful thinking.

Conditions on the island are dire thanks to the US blockade, in place since 1958 but increased by Trump. There are rolling blackouts lasting up to 20 hours a day. Hospitals are shutting down wings, and patients have died because respirators lost power. Food is spoiling due to lack of refrigeration, pushing child malnutrition rates to levels not seen since the 1990s. But despite the suffering, Cuba has not budged. Negotiators have said they are “not going anywhere.”

Cubans are reminded daily of what subjugation under the US’s thumb was like, and they see a live demonstration in Venezuela, where the US extracts resources with no regard for the local population. No matter how much the US pushes, Cubans may only be urged to rebel further.

There have been massive youth protests in Cuba, but notably, they rebuke the US and the blockade, throwing out the possibility of an inside coup. Progressives in the US have pushed back, and Cuba’s young population has lost more than 1 million people to emigration (10 percent of the population), which has slowed the economy and decreased the risk of an insurgency. Rich right-wing Cubans are in South Florida. An older, more ideologically-committed population remains.

The history of American interference in Cuba is long and bloody. There was the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961. There have been hundreds of assassination attempts against Fidel Castro. There is the ongoing blockade, codified by the Helms-Burton Act. For six decades, Washington has used OFAC to seize Cuban assets. Every tool in the regime change toolbox has been used. None have worked.

What Cuba hawks like Trump, Rubio, Ted Cruz, Maria Elvira Salazar, and Mario Diaz-Balart want is not new. All come from wealthy conservative families, with Rubio, Cruz, and Salazar being of Cuban descent, and they have a personal and ideological vendetta against socialist Cuba – many of their families held positions within the old Batista regime.

They want a throwback to the old pro-US regime that will do the bidding of American corporations and the military. The island is a strategic base for other operations. Washington wants Guantánamo not just for detention but as a staging ground for airstrikes against fishing boats in the Caribbean – strikes that are war crimes according to international law.

Cuba is an older, more resilient regime than the ones the US has successfully toppled. Cuba was the main socialist revolution that spurred anti-colonial revolts throughout Latin America, Europe, and Asia. The Cuban revolutionary government, while blockaded and sanctioned, helped socialist movements in Angola, Bolivia, Syria, Libya, Venezuela, El Salvador, Granada, Colombia, Ethiopia, Congo, Mozambique, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Nicaragua, and elsewhere.

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White House ‘signed off’ on Pakistan’s declaration that Iran ceasefire included Lebanon: Report

The White House was directly involved in “shaping” the ceasefire announcement by Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, having reviewed and approved it before publication, according to a New York Times (NYT) report on 8 April.

The report says Washington saw and signed off on the statement in advance, indicating that the announcement was not an independent diplomatic move but part of coordinated communication. 

US President Donald Trump had issued an 8:00 pm deadline on Tuesday for Iran to surrender, saying that he would erase an entire civilization if Tehran did not agree to his terms for a deal.

“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will,” the president wrote on his social media platform, Truth Social.

The NYT report notes that, behind the scenes, US officials were actively seeking a way out as the deadline approached, even as US President Donald Trump was threatening Iran with annihilation if it did not open the Strait of Hormuz.

It asserts that diplomatic channels were far more active than the public messaging indicated, with the ceasefire appeal reflecting a managed effort rather than a spontaneous initiative.

Sharif’s post itself had appeared earlier with the header “Draft – Pakistan’s PM Message on X,” fueling speculation that the text had been provided externally before publication. It called for extending the deadline by two weeks, reopening the Strait of Hormuz as a “goodwill gesture,” and implementing a temporary ceasefire across all fronts. 

Iran’s 10-point plan includes US non-aggression, sanctions removal, compensation, troop withdrawal, uranium enrichment, and Iranian control of Hormuz, alongside a halt to fighting across all fronts, directly naming Lebanon. 

The Pakistani premier’s statement on X explicitly stated that “the Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States of America, along with their allies, have agreed to an immediate ceasefire everywhere, including Lebanon and elsewhere, EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY.”

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Trump claims Netanyahu will scale back strikes on Lebanon 

US President Donald Trump has said he asked Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to scale back the bombing of Lebanon as Gulf countries and some NATO members insisted that a ceasefire in the area must be part of a broader truce with Iran.

Despite Trump’s assertion, Lebanese media reported Israeli strikes across the country on Friday morning. An estimated 1,800 people have been killed in Israeli strikes in Lebanon since the start of the escalation in the Middle East, with more than 300 dying on Wednesday alone. The attacks triggered significant public outcry, including from US allies in the EU.

Iran has insisted that fighting in Lebanon must cease as part of the two-week truce framework with the US – something Washington and the Jewish state have opposed.

The exact outlines of a potential US-Iran peace deal remain unclear, after Iranian media shared a plan envisaging non-aggression, Tehran’s control over the strategic Strait of Hormuz, acceptance of some uranium enrichment, stopping Israeli attacks on Hezbollah, and the lifting of all sanctions. The US previously opposed many of the terms.

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The War in Iran as International Terrorism

As someone born in 1944, when Franklin D. Roosevelt was president, who lived through 12 other presidencies before Donald Trump took — and that word has a different meaning with him — office in 2016, the truth is that I’ve simply never experienced anything quite like this (and I know that I’m in good company). Yes, I’ve certainly lived through other wars, from the Korean War of my childhood to the nightmarish war in Vietnam of my collegiate years (though it began well before and went on long after that) to the invasion of Afghanistan (that led me to launch TomDispatch) to George W. Bush’s nightmarish war in Iraq that was a critical part of my reportorial (or at least TomDispatchian) life. And now, in my old age, yet another war! (Why is it that my country, with or without Donald Trump, just can’t seem to stop going to war?)

Iran is, of course, being trumped (or rather Trumped!). The “president of peace” was only the president of peace until he wasn’t. Ask Nicolás Maduro and his wife if you doubt that for a second. And give Donald Trump credit for his unpredictability. One moment he is indeed the president of peace and the next moment — no question about it — he’s making war like a maniac or blowing staggering numbers of boats (almost 50 as I was writing this) out of the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean.

You might wonder, under the circumstances, if it’s even possible to cover his presidency as a reporter the way any journalist might once have covered a presidency. The very name for his latest assault (on Iran), Operation Epic Fury, is distinctly all Trump all the time. As he told a crowd at a rally in Kentucky recently, “They gave me a list of names to choose. ‘Sir, you could pick the name you’d like, sir.’ I said, ‘The name of what?’ ‘The name of the attack on Iran, sir.’ And they gave me, like, 20 names, and I’m, like, falling asleep. I didn’t like any of them. Then I see ‘Epic Fury.’ I said, ‘I like that name! I like that name!’”

In short, the president of peace has distinctly made peace with war and, when it comes to Latin America, his version of war may just be beginning. (Watch out, Cuba!) With all of that and, sadly, more in mind, let TomDispatch regular Nan Levinson take you into a world in which reporters do indeed have to cover (whatever that may mean these days) Donald Trump making war on this world of ours.

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Is the ‘Ghost Murmur’ quantum device possible? Scientists are skeptical

On Monday afternoon President Donald Trump and CIA Director John Ratcliffe hinted at technology that had helped locate a downed American Air Force officer hiding in a mountain crevice in southern Iran. By Tuesday, the New York Post reported that the CIA had deployed Ghost Murmur, a device that uses vaguely described “long-range quantum magnetometry” to find signals of human heartbeats, after which artificial intelligence software isolates each heartbeat from the noisy data. An unnamed source told the Post it was like “hearing a voice in a stadium, except the stadium is a thousand square miles of desert.” Another line landed like a movie tagline: “In the right conditions, if your heart is beating, we will find you.”

It’s a terrific story. It is also, according to scientists who study magnetic fields, almost certainly not true. The rescue was real—the mission involved multiple aircraft and a survival beacon carried by the airman—but Ghost Murmur, at least as publicly described, finds no support in decades of peer-reviewed physics, even with the help of AI, experts told me.

Quantum magnetometers are real; they are ultraprecise at, for instance, detecting heart arrhythmias by measuring magnetic fields (via quantum properties) produced by the cardiac muscle. The problem is that the heart’s magnetic field is weak. “At the surface of the chest, where you’re about 10 centimeters away from the source, the magnetic field is just barely detectable,” says John Wikswo, a professor of biomedical engineering and physics at Vanderbilt University. “Now, [if] instead of going 10 centimeters away—which is a tenth of a meter—you go a meter away, the amplitude of the signal has dropped to a thousandth of what it was.” The signal becomes dramatically weaker at a kilometer.

Wikswo was the first scientist to measure the magnetic field of an isolated nerve and has been measuring the heart’s magnetic field since the mid-1970s. The first such detection was done by other researchers with two coils, each containing two million turns of wire, and then with a magnetometer “cooled to four degrees above absolute zero,” Wikswo says. This magnetometer is not spy gear—it is a cryogenic instrument designed to keep the rest of the universe out.

To find a heartbeat, a quantum Ghost Murmur tool would have to contend not just with Earth’s magnetic field and magnetic noise from natural and human-made electric currents but also with “the heartbeats of the sheep and dogs and jackrabbits—whatever else is running around out there,” says Chad Orzel, a professor of physics at Union College in New York State and author of How to Teach Quantum Physics to Your Dog. He uses refrigerator magnets to illustrate the weakness of magnetic fields in general. “You have to get the magnet very, very close to the refrigerator before it snaps into place,” he says. “That field drops off very quickly.” Clinical sensors “are usually butted right up against your body … at a distance of centimeters,” Orzel adds. Even pattern-matching using artificial intelligence, he says, couldn’t find a magnetic signal large enough to identify the presence of a person from kilometers away in a desert. At one kilometer away, the signal would diminish to about one trillionth of the strength.

Bradley Roth, a physicist at Oakland University and author of the 2023 review Biomagnetism: The First Sixty Years, agrees. “People have been measuring the magnetic field of the heart for 60 years, and usually it’s done in a lab with shielding, and it’s done just a few centimeters or a couple inches from the heart, and even then you can barely record it.” A helicopter-borne version, he says, “would be not just a small advance, but it’d be a revolutionary advance from the state of the art.”

Orzel struggles to see how a Ghost Murmur could work. “There is really fascinating work being done using quantum magnetometry to measure heart rates,” he says, and magnetic brain scans can now catch the tiny flickers of firing nerves. “But none of that is something that works over ranges of many miles.”

So why was this a story at all? Orzel has a guess: “Somebody yanking a reporter’s chain,” he says. It could be a “snarky, clever way to say, ‘Of course, I’m not going to tell you how we figured this out’”—or a piece of disinformation “to fool somebody into thinking that we actually have this secret technology.”

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Trump Launches Federal Investigation Into “Fraudsters and Charlatans” Pushing FAKE Iran Ceasefire Letters

President Donald Trump just dropped the hammer on a coordinated campaign of fraud and deception surrounding the U.S.-Iran ceasefire negotiations.

President Trump announced a full federal investigation into the flood of phony “agreements,” lists, and letters being circulated by total “fraudsters and charlatans” who have absolutely nothing to do with the real negotiations.

As The Gateway Pundit previously reported, President Trump announced a double-sided ceasefire just yesterday, agreeing to suspend bombing of Iran for two weeks after negotiations.

And of course, Fake News CNN is right in the middle of it, just like Trump called out. They ran with a bogus “statement” from someone with zero power or involvement.

Trump wrote on Truth Social:

“The alleged Statement put out by CNN World News is a FRAUD, as CNN well knows. The false Statement was linked to a Fake News site (from Nigeria) and, of course, immediately picked up by CNN, and blared out as a “legitimate” headline. The Official Statement by Iran was just released, and posted on TRUTH, below.

“Authorities are looking to determine whether or not a crime was committed on the issuance of the Fake CNN World Statement, or was it a sick rogue player? CNN is being ordered to immediately withdraw this Statement with full apologies for their, as usual, terrible “reporting.” Results of the investigation will be announced in the near future.”

CNN pushed back on President Trump’s claim, asserting that the Iranian statement originated from official regime spokespeople.

“The statement in question was obtained by CNN from Iranian officials and reported on multiple Iranian state media outlets. We received the statement from specific official Iranian spokespeople who are known to us.”

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Supreme Court Reverses Former Cincinnati Councilor’s Bribery Conviction

The U.S. Supreme Court cleared the way for a former Cincinnati City Council member convicted of bribery and attempted extortion but later pardoned by President Donald Trump to have those charges dismissed in the lower courts.

The ruling came as the high court has, in recent years, been willing to overturn corruption convictions involving public officials engaging in activities some consider normal political activity. For example, in 2016, the Supreme Court vacated the conviction of the former Republican governor of Virginia, Bob McDonnell, for accepting gifts from a benefactor without actually taking action to benefit that person.

On April 6, the justices granted Alexander “P.G.” Sittenfeld’s petition in an unsigned order. The court did not explain its decision. No justices dissented. The court disposed of the case summarily without hearing oral arguments. 

The Supreme Court also vacated the convictions and sent the case back to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit to be reconsidered in light of a pending motion to dismiss the indictment against Sittenfeld.

The new ruling came after Trump pardoned Sittenfeld on May 28, 2025. This act of presidential clemency eliminated his 16-month sentence of incarceration after he had served almost five months of it.

A presidential pardon forgives federal criminal offenses and removes the legal consequences of those offenses, but does not change history by erasing the judicial finding of guilt.

The pardon covered Sittenfeld’s October 2023 conviction for bribery and attempted extortion related to an FBI-led sting operation that involved campaign contributions. Prosecutors said he accepted $20,000 in donations to his political action committee from undercover FBI agents who feigned interest in developing a specific property. Prosecutors also said Sittenfeld’s actions went beyond mere campaign fundraising to bribery that constituted an illegal quid pro quo for backing the development project.

A quid pro quo—from Latin, meaning “this for that”—is something given or received in exchange for something else.

Sittenfeld’s attorney said in the petition that he was considered “a rising star in Ohio politics,” first elected to the Cincinnati City Council in 2011 at age 27, making him the youngest person ever elected to the council.

“A defining trait of Sittenfeld’s political identity was his unwavering support for economic development. He voted for every economic development deal put in front of him while on the Council,” according to the petition.

In 2018, Sittenfeld approached a local developer to help raise money for his mayoral campaign, in order to match contributions from other developers, and “nothing about this was unlawful,” the petition said.

The government was informed about this, and the FBI organized a sting operation. The local developer contacted Sittenfeld about a specific project, which the then-elected official was already supporting, and offered to connect him with potential investors, who were actually undercover agents. The agents proposed a quid pro quo, saying if Sittenfeld agreed to back the project, they would donate to his campaign, the petition said.

The petition said Sittenfeld filed a motion after the conviction for post-trial relief, saying the evidence at trial was not sufficient to prove an “explicit” quid pro quo, as required by McCormick v. United States (1991). In that case, the Supreme Court ruled that the receipt of a campaign contribution was not a federal crime unless the payment was part of an “explicit quid pro.”

The federal district court ruled that the evidence was “ambiguous” at best and believed that, despite that, the jury could still surmise an “explicit” exchange from the record. The court sentenced Sittenfeld to 16 months and fined him $40,000. A divided panel of the Sixth Circuit upheld the conviction, finding the jury was allowed to conclude based on the ambiguous evidence that he had accepted an illegal bribe.

In the petition, Sittenfeld’s attorney urged the Supreme Court to take up the case, saying candidates “routinely raise money based on pledges of official action: ‘Donate to me and I will vote to repeal the law my opponent supported!’ ‘Send me a campaign check and I will cut your taxes—I can’t do it without you!’”

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What Trump’s inner circle really thought of plan to go to war with Iran: CIA ‘dismissed regime-change plan as “farcical”. JD Vance said “it’s a bad idea”. But Donald went with his instinct’

Donald Trump’s inner circle’s almost all thought the Iran war was a bad idea when Israel gave a secret White House briefing that convinced him to launch Operation Epic Fury, it has been claimed.

Benjamin Netanyahu was invited to make his case for war in the Situation Room, The New York Times reports, a venue rarely used for in-person briefings with foreign leaders.

Seated across from the President on February 11, the Israeli prime minister delivered a detailed, hour-long presentation. His message was clear – Iran was vulnerable and the time was ripe for regime change. 

The Israeli delegation painted a picture of swift and decisive victory. Iran’s missile capabilities, they argued, could be dismantled within weeks.

The Strait of Hormuz would remain open, and retaliation against American targets would be minimal.

Behind the scenes, Israel’s intelligence service, Mossad, could help spark an internal uprising to finish the job.

At one point, Netanyahu played a video montage highlighting potential future leaders of Iran should the regime collapse – including Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of the country’s last shah.

Trump’s reaction was positive, and he appeared to be on board.

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