Tag: iran

Trump has no good options to resolve the disaster he created in Iran

U.S. President Donald Trump addressed the American public on Wednesday, but he didn’t have anything new to say. That lack of any substance is emblematic of the entire criminal and foolish war he agreed to launch on Iran.

The American war effort is a disaster. While the United States and Israel have inflicted enormous damage on Iran and killed and injured thousands of innocent civilians both there and in Lebanon, the actual gains are minimal, and to the extent that there were any goals for this war, they haven’t been achieved.

When Trump announced that he would speak Wednesday night, many thought he was going to announce a timetable for an American departure from this war, but all we got was more of the same “four weeks” guesswork that we heard four weeks ago. 

The only item that was even a little different, although Trump has been alluding to it for several days, is that the U.S. might leave the war without a deal to fully reopen the Strait of Hormuz. 

Doing that would make American losses in this war even more dramatic. But Trump has allowed himself to be led into a war with no way out. 

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Downed U.S. Drone Appears On TikTok Live As Iraqi Children Try To Sell It

As the U.S.-Iran conflict enters its second month, America’s Low-Cost Unmanned Combat Attack System, or LUCAS, is becoming increasingly visible across the Middle East theater, a sign that the Department of War has learned one critical lesson from both the Iranian drone playbook and the Ukraine-Russia war: cheap drones are the future of warfare.

The latest news on LUCAS comes from an unverifiable TikTok video, amplified on X, which appears to show a downed drone seized by Iraqi children who are reportedly trying to sell it.

If authentic, the footage is another reminder that low-cost drones are proliferating so widely across the region that they will likely spread to other parts of the world.

In a separate video reposted on X, Iranian forces appear to have recovered a LUCAS drone in the Persian Gulf area.

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Foreign Influence Exposed: How Non-U.S. Social Media Accounts Shape the Narrative on Iran Conflict

Foreign social media accounts could be shaping negative narratives about the U.S.-Iran conflict, raising concerns about misinformation and public perception.

A report by Pew Research Center on March 25 indicates that a significant number of Americans are against U.S. military involvement in Iran. According to their survey, about 61 percent of Americans are dissatisfied with President Donald Trump’s handling of the conflict, while 37 percent express approval.

Furthermore, by a margin of almost two-to-one, more of the survey’s participants believe military action is not progressing well—45 percent compared to the 25 percent who think it is going extremely or very well.

But is someone shaping this narrative? On X, foreign users are certainly influencing the way the conflict is perceived. A recent analysis published on conservative political commentator Glenn Beck’s website of more than 1,000 viral English-language posts may offer valuable insights into who is crafting the narrative.

These posts, published between February 28 and March 13, showed a significant influence from accounts based outside the U.S. In his opinion, these accounts, along with the groups or governments behind them, are significantly steering the conversation on X, inundating it with “inflammatory and demoralizing propaganda,” which can alter public perception and sentiment.

Mauro, a national security analyst and founder of The Mauro Institute, spoke to The Gateway Pundit about his discovery. He shared that, according to his research, “more than half, specifically 559 out of 1,000, of the viral X posts written in English about Iran come from abroad. These 559 posts garnered more than 650 million views and accumulated nearly 22 million total interactions, including reposts, likes, and replies. For him, “This engagement underscores the power of social media to amplify certain narratives.”

Interestingly, a random selection of 150 posts from the thousand viral X posts showed that 108 (72%) were negative, whereas only 40 (27%) were positive. The non-U.S. portion of that random selection showed a significantly negative response, with 64 percent expressing negativity and only 10 percent showing positivity. According to Mauro, this imbalance alone raises questions about the authenticity of the discourse surrounding the issue.

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How Israel and the FBI manipulated assassination plots to goad Trump into Iran war

The FBI manufactured plots to convince Trump that Iran sought to kill him, while Israel and its administration allies exploited the president’s deepest fears to keep him on the war path.

“I got him before he got me,” an ebullient President Donald Trump remarked to a reporter when asked about his motives for authorizing the killing of Iran’s Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, on February 28, 2026.

With his off-the-cuff remark, Trump revealed that anxiety about his own assassination at the hands of Iranian agents influenced his decision to initiate a US-Israeli regime change war that has already resulted in American casualties, the bombings of schools and hospitals inside Iran, devastating Iranian retaliatory strikes on US military bases and embassies, and a spiraling global economic crisis.

Trump’s generalized fears of assassination were well-founded. He was nearly killed in Butler, Pennsylvania on July 13, 2024 by a 20-year-old engineering student named Thomas Crooks who managed to fire eight rounds at the former president from a rooftop, slicing his ear and missing his head by a hair’s breadth. Two months later, a drifter named Ryan Routh was arrested after hiding for hours in the shrubbery outside the former president’s Mar-a-Lago estate in West Palm Beach, Florida. Routh had been spotted after pointing an assault rifle toward a Secret Service agent as Trump played golf 400 yards away. 

Officials have yet to produce any evidence that Iran played a role in either of these attempts on Trump’s life. Yet since those fateful events, Israel-aligned Trump advisors, Israeli intelligence, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself have gone to extreme lengths in order to tie Tehran to the plots. More shocking still is the fact that the FBI has manufactured a series of assassination plots, successfully convincing Trump that Iran was hunting him on US soil with highly sophisticated teams of hit men.

The man accused of leading the most significant of these operations, Asif Merchant, is currently on trial in a Brooklyn, NY federal court. After the US granted him a visa despite his presence on a terror watchlist, Merchant was in the constant company of an FBI confidential informant who ultimately steered the contrived plot to its conclusion. He never stood a chance of realizing his plans, and did not appear serious about doing so.

Independent journalist Ken Silva puts it succinctly in his forthcoming investigative book, “The Trump Assassination Plots”: “A closer look at the Merchant case reveals that at the very least…it was a highly controlled FBI sting operation that never posed a threat to Trump. More nefariously, records and whistleblower disclosures indicate that Merchant may have been the patsy in a case totally fabricated by the undercover agents.”

Authorities arrested Merchant on July 12, 2024 – just one day before Crooks attempted to kill Trump in Butler. Hours after the failed Butler assassination, FBI agents interrogated Merchant about whether it was in fact Iran that had Crooks under its control. 

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Another US plane hit by Iran after jet shot down & two Black Hawks also damaged as race to find missing pilot continues

Another US plane hit by Iran after jet shot down & two Black Hawks also damaged as race to find missing pilot continues

TWO Black Hawk helicopters involved in rescuing one of the two F-15 pilots were pounded by small arms fire as they transported the stricken serviceman.

It comes as the frantic race to find the second missing crew member continues after the US fighter jet was struck down over Iran.

A second American aircraft was also shot down during combat operations around the same time near the Strait of Hormuz, the Washington Post reported.

The lone pilot of the A-10 attack plane, known as Warthog, navigated it to Kuwaiti airspace before ejecting and was subsequently rescued, three US officials said.

Meanwhile, Iranian state TV claimed that “an American A-10 aircraft was shot by the defence systems of the Army Air Defence Force and crashed in the Persian Gulf in southern Iran.”

It is unclear if this is the same Warthog, or another targeted during the rescue mission for the stranded pilots.

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Trump White House plagiarized Iran war manifesto from Israel-aligned think tank

The Trump White House plagiarized its justification for attacking Iran from the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, the main DC outfit promoting war with Tehran. The think tank was originally founded to “enhance Israel’s image,” and partners closely with the Israeli government.

The Trump Administration appeared to plagiarize its official justification for its war on Iran, copying almost word-for-word a document originally produced by the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD), a pro-war think tank with close ties to Israeli intelligence which was originally founded to “enhance Israel’s image.”

The FDD document was authored by Tzvi Kahn, the former assistant director for policy and government affairs at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

A March 2, 2026 statement issued by the White House accusing Tehran of 44 instances of terrorism against American citizens is “virtually identical” to the list published by FDD in June 2025, analyst Stephen McIntyre noted Thursday.

While the White House did make superficial alterations to the text, they largely consisted of appending the label “Iran-backed” to every mention of groups like Hezbollah and Hamas. In the few instances where Trump administration officials bothered to make significant changes to the original FDD list, the edits were almost always made in service of “ratcheting up the underlying allegation,” McIntyre concluded.

Among the most egregious examples was a 1996 attack on the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, which FDD originally said merely that Hezbollah al-Hejaz was “deemed responsible” for. In the White House version, however, the group’s responsibility was “asserted as factual,” explained McIntyre, noting that serious questions about the incident remain unanswered to this day. “Clinton’s Defense Secretary William Perry subsequently wondered (along with many others) whether Khobar Towers should have been attributed to Al Qaeda,” he wrote.

A 2009 investigation by journalist Gareth Porter based on interviews with over a dozen former CIA, FBI and Clinton administration officials demonstrated that the FBI’s inquiry into the Khobar Towers attack was precooked to blame Iran, when Al Qaeda was most likely the culprit. Porter found that Shia citizens of Saudi Arabia had been tortured into confessing to the crime by Saudi secret police.

While the White House declined to join FDD in blaming Iran for the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks, it echoed the Israel-oriented organization in blaming Tehran for 603 military deaths in Iraq, which both documents attributed to “Iran-backed militias.” But there are major discrepancies with the figure, which amounts to 60% of the total US combatant deaths attributed to Iran. As McIntyre noted, such a claim is “not made in the State Department annual reports on Global Terrorism.”

At least four of the Americans the Trump administration claims were killed by Iran had served in Israel’s military. These included a US citizen who died while invading Lebanon in 2006 and two Americans in the IDF’s Golani brigade who were killed while invading Gaza in 2014. The fourth American, who was born in Israel and had also served in the Golani brigade, was killed amid violent reprisals against settlers in the West Bank in 2015.

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Chinese engineer’s tutorial on how to take down a US F-35 went viral. 5 days later, Iran claimed it did

Chinese people with expertise in technology and some who understand military equipment are creating tutorials to help Iran bring down the United States, according to a report. The reasons are not political, but personal.

Chinese people with expertise in defence are telling Iran how to attack American jets and carriers

Technically skilled people in China are sharing their knowledge online to help Iran counter the American military in the ongoing war. Someone posted a detailed tutorial on how to bring down the F-35 fighter jet on Chinese social media, and five days later, Iran claimed that it had struck the plane, SCMP reported. The video posted on March 14 went viral and garnered tens of millions of views, while the Iranian claim came on March 19.

Chinese tutorials on how to bring down F-35 fighter jet

The account “Laohu Talks World” posted Persian subtitles alongside it and explained how Iran could use its low-cost systems to destroy the advanced stealth fighter. The outlet reported that such tutorials have exploded online in China. Those with backgrounds in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) are sharing content to help Iran fight against the US and Israel, with some of them seemingly extremely aware of military equipment.

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Trump’s Tone-Deaf Sales Pitch for More War

The President’s address to the nation was a tone-deaf sales pitch for more war, delivered on the first night of Passover.

Civilian and military casualties are mounting across the region. Lives are being extinguished while triumphalist and violent rhetoric is offered as justification. War is being escalated in the name of peace, a contradiction that demands moral clarity, not political acceptance.

Each life lost carries equal value. No nation’s suffering is expendable. No people exist as collateral.

Iran is not an abstraction, nor just a target on a map. It is one of the great cradles of civilization, a society whose cultural and intellectual contributions long predate the rise of the modern West. To speak casually of bombing such a nation ‘back to the Stone Age’ reveals a colonial mindset that dehumanizes others and diminishes our own humanity in the process.

The extensive bombing of Iran by the United States and Israel, along with Iran’s counterstrikes, is already taking innocent lives. The global economy is destabilizing as a result.

Energy markets are being disrupted. Oil and gas production is constrained. Fertilizer supply chains are impaired. Critical materials are being cut off.

These consequences will be felt worldwide. Yet the deeper crisis is not economic, it is moral.

We have seen this before. The repeated invocation of a nuclear threat echoes the false claims of ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’ used to justify the invasion of Iraq. That war cost thousands of American lives, the lives of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, and trillions of dollars, while leaving a legacy of instability and grief that endures to this day.

If the President truly sought to prevent a nuclear Iran, he would not have abandoned the JCPOA, an agreement that placed verifiable limits on Iran’s nuclear program. Instead, we are presented with a cycle of escalation that defies logic and invites catastrophe.

Political rhetoric is becoming increasingly radical and dangerous. This is not a question of partisan politics. It is a question of conscience with very real global and domestic consequences.

The American people are not called to accept this. They are called to stand against it.

Members of Congress must have the courage to exercise their constitutional authority and rein this in.

War framed as strength is destruction. Violence presented as necessity is gratuitous violence, with consequences already accelerating destabilizing shifts in the global order.

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Iran shares ‘video of rescuers hunting for downed American pilot’ after showing wreckage of ‘shot down F-15 fighter jet’

Iran has aired footage of an alleged US search and rescue effort amid claims an American warplane was shot down over the country earlier today.

Iranian television channels have shared video of a helicopter said to be flying low over the countryside across southern Iran apparently trying to locate the pilot. The US military and White House are yet to comment on the claims.

It comes after Iranian military earlier today claimed it has brought down a F-35 fighter jet and forced it to crash.

However, pictures posted by Iranian media of the wreckage appeared to match an F-15 Strike Eagle aircraft based at a British RAF base. 

Aviation experts studying pictures posted of the apparent wreckage say it sports the US Air Force in Europe badge as well as a red tail flash belonging to the 494th Fighter Squadron based at RAF Lakenheath in Suffolk.

Meanwhile Iran has unleashed a ferocious attack on Gulf energy sites striking an oil refinery and desalination plant in Kuwait as well as a major gas complex in Abu Dhabi.

Authorities in Kuwait say one of its power and desalination plants has been damaged following an Iranian hit while the Habshan gas plant in the UAE has suspended operations in response to falling debris.

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Austria denies US military access to its airspace for Iran operations

Austria has rejected multiple US requests to use its airspace for military operations against Iran, citing neutrality laws, Austrian Defense Ministry spokesperson Colonel Michael Bauer announced on 2 April.

“There have indeed been requests, and they were refused from the outset,” Bauer said in a statement reported by public broadcaster ORF, adding that “every time a similar request involves a country at war, it is refused.”

A Defense Ministry spokesperson confirmed there had been “several” requests from Washington but did not specify the number, noting that each case is assessed under Austria’s legal obligation to avoid involvement in active wars.

The ministry added that Austria is not enforcing a blanket ban but is reviewing overflight requests individually in coordination with the Foreign Ministry. 

Still, officials emphasized that neutrality remains the main guiding principle behind each decision.

Opposition figures in Austria have called for an even stricter stance, with Sven Hergovich saying Defense Minister Klaudia Tanner “should not approve a single further US military flight to the Gulf,” warning the war is harming “Austrian economic interests, Europe as a whole, and world peace.”

US President Donald Trump criticized European allies as “very unhelpful” and said Washington would “remember” their refusal to support military efforts to take control of the Strait of Hormuz from Iran.

The move places Austria among a growing group of states restricting US military access as Washington and Tel Aviv continue their assault on Iran, favoring either diplomacy over military operations to end the fighting.

Earlier, Italy had also restricted US military access, denying warplanes permission to land at the Sigonella Air Base after flight plans were submitted mid-air without prior approval. 

Officials said the request fell outside existing agreements and lacked authorization, prompting Rome to block the landing except in case of emergencies.

Italian political figures had stressed that Italy “is not at war with Iran and does not want to enter it.”

Earlier, Spain had also barred US-linked warplanes involved in strikes on Iran from using its airspace and bases for combat operations, rejecting all related flight plans, including refueling missions.

Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said Madrid had denied access for “this illegal war,” while allowing limited logistical support under existing agreement obligations, and also maintaining exceptions for emergencies. 

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