Tag: perpetual war

Federal Contractor Shuts Down Smear Campaign Accusing Tucker Carlson of Being Funded by Qatar

A federal contractor involved in the controversy has flatly debunked a smear campaign accusing Tucker Carlson of being a Qatari puppet.

The Jerusalem Post reported in May that Qatar, a known supporter of terrorist groups like Hamas and a close ally of the Iranian regime, ramped up its outreach to right-wing media by over 50% following Donald Trump’s landslide 2024 election victory.

The news outlet cited a report from The Washington Examiner, which analyzed U.S. Justice Department records, that Qatar orchestrated a high-profile interview between Carlson and Qatar’s Prime Minister, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al Thani.

Qatari agents paid a US firm $180,000 per month for this interview to materialize, it added.

Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) filings revealed that Lumen8 Advisors LLC, a little-known legal consulting firm, played a role in arranging the meeting between Carlson and Thani.

Anna Jacobs, a non-resident fellow at the Arab Gulf States Institute, told The Washington Examiner in response to the Carlson interview: “Qatar wants to further cement ties with Trump for many reasons, including to defend itself against Republican attacks for its relationship with Hamas and Iran.”

Carlson was far from Qatar’s sole target in its goal to hold influence over conservative media. Doha engaged with conservative news agencies such as Fox News, the New York Post, Just the News, and The Daily Mail. In some cases, favorable coverage shortly followed.

Critics are concerned that Qatar is trying to soften its image in the eyes of America, keeping in mind that it is known for having ties with the Iranian regime and with terrorist groups such as Hamas.

America First investigative reporter Laura Loomer didn’t hold back, sharing screenshots of the FARA filings and accusing Carlson of participating in “paid propaganda.” Loomer torched Carlson on X, saying:

Here’s the screenshot from the FARA documents filled out this year that prove Qatar paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for an interview between @TuckerCarlson and the Prime Minister of Qatar (the same Qatar which funds HAMAS) regarding the “war with Iran”.

This was a paid propaganda piece in which over $200,000 was paid by the Embassy of the State of Qatar for Tucker to interview a Qatari official all while knowing HAMAS is an Iranian proxy and funded by Qatar.

Qatar funds Islamic terror all around the world and they think they can just pay everyone off to make them turn a blind eye. The Qataris are global funders of Islamic terrorism and their money has been used to murder American citizens.

These are not good people.

Tucker Carlson wants you to think his thoughts on Iran are based and original, but he’s literally participating in paid for interviews by the Qataris, who are funding and providing pent houses and luxury lifestyles to the leaders of HAMAS in DOHA.

Tucker should just be honest that he’s a mouthpiece for genocidal Muslims.

His media company was literally funded by a MUSLIM investor who is half Pakistani and half Iranian and who spends a lot of time in Qatar. And trust me when I say a lot of people in pro-Trump circles are very uncomfortable with this.

Tucker is controlled by Muslims. People need to wake up and stop pretending like this is a conspiracy theory.

Qatar and Iran are buying off conservative podcasters to push pro-Islamist, anti-American and anti-Israel talking points to undermine President Trump.

Conservative titan Mark Levin praised Loomer’s exposé, simply stating, “Well done.”

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The Real National Emergency: Endless Wars, Failing Infrastructure, and a Dying Republic

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”—President Dwight D. Eisenhower (April 16, 1953)

Seventy years after President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned about the cost of a military-industrial complex, America is still stealing from its own people to fund a global empire.

In 2025 alone, the U.S. has launched airstrikes in Yemen (Operation Rough Rider), bombed Houthi-controlled ports and radar installations (killing scores of civilians), deployed greater numbers of troops and multiple aircraft carriers to the Middle East, and edged closer to direct war with Iran in support of Israel’s escalating conflict.

Each of these “new” fronts has been sold to the public as national defense. In truth, they are the latest outposts in a decades-long campaign of empire maintenance—one that lines the pockets of defense contractors while schools crumble, bridges collapse, and veterans sleep on the streets at home.

This isn’t about national defense. This is empire maintenance.

It’s about preserving a military-industrial complex that profits from endless war, global policing, and foreign occupations—while the nation’s infrastructure rots and its people are neglected.

The United States has spent much of the past half-century policing the globe, occupying other countries, and waging endless wars.

What most Americans fail to recognize is that these ongoing wars have little to do with keeping the country safe and everything to do with propping up a military-industrial complex that has its sights set on world domination.

War has become a huge money-making venture, and the U.S. government, with its vast military empire, is one of its best buyers and sellers.

America’s role in the Russia-Ukraine conflict has already cost taxpayers more than $112 billion.

And now, the price of empire is rising again.

Clearly, it’s time for the U.S. government to stop policing the globe.

The U.S. military reportedly has more than 1.3 million men and women on active duty, with more than 200,000 of them stationed overseas in nearly every country in the world.

American troops are stationed in Somalia, Iraq and Syria. In Germany, South Korea and Japan. In Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Oman. In Niger, Chad and Mali. In Turkey, the Philippines, and northern Australia.

Those numbers are likely significantly higher in keeping with the Pentagon’s policy of not fully disclosing where and how many troops are deployed for the sake of “operational security and denying the enemy any advantage.” As investigative journalist David Vine explains, “Although few Americans realize it, the United States likely has more bases in foreign lands than any other people, nation, or empire in history.”

Incredibly, America’s military forces aren’t being deployed abroad to protect our freedoms here at home. Rather, they’re being used to guard oil fields, build foreign infrastructure and protect the financial interests of the corporate elite. In fact, the United States military spends about $81 billion a year just to protect oil supplies around the world.

America’s military empire spans nearly 800 bases in 160 countries, operated at a cost of more than $156 billion annually. As Vine reports, “Even US military resorts and recreation areas in places like the Bavarian Alps and Seoul, South Korea, are bases of a kind. Worldwide, the military runs more than 170 golf courses.”

This is how a military empire occupies the globe.

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IAEA Chief Says There’s ‘No Proof’ Iran Working Toward a Nuclear Bomb

Rafael Grossi, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), reaffirmed on Tuesday that his organization had “no proof” that Iran decided to build a nuclear bomb ahead of Israel’s attacks on the country.

Grossi made the comments in an interview with CNN host Christiane Amanpour, who brought up the fact that US intelligence had also assessed there was no evidence Iran was working toward a nuclear weapon.

“What we informed and what we reported was that we did not have — as in coincidence with some of the sources you mentioned there, that we did not have any proof of a systematic effort to move into a nuclear weapon,” Grossi said.

He added that the IAEA couldn’t say whether or not there was “clandestine” activity that it wasn’t aware of, but based on available evidence, there was no indication that Iran was attempting to weaponize its nuclear program.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu launched his war with Iran based on the claim that Iran was advancing toward nuclear weapons. According to a report from The Wall Street Journal, the US was not convinced by Israel’s intelligence that Iran had made the decision to build a nuclear bomb, and other reports say the US still assessed Tehran wasn’t seeking one ahead of Israel’s attacks.

Grossi brought up the fact that Iran has a stockpile of uranium enriched at the 60% level, but it has not attempted to enrich at the 90% level needed for weapons-grade, and Iranian officials had made clear they were willing to reduce enrichment levels and get rid of the stockpile of highly enriched uranium in exchange for sanctions relief as part of a deal with the US.

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Working Hard to Justify Israel’s Unprovoked Attack on Iran

Imagine for a moment that Country A launched an illegal and unprovoked attack on Country B. In any sort of objective world, you might expect media coverage of the episode to go something along the lines of: “Country A Launches Illegal and Unprovoked Attack on Country B.”

Not so in the case of Israel, whose special relationship with the United States means it gets special coverage in the US corporate media. When Israel attacked Iran early last Friday, killing numerous civilians along with military officials and scientists, the press was standing by to present the assault as fundamentally justified—no surprise coming from the outlets that have for more than 20 months refused to describe Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip as genocide.

From the get-go, the corporate media narrative was that Israel had targeted Iranian military and nuclear facilities in a “preemptive strike” (ABC, 6/13/25), with civilian casualties presented either as an afterthought or not at all (e.g., AP, 6/18/25). (As the Israeli attack on Iran has continued unabated for the past week in tandem with retaliatory Iranian strikes on Israel, the Iranian civilian death toll has become harder to ignore—as, for example, in the Washington Post’s recent profile of 23-year-old poet Parnia Abbasi, killed along with her family as they slept in their Tehran apartment building.)

On Monday, June 16, the fourth day of the assault, the Associated Press reported that Israeli strikes had “killed at least 224 people since Friday.” This figure appeared in the eighth paragraph of the 34-paragraph article; the first reference to Iranian civilians appeared in paragraph 33, which informed readers that “rights groups” had suggested that the number was a “significant undercount,” and that 197 civilians were thus far among the upwards of 400 dead.

Back in paragraph 8, meanwhile, came the typical implicit validation of Israeli actions:

Israel says its sweeping assault on Iran’s top military leaders, uranium enrichment sites and nuclear scientists, is necessary to prevent its longtime adversary from getting any closer to building an atomic weapon.

That Israel’s “preventive” efforts happened to occur smack in the middle of a US push for a diplomatic resolution to the Iranian nuclear issue has not proved to be a detail that is overly of interest to the US media; nor have corporate outlets found it necessary to dwell too deeply on the matter of the personal convenience of war on Iran for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu—both as a distraction from the genocide in Gaza, and from his domestic embroilment in assorted corruption charges.

In its own coverage, NBC News (6/14/25) highlighted that Netanyahu had “said the operation targeted Iran’s nuclear program and ‘will continue for as many days as it takes to remove this threat.’” Somehow, it is never deemed worth mentioning in such reports that it is not in fact up to Israel—the only state in the region with an (undeclared) nuclear arsenal, and a non-signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty—to be policing any perceived nuclear “threat.” Instead, Israeli officials are given ample space, time and again, to present their supposed cause as entirely legitimate, while getting away with murder—not to mention genocide.

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President Trump Told Netanyahu To ‘Keep Going’ in Iran

President Trump said on Wednesday that he told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a phone call a day earlier to “keep going” with his attacks on Iran.

The president told reporters that Netanyahu, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court for his role in war crimes in Gaza, is a “good man” who has been treated “very unfairly” by his own country. “He’s a wartime president. Going through this nonsense — ridiculous,” Trump said.

Trump’s comments about Netanyahu come amid anticipation over whether or not the US will enter Israel’s war with Iran directly by launching airstrikes. The US has supported the assault by providing weapons and intelligence and intercepting Iranian missiles and drones, but so far hasn’t launched direct strikes of its own.

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Stop Netanyahu Before He Gets Us All Killed

For nearly 30 years, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has driven the Middle East into war and destruction.

The man is a powder keg of violence.

Throughout all the wars that he has championed, Netanyahu [who is wanted by the International Criminal Court] has always dreamed of the big one: to defeat and overthrow the Iranian government.

His long-sought war, just launched, might just get us all killed in a nuclear Armageddon, unless Netanyahu is stopped.

Netanyahu’s fixation on war goes back to his extremist mentors, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, Yitzhak Shamir and Menachem Begin. The older generation believed that Zionists should use whatever violence — wars, assassinations, terror — is needed to achieve their aims of eliminating any Palestinian claim to a homeland.

The founders of Netanyahu’s political movement, the Likud, called for exclusive Zionist control over all of what had been British Mandatory Palestine.

At the start of the British Mandate in the early 1920s, the Muslim and Christian Arabs constituted roughly 87 percent of the population and owned 10 times more land than the Jewish population.

As of 1948, the Arabs still outnumbered the Jews roughly two to one. Nonetheless, the founding charter of Likud (1977) declared that “between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.”

The now infamous chant, “from the River to the Sea,” which is characterized as anti-Semitic, turns out to be the anti-Palestinian rallying call of the Likud.

The challenge for Likud was how to pursue its maximalist aims despite their blatant illegality under international law and morality, both of which call for a two-state solution.

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The U.S. killed almost as many civilians in 52 days as the previous 23 years of U.S. action in Yemen

On May 6 2025, a ceasefire between Yemen’s Houthis and the United States ended the most extensive military campaign of President Trump’s second term to date. But what was the full human cost of Trump’s eight-week bombing campaign, and how does it compare to the history of U.S. military action in Yemen?

Airwars analysed every public allegation of civilian harm during the Trump campaign against the Iran-allied Houthis – dubbed Operation Rough Rider – and compared it to previous harm allegations from U.S. campaigns in Yemen, both targeting the Houthis under President Joe Biden and against Al-Qaeda in the decades before.

Key findings reveal:

  • In the period between the first recorded U.S. strike in Yemen to the beginning of Trump’s campaign in March, Airwars tracked at least 258 civilians allegedly killed by U.S. actions. In less than two months of Operation Rough Rider, Airwars documented at least 224 civilians in Yemen killed by U.S. airstrikes – nearly doubling the civilian casualty toll in Yemen by U.S. actions since 2002.
  • The two deadliest civilian harm incidents publicly recorded in the history of U.S. military operations in Yemen occurred during Trump’s campaign. Strikes on Ras Isa Port and Saada’s Remand Detention Prison allegedly killed at least 152 civilians and injured almost 200 others. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have now questioned the legality of both strikes.
  • The scale of the campaign resulted in an unprecedented level of civilian casualties per incident. During Operation Rough Rider, Airwars documented more incidents with higher numbers of casualties per strike than in any other U.S. campaign.
  • Some of the most advanced munitions in the U.S. military arsenal were deployed, including the first documented use of the StormBreaker in combat – a new precision-guided U.S bomb.
  • Civilian harm incidents were concentrated in the heavily populated cities of Sana’a and Saada. This differed from President Biden’s campaign against the Houthis, where civilian harm was typically dispersed across less heavily populated areas in western Yemen.

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AIPAC Demands Democrats “Stand With Israel” on Iran

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) has been furiously urging House Democrats to release messages of steadfast support for Israel in its war with Iran, the Prospect and Drop Site News have learned, even as bipartisan lawmakers come together on a War Powers Act resolution to prevent U.S. troops or funds being used in yet another Middle East conflagration.

One member relayed that a colleague had received literally 100 phone calls from members of AIPAC and its allied pressure groups. AIPAC wants House Democratic members to state explicitly that they “stand with Israel” in its actions against Iran aimed at destroying the Islamic Republic’s nuclear capability, and add that Iran “must never have a nuclear weapon.”

In addition, AIPAC has taken particular pains to denigrate the moderate pro-Israel group J Street, both in private conversations with members of Congress and in public, picking a fight aimed at blocking any Democrats from using J Street as cover to deviate from AIPAC’s maximalist position. “They’re worried their members in Congress may start to shift toward J Street and they’re trying to head that off,” said an aide to one Democrat.

“I did see that AIPAC took issue with my statement,” said Rep. Pramila Jayapal of Washington state. “They were taking on J Street for endorsing me, which was ridiculous.” To get a sense of how extreme AIPAC’s demands are, note that J Street’s own statement merely calls for diplomacy while still supporting Israel. “We urge the Trump Administration to meaningfully pursue a diplomatic resolution to this conflict as quickly as possible while making clear the US will do what is necessary to defend Israel and US troops from retaliation,” the statement read.

AIPAC issued the same tweet in response to any statement that fell short of its expectations, such as one by Rep. Greg Casar of Texas, which called for a diplomatic resolution: “Consistent pattern: J Street endorsees issue anti-Israel statements. @jstreetdotorg is many things, but it’s not pro-Israel.”

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Pentagon Officer on Joint Chiefs Of Staff Planning Team Removed For Calling Israel a “Death Cult”

An officer serving on the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s Levant desk, tasked with assessing Israel-related matters, was sacked by the Pentagon after social media posts revealed he labeled the Zionist Israeli regime a “death cult.”

Reports claim U.S. Army Capt. Nathan McCormack, who served on the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s J5 planning directorate for the Levant and Egypt branch, was recently expelled over posts critical of Israel’s war on Gaza and more.

“The information on the X account does not reflect the position of the Joint Staff or the Department of Defense,” the Pentagon noted in a statement to the Jewish News Syndicate (JNS). “The individual is being returned to his service while the matter is being investigated.”

“He will no longer be on the joint staff while the matter is being investigated,” the Pentagon wrote.

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