Tag: propaganda

Did Iran launch missiles at US-UK base on Diego Garcia? Here’s what to know

The United Kingdom has slammed “reckless Iranian threats” after missiles targeted a joint United States-UK military base located on the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia.

However, Iran’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Monday denied the allegations that it was behind the launch of what US media reports said were two ballistic missiles.

The US has not commented officially on the firing of the missiles at Diego Garcia, which is approximately 4,000km (2,500 miles) from Iran.

The incident over the weekend came three weeks into the war launched by the US and Israel against Iran on February 28. One of the goals of the war, they have said, is to degrade Iran’s nuclear and missile programmes.

Tehran has maintained its nuclear programme is for civilian purposes. The United Nations nuclear watchdog and US intelligence chief Tulsi Gabbard have said Iran was not on the verge of making nuclear bombs. Contrary assertions were invoked to launch the current war.

Keep reading

War Becomes Spectacle in Trump’s Horrific Propaganda Promoting War in Iran

During his presidential campaign, Donald Trump promised to be an antiwar candidate, boasting that, unlike his predecessors, he would end endless wars and keep the United States out of new military conflicts. Yet the trajectory of his presidency has unfolded in the opposite direction. From expanding military confrontations in the Caribbean to the escalating war with Iran, launched through large-scale strikes that risk igniting a wider regional catastrophe, Trump’s rule has increasingly relied on the language and machinery of war. As Zachary Basu points out in Axios, “he has attacked seven nations [and] authorized more individual air strikes in 2025 than President Biden did in four years.”

What makes this moment particularly disturbing is not only the violence itself, but also the way it is staged and celebrated. As the conflict with Iran intensified, the White House circulated promotional videos that fused real footage of bombing raids with visuals drawn from video games and action films, transforming acts of destruction into a spectacle of national triumph. In such images, war appears not as tragedy or political catastrophe but as thrilling display, inviting viewers to admire the technological performance of power while remaining detached from the human suffering it produces. These spectacles are more than crude propaganda. They reveal a deeper shift in political culture in which violence is aestheticized, cruelty normalized, and militarism staged as entertainment, training the public to experience domination not as a catastrophe but as an exhilarating display of power.

We live in an age of monsters. More than two centuries ago, Francisco Goya captured such a moment in his haunting 1799 etching, “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters,” an image that now reads less like a relic of the Enlightenment than a prophecy of our own time. The Italian political thinker Antonio Gramsci described moments like this as periods of historical crisis, writing that “the crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” Our present moment bears all the marks of such an interregnum.

Keep reading

Pete Hegseth’s War on Journalists (and Iran Too)

Last fall, nearly the entire Pentagon press corps was banned from the Pentagon after refusing to sign Pete Hegseth’s loyalty oath, which would have bound them to only report information “authorized” by the government (FAIR.org, 9/23/25). They were quickly replaced by pundits from Hegseth-approved outlets like One America News, Gateway Pundit and Lindell TV, which is “Pillow Guy” Mike Lindell’s pet project.

But once the Iran War got underway, it dawned on Hegseth that a Defense secretary needs to communicate with the whole country, not just the narrow slice of it reached by his favorite right-wing pundits. So Hegseth reversed course, asking the major networks to bring their cameras back to the Pentagon. They agreed, but on one condition: Some of their reporters had to be allowed to return to the press briefing room, too.

So back they came, albeit now at the back of the room. Few of these reporters—who represent outlets you’ve actually heard of, like ABC, NBC and the New York Times—are called on. Hegseth, a former Fox News weekend host, instead fields questions almost exclusively from handpicked media personalities seated in the front rows. (I’d call them reporters, but if they signed Hegseth’s 2025 oath, as most did, they’re anything but.)

Keep reading

A History of Iran Propaganda

This week on CounterSpin: House Foreign Affairs Committee chair Brian Mast declared of Iran: “This murderous regime has posed an imminent threat against every American both at home and abroad for the last 47 years”—leading many at home and abroad to reach for their dictionaries.

The Trump White House’s war on Iran is unpopular in the US: “Even the highest level of public support for this conflict falls far lower than that at the start of most other conflicts, including World War II, the Korean War and the Iraq War,” reports the New York Times.

That may have something to do with the parade of rationales offered; Popular Information has a roundup of the 17 different reasons the Trump regime has given to date for why we went to war. All of it normalized by corporate media that allow recorded history to be put up for debate, that pretend we haven’t seen what we’ve seen, leaving today’s warmongers free to draw up a historical narrative, or several, that serve their present purpose.

Keep reading

Iran War Supporters Invent a New and Absurd Justification: It Is All About China

Before Operation Epic Fury began, the Trump administration spent very little energy trying to justify the looming war with Iran. The few defenses they did offer were banal platitudes, just echoes of the case for the Iraq War from more than twenty years ago: that Iran was weeks away from obtaining a nuclear device, that their ballistic missile program posed a significant threat to American assets and allies in the region, and that the Iranian people deserved liberation via regime change.

But not long after the bombing began, a new (admittedly more creative) justification emerged online and in the pro-Israel media that war supporters assume will be more persuasive to those doubting the wisdom of yet another Middle East conflict. The war with Iran, we are now told by many, is not really about Iran at all. It is, instead, all about China.

“Some argue Israel dragged the U.S. into war,” a post from The Free Press reads, “But this conflict is bigger than Israel and Iran — it’s about China.” Another article from The Spectator, a British conservative outlet, sang the same tune: “Trump’s ultimate target in this war is China.” Glenn Beck, on March 2, unveiled C.R.I.N.K., or “the new Axis Powers of China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea,” as a way to “understand why Trump attacked Iran.” Fox News’ Jesse Watters told his audience last week that “we are killing two birds with one stone: we stop the number-one sponsor of terror, and we checkmate the Chinese.”

At the very least, if China were really the motive, one would have expected the Trump administration to offer this theory — “this is the chance to counter America’s greatest geopolitical rival” — as a major justification to the American people. One would think they would be particularly motivated to do so, given the consensus of polling data showing that public support for this war is far weaker than for any American war in decades.

But Trump officials never mentioned China as a core motive. In fact, even now, the administration and its backers have hardly mentioned China. This is a theory invented out of whole cloth by Iran-war supporters and/or Trump supporters, grasping for some cogent reason why this new war is in Americans’ interests.

Late last week, Senator Lindsey Graham claimed that this conflict is “a religious war” waged by “radical Islamic terrorists.” On March 2, House Speaker Mike Johnson explained to a group of reporters that the United States “determined, because of the exquisite intelligence that [it] had, that if Israel fired on Iran,” then “[Iran] would have immediately retaliated against U.S. personnel and assets.” Therefore, the House Speaker insisted, because the U.S. would be attacked either way, it had to hit Iran with Israel. President Trump announced on Friday that the U.S. intends to select “GREAT & ACCEPTABLE Leader(s)” for the Iranian people, in order to make their country “economically bigger, better, and stronger than ever before.”

Keep reading

Epic Fury, Epic Incoherence, Epic Propaganda

The Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps did not confess to accidentally bombing a girls school in the Iranian city of Minab last weekend, killing 165 students. Israeli warplanes weren’t involved, either, and U.S. military investigators have tentatively concluded that U.S. forces were responsible.

Here’s a huge and amazing story from Fox News on Wednesday: Thousands of Iraqi Kurds launch ground offensive in Iran. Absolutely nothing of the kind occurred, not even close, as Fox itself was later obliged to admit in a sideways kind of way.

A major US radar installation at Qatar’s Al-Udeid Air Base was not destroyed by an Iranian drone strike in the early hours of the war. The USS Abraham Lincoln was not hit by four Iranian ballistic missiles last Sunday. And no, 650 U.S. troops were not killed in the first two days of fighting. The number of U.S. servicemen who lost their lives: six.

Elon Musk’s X has been an absolute swamp of “fake news” and video-game imagery and burning buildings in Dubai that actually burned in Tel Aviv last summer. I can’t even be bothered to debunk a fraction of it. More pressing business is at hand.

Let’s get something important out of the way, up front.

Its about what we mean when we talk about “the war.”

The wildly ambitious American-Israeli operation that began last weekend as a now-or-never confrontation with the hydra-headed Khomeinist military-industrial theocracy in Tehran had become, by the third day, another war altogether.

By Wednesday the war was primarily an all-out Khomeinist war against a dozen countries in the Greater Middle East, a war of survival that was itself merely an immediate extension of the war the regime had been waging against the Iranian people since last December.

The European Union’s foreign affairs and security chief Kaja Kallas described the state of play succinctly on Wednesday: “Tehran’s strategy is to sow chaos and set the region on fire. By indiscriminately attacking its neighbours, the regime is making a strong case for its own demise.”

The war Kaja Kallas described is merely the most urgently prosecuted campaign in the same war the Iranian regime has been waging in various forms and phases, both subterranean and out in the open, by regional proxy and by state satrapy, ever since 1979.

The many Khomeinist wars against Israel and by necessary extension against the United States and the rest of “the west” have been waged most consistently and brutally against the democratic rights of the Iranian people themselves, especially Iran’s women and Iran’s minorities.

Those are the “forever wars” you haven’t been hearing much about over the past week in all the complaints, from the “left” as well as from the “right,” from certain Liberal Party pseuds and Code Pink noisemakers and batshit MAGA influencers Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly about what the White House has gotten itself into.

Keep reading

X CRACKS DOWN on AI-Generated War Propaganda: NO MORE Cashing In on Fake Footage Without Labels

In an effort to protect truthful information during global conflicts, X has rolled out strict new rules targeting creators who peddle AI-generated videos of war without clear disclosures. This comes as pro-Iran propagandists flooded the platform with fabricated clips designed to sow chaos.

The policy shift, effective immediately focuses on X’s Creator Revenue Sharing program. Creators posting AI-made content showing armed conflicts must include a clear label, or face penalties that hit where it hurts: their wallets.

According to details from X’s head of product, Nikita Bier, the platform is clamping down hard. “During times of war, it is critical that people have access to authentic information on the ground. With today’s AI technologies, it is trivial to create content that can mislead people,” Bier stated.

Bier elaborated that X will use its Community Notes system—crowdsourced fact-checking that empowers users over elite moderators—along with post metadata to detect undeclared AI content. The rules don’t ban AI videos outright; they just demand transparency via X’s built-in “Made with AI” label option.

Violators get a 90-day suspension from earning ad revenue on their posts. A second offense leads to a permanent ban from the program. This targets those exploiting wars for profit, without stifling creative expression.

The update follows a surge in deceptive content amid the Iran-Israel clash. Pro-Iran accounts have pushed AI fakes, like one claiming Iranian missiles sank the USS Abraham Lincoln. “Iran’s IRGC claims to have struck USS Abraham Lincoln with ballistic missiles. LIE,” CENTCOM posted. “The Lincoln was not hit. The missiles launched didn’t even come close.”

Keep reading

Going to War, Again, for Israel

Once again, America is going to war for Israel. Once again, many will die for the Zionist state, including American service members. Once again, we will stumble blindly into a military fiasco. Once again, we will do the bidding of a foreign power whose interests are not our interests, but whose lobbyists have bought up our political class, including Donald Trump. Once again, we will violate the U.N. charter by attacking a country that does not pose an imminent threat.

This is not our war. This is part of Israel’s demented vision of Greater Israel, of dominating the Middle East. But Israel needs our military, our taxpayer dollars, our weapons to do it. And we have handed them the keys to our formidable arsenal.

The architects of the war with Iran, which the administration feels no need to justify to the American public or the international community, admit it will not be quick.

Sen. Tom Cotton, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told CBS News on Saturday that the goal is not only to curb Iran’s nuclear program, but “dismantle their terror support network.”

“To do all that is going to take longer than the strikes on their nuclear program last summer,” Cotton said. “We’re probably looking at weeks, not days, of joint efforts by the United States, Israel and our Arab partners, who have also been attacked this morning.”

Israel’s lackeys in the political class, along with their courtiers in the media, including former American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) employee Wolf Blitzer, as well as academia, are shining examples of Israel’s transparent and often illegal meddling in the American political system. Forget Russia. Forget China. No foreign government comes close to exerting Israel’s influence.

Democratic Party leaders are not opposed to attacking Iran — they are opposed to attacking Iran without being consulted. Two dozen Democrats lept to their feet and applauded every time Trump threatened Iran, or lauded Israel, in his State of the Union address. The Biden administration and Democratic Party leadership made no effort to reinstate Barack Obama’s Iran nuclear agreement. It focused instead on sustaining the genocide in Gaza. It cheered Israel’s decapitation of Iranian proxies in Lebanon, Syria and Yemen. Kamala Harris in her feckless and tone deaf presidential campaign promised to continue funding the genocide, which alienated many voters, and labeled Iran our most dangerous enemy.

Endless war is a bipartisan project.

Keep reading

Trump Claims Iran Developing Missiles To Hit US, Contradicting Intel Reports

With nuclear talks hanging in the balance, and the potential for yet another US war of choice in the Middle East, President Donald Trump escalated the rhetoric Tuesday night, warning that Iran is moving beyond just regional missile capabilities and setting its sights farther west by developing missiles capable of hitting the United States.

During his State of the Union address Tuesday night, Trump claimed, “They’ve already developed missiles that can threaten Europe and our bases overseas, and they’re working to build missiles that will soon reach the United States of America.”

It seemed a transparent attempt to make the American people believe they are under direct threat from Tehran, in order to justify potential near-future strikes, however flimsy the case might be. So far Washington’s main talking point has been that Iran simply can never have a nuclear weapon and so something has to be done – and this actually does resonate with some sectors of the American public.

But Tehran setting its sites on directly attacking the US homeland is a huge stretch, with no serious analyst so much as suggesting the Islamic Republic has the capability or is even close.

US intelligence assessments have been very conservative on this. For example, in 2025, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) stated that Iran could potentially field a militarily viable intercontinental ballistic missile by 2035 “should Tehran decide to pursue the capability.”

Given US intelligence also has not concluded that such a decision had been made, this means Iran is likely at least a decade away from even being close to possessing such an ultra long range missile.

The US mainland is some 6000 miles away from western Iran, and currently Iran’s longest range missile is said to reach just under 1900 miles – a huge gap.

Iran’s ballistic missile focus has always been developing with an eye on the country’s number one nemesis in the region: Israel. 

There’s a broad understanding even among the Western public that in reality Washington’s anti-Iran stance has much more to do with defending Israel than the US homeland, which is clearly not under immediate threat from Tehran. There’s not so much as been a terror attack carried out by a single Iranian Shia operative on American soil in all of history.

Keep reading

War Propaganda and Iran: The Exact Script Used for Every Failed US War Is Hauled Out Again

When President Lyndon B. Johnson decided in 1965 to significantly increase the number of American troops to fight the growing war in Vietnam, he felt obligated to justify this major escalation to the American people (this was from a quaint, obsolete era when Washington believed public support was mildly important for starting or escalating American wars). On April 7 of that year, Johnson went to Johns Hopkins University to present his definitive case for why the U.S. must fight a war on the other side of the world, against a country that had not attacked and could not meaningfully threaten the U.S.

Johnson presented the American war as one of benevolence, selflessness, and a noble desire to liberate the world’s oppressed peoples from a uniquely murderous, tyrannical regime. “Tonight Americans and Asians are dying for a world where each people may choose its own path to change,” Johnson proclaimed. He compared American motives in Vietnam to those of the freedom-craving American Founders who waged the Revolutionary War to liberate themselves from the British Crown: ”This is the principle for which our ancestors fought in the valleys of Pennsylvania. It is the principle for which our sons fight tonight in the jungles of Viet-Nam.”

While Johnson invoked some geo-political justifications, he emphasized that the U.S. was deploying and putting at risk tens of thousands of young American soldiers in Vietnam simply because we wanted to help the Vietnamese people be free. “We want nothing for ourselves — only that the people of South Viet-Nam be allowed to guide their own country in their own way,” Johnson said.

Central to this propagandistic narrative was the repeated parading around by the American media of a handful of South Vietnamese activists with deep connections to the West. These camera-ready “natives” assured Americans that the Vietnamese people — on whose behalf they claimed to speak — desperately craved American invasion and bombing of their country in order to liberate them. Individuals like Phan Quang Da, a Harvard-educated physician, and CIA-fronted groups, like The American Friends of Vietnam, were used as battering rams against American opponents of the war to accuse them of being indifferent, even contemptuous, of the desire of the Vietnamese people to have the U.S. military free the population. “The Vietnamese people are asking for this, but you do not care about them,” was the refrain war opponents invariably confronted.

Keep reading