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“On top of everything else, Israel and the US have unleashed an environmental disaster in Tehran. How many ways can they show you they have no regard for human life?”

-- Assal Rad

News and Opinion

This Is Even Dumber And Crazier Than The Iraq War

Young people keep asking me if this was what the Iraq invasion was like. I’ve been telling them “Sort of, but this is way dumber and crazier.”

There were fairly intelligent people who bought into the Iraq war propaganda. Many anti-war folk assumed Saddam probably did have weapons of mass destruction — they just didn’t buy into the narrative that war was the answer. There really were interventionists who sincerely believed the war could do good things for the Iraqi people.

This is nothing like that. Only the most shitbrained of morons sincerely believe the narratives supporting the Trumpanyahu administration’s attack on Iran. Mostly it’s just liars and manipulators cynically pretending to believe the stories about nuclear weapons and massacred protesters and bringing freedom and democracy to the Iranian people, because they want Iran to be bombed.

This time they’re not even pretending to care about the will of the American people. They’re not even pretending to care about humanitarian interests or the future of the people they are bombing. They’re just spouting extremely obvious lies that get fact-checked and debunked by the mainstream media in real time, and then murdering people and bragging about it.

I’ve spent years, decades, obsessing over the Bush Administration’s Iraq WMD lies, writing about them, debunking them.

I can think of no lie about Iraq WMDs told by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld et al that comes even close to the enormity and absurdity of this lie from Donald Trump. https://t.co/fVR5sZT5ri

— Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan) March 5, 2026

The Iraq invasion was an unforgivable mass atrocity of unfathomable evil, but looking back on it you can understand how a person acting in good faith could have been taken in by the post-9/11 hysteria and the uniform war propaganda of the mass media. There was an argument put forward that Saddam Hussein would be replaced with a government that serves the interests of the Iraqi people, and then the US coalition really did stay in the country and build up a new regime to run things. Compared to what we’re seeing now, it’s almost quaint.

This is just open savagery. The US and Israel are pursuing the Libya model with Iran: smashing and decapitating the nation and then leaving the people to pick up the pieces and deal with all the chaos, lawlessness and sectarian conflict that ensues. They intend to plunge a nation of 90 million people into mass-scale strife and potential state collapse or balkanization, and then casually stroll away from the wreckage in cool indifference to the suffering they just unleashed upon the world.

They make no claim to be replacing the Iranian government with a better one. They make no claim to be bringing freedom and democracy to an oppressed people. They’re selling WMD lies and atrocity propaganda, but only in the most half-assed and low-energy of ways, with no interest in whether anyone actually believes them. Mostly they’re just destroying an ancient nation because they can, and looking at the world saying “Yeah we’re thugs. What are you gonna do about it?”

This is the new George W Bush. Trump is what Bush metamorphoses into when it emerges from its red cocoon. The crazier the US empire gets, the more insane its managers are becoming.

Epic Disaster w/ Jeffrey Sachs

‘A very dangerous person’: alarm as Pete Hegseth revels in carnage of Iran war

Brash and bellicose, he sounded more like a cartoon bully than a sombre statesman. “Death and destruction from the sky all day long,” Pete Hegseth, wearing a red, white and and blue tie and pocket square, bragged to reporters at the Pentagon near Washington. “This was never meant to be a fair fight, and it is not a fair fight. We are punching them while they’re down, which is exactly how it should be.”

Hegseth, 45, a former Fox News TV host who now commands the world’s most powerful military, has this week become the face of Donald Trump’s war in Iran. That has set off alarm bells for critics who warn that the Secretary of Defense – pointedly rebranded “Secretary of War” – has rapidly transformed the Pentagon into the staging ground for an ideological and religious crusade.

With machismo, Christian nationalism and callousness toward the lives of US troops, they say, Hegseth’s puerile displays on TV are aimed at sating Trump’s desire for a warmonger worthy of the manosphere. This was reinforced by a lurid social media video that intersperses clips from Hollywood blockbusters such as Braveheart, Gladiator, Superman and Top Gun with Hegseth and real kill-shot footage of the attacks in Iran.

Janessa Goldbeck, chief executive of Vet Voice Foundation, a nonprofit advocacy organisation, said: “Pete Hegseth is a very dangerous person. He’s a white Christian nationalist and has the arsenal of the United States government at his disposal and a permission slip from President Trump to deploy carnage wherever he wishes against whomever he wishes.” ... Now, in his first week guiding the nation through a murky new Middle East conflict, Hegseth has largely forgone the solemnity of a traditional defence secretary in favour of the performative antics of a partisan broadcaster revelling in America’s capacity to inflict violence.

For years he had cultivated a hypermasculine “muscleman” aesthetic designed to play to Trump’s sensibilities and the rightwing media ecosystem. Now, faced with a geopolitical crisis that demands nuance and strategic foresight, he appears to many to be out of his depth. Goldbeck, a Marine Corps veteran who was deployed overseas as a combat engineer officer, commented: “I wish I could say how cavalier, obtuse and hopeless Secretary Hegseth is at leading the Pentagon. I can’t even muster the words to describe his self-adulation, matched only in scope by his apparent moral depravity.”

Scott Ritter : Will Iran End US Hegemony?

Who cares about Israel’s genocide, apartheid and aggression? Trump’s State Department “is declaring an emergency with the war in Iran to bypass Congressional approval and sell more than 20,000 bombs to Israel that are valued at nearly $660 million.” https://t.co/tGenrQ6fzR

— Kenneth Roth (@KenRoth) March 7, 2026

Larry Johnson : US Intel Covering Its Backside

Iran threatens retaliatory attacks on oil facilities across Gulf after Israeli strikes

Iran has threatened to attack oil facilities in neighbouring countries after Israel struck at least five energy sites in and around Tehran, smothering the city in black smoke and escalating fears that the conflict will result in significant disruption to the world economy. “If you can tolerate oil at more than $200 per barrel, continue this game,” said a spokesperson for Iran’s Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) on Sunday.

The US sought to calm markets as oil prices surge by pledging not to target Iran’s energy infrastructure. However, fireballs and thick plumes of smoke rose over Tehran on Sunday after Israeli airstrikes hit four storage facilities. Iran’s oil distribution company said four employees were killed, as a dark haze hung over the city and the smell of burning oil lingered in the air. Explosions in the capital’s nearby city of Karaj reverberated across the region, and left the area under smoke.

A spokesperson for the IRGC said Iran would retaliate if the strikes on energy infrastructure continue. State media quoted the spokesperson accusing the US and Israel of targeting civilians and fuel facilities, saying Gulf states should press them to stop or “similar actions will be taken in the region”. However, the US energy secretary, Chris Wright, suggested the strikes that hit Iranian oil facilities were carried out by Israel and that Washington would not target Iran’s energy infrastructure. Speaking to CNN, Wright claimed disruptions to petroleum and gas supplies would be brief, “a few weeks” at worst. Iran produces about 4% of global oil, much of it exported to China.

A fresh wave of Iranian strikes hit the Gulf on Sunday, with Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait all reporting attacks. Saudi Arabia said it intercepted 15 drones, while strikes in Bahrain caused “material damage” to an important desalination plant. Two people were killed on Sunday and 12 others injured after a projectile fell on a residential location in Al-Kharj, a city in Saudi Arabia, the Saudi civil defence said. On Sunday evening the US military said a US service member had died of injuries sustained during an Iranian attack on US troops in Saudi Arabia. It brings the US death toll from the war to seven.

The recent attacks on Gulf states appear to highlight a clash within Iran’s leadership, contradicting remarks made on Saturday by the president, Masoud Pezeshkian, who apologised to countries on the Arabian peninsula and suggested strikes against them would end, provided their airspace and US bases were not used against Iran. According to analysts, Pezeshkian’s pledge not to strike Gulf states exposed rare public rifts within the ruling elite with Iran’s leadership showing signs of strain, as officials of the regime scrambled to explain and reinterpret the president’s words, which appeared to anger the country’s more conservative factions. Nonetheless, the Iranian military continued striking the neighbouring countries.

Iran Will Not Surrender: How the US Miscalculated Tehran

US energy chief says spike in gas prices will fall ‘before too long’ amid Iran war

Chris Wright, the US Department of Energy secretary, said on Sunday that the spike in energy prices would last weeks, at the worst, not months, and that the US would not target Iran’s energy industry. His comments come amid rising anxiety that Iran’s response to the US-Israel strikes, which caused a reduction in shipping through the strait of Hormuz and production slowdowns in some oil and gas producing states in the Middle East, may cause broad economic turbulence and higher inflation.

Asked about rising energy prices on CNN’s State of the Union, Wright said “in the worst case, this is a weeks, this is not a months thing”, adding that the US has “no plans to target Iran’s oil industry, their natural gas industry, or anything about their energy industry”.

The nine-day war has caused a significant spike in oil prices, with the price of WTI crude rising 35% in one week. Gasoline, diesel and jet fuel prices have jumped. In the US, a gallon of regular gasoline jumped by 14% in a week to $3.41 on Saturday, according to the AAA motor club.

Wright predicted that US domestic energy prices, which have dropped during Trump’s term, will ultimately fall back. “We want it back below $3 a gallon. And it will be again before too long,” he said, adding: “You never know exactly the time frame of this, but, in the worst case, this is a weeks, this is not a months thing.”

Administration officials are seeking to sell the US public on the concept that a short-term energy prices rises are more acceptable than a long-term threat from a missile and nuclear-armed Iran.

Oil APOCALYPSE IN Tehran As 'GLOBAL DEPRESSION' Looms

‘Your Tax Dollars Being Used to Raise Your Gas Prices’: US-Israel Bomb Major Iranian Oil Depots

In what was described as a “major escalation” of an attack already denounced as an illegal war of choice, the US-Israeli military coalition bombed major oil depots and other fossil fuel infrastructure in and around Tehran on Saturday, unleashing huge fireballs, turning streets to fire, and sending plumes of black smoke into the night sky while garnering fresh condemnation from the international community.

“Your tax dollars being used to raise your gas prices,” Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, the Michigan Democrat running for the US Senate, said in reaction to dramatic footage of the explosions circulating online.

“Scenes from Tehran look apocalyptic,” said Assal Rad, a fellow at the Arab Center in Washington, DC, sharing footage of the massive fire storm.

Scenes from Tehran look apocalyptic. This is a city of 10 million people.
pic.twitter.com/gVj2GvrJBI

— Assal Rad (@AssalRad) March 7, 2026

Separate footage showed the Aqdasiyeh Oil Depot in flames with Iranian first responders trying to create a perimeter around the inferno:

'آتش‌سوزی انبار نفت اقدسیه از فاصله نزدیک'
ویدیوی دریافتی از سوهانک، انتهای بزرگراه ارتش #تهران'
شنبه ۱۶ اسفند #Iran #Tehran pic.twitter.com/ikqloDGwbm

— Vahid Online (@Vahid) March 7, 2026

“Iran is being destroyed,” declared British journalist Owen Jones.

In the wake of last week’s attack, ordered by US President Donald Trump and carried out in conjunction with Israeli forces, the price of crude futures jumped by 35%, which CNBC characterized as “the biggest weekly gain in the history of the futures contract dating back to 1983.”

On Friday, Qatar’s energy minister, Saad al-Kaabi, told The Financial Times that crude prices could reach $150 per barrel in the coming weeks if the Strait of Hormuz remained closed to tanker traffic. Kaabi warned this could “bring down the economies of the world,” though Trump has said he is not worried about gas prices, saying Thursday: “If they rise, they rise.”

Meanwhile, others on Saturday shared video of a city streets of Tehran blazing with fire as oil from a destroyed depot flowed into sidewalks and sewer tunnels.

“I don’t know how many times I can say this but my god,” said Iranian political commentator Kev Joon in a social media post, describing what he was seeing as “apocalyptic,” unprecedented, and intentionally cruel.

“I have never seen something like this,” he added. “These are gutters and streams that run the sides of streets on almost every street and alley in Tehran. They are destroying a city in ways we haven’t witnessed before.”

According to the New York Times:

Iran’s Ministry of Oil said in a statement that multiple oil storage depots in the provinces of Tehran and Alborz had been targeted.

The Israeli military confirmed in a statement that it had attacked several fuel storage and energy complexes in Tehran, saying the facilities were being used by Iran’s armed forces. Israel’s military called it a “significant strike” aimed at dismantling the military infrastructure of the government.

“What is happening tonight is that US and Israel are targeting oil depots and desalination plants,” said Joon. “These aren’t military targets. They’re the infrastructure of everyday life. This isn’t a liberatory war. It’s an attempt to break the backs of Iranian people.”

How long will the war on Iran last and who will win it? | Trita Parsi

Ali Khamenei’s son Mojtaba chosen as Iran’s new supreme leader

Mojtaba Khamenei, the second son of the late Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has been chosen as his successor.

Members of the clerical body responsible for selecting Iran’s highest authority announced the decision on Sunday, calling on Iranians to rally behind him and preserve national unity.

In a statement carried by state media, the assembly said Khamenei had been chosen through what it described as a “decisive vote”. The body urged citizens across the country, “especially the elites and intellectuals of the seminaries and universities”, to pledge allegiance to the new leadership and safeguard unity at a critical moment for Iran.

The move could lead to a further escalation of the war, given Donald Trump had already acknowledged that Mojtaba Khamenei was the most likely successor and made clear he considered such an outcome unacceptable. Trump said earlier on Sunday that Iran’s next supreme leader was “not going to last long” if Tehran did not get his approval first. He has called Mojtaba Khamenei an “unacceptable” choice.

DESALINATION PLANTS STRUCK As UAE Accuses Israel Of DISINFORMATION

"She [Susan Collins] is more interested in their profits [AIPAC donors and the defense industry] than the shame that we bring upon ourselves when we kill children."

Watch Maine Democratic U.S. Senate candidate @grahamformaine confront Republican Senator Susan Collins. pic.twitter.com/9uaKqBcKix

— Zeteo (@zeteo_news) March 7, 2026

Israeli settlers and soldiers kill three Palestinians in West Bank village

Israeli settlers and soldiers killed three Palestinians in their village near Ramallah on Saturday night, the third deadly attack in a week of surging Israeli violence across the occupied West Bank. Israeli settlers have shot dead five civilians during invasions of Palestinian olive groves, villages and grazing land, in the brief period since Israel and the US launched a new war on Iran at the end of February. A sixth person died on Saturday after inhaling military-grade tear gas used by the Israeli army.

The escalating regional conflict diverted diplomatic, media and political attention away from occupied Palestine, even as Israeli authorities imposed a new blockade on Gaza and brought in sweeping movement restrictions across the occupied West Bank, and settlers intensified Israeli attacks on Palestinian land, crops, livestock and homes.

“Under the cover of war, the cooperation between the military and Israeli settler militias is deepening the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank,” Israel-based rights group B’tselem said this week. “Settlers deliberately graze livestock in Palestinians’ cultivated fields, destroy crops and stored food, steal livestock, and vandalise solar panels and water tanks. Settlers have also used bulldozers to raze and take over privately owned Palestinian land.”

“What is happening now is extremely dangerous. The world is preoccupied with the war with Iran, while settlers, protected by the Israeli army, continue to attack innocent civilians,” said Amin Shuman, a member of the local council in Abu Falah. “No one is being held accountable.”

IRAN WAR: Where's the War Going? /Patrick Henningsen & Lt Col Daniel Davis

Court records reveal gutting of DHS oversight

The Trump administration has so radically transformed the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) independent watchdog teams that thousands of cases related to conditions in immigration detention, deaths in custody and officers’ use of force are not being investigated, according to court records reviewed by the Guardian.

Hundreds of pages of court filings in a key legal battle in federal court serve to contradict the Trump administration’s repeated claims that the DHS watchdogs are performing “all required functions”. The allegations of failings within the shrunken oversight offices at the DHS, tasked by Congress with investigating civil rights and related concerns, come as the department grapples with public criticism of killings by immigration agents, escalating arrest tactics and plans to increase immigrant detention.

The latest documents in the case were submitted in February this year as part of a lawsuit in federal court in Washington DC brought last year by the Robert and Ethel Kennedy Human Rights Center and immigration advocate organizations the Southern Border Communities Coalition and the Urban Justice Center, against the DHS and the newly ousted homeland security secretary, Krisi Noem. The action came after the DHS dismantled the independent watchdog teams last March. At the time, the DHS said the offices “obstructed immigration enforcement” and were being closed. After the lawsuit was filed last April, the department backtracked and allocated a very small number of people to run them, court filings from last August and last month show.

The plaintiffs accuse the DHS and Noem of having exceeded their powers “to eliminate” the watchdog offices and say such actions “violate the constitutional separation of powers” and are illegally “arbitrary and capricious”. ... In the court records of the ongoing lawsuit, the Trump administration has repeatedly argued that the DHS civil rights-related offices are functioning appropriately, despite data they themselves submitted suggesting otherwise. The administration also claims the reduced number of staff members is sufficient to investigate civil rights complaints.

Stephen Miller a ‘big problem’ for Trump administration, says Republican senator

Republican Senator Thom Tillis said on Sunday he believes White House adviser Stephen Miller “should go” and that his role in the Trump administration has been a “big problem”. The senior senator representing North Carolina, when asked on CNN’s State of the Union if he thinks Miller should go, during a conversation about the administration’s immigration crackdown, responded to host Jake Tapper stating “Oh, of course I do.”

“He is not worried about substance. He’s more worried about form, but I also think that he has an outsized influence over the operations of the cabinet. And I believe we’ve got qualified cabinet members there that sometimes are doing less than what they want to, because of his direction and his outsized influence. He’s a big problem in this administration. He has been from the beginning,” said Tillis.

“It gives me pause that you had people like Stephen Miller calling the shots,” Tillis added. “It was Stephen Miller who said it was the position of the United States that we should go after Greenland. And Stephen Miller, that’s been repeatedly responsible for embarrassments for the President of the United States by acting too quickly speaking, first, and thinking later.”

Tillis, who is not seeking re-election this year, was the first Republican to call for the resignation or firing of DHS secretary Noem.

RIP.

Country Joe McDonald, Woodstock star and anti-war singer, dies aged 84

“Country Joe” McDonald, a hippy rock star of the 1960s whose protest track I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-To-Die Rag rebuked the Vietnam war and became a highlight of the Woodstock music festival, died on Sunday. He was 84.

McDonald died in Berkeley, California. His death from complications of Parkinson’s disease was reported by Kathy McDonald, his wife of 43 years, in a statement issued by his publicist.

Born in 1942 in Washington DC and raised in El Monte, California, McDonald began writing songs as a teenager, when he taught himself folk, blues and country songs on guitar.

As a musician, he was a longtime presence in the Bay Area scene, where peers included the Grateful Dead, the Jefferson Airplane and his one-time girlfriend, Janis Joplin. He wrote or co-wrote hundreds of songs, from psychedelic jams to soul-influenced rockers, and released dozens of albums.

But he was known best for a talking blues track he completed in less than an hour in 1965 – the year the then US president, Lyndon Johnson, began sending ground forces to Vietnam. In the deadpan style of McDonald’s hero, Woody Guthrie, I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-To-Die Rag was a mock celebration of war and early, senseless death.

How Trump’s EPA rollbacks give US states new tools in climate suits

By rolling back a bedrock climate legal determination, the Trump administration has undercut its attacks on a groundbreaking state climate accountability law, green groups have argued in court.

Trump’s justice department has asked a judge to kill a first-of-its-kind 2024 Vermont “climate superfund” policy requiring major polluters to pay for damages caused by their past planet-heating pollution, partly on the grounds that that federal law, not state law, governs greenhouse gas emissions. But last month, Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) repealed the endangerment finding, the scientific determination giving federal officials the authority to control those very pollutants.

“They’re trying to talk out of both sides of their mouths,” said Kate Sinding Daly, senior vice-president for law and policy at the environmental legal non-profit Conservation Law Foundation (CLF). The administration cannot claim the federal government’s ability to enact greenhouse gas regulations precludes states’ authority to pass climate superfund laws while claiming it has no statutory authority to regulate emissions, CLF and advocacy group Northeast Organic Farming Association of Vermont asserted in a recent filing in federal court meant to defend Vermont’s climate superfund law. (Both the EPA and the Department of Justice declined to comment on the new filing.)

“We believe the rescission of the endangerment finding was wrong, that they were wrong to claim they don’t have the authority to regulate greenhouse gases,” said Daly. “But if they are going to say that, that then they can’t possibly preempt states from stepping in to do the same thing.” It’s an argument legal experts anticipated would be made in the wake of the final endangerment finding repeal, and one that could also apply to defenses of the dozens of climate lawsuits filed by cities and states against big oil.

Humanity heating planet faster than ever before

Humanity is heating the planet faster than ever before, a study has found. Climate breakdown is occurring more rapidly with the heating rate almost doubling, according to research that excludes the effect of natural factors behind the latest scorching temperatures.

It found global heating accelerated from a steady rate of less than 0.2C per decade between 1970 and 2015 to about 0.35C per decade over the past 10 years. The rate is higher than scientists have seen since they started systematically taking the Earth’s temperature in 1880.

“If the warming rate of the past 10 years continues, it would lead to a long-term exceedance of the 1.5C (2.7F) limit of the Paris agreement before 2030,” said Stefan Rahmstorf, a scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and co-author of the study.

Extreme heat in recent years has been pushed higher by natural fluctuations – such as solar cycles, volcanic eruptions, and the weather pattern El Niño – that have led scientists to question whether startling temperature readings are outliers or the result of an increase in global heating.

The researchers applied a noise-reduction method to filter out the estimated effect of nonhuman factors in five major datasets that scientists have compiled to gauge the Earth’s temperature. In each of them, they found an acceleration in global heating emerged in 2013 or 2014.

Also of Interest

Here are some articles of interest, some which defied fair-use abstraction.

Iran Is Revealing The American Empire’s End

War On Iran: – No Missile Defense – AI Targeting – Local Retaliation

Iran War: More Trump Bluster as US and Israel Weapon Stocks Thin and Claims of Success Questioned; Report of Plans to Send Special Forces to Seize Nuclear Material Among Signs of US Troop Mobilization

What Is the US Exit Strategy From Its War on Iran?

US Argues ‘Emergency’ of Iran War Means Israel Needs 20,000+ More Bombs Without Congressional Approval

‘Intentional Chemical Warfare’: Toxic Black Rain in Tehran After US-Israel Bomb Oil Facilities

‘We Can All See’: Platner Rips Collins for Choosing War Profits Over Children Killed by US in Iran

DAY 8: ATTACK ON IRAN

US senator seeks perjury investigation into Kristi Noem over DHS spending

Lindsey Graham COACHED Bibi On Manipulating Trump

A Little Night Music

Furry Lewis - Falling Down Blues

Furry Lewis - When My Baby Left Me

Furry Lewis - Big Chief Blues

Furry Lewis - John Henry

Furry Lewis - Im Going To Brownsville

Furry Lewis - Kassie Jones

Furry Lewis - I'll Turn Your Money Green

Furry Lewis - Jelly Roll

Furry Lewis - Billy Lyons And Stack O'Lee