Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth took to a Pentagon podium to brief the media on the ongoing state of the conflict in Iran. TL;DR: Mission Accomplished.
Iran’s regime, he said, has waged a “savage, one-sided war against America” for decades. “We didn’t start this war, but under President Trump, we are finishing it.” Apparently, this war will go better than Iraq and Afghanistan because we have no long-term objectives: Trump “called the last twenty years of nation-building wars dumb, and he’s right. This is the opposite,” Hegseth said. “No stupid rules of engagement. No nation-building quagmire. No democracy-building exercise. No politically correct wars.”
President Trump told The Post Monday that he’s not ruling out sending US ground troops into Iran “if they were necessary” — adding that Operation Epic Fury was “way ahead of schedule” by taking out dozens of Tehran’s top officials.
“I don’t have the yips with respect to boots on the ground — like every president says, ‘There will be no boots on the ground.’ I don’t say it,” Trump said after launching strikes Saturday to decapitate Iran’s military and political leadership. “I say ‘probably don’t need them,’ [or] ‘if they were necessary.’”
He doesn’t have the yips about boots on the ground. Great. Don’t let the make-up and hair fool you, he’s a real man.
“It’s going to go pretty quickly,” he said. “We’re right on schedule, way ahead of schedule in terms of leadership — 49 killed — and that was, you know, going to take, we figured, at least four weeks, and we did it in one day.”
Trump also said he wasn’t concerned about Iran using terrorism to repay America for the weekend’s attack.
“We’ll take it out. Whatever. It’s like everything else, we’ll take it out,” Trump said.
He doesn’t have the yips about terrorist reprisals either. Apparently, he doesn’t have them about Americans being killed in general. Fine, fine, everything’s fine.
Here’s a new lie about the nuclear sites:
“They wanted to make a nuclear weapon, so we destroyed them completely, but we found they were in a totally different site — totally different — because the sites that we took out were permanent. They tried to use them, but they were totally, as I said correctly before, obliterated, right? So then we found them working on a totally different area, a totally different site, in order to make a nuclear weapon through enrichment — so it was just time.”
“I said, ‘Let’s go.’”
Ooooh. There was another site nobody knew about. Uh huh.
He said that most people support him and he did “the right thing.”
“I think that the polling is very good, but I don’t care about polling. I have to do the right thing. I have to do the right thing. This should have been done a long time ago,” Trump said.
I don’t think he does care about polling. He does whatever he wants under the assumption that he’s so perfect they will inevitably come around.
The megalomania is running strong right now. We are in a very dangerous moment.
“Gemini is AI and can make mistakes,” reads the disclaimer below this AI-generated image.
As of this writing, Kuwait has shot down three U.S. F-15s in “friendly fire” incidents. Reports say all crew members are safe, whatever that means for airman ejecting into an airstream at hundreds of miles per hour. Four U.S. servicemembers died in an Iranian missile attack on a tactical operations center in Kuwait. A “squirter” slipped through air defenses, says former Fox News Weekend’s Pete Hegseth.
The New Republic‘s Siva Vaidhyanathan wonders just who is minding the war: humans or AI? Commenting on the reported attack on a girls’ school in Southern Iran, Vaidhyanathan wonders (without citing confirming facts) if autonomous weapons are in play. The question arises in the wake of the Pentagon’s dispute with Anthropic over use of its AI technology for operating fully autonomous killing machines. Yes, the kind featured in dystopian movies.
The Pentagon insists its contracts with AI firms sanction “any lawful use” of the technology. Anthropic balked. The Trump administration’s definition of lawful is as suspect as its adherence to any laws with which it disagrees:
To understand what “any lawful use” means in practice, it helps to understand what it is designed to eliminate: The possibility that a private company could tell the United States military how its technology may or may not be used. In the Pentagon’s view, once a tool is purchased, the buyer sets the terms of its application. The vendor’s values, safety commitments, and ethical frameworks become, at the moment of transaction, irrelevant. The military has its own lawyers. It has its own review processes. It has its own standards. And given the degradation of legal safeguards and restrictions on the entire executive branch in the last year, almost any act of depravity or mass murder could be ruled “lawful” by a Pentagon that has purged itself of its most moral and ethical lawyers and leaders and a Supreme Court devoted to maximizing Trump’s autocracy.
Just picture a self-driving taxi with a missile strapped to the hood.
In his February 26 statement, [Anthropic CEO Dario] Amodei said: “Today, frontier AI systems are simply not reliable enough to power fully autonomous weapons.” This technical conclusion is shared by a significant portion of the AI research community, grounded in the basic observation that large language models hallucinate, misidentify, and fail in ways that are not fully predictable. In a military context, an unpredictable failure is a dead civilian with no accountable author.
And your point is? asks Pete Hegseth. His Pentagon “wants an AI that will do what it is told without the inconvenience of a conscience embedded in its terms of service,” writes Vaidhyanathan.
So Hegseth declared Anthropic a “supply chain risk to national security,” immediately barred any U.S. military contractor, supplier, or partner from doing business with Anthropic. Naturally, Sam Altman’s OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, stepped forward and accepted the “any lawful use” language.
I’ve long argued that corporate “persons” possess only appetite and instinct, and no soul and no conscience. Anthropic at least retains their memory.
Donald John Trump should have this headline emblazoned over his mausoleum in gold:
Trump Buries the 20th Century
(Has he had a gaudy mausoleum designed yet or does he expect to live forever?)
The headline comes from a Politico column by Alexander Burns, Politico’s senior executive editor:
With a roar of rockets and bombs, a gasp of international outcry and the death of Iran’s supreme leader, President Donald Trump’s legacy became clearer than ever.
He is burying the 20th Century: Its villains, its alliances, its political norms and ceasefires. And he is unleashing a future of uncertainty and disruption with no new equilibrium in sight.
Across both his terms as president, and in so many different areas of policy and governance and culture, his signal achievements have been acts of demolition.
His Supreme Court appointees struck down Roe v. Wade, ending the seething political and legal stalemate on abortion rights that governed America since the 1970s.
His military interventions in Latin America have brought the Cuban government, one of the last surviving Cold War regimes, to the brink of collapse.
His tariffs and trade threats have blown apart the Reagan-Clinton policy consensus on free trade, upending half a century of global commercial arrangements and diplomatic relations.
This reads like the bill of particulars in our Declaration of Independence from George III.
Burns goes on. NATO’s post-war legacy of trans-Atlantic stability? Dead. Post-Watergate legal and ethical norms? Dead. Any sense that the United States, the former arsenal of democracy, stands for anything beyond “corporate favoritism and personal enrichment” and “use of the justice system as a weapon of vengeance”? Dead.
“Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
America’s credibility in the community of nations is ground to dust, its legacy abandoned in the desert like the trunkless legs of Ozymandias. Joe Biden considered the TV showman’s self-absorption, Burns writes, with his “philistinism and historical ignorance,” an insult to American tradition and to the office of the presidency. And Trump is.
The builder, it turns out, is better at demolishing what others created than he is at building. That includes our nation of laws. He is better at slapping his name in gold on once noble edifices than at creating anything worthy of the world’s memory, save for what once was. Trump would rather cart the links at his Mar-a-Lago resort and be feted by Botoxed courtiers as artificial as his ridiculous comb over.
Burns concludes:
If the 20th Century is finally dead, this country’s trajectory in the 21st is an immense question mark.
That is the great challenge Trump has left for the next president. For a visionary successor, it could also be an opportunity unmatched in recent U.S. history.
Has anyone checked to see if in his temple of honor, Lincoln’s seated statue sheds tears? Such a miracle might at least shock some Americans deadened by Trump’s garish spectacle into shedding their own over what he’s destroyed. Perhaps to mourn. Perhaps to repent. Perhaps to find themselves once again. It’s long been said that with Trump and the party he leads there is no bottom. No ultimate, dark night of the soul from which springs a renewed commitment to clawing back a life (and a country) worth living. Indeed, there seems none.
As the country staggers toward fall elections and whatever befalls us in 2028, now is a time for visionaries, if there be any left among the technocrats and social media influencers Americans now send to Washington, D.C. in place of statesmen like Lincoln.
a slurring Trump in new video on American troops killed by Iran: “Sadly, there will likely be more before it ends. That's the way it is. Likely be more.“ pic.twitter.com/oSARG2xrv7
I don’t usually do the “imagine if XXXX said this…” because it’s just so obvious. But I have to make an exception in this case. My God. Imagine if Biden or Obama had ever said such a thing.
He seems more addled than usual. I’d guess he isn’t getting much sleep. He’s awake all night hoping against hope that somehow this works out ok even though he has no idea what to do. He just banks on his luck holding out.
Days before the election, the president appeared to admit for the first time that Republicans might lose the House. “It could happen,” Trump said. “And you know what you do? My whole life, you know what I say? ‘Don’t worry about it, I’ll just figure it out.’” Trump said.
It’s worked for him so far. But the stakes have never been higher than they are now.
The New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner interviewed progressive foreign policy expert Matt Duss about why this Iran gambit is such a mistake. Here Duss discusses how the Obama administration approached the problem, first with the nuclear agreement and what they saw as the advantages that agreement conferred for future progress:
Over the past several months, there has been incredible repression by the Iranian regime against Iranians. We don’t know how many people have been killed, but it’s in the many thousands. The Trump Administration has occasionally threatened Iran, saying that it can’t kill protesters, and has occasionally made noises about caring about the welfare of the Iranian people, but the Administration has obviously allowed the regime to continue killing protesters. What do you think would be a sane posture for America to take toward Iran, and does the repression that we’ve seen over the past few months change how you think about it?
Clearly, this is a bad regime. It’s a repressive regime. It uses enormous violence against its own people, which we’ve seen horrific examples of over the past few weeks. I think the approach to Iran that makes the most sense was the one that President Barack Obama had, which was to acknowledge that Iran poses a challenge on a number of fronts, the most important of which was the possibility of Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon. That’s why he pursued diplomacy to deal with that challenge aggressively. He did so with close international partners, and got what, I think, was clearly a pretty strong nonproliferation agreement that established heavy inspections and surveillance of Iran’s nuclear program. That dealt with that one challenge, but it also created the opportunity to begin to deal with the other challenges Iran posed.
At the end of Obama’s Presidency, right before Trump took office, there were a number of American sailors seized by Iran in the Gulf, creating a situation that could have escalated easily and ended very badly. But because there was a line of communication that had been built up between the U.S. and Iran over the course of negotiating the Iran nuclear deal, that situation was de-escalated and ended without real incident. The nuclear deal was an opportunity to begin to deal with issues like Iran’s support for regional extremist groups and questions of Iran’s internal repression. That opportunity was squandered when Trump withdrew from the agreement during his first term. It showed Iran, and frankly showed the world, that you cannot trust the United States. And I have to say, Joe Biden squandered an opportunity to rejoin that agreement and to re-start that channel. I would add this: historically, Iran’s internal repression has gotten worse when it feels threatened externally. I’ve heard this from Iranian activists. And when you dial down tension between the U.S. and Iran, space for reform begins to open up.
Now I think given the level of the Iranian government’s violence against protesters, my understanding, again, from talking to Iranian colleagues, is that we are in a different situation. There’s much less hope now, if any hope, that the current government could be reasonably reformed, but, still, the idea that we can change the Iranian government for the better through a violent regime-change operation, like the one we’re witnessing right now, has a very bad historical track record.
He says that the Biden administration made a mistake in the early years of his administration by thinking they could slow walk further talks in the hope of getting more which seems odd to me. They changed their approach later but it was too late.
Personally, I think it was probably hopeless anyway since the election of Trump and his subsequent idiotic actions showed that the U.S. was becoming unstable and there was no reason to trust anything we did. Electing him to a second term has pretty much written that in stone. Agreements with America have no meaning anymore.
But it is interesting to see what might have been if we didn’t lose our minds back in 2016.
Timeline: 2014: Trump says Obama will invade Iran because he’s not a good enough negotiator to get a deal with them
2015: Obama, with the backing of the EU, China, Russia and others, gets a deal with them
2018: Trump cancels deal bc it was Obama’s and says he can negotiate a better one.
2018-2020: Trump can’t negotiate one. Arms control experts and Trump officials start to grumble that scrapping Obama’s deal was probably a bad idea.
2025: Trump still can’t negotiate a new deal
2025: Israel launches an attack on Iran. Drags Trump in. Trump claims Iran’s nuclear capacity was wiped out
2025-2026: Trump still can’t negotiate a deal
2026: Trump launches a regime change war on Iran, at Israel’s goading
The mistake McFaul makes in this analysis is in assuming that democracy is the goal. Clearly neither the United States or Israeli governments particularly want democracy. Just look at what we’ve done in Venezuela. They obviously only cared about getting an acquiescent puppet in place and believe they have one there in Darcy Rodriguez. There has been no talk of elections and a total side-lining of the people who actually won the last one. Democracy is far too messy for these people — including here at home.
They want business partners, period. They don’t care about anything else.
Remember that old fashioned term “the appearance of conflict of interest?” This is a full blown, living color illustration of it.
I just want you to take a moment to consider that these assholes made Hunter Biden into a political pinata for four years while Jr and Eric are openly profiting from Trump’s presidency without any consideration for how it looks. And if you think these bets weren’t “informed” by people on the inside you’re being naive. Of course they were.
Democrats have zero reasons to offer any support for this. That doesn’t mean that some won’t. We’re already seeing some reflexive clinging to “process” in which the main argument isn’t about why it’s daft and dangerous to do it but that he didn’t follow the right rules in doing it. That is a cowardly tactic to try to have it both ways. The reason to oppose this war is because it’s a felony stupid decision based upon prodding from the Israeli government, hawkish weirdos like Lindsey Graham and Trump’s megalomania.
Maybe Trump does some bombing, gets bored, and moves on to something else. But if we take him at his word, this will be a protracted conflict that could cost American lives, destabilize the region, and spike energy prices here at home.
Democrats must loudly and boldly oppose this war. They have a moral responsibility and a political obligation to do so. If Democrats cannot bring themselves to oppose an idiotic, unjustified regime change war in the Middle East, they do not deserve the power they seek.
The vast majority of Democrats are in the right place. Many have been loudly criticizing Trump and pointing out the stupidity and hypocrisy of this war. But we need to be as unified as possible and speak with one voice.
That starts with a vote in the House next week on a bipartisan War Powers Resolution, which would require Trump to seek congressional approval to continue bombing Iran. Almost every Democrat and at least one Republican is expected to vote for it.
Two Democrats — Josh Gottheimer and Jared Moskowitz — have said they will vote no. Moskowitz even obnoxiously called the resolution the “Ayatollah Protection Act.” By blocking a Congressional vote on the war, Gottheimer and Moskowitz are playing cynical national security politics, and I hope they face vigorous primary challenges because of it.
The resolution could, but probably won’t, pass the House. Even if it passed the Senate, Trump would veto it, and there aren’t the votes to override. That said, many of the Democrats who will vote for the resolution are less firm on the underlying policy question of the war itself.
Axios reported earlier this week that a potential U.S. strike on Iran is exposing a quiet but consequential split inside the Senate Democratic caucus. The Democratic base strongly opposes war with Iran, but some of Chuck Schumer’s colleagues are more open to military action — provided Congress has a say.
That’s the “process” BS.
No. Not this time. Not with Trump, a criminal president with a 36% approval rating. Jesus.
There are two reasons Democrats behave this way. Many still carry a post-9/11 mentality, perpetually worried about being cast as weak or unpatriotic by Republicans and the right-wing media machine. That fear is an increasingly outdated notion in today’s political environment, but learned helplessness is hard to unlearn.
There are also Democrats who genuinely believe that regime change in Iran is a top national security priority and are willing to support military force, under the right circumstances, to achieve it. That’s not a view I share — I think it means failing to absorb every lesson of Iraq — but it’s a position someone can hold in good faith.
Even so: how can anyone seriously believe that Donald Trump, a corrupt, erratic wannabe dictator who couldn’t find Iran on a map, is the right person to manage that incredibly complex undertaking? Even if the military achieves regime change, do we really want Trump deciding what comes next in Iran? His first priority will probably be a Trump-branded golf course outside Tehran. The idea that Trump should be the one doing this is indefensible.
The American people are on our side. They don’t want this war. They elected Trump to stop wars, not start them. Democrats need to stop complicating something that is actually pretty simple — and loudly, boldly oppose a dumb and dangerous man launching a dumb and dangerous war for no good reason.
The fact is that the United States has proved over many decades now that this “regime change” concept, usually taken with the fatuous notion that we are killing the people for their own good, backfires every time. This self-serving idea that we’ll be greeted a liberators never proves true and the death and chaos we inflict in the process is never worth it.
Wars of choice are bad, period. We should have learned this by now.
Moreover, Rachel Maddow’s point from yesterday — that you have to look at who will really benefit — is especially true with this corrupt bunch of gangsters leading the charge. There is simply no doubt that Trump was persuaded by the prospect of somehow getting our hands on all that oil. It’s not like he ever made a secret of it, since he’s said “we should have kept the oil!” hundreds of times over the years.
No, this is one is very easy (as was Iraq) — just say no. Democrats have a head start this time, the public is already against it. Even Republicans are tepid much less the Democrats and Independents. They’ve never had a better case, from “wag the dog” to “no war for oil” to “he promised no more wars.” They simply must stick together and oppose this war unequivocally.
Image shows a young woman receiving surgical procedure at Jeffrey Epstein’s apartment. Photo via Department of Justice
Citizen and professional journalists more motivated than Donald Trump lackeys at the Department of Justice continue to uncover disturbing items in Epstein files released to date. Among them, photographs that the DOJ should have been redacted but missed, “including pictures of a young girl kissing Jeffrey Epstein on the cheek and personal data on passports and drivers’ licenses,” CNN found.
The New Jersey mother of four is among hundreds of citizen-journalists, or sleuths, absorbed by the material connected to the late Jeffrey Epstein. She’s determined to learn the stories behind his illicit sex ring and relationships with some of the world’s most powerful people — and publish what she finds on Substack.
[…]
With all that, there’s plenty of room for people like Leonard. She’s been journalism-adjacent for much of her career, running a business that offered transcription services until AI rendered it largely obsolete. She worked briefly in education and wrote about politics and social issues on her Substack, The Panicked Writer.
But after seeing the interest generated when she started looking at Epstein documents a few months ago, she began devoting all of her professional time to it.
[…]
Journalist Wajahat Ali, who runs the Left Hook Substack, said he admires Leonard’s work and often features her on his site. Some of the Epstein citizen journalists gather on livestreams to talk about what they’ve found.
Over the past decade, Ali has watched the growth of a subculture of people obsessed with true crime stories who love to comb through evidence and advance their own theories.
The Epstein files are “the mother lode,” he said. “If you love conspiracy theories, if you love true crime, this is the ‘Citizen Kane’ of true crime. It is the unfortunately sordid gift that will keep on giving.”
These sleuths are Trump’s worst nightmare as well as for the men and women not yet publicly named in connection with Epstein or who had their names “helpfully” redacted by the Trump DOJ. They’ve escaped American justice for crimes committed with Epstein while overseas counterparts to U.S. policing are “eager to examine the American documents as part of criminal investigations into potential wrongdoing,” the New York Times reports:
In Britain, two arrests have taken place, of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, the former prince, and of Peter Mandelson, a former ambassador to Washington. Both were arrested on suspicion of the same offense: misconduct in public office. It’s a broad, centuries-old common law offense that makes it a crime to act with “wilfull abuse or neglect of the power or responsibilities of the public office.”
“We don’t have those sort of generic, open-ended kinds of crimes in the United States,” said Paul G. Cassell, a professor of law at the University of Utah. For a decade, he represented Virginia Giuffre, who accused Mr. Epstein of trafficking her to his friends, including Mr. Mountbatten-Windsor, in the early 2000s.
As in the United States, the Epstein files have forced some firings or resignations outside of the criminal justice system.
In Britain, the prime minister’s chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, and his communications director, Tim Allan, stepped down amid ongoing questions about how much they were aware of connections between Mr. Epstein and Mr. Mandelson, the man they pushed to be Britain’s ambassador to the United States. Neither Mr. McSweeney nor Mr. Allan has any known ties to Mr. Epstein.
CNN worked with Visual Layer, an Israeli software company that uses artificial intelligence to analyze massive sets of images, to review 100,000 photos that the DOJ released related to Epstein, the late convicted sex offender who was accused of abusing hundreds of girls. Those images were among millions of pages of documents and videos released by the DOJ.
These previously unreported findings add to a growing list of botched redactions in the DOJ releases. This includes multiple videos showing women’s faces, documents that named a survivor of Epstein’s abuse, footage showing an undercover FBI agent on the job, and at least one court filing in which sensitive material could be unredacted via copy-and-paste.
CNN reached out to the DOJ on Monday about the problematic images that were still viewable on the government site. After CNN’s inquiry, DOJ uploaded new versions of these images with proper redactions, covering up private data and faces of women and minors.
“Our team is working around the clock to address any victim concerns, additional redactions of personally identifiable information, as well as any files that require further redactions under the Act, to include images of a sexual nature,” a DOJ spokesperson told CNN in a statement on Tuesday.
The transparency law that Congress passed last year requiring the files’ release said the DOJ could withhold or redact images depicting child sexual abuse or any materials that would lead to an “unwarranted invasion of personal privacy,” especially for victims.
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche in January said that his document team had redacted every woman in images except for Ghislaine Maxwell. They undertook “painstaking” efforts redact “personal identifying information” as well as all “victim information.”
Apparently not painstaking enough. What’s helped keep such images hidden in plain sight is a terrible search engine on the government’s site:
CNN used Visual Layer’s technology to find unredacted items that simpler searches on the Justice Department’s database may have missed. The company’s founder, Danny Bickson, said the Justice Department website has a “basic search engine” that can find text in Epstein’s emails and court filings, “but if you need to search for an image or video, it’s impossible.”
So, Bickson imported the full original DOJ dataset onto his platform, and “it was pretty easy to find, in a few minutes, problematic content,” he said.
So while Trump is ordering the U.S. military to throw up a massive Epstein smokescreen in Iran, people obsessed with the obvious coverup are poring over the documents and making connections that redactions fail to hide. And it is not simply pedophile men, but a stable of medical professionals with flexible ethics that Epstein kept on informal “retainer” to ensure his girls were sexually fit. (Follow gift link.) The amateurs will keep digging. They will ensure that this scandal keeps unfolding for years. Trump is almost powerless to stop them. Almost. But more careers will come crashing down. He’ll be fine with that so long as it’s not his.
If it comes down to it, Trump will throw the world under the bus to save himself.
