It has been ten days since Israel launched an unprovoked campaign of sustained bombing against the Islamic Republic of Iran. Hundreds of Iranian civilians have been killed as Israel assassinated dozens of military and intelligence leaders, including commanders of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, as well as nuclear scientists and other technical experts. In some cases, these assassinations have been conducted in crowded residential buildings. Israel has also attacked medical sites, ambulances, and civilian neighborhoods, intensifying its attacks on Tehran on Monday. Estimates range from 400 to 900 Iranians killed and well over 3,000 injured. Iran’s Red Crescent and regional civil defense organizations estimate that more than 40,000 people have been displaced since the bombing began.
This weekend, the U.S. overtly joined Israel’s war against Iran, launching a series of bombings targeting several Iranian nuclear sites in Operation Midnight Hammer. President Donald Trump claimed that Iran’s nuclear capability has been totally decimated and praised himself for his decision to bomb Iran despite no evidence that Iran posed any imminent threat to the United States. Iran has suggested these attacks, which included the use of fourteen 30,000 pound bombs, did far less damage than the U.S. and Israel have suggested and that Iran may well have evacuated its most important assets, including enriched uranium and vital equipment, in advance of the anticipated attacks.
On Monday evening local time, Iran launched a barrage of missiles at the headquarters of U.S. Central Command which is situated at Al Udeid air base in the Gulf nation of Qatar. Initial reports about Iran’s strike indicate that Iranian officials informed Qatar of the strikes in advance in an effort to prevent loss of life or other casualties. Iran likely selected the CENTCOM headquarters because it serves as the main operations hub for U.S. military operations in the Middle East.
In a statement released after the strikes, the General Secretariat of the Supreme National Security Council of Iran said:
In response to the aggressive and brazen action carried out by the United States against Iranian nuclear sites and facilities, the powerful armed forces of the Islamic Republic of Iran have struck Al Udeid Air Base where American forces are stationed in Qatar.
The number of missiles used in this successful operation equals the number of bombs used by the United States in its attack on Iranian nuclear facilities, and a military base completely distant from residential areas and civilian facilities in Qatar was targeted.
This action carries no dangerous nature toward the friendly and brotherly state of Qatar and its honorable people, and the Islamic Republic of Iran affirms its commitment to maintaining and continuing the warm and historical relations with Qatar.
A Pentagon spokesperson said that a combination of medium- and long-range rockets were fired at the base, though no injuries or deaths were reported. The facility has a sophisticated array of air defense systems and video of the attack shows missiles being shot down in the skies over Qatar.
Shortly before Iran’s strikes, which were conducted in response to the U.S. bombing of several Iranian nuclear sites on Sunday, I interviewed Iranian scholar Helyeh Doutaghi, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Tehran. Doutaghi was a prominent scholar at Yale University until last spring when she was politically targeted and driven out because of her political activism in support of Palestine. Doutaghi has rarely granted interviews since her firing by Yale.
This weekend, Trump and other U.S. officials threatened even greater use of force against Iran should it retaliate against the unprovoked U.S. bombings this weekend. The U.S. position is that Iran must capitulate to the demands of the U.S. and Israel.
On several occasions, Trump and Israel have floated the possibility they would seek to assassinate Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei with Trump saying that the U.S. knows his precise location. While Trump administration officials have claimed the U.S. does not seek a wider war in Iran, current developments suggest that is not the case. On Sunday night, Trump posted on Truth Social: “It’s not politically correct to use the term, ‘Regime Change,’ but if the current Iranian Regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn’t there be a Regime change??? MIGA!!!”
When Israel first launched its bombing campaign against Iran, the U.S. was publicly claiming to be involved in good faith negotiations with Iran over the nuclear issue. Another round of talks was scheduled for June 15. In reality, the U.S. was engaged in a concealment operation aimed at giving Israel the element of surprise as it launched its bombing of Iran on June 13. The same scenario played out late last week. Just 30 hours after the White House announced that Trump would make a decision in the next two weeks on whether the U.S. would directly attack Iran, B2 bombers, subs, and other U.S. assets were bombing sites across Iran. They were the first publicly acknowledged U.S. military strikes inside Iran since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
What the world is now witnessing is a U.S.-Israeli war of aggression against Iran that notorious neoconservatives like Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz spent their careers working toward. Never before in history has an Israeli ruler been more empowered and unrestrained than Benjamin Netanyahu has been over the past 20 months.
His genocidal war in Gaza continues to intensify as the world’s attention has shifted. Every single day, many dozens of Palestinians are murdered as they desperately seek access to the meager supplies of food that the U.S. and Israel have allowed into Gaza. Israeli disseminated maps showing areas it has declared off-limits to Palestinians in Gaza depict an ever shrinking killing cage where Palestinians are being forced into as Israel continues what it has described as a war of conquest aimed at expelling or killing all Palestinians in Gaza.
With the formal launch of the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran, the whole notion of any sort of rules-based global order has been tossed into the waste bin of history. Both Trump and his close ally, the indicted war criminal Netanyahu, have made clear they have no respect for any international conventions, laws, or world courts. The stated justification for the war against Iran is a nuclear grade fraud, an epic lie that Netanyahu has spent his political career trying to sell. Israel is the sole entity with nuclear weapons in the region and has used that fact as part of its wars of annihilation and aggression. The consensus in the U.S. intelligence community since 2003 has been that Iran had not been actively pursuing a nuclear weapons program. It was Donald Trump who ripped up the nuclear agreement with Iran in his first term.
The message sent by the U.S.-Israeli war right now is that nuclear weapons are the only real deterrent against Israel and its chief sponsor and protector. Israel is not a member of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Iran is. Iran’s foreign minister said Sunday that the NPT had failed to protect Iran. Iran’s speaker of parliament announced Monday that Iran will cease cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Trump has portrayed the war against Iran as a joint effort, saying after the U.S. bombing, “We worked as a team like perhaps no team has ever worked before, and we've gone a long way to erasing this horrible threat to Israel.” There are reports that the U.S. gave Israel lists of air defense targets to hit ahead of the American bombing raids. While Netanyahu and Israel were close partners in the U.S. attack, the Trump administration said it did not inform U.S. congressional leadership of the attacks until after the bombing was completed and the U.S. warplanes were out of Iranian airspace.
Dr. Helyeh Doutaghi is an Iranian scholar of international law and geopolitical economy. Earlier this year, she was suspended and ultimately fired by Yale University after a Zionist-led campaign to portray her as a member of a terror organization. She served as the deputy Director of the Law and Political Economy Project at Yale. I did the first interview with Dr. Doutaghi in March as she was being targeted and threatened. She is now a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Tehran.
I do not have a frame of reference to think about my country, The United States, launching an unprovoked attack on a sovereign nation. I likewise have no reference for the nations of the world, signatories and member of The United Nations, looking away and rationalizing, using the most obscene language available to liars and cowards, to justify their do-nothing stand. At Nuremberg, at the end of WW II, we stood against murder and genocide, invasion and war, and now we stand for it. We have failed to learn the lesson of history, and so we are lost – utterly lost.
There are several frames of reference for y/our country's unprovoked attacks, one is Vietnam, bombing of Cambodia and Laos, then there was Grenada, Lebanon, and then Panama, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen.
How are you missing this picture?
I don’t believe I am missing anything, and your rather casual combined reference to the various countries you have listed misunderstands and misrepresents the history and context of each. My reply to you is no way a defense of US behavior in each of those nations/cases, so please spare me your further critique.
Good to know. That was something that I wasn't able to discern in your initial post.
Ed, even Nuremberg was mostly theatre. The US protected and imported thousands of Nazis after the war. The Dulles brothers helped Nazi officials escape prosecution. A Nazi was even made head of NATO. Several American corporations, like IBM, facilitated the Nazis all through the war, including their "final solution." Prominent American families like the Bushes helped the Nazis rise to power. Prescott Bush even actively colluded with other tycoons to assassinate Roosevelt, but made the mistake of trying to recruit Smedley Butler for that effort. Butler promptly revealed the plot, and the perpetrators claimed it was just a joke.
I will take exception to your first sentence, only. The International Military Tribunal was a serious attempt to establish a basis for criminalizing crimes during wartime. I think Justice Jackson would back me up in that regard – notwithstanding the later deeds and perfidy of John Foster and his baby brother. And yes, I know how we got all the “good” Nazis to keep them out of Soviet hands. But all that came later during the cold war. My original statement is reflected in Jeremy’s question, about 33 minutes into the interview, where he says “What kind of world are we living in”? In the context of Helyeh’s reply, and the span of time since the end of WWII, one can reasonably understand that there is no frame of reference. It's broken, unhinged, and shattered… not the kind of words one would choose to describe “civilization”.
Operation Paperclip started in 1945, Ed, the minute victory was declared. Look it up.
WTF does that have to do with the (IMT) Nuremberg trials?
I was replying to your claim that "all that came later during the cold war."
No more wars!! Stop all aggression now!!
We can’t allow ourselves to forget the horror of what’s happening to Palestine.
Fasting for Gaza
https://www.fosna.org/2025gazafast
Organized by Veterans for Peace
On May 22, we begin our fasting across the country while demanding:
1) a resumption of humanitarian aid, under UN authority, to Gaza
2) that the U.S. stop arming Israel NOW!
We can join or support or both. Surely, we must do more.
It’s not just Gaza, Israel is trying to distract us from. Israel just changed how land ownership works in the West Bank. Here’s what that means.
“The consequences of this decision paint a very grim outlook for the future,” said Abdallah Hammad from JLAC. “This will turn things upside down like never before, as it won’t be Israeli settlers demanding to get their outposts legalized. They will be legalized almost immediately, while Palestinians will be made into strangers, forced to justify their claim over the lands of their families and ancestors.”
“When I hear people talking about the risk of annexation, I tell them: this is annexation. It has already begun, and it is advancing.”
Read the details of this annexation the MSM will not tell you about in Mondoweiss:
https://mondoweiss.net/2025/06/israel-just-reopened-land-property-registration-in-the-west-bank-heres-what-that-means/?ml_recipient=157093614016529524&ml_link=157093523619841740&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=2025-06-13&utm_campaign=Daily+Headlines+RSS+Automation
ZIONIST PROPAGANDA
by Fred Gardner
Israel began bombing Iran on June 13. A banner headline in the New York Times the next day announced "Missiles Fly Across the Middle East."
This misleading implication of parity reappeared in a June 14 story about Putin contacting Trump and offering to mediate. "The call came," the Times reported "as Israel and Iran continued to pummel each other with intense airstrikes for a second day." Muhammed Ali and Joe Frazier used to pummel each other in a boxing ring. Israel is a nuclear power, fortified by the world's most sophisticated anti-missile network (the "Iron Dome"). They bombarded a country that could not defend itself and can barely strike back.
The implication of a fair fight was repeated in a June 14 "news analysis" hedded "How the Israel-Iran Conflict Could Spiral Into More Turmoil."
To call what's happening a "conflict" and "turmoil" is accurate in some technical, literal sense, but both words hide the reality –it's a one-sided onslaught. Same thing next day on the Times webpage: "Israel and Iran exchanged a new wave of attacks, striking one another with missiles and drones."
A companion piece played up the human side of the tragedy:
Iraq was reporting 406 dead and Israel 13... Meanwhile on the editorial page:
Noam Chomsky noted that the Times might contain nuggets of significant news, but you had to dig for them. June 15 there was a revealing story with a very misleading headline on the front page in the print edition: "A Miscalculation by Iran Led to Israeli Strikes' Extensive Toll, Officials Say."
According to reporter Farnaz Fassihi, "Iran’s senior leaders had been planning for more than a week for an Israeli attack should nuclear talks with the United States fail. But they made one enormous miscalculation. They never expected Israel to strike before another round of talks that had been scheduled for this coming Sunday in Oman, officials close to Iran’s leadership said on Friday. They dismissed reports that an attack was imminent as Israeli propaganda meant o pressure Iran to make concessions on its nuclear program in those talks.
An accurate headline would have read "Israel Struck While US Lulled Iran by Negotiating." The Iranians, desperate for a glimmer of hope, fell for a good cop/bad cop act. The ploy bought the US time to move military "assets" into position to protect "our" many bases in the Middle East.
June 16 "Israel and Iran Trade Blasts" was the print edition banner headline. Online it was "Trade Attacks." The implication of a tit-for-tat struggle is deceitful
June 17, A "News Analysis" asserted: "Israel and Iran both have little incentive to stop and no obvious route to outright victory. Much depends on President Trump." The first sentence reprises the false image of parity while a one-sided slaughter goes on. The second conveys a false impression that Trump was still making up his mind.
June 18, "Trump Seeks Surrender By Iran as He Considers Attack on Nuclear Site."
David Sanger, whose beat has been the CIA for many years, quoted the US President gloating, "We now have complete and total control of the skies over Iran.” Trump's "increasingly martial tone," according to Sanger, was " a sharp reversal from his announced confidence two weeks ago that a nuclear deal with Iran was easily within reach." Maybe Trump's egomania will lead him to take credit for suckering the Ayatollah. David Sanger ain't gonna do it.
June 19 the headline said "Trump Buys Himself Time, and Opens Up Some New Options. The accompanying piece by Sanger and Tyler Pager said, "President Trump’s sudden announcement that he could take up to two weeks to decide whether to plunge the United States into the heart of the Israel-Iran conflict is being advertised by the White House as giving diplomacy one more chance to work." Are the Iranians still falling for it?
Apparently they were. After the US bombed Iran's nuclear research facilities, Fassihi of the Times reported, "Two senior Iranian officials said in text messages that, before the strikes, there had been hope in Tehran that Mr. Trump could be dissuaded by those around him who opposed another American war in the Middle East. Mr. Araghchi had been in Turkey for meetings, and his diplomatic outreach to European counterparts, to Arab leaders in the region, and to Turkey, was part of an effort to rally support, according to the two Iranian officials.
"But it failed. The Atomic Energy Organization of Iran confirmed the U.S. strikes in a statement, saying that around dawn on Sunday Iran’s three nuclear sites, Fordo, Natanz and Isfahan, “were attacked in a violent act against international laws, including the Non-Proliferation Treaty, by the enemies of Islamic Iran.”
Although it may not have stayed up very long, this is what I posted right after the Israeli attack.
Shockingly clear statement from the NYT:
Live Updates: Iranian Missiles hit Tel Aviv After Israeli Strikes on Nuclear Sites watchdog agency said.
The retaliatory strikes came after Israel attacked Iran, killing top military leaders and scientists. The assault destroyed an aboveground nuclear enrichment plant near Natanz, the head of the U.N. nuclear
enrichment plant near Natanz, the head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency said.
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/06/12/world/israel-iran-us-nuclear
“The Israeli attack on Iran and Tehran’s retaliatory strikes inside Israel have prompted a flurry of diplomatic conversations among world leaders, many of whom urged restraint from both countries.”
No equivocation that time. I'm sure they changed it in record time, but for that moment it was there. "he retaliatory strikes came after Israel attacked Iran..."
Thank you for the great interview. I did not see/read the last one. The USA is losing smart, thoughtful people during this crackdown that would great assets to this country…it is shameful. I have not been able to follow what has been going on today. The NYT must be read very carefully…from the headlines to the end. I don’t read it much anymore but gladly pay for Drop Site and a few others I have grown to trust .The US is incapable and unwilling to learn lessons from the past and is tragic because so many humans and non humans suffer from its hubris. It will end.
I have not read the NYT since Judith Miller wrote her stories (fables) about Iraqi nuclear weaponry. If you read it now, and spend money on it, wasting money and time must not be any concern to you.
There is only one political party in the USA, the AIPAC party.
I'm immensely impressed with Dr. Doutaghi. She synthesizes a lot of information in an absolutely clear way, leaving out nothing important. Kudos to the women of Iran!
Jeremy thank you for this interview.
Dropsite is one of my go toos.
The line is drawn: unipolarity or multipolarity.
I''m all in for a DEI multiploar world. Hope BRICS grows and grows and grows.
Thank you for this very informative interview.
The US and Israel are free to do what ever they want.
The whole world hasn't the guts to really fight them.
Treachery, thy name is Trump. One can only hope Russia or China can help stem this movement toward world war.
Thank you for Scahill's articulate analysis of the "new" war.
It was a good interview. Dr Doutaggi is very well informed and she expressed viewpoints based on evidence and reason. It is informative to hear her discussion if the events in the Middle East.
I’m deeply disappointed to see that you are letting a person basically representing Iranian Regime to propagate views of Iranian government. Do you know, Jeremy, that Iran has spent, by some estimates, well over one trillion dollars in order to enrich uranium? And for what? How does that help Iranian people? Based on Iran government data, over 30% of Iranian people live in poverty. On the other hand, a small minority of those who rule Iran have become multi billionaires. Your guest declares that “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement was based on legitimate grievances, but it was hijacked by the West. And you never asked her how? Don’t you know that the reason for that movement was killing of that young woman, Mahsa Amini, who was killed because she was not wearing “proper hijab”? People of Iran protesting her death, which was not the first such case, was hijacked? It is really shameful that you air the views of Iranian government as an alternative to US government views or that of Israeli government. Why don’t you interview those who oppose both US and Israeli war, and at the same time condemn Iranian government?
Very informative!
Wonderful breakdown by Professor Doutaghi. It is refreshing to listen to interviews and analyses where revolutionary frameworks are capable of being discussed to shape our understanding of current events. Glad to see Professor Doutaghi has found an academic home that is supportive of her work. Thank you both!
Thanks so much for a terrific interview. It was very informative. I hope this talented young scholar is able to continue her important work
This was a great interview!!