This is an account of the authorities, many of them top secret and higher, that permit President Donald Trump and his more knowledgeable senior aides to carry on their violent and vicious attacks on minorities and those who disagree with them and their policies with legislative and even legal impunity.

The answer lies in most cases with what are known as Presidential Emergency Action Documents (PEADs), which have enabled Trump today and his predecessors before him to suspend fundamental constitutional rights, detain civilians, seize property, impose martial law, and censor communications. These extraordinary powers have been put to widespread use by Trump and his aides, such as White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller and Director of the Office of Management and Budget Russell Vought. They have acted with no congressional authority, no judicial review, and no statutory mechanism for Congress to terminate their powers, once activated, as they have been since Trump took office.

These little known and rarely discussed authorities have been developed across more than a dozen administrations, since Dwight Eisenhower was in office, by presidents of both political parties, and their secrecy and authority have yet to be successfully challenged in Congress or by a federal court. One of the most detailed accounts of PEADs, last updated in 2024, has been prepared by the Brennan Center for Justice, a public policy group sponsored by NYU School of Law. It warns of the political danger of PEADs as extraordinary secret presidential documents that have never been declassified or leaked: “It appears they are not even subject to congressional oversight. Although the law requires the executive branch to report even the most sensitive covert military and intelligence operations to at least some members of Congress, there is no such disclosure requirement for PEADs, and no evidence that the documents have ever been shared with relevant congressional committees.”

I am summarizing here the initial paragraphs from what is perhaps the most detailed and up-to-date private study of PEADs written by Joel McCleary, a former aide to President Jimmy Carter and an expert on biological weapons. McCleary has steeped himself for decades in the study of secret presidential authorities. He is a low-profile Harvard graduate who served as treasurer of the Democratic National Committee during the Carter administration and later led projects for the Defense Department and Homeland Security regarding pandemic and biological defense issues. I wrote a book on chemical and biological warfare and worked with members of Congress in the months before President Richard Nixon agreed in 1969 to enact a US ban on such weapons. A friendship was inevitable when McCleary and I first met decades ago, but we grew closer after Trump took office for a second time in 2025 and began a massive attack on the federal government workforce and authorized Stephen Miller, who by any standard is a sadistic extremist, to carry out the mass deportation of Hispanics and others, both undocumented individuals and persons in the country legally, often separating parents and young children.

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Four months into a difficult air war with Iran, President Donald Trump’s popularity is sinking among American voters. I have been told that in a recent secret meeting in the White House, he began speculating, albeit vaguely, about a nuclear option that could perhaps bring a quicker end to the war.

It should be said immediately that it was just inside talk to senior staff by a frustrated president. On Monday night Trump was intensely booed at the NBA Finals game between the Knicks and the Spurs at Madison Square Garden in New York City, and polls have consistently indicated that the Democrats will return to a majority in the House this fall and might flip enough Republican seats to gain control of the Senate.

If that happens, there will likely be calls for impeachment proceedings. There is no mixed-martial-arts fight, basketball game, or World Cup soccer match that can change the scenario. Iran has been able to continue producing drones and missiles in underground factories during US and Israeli bombing attacks, and Trump is stuck in a war he may not be able to win before the midterms. The immense US and Israeli intelligence failure about Iran’s underground capabilities has rarely been discussed by the Trump administration as the war goes on with no resolution in sight.

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President Donald Trump’s war with Israel against Iran is now in its fourth month. US and Israeli warplanes began bombing the country in February, and Iran responded with a successful counterattack, launching a seemingly unending supply of missiles and drones at Israeli cities, US military bases, and America’s oil- and gas-producing allies in the Middle East. Peace talks sponsored by Pakistan have gone nowhere and a clearly impatient Trump, who on April 7 threatened to destroy Iranian civilization, told a reporter this week that his negotiations with Iran have gotten “very boring.”

Americans who are paying more for gasoline and food costs because of the war and Iran’s shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz are experiencing feelings more intense than boredom.

I’ve been reporting on international crises since the Vietnam War and have maintained professional relationships for decades with two men: a member of the American intelligence community and a high-ranking veteran of the Israeli military. I recently discussed the current war against Iran with each of them. Both men are well educated, have participated in brutal combat, and are steeped in history as well as current operations. Their responses were insightful and contradictory.

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The Iranian military and civilian leadership structure has so far befuddled the increasingly erratic US president who has lost the ability to speak straight to the American people. President Donald Trump, with the backing and bombs and assassinations from Israel and its Prime Minister Benjamin Netanhayu, went to war with Iran on February 28. To the surprise of American war planners, Iran responded by attacking US bases in the region as well as the oil- and gas-producing facilities of our allies and by shutting passage through the Strait of Hormuz.

The Iranian leadership seems unwilling to give up its now essentially useless supply of enriched uranium. The Iranians, experts in chess as they are, seem secure in the belief that a rattled Trump, facing political ruin this fall as gasoline and other prices soar, will decide at this politically contentious point to leave his ally Netanhayu at the altar—if he can somehow pull off a deal to get the oil flowing. More US and Israeli bombing of Iran—which is continuing this week, according to press reports—will not change the stalemate, nor will America’s and the world’s growing unhappiness with the bumbling leadership of the US president.

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If you don’t remember the Steele dossier, it was the largely discredited report assembled in 2016 by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele, claiming that Donald Trump, then running against Hillary Clinton for the presidency, had engaged in what we will say here were “perverted acts” while in a Moscow hotel, among other allegations that were catnip to Democrats. The FBI subsequently concluded that no such tape could be verified.

Such fanciful allegations have returned in Washington, although this time it’s the Republicans who are overreaching, spurred on by Trump. In his second term, he still wants payback against the Democrats because he believes they were bending the truth when he first took office in 2017. One key target has been former FBI Director James Comey. He was indicted last month not in Washington, where federal grand juries occasionally refuse to indict, but by a compliant federal grand jury in the Eastern District of North Carolina.

There were two felony counts in the indictment. It accuses Comey, who was fired in 2017 by Trump four years into his Congressionally mandated ten-year term as FBI director, of posting an item on Instagram last May that included a photo of seashells arranged on a beach that spelled 86 47. Federal prosecutors have claimed that the seashell numbers, as Comey knew or had to know, were a death threat. (To 86 in hospitality parlance means to eject a patron from an establishment, among other things, and Trump is the forty-seventh president of the United States.)

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Palestinians in Gaza continue to suffer and die today, and I’ve always considered the horrors there since Hamas’s surprise attack inside Israel on October 7, 2023, to be the work of Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister. But he and the religious fanatics who keep him in office, were not there at the beginning.

A memoir, The General’s Son by Miko Peled, first published in 2012 and reissued in 2022, focuses on the life and times of the author’s father, Matti Peled, an Israeli general who played a key role in the country’s early conquests in the Middle East, including the famed Six-Day War of 1967, in which Israel captured the whole of the Sinai Peninsula and Gaza in a little over one hundred hours of warfare, while also occupying the West Bank and the Golan Heights. Arab casualties were fifteen thousand; Israel suffered less than eight hundred combat losses. In the fanatical Zionist view that existed then and as it does today, these were 4,000-year-old biblical lands—Eretz Yisrael—that were finally being returned to Jewish hands.

General Peled followed his warfare success by arguing that the time had come for Israel to take its foot off the throat of the Palestinian community. His son writes that his father always believed the war he was leading was to be a limited one, with the intent of punishing the Egyptians for their breach of a recent ceasefire and to assert Israeli legitimacy and military might. “Taking the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and Golan Heights,” Miko writes, “was never part of any official plan.”

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Whatever one thinks of Vladimir Putin, the rudderless world is missing him now amid what amounts to an opera buffa ceasefire in the ongoing war President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu started with Iran. Iran’s fundamentalist leadership remains in power and more insistent than ever on clinging to their essentially useless stockpile of partially enriched uranium.

Putin is stuck in an at best stalemated and perhaps losing war in Ukraine and a fall from grace. He has served Russia for twenty-six years as a leader, and his speeches and public statements have often been marked by intelligence, along with much arrogance and even insolence. He was an ally of the leaders of Iran, and he supplied that regime with arms. But he sought to keep the peace and perhaps today would be making the Iranian case to Trump.

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America’s love affair with Israel has hit an astonishing bump because President Donald Trump, in a political panic over the economic fallout from the Iranian blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, is now “talking to Iran,” as an Israeli insider put it, about ending the current impasse in return for a payment from the United States of at least $25 billion, and possibly much more, to the government in Tehran. In return, Iran would end its blockade and open the strait to all traffic, ending a crisis for Trump, the US, and much of the world.

One motive for Trump’s extraordinary step—I was not told how or by whom Trump’s offer was communicated—may be personal. The president, I was told, “no longer trusts Israel. He now believes he was misled” by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about the potential for success of the recent joint US-Israeli bombing attack, a goal of which was to trigger an overthrow of the religious leadership in Iran. The president is said not to share Israel’s existential concern about the need to destroy or neutralize the large depot of partially enriched uranium that is allegedly stored in at least three deep tunnels in Iran. Iran as a member of the world’s nuclear club may be an existential threat for the Israeli leadership, but not for the president of the United States.

“He wants out,” the Israeli insider told me, and the Israeli leadership “is very upset because Trump”—in his fear of the political cost to him of a continuing blockade of the strait “has shown a willingness to ignore Israeli interests and desires.” People in the Israeli leadership “say he’s lost it. He doesn’t think of the consequences. You cannot do negotiations with Iran because every step we make he immediately broadcasts it on his social media posts. He is so obtuse.”

One clear sign of Trump’s indecision came this morning when the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg published similar stories quoting Trump telling “his aides” to prepare for a lengthy US Navy blockade of the strait in an effort to compel cash-strapped Iran to agree to giving up the nation’s stockpile of partially enriched uranium. The Journal depicted the offer as demonstrating that Trump, “who always seeks a quick and salable victory, is devoid of a silver bullet.”

The Israeli insider told me that the reports accurately reflected the conflicting opinions inside the administration about how to resolve the crisis, given the widespread belief that the Iranian leadership, facing steep losses of income, will eventually have to give in to economic pressure.

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The war in Ukraine, which began with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion in February 2022, has gone on longer than the Soviet war against Nazi Germany. With its huge army and population, Russia seemed in the early years to be on the verge of winning only to have Putin, behaving like the irrational czars of the past, reject peace plans that gave him control of some of the territory his troops had taken inside eastern Ukraine. And now, I have been told, a war that Russia seemed to be winning has turned in the last year into an economic and military nightmare for Putin and the Russian army led by General Valery Gerasimov, the battle-tested commander who is one of three men in Russia with access to the nation’s nuclear codes.

The war is now a war of drones, in the view of one military expert who has toured the front under cover, with Ukraine holding a distinct edge. Bedraggled Russian soldiers at the front find themselves under deadly drone attack the moment they crawl out of their bunkers. “Ukraine has a vast drone surveillance network that is picking off Russians as soon as they appear,” the expert told me. He added that he was repelled by the horrid living conditions for all the soldiers on both sides of the front lines.

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It was 93 degrees in Gaza on Wednesday, and the best that most survivors of Israel’s war there could manage was to find shade under a tent. The Israeli air force, unchallenged by anti-aircraft defenses, has damaged or destroyed 92 percent of the territory’s homes and apartment buildings, leaving the Palestinian survivors of the war lucky, but surely not grateful, to have a tent over their heads.

The Israeli bombing of Gaza has now gone on for more than thirty months. It began immediately after Hamas’s attack on Israel of October 7, 2023. Hamas’s goal was to snatch vulnerable Israeli soldiers as hostages. The gates separating Israel from south Gaza were down and hundreds of frustrated Gazans, who had been suffering in a subjugated society for decades, poured into Israel seeking revenge. Both US and Israeli intelligence services had warned for months that Hamas was planning a major assault inside Israel, but those reports, which included translated US intercepts of communications from Hamas training sites and reached senior levels of the Israeli government, were ignored or not believed.

More than 1,200 Israelis, including young attendees of an all-night rave near the border with Gaza, were murdered on October 7, and 250 men and women, many of them serving in the Israeli military, were taken hostage. Unanswered questions remain today about the ignored intelligence warnings and the slow response of the Israel Defense Forces.

There were a few Americans with military and intelligence ties to Israel who tried and failed in those early days to stop Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu from his all-out bombing response. One American thought was to convince Hamas, whose senior officers planned the attack, to turn over the leaders to stand trial. It was a nonstarter for both parties. Netanyahu had moved closer to the extreme right out of political necessity and took up a policy of all-out retaliation. He was then on trial on corruption charges that, as it was reported at the time, were more than convincing. But under Israeli law as long as he was prime minister he could stay in office if convicted and delay going to prison by appealing the verdict. It has been no secret in Israel that avoiding prison was one of his motives in turning to collective punishment from the air in Gaza. The war delayed the trial and kept him in office. Two US presidents, Joe Biden and Donald Trump, have done nothing to restrain the Israeli prime minister, and supported and supplied him in the war.

The IDF now controls close to 60 percent of Gaza. Hamas is still alive and still a threat, if a much subdued one. The Palestinian survivors living in tents fight the elements, with more available food than earlier in the war but still lacking health care and decent sanitation. They are under the watch and control of the IDF, who shoot to kill if a Palestinian father or son, even one searching for firewood, strays even a few feet from the constantly narrowing borders of the tent camps.

I’ve been watching the mainstream coverage of Gaza since the beginning of the war. The stagnant situation there has inevitably become a humdrum story for the Western media unless a stray bomb wipes out a family or a widely publicized plan by a member of the Trump family emerges to turn Gaza, once the Palestinian issue is resolved—no specifications about that—into a $25 billion luxury resort and skyscraper business complex. Sometimes there is a flash of coverage when, as happened last month, Al-Jazeera reported the torture by a group of Israeli soldiers of an 18-month old Gazan boy. Cigarette burns and nail punctures were part of an effort to get the child’s father to confess to unspecified actions. (It should be noted here that the US and international press corps has been thoroughly reporting on the increasing violence against Palestinians in the West Bank by Israeli settlers, their murder and seizure of long-held Palestinian property, all with the IDF looking on.)

I have previously reported on the remarkable work of Francesca Albanese, an Italian legal scholar who is now in her second three-year tour as the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation in Gaza and the West Bank. She does not mince words when it comes to the continuing escalation of torture and mistreatment of the Palestinians.

“Torture has always been a central feature of the dispossession of Palestinians by Israel,” Albanese writes in her current report, which was released on March 23. Since the Hamas attack in October of 2023: “Israel has employed torture on a scale that suggests collective vengeance and destructive intent. . . . The escalation of torture in Israeli detention centers is a coordinated plan” that has been coordinated by Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s minister of national security. Albanese finds that since the October 7 attack, “the systematic torture of Palestinians has been an integral component of the settler-colonial genocide perpetrated by Israel, functioning as an instrument of annihilatory violence directed at the Palestinians as a people. When torture is perpetrated across an entire territory, against a population as such and sustained through policies that destroy the conditions of life, the genocidal intent is apparent.”

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I got to Washington in 1965 as a kid reporter for the Associated Press, just as the Vietnam war was heating up and President Lyndon Johnson, like the man in office now, was doing all he could to keep the bombs dropping and to avoid a settlement with the evil Commies from North Vietnam.

The Senate wasn’t much help on that issue. I remember an early visit as a Congressional reporter that I had with Senator William Fulbright, the often caustic Democrat from Arkansas who was the chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. He was running hearings about the defensive Anti-ballistic Missile System when the real issue, so I innocently thought, was the fact that the United States and the Soviet Union were working away on far more threatening Multiple Independently Targetable Reentry Vehicles, missiles capable of carrying and deploying as many as twelve separately targeted nuclear warheads.

I asked the chairman: why was he planning hearings on the ABM when MIRVs were a much more formidable threat? He did not know me but AP reporting was all over Arkansas newspapers and so he gave me an amused look and asked if it were so that I was called Sy. I said yes and he, in words I’ve never forgotten, said: “Well, Sy,” he said, slowly drawing out my name with a sigh, “I just got done educating the senators on my committee about a three letter acronym, and now you want me to teach them about a four-letter acronym?”

I got the drift. End of interview. We had leaders in the Senate then who were unafraid to defy a president from their own party. With few exceptions, that can hardly be said today.

So we now have a president who was still asking in a hard-to-fathom press conference yesterday why he did not win the Nobel Peace Prize this year, on the day after a joint American and Israel bombing attack bombs struck Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, the nation’s most prestigious scientific institution, often compared to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. No Iranian nuclear sites were destroyed, but the bombings across the country yesterday killed at least thirty-four people, including six children.

It has been widely understood and accepted that the United States would go to war as an ally of Israel if there was impossible-to-ignore evidence that Iran had mastered the process of enriching uranium and making the bomb. “We can’t let Iran have a nuclear weapon,” Trump said, embracing once again the position of US presidents and Israeli leaders—most avidly by Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israel prime minister—since the overthrow of the Shah of Iran in 1979.

That possibility was seen within years of the rise of the Islamic Republic as an existential threat to Israel, which had been nuclear-armed with the secret support of US presidents since the 1960s. The fear of an Iranian bomb has consumed Israeli leaders for decades, especially Netanyahu. Like his predecessors, Trump has repeatedly threatened Iran for its research into the bomb while never challenging Israel in its long-standing and often ridiculed policy of never denying or acknowledging that it is a nuclear power.

So here, for the record, is an update of where Israel is today, in terms of its knowledge of the Iranian nuclear program. I write as someone who published a book on the Israeli nuclear weapons program, The Samson Option, with Random House in 1991. Rights to the book were immediately purchased by a leading publisher in Israel and, when it appeared in Hebrew, it did not include a final chapter on the role of Robert Maxwell, the British publishing magnate, in the protection of Israeli nuclear secrets.

Most important, here is what is known about the location of Iran’s uranium ore that has been enriched to 60 degrees of purity, just short of the 90-plus degrees of purity needed to trigger a nuclear bomb.

Iran’s main enrichment center, deep inside a mountain at Fordow, one of three main nuclear sites in Iran, was struck last June by a US air attack authorized by Trump in cooperation with Israel. I now understand that every three kilograms of uranium, once enriched at Fordow, would be stored in a heavy container and quickly shipped to one of the vast underground tunnels—depicted to me as “octopus” tunnels—beneath a second major Iranian nuclear facility at Isfahan. Iran’s fleet of ballistic missiles and launchers were similarly stored, among other hidden sites, in the tunnels at Isfahan and at a third underground nuclear facility at Natanz.

At this point, I learned, 390 kilograms of enriched uranium are known by Israeli intelligence to be stored at the underground nuclear facility in Isfahan, 25 to 30 kilograms at Natanz, and 15 kilograms at bombed-out Fordow. US and Israeli military teams have tracked locations and have been studying the question of how to fight their way into the tunnels and retrieve the enriched materials. The next step, so the thinking goes, would be to transport the canisters by helicopter to a covert US base in Azerbaijan.

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Who was the guy pretending to be President Donald Trump on stage last night? Surely not the man who once bragged that he could shoot somebody walking down Fifth Avenue in New York City and still get elected. He was subdued as he flawlessly read a prepared speech written by his handlers that had its moments.

In this morning’s New York Times, Edward Wong assesses whether the US has achieved the goals the president set out in a February 28 video announcing the war and finds that it has fallen short. The harsh religious government in Tehran is still in power, and Iran is continuing to limit the flow of oil, gas, fertilizer, and food through the Strait of Hormuz, creating economic havoc throughout the Western world. Iranian missiles and drones are continuing to strike Israeli and America’s oil-producing allies in the Persian Gulf.

What the president’s speech last night didn’t offer were any specifics about the US troop buildup through the region, but the threat was there. “I can say tonight,” he said, “that we are on track to complete all of America’s military objectives shortly, very shortly. We are going to hit them extremely hard. Over the next two to three weeks, we’re going to bring them back to the stone ages, where they belong.”

Trump was telling the world that the ground war is on as of today, and he is in the process of sending thousands of American soldiers into the Middle East to engage on the ground, as well as in the air, against the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.

Thousands of US Special Operations forces—Navy SEALs and Army Rangers—are either en route or soon will be to zones within striking range of the Strait of Hormuz, the crucial choke points for the shipping of oil from the Middle East to the rest of the world.

Add the number of those en route to those already stationed in the region, and Trump easily could have fifty thousand US fighters ready to clear the Strait of Hormuz or even to dig out the partially enriched uranium Iran is believed to have tucked away in one or more of tunnels under the nuclear facilities the US and Israel attacked last June.

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In February 2002, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld famously said, in advance of the disastrous war he led against Iraq, when asked about evidence, or the lack thereof, linking Saddam Hussein’s government to supplying weapons of mass destruction to terrorists:

“Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tends to be the difficult ones.”

I have often thought of Rumsfeld’s obfuscating words while reporting on the unforeseen consequences of President Donald Trump’s decision a few weeks ago to go to war once again alongside Israel against Iran. He has at this point bombed himself into a global fuel shortage and economic chaos, along with more concern here and among his allies in Israel about his day-to-day competence. The US and Israeli bombing missions are not contested—Iran has no anti-aircraft defenses—and are continuing today, but there is no sign yet that Iran will surrender.

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In the days when Air Force General Charles Brown Jr. served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—under President Joe Biden from 2023 until his firing by President Donald Trump early in 2025—there was highly secret contact between Brown, who is now at Duke University, and the military leadership of Iran. He even had some indirect dealings with the late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the recently assassinated supreme leader.

Out of those dealings, which were about an earlier air war between Iran and Israel during the last year of the Biden administration, there emerged the story of an inside joke about a golf match between the inscrutable Ayatollah and Saint Paul the Apostle. On the first hole, a long par four, so the joke went, Saint Paul hit a drive right down the middle of the fairway. The Ayatollah’s drive sliced into a dense bank of bushes, whereupon a rabbit picked it up and hopped it onto the fairway. Saint Paul then hit an iron shot to the green, twelve feet from the hole. The Ayatollah’s second shot landed in a sand bunker near the green. A bird quickly dug out the ball and dropped it into the cup for a birdie three. At that point Saint Paul said to the Ayatollah, “Are you going to keep on fucking around or play golf?”

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As I write, American and Israeli warplanes are bombing targets in Iran at will, since its Russian-supplied S-300 air defense systems were shredded in earlier attacks. Today’s strikes on pre-selected and unprotected targets were known in previous wars as “turkey shoots”—which is to say there’s no significant opposition. Another example would be the Israeli Air Force’s unchallenged bombing attacks in Gaza, which have killed and maimed hundreds of thousands, if not more, in response to the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack on Israel. The bombing of Gaza is still going on.

Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump’s unfit choice for secretary of defense, cannot stop bragging about the unopposed air war that has been tearing Iranian military and civilian targets apart. Hegseth has told journalists that the US combat operations, code-named Epic Fury, are “crushing the enemy,” whom he has labeled “terrorist cowards.” A few days ago he told a news conference: “We have only just begun to hunt. We are punching them while they’re down, which is exactly how it should be.”

In terms of reading newspapers and beginning to understand the world, I came of age in the late years of the Second World War, when America’s newspapers were full of US heroics abroad, as they are now full of murderous deeds in Iran. During the war, as kids in our pre-teens, my twin brother and I would be taken to afternoon movies—the local theater in Chicago was named V, for victory—by our older sisters. We would cheer madly at the blatant propaganda that was being produced about the war on the ground and in the air by Hollywood. We loyal Americans are, I fear, getting much of the same today.

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As the war in Iran expands—the US and Israeli air forces and navies have detailed schedules, as of Wednesday March 4, of what targets to hit inside Iran and when—there is increasing concern in the American intelligence community about President Donald Trump’s inability to differentiate between what is secret intelligence information and what is not.

After the killing by air strike of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Saturday, Trump was widely quoted this week as saying that “most of the people we had in mind” as possible future leaders of Iran “are dead.” He said that whoever takes over Iran could be “as bad or worse” than Khamenei.

Before the attacks on Iran commenced, US and Israeli operatives inside the country worked intensely under deep cover to recruit future leaders of Iran from various groups, including, perhaps, from inside the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps that is responsible for protecting the Ayatollah. The president apparently spoke without recalling that this fact is top secret.

I have been told Trump’s casual comment has led to a Revolutionary Guard witch hunt to search out the insiders who may have been dealing directly or indirectly with Israeli or American intelligence agencies. Trump has also talked casually, clearly in response to a suggestion from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, about bringing “in the Kurds” to help in what is beginning to look like a long-term war to end the religious regime that still remains standing in Tehran. There is no evidence that the president or his immediate advisers were aware that the Kurds, who once controlled an area in what is now northwest Iran, have never given up on their ambition to gain sovereignty as they’ve also struggled for land inside Iraq, Syria, and Turkey.

The Kurds were described to me by one experienced US intelligence insider as being “massed at the border” right now, “armed and ready.” Bringing in the Kurds, he said, “was one sure way to guarantee ethnic civil war.” The American, who was pleased that Trump was elected after the foreign policy calamities of the Biden administration, was dismayed by the president’s recent lapses in judgment. “How do we protect ourselves from people like him?” he asked.

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I have been in London for the past week, once again not winning a prize at the British Academy of Film and Television Awards, for Cover-Up, the documentary on my career directed by Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus. I still resent losing while clad in a tuxedo. Returning to Washington was delayed for days by the storms that walloped the Northeast.

I missed the live broadcast of President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address, an extended Mel Brooks’ imitation that aired in the wee hours of Wednesday morning, London time. Edward Luce, a columnist for the Financial Times, had a good go at it: “As Trump readies a US armada for a Middle Eastern war whose aims he cannot articulate,” Luce wrote Wednesday, “an honest reckoning of geopolitical risks would place his wayward psychology high up. That Trump often lies is, in itself, not proof of irrationality. That he is encouraged to believe his own lies is more serious. . . . Whether foreign or American, people who tell him what he wants to hear, not what he needs to know, are playing a dangerous game. The road to Trumpian recklessness is paved with flattery.”

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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited Washington last Wednesday, February 11, unaccompanied by his wife Sara—a sign, I have been told, of urgency—for a hurried meeting at the White House with Donald Trump.

Netanyahu, who has led Israel’s war on Gaza, arrived with a citation from Genesis 18-19 in hand: the meaning was that he, like God, would hold people accountable for sin—primarily the Ayatollah Ali Khameini of Iran—but would also show grace and mercy.

One of the messages that emerged in my subsequent reporting on the meeting is that the Israelis believe that the Iranians, whose three main nuclear facilities were bombed by US B-2 bombers last June, smuggled before the attack as much as 440 kilograms of partially enriched uranium—to 60 percent—into one of the myriad of tunnels known to exist under the Isfahan nuclear research center.

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Jerry Blackwell was a winner. A Minneapolis kid, he went to a first-rate college on a scholarship, whizzed his way through law school, and went into private practice in his home town. At one point, the singer Prince was among his clients. He served as a pro bono prosecutor after the 2020 murder of George Floyd and delivered the opening statement and closing argument in the successful prosecution of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin.

Blackwell was nominated in June 2022 by President Joe Biden to be a US District Court judge for Minneapolis. He was approved by the Senate and assumed office that December. He’s run a tight ship at a time of chaos in Minneapolis as ICE, supported by other federal agencies and President Donald Trump, began an all-out assault on suspected undocumented residents of the city. There have been mass arrests and violence, including two killings of protesters by federal agents. The protests are ongoing.

The issue before Judge Blackwell on February 3 was a narrow one, as the transcript makes clear. “The hearing this afternoon,” he announced, “concerns compliance with court orders; not policy, Just compliance. Nothing else.” There was no need to state the obvious—that the White House had decided to make a show of force in liberal Minnesota, with its large population of immigrants from Somalia, by doing what it has been doing elsewhere in America—bringing in ICE and other armed units to seize people of color. Since 1932, Minnesota has consistently voted Democratic in presidential elections, with the exception of 1972, when Richard Nixon won in a landslide.

Many immigrants without documentation in hand have been grabbed—literally forced at gunpoint out of a delivery car or van—and immediately deported, in Blackwell’s view, without any attempt to meet the legal and constitutional due process requirements.

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My favorite foreign policy guru these days is Eliot A. Cohen, a professor emeritus at the John Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, DC, who has emerged in what should be his dotage as an innovative critic of President Donald Trump. In a recent essay for the Atlantic, he suggests that the appropriate honorific for Trump ought to be “Dear Leader,” the one enjoyed by North Korea’s Kim Jong Il, who ruled, as does Trump, without criticism of anyone in his government.

I have been told that America’s Dear Leader has been given what should be a very delicate assignment: dealing with the increasing tensions inside Iran as the nation struggles with the fallout from Ayatollah Khamenei’s brutal repression of a recent revolt that led to “several thousand” deaths, by his own admission. The official death toll to date is 3,117, but that is viewed as grossly underestimated, with some counts reaching as high as 16,500. The Iranian Revolutionary Guards, a force close to 200,0000 troops, was given authority to shoot to kill protesters and did so with vengeance.

Overthrowing the religious leadership of Iran has long been a goal of Israel and many in America and Europe, as well as untold numbers of Iranians, but doing so will not be possible until the Iranian army, with its 760,000 active and reserve troops, excluding the Revolutionary Guards, agreed or was persuaded to take part. Planning for that possibility is actively under way again.

I was told weeks ago that David Barnea, the soon-to-retire head of Mossad, Israel’s lethal foreign operations and counter-terrorism unit, made a little-noted visit last month to Washington, accompanied by some military commanders, to discuss how to proceed when and if a decision was made to aggressively seek the overthrow of the Iran’s religious regime.

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