Tag Archives: Iran

CNN publishes a stolen, inaccurate report in an effort to help Iran

Posted on by
4

CNN last week got their hands on a classified document stolen from the National Security Agency. That’s a felony punishable by ten years in prison, by the way.

The stolen document guessed that the efforts by Israel and America to neutralize Iran’s nuclear weapon program had set back the program by only “a few months.”

CNN and the rest of the media cabal could hardly contain their glee. They celebrated the failure of America and Israel.

Hardly mentioned in CNN’s report was that the document itself noted that its conclusions were merely “preliminary” and were expressed with only “low confidence.” 

This week, a more considered report was published by the Institute for Science and International Security (which, ironically, has been going by the acronym ISIS since long before the ISIS terrorists came around).

ISIS – the good one – is a non-partisan think tank and investigatory group. If anything, it might lean a bit to the left, as its financial supporters include left-leaning organizations such as the McArthur Foundation, the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation. 

The Wall Street Journal reported on ISIS’s findings. (The Journal’s report is behind their paywall here, but you can click into ISIS’s underlying report here.)

ISIS concluded that Iran’s nuclear weapons program has been “effectively destroyed.”

That conclusion is supported in their report by extensive review and detailed analysis of the attacks and the videos, aided by intimate knowledge of the layouts of the Iranian facilities and interviews with international inspectors of those facilities.  

In some particulars, the ISIS report shows that the stolen preliminary report as characterized by CNN is simply wrong on the facts about what facilities were attacked, and how.

Apart from CNN, everyone else knows that the Iranian program has been hit very hard. The Israelis concluded that the Israeli and American efforts have set the Iranian program back “many years.” The U.S. Director of National Security, a dove who downplayed Iran’s nuclear ambitions a few months ago, reported yesterday that the Iranian facilities have been “destroyed.” President Trump himself reported last week that the facilities have been “obliterated.”

The head of the CIA said yesterday that Iran’s program had been “severely damaged” and would require “several years” to rebuild. Even the head of the nuclear watchdog at the U.N. – not exactly an Israel fan club – reported that the damage had to be “very significant” in view of the “the explosive payload utilized and the extreme vibration-sensitive nature of centrifuges.” Well, duh.

Meanwhile, Iran has congratulated itself on its “decisive victory.” The Ayatollah proclaimed that Israel has “almost collapsed and been crushed” and America has been delivered “a slap in the face.”

CNN has not gone that far, yet. But as of this writing, the stolen, erroneous NSA preliminary report is still on CNN’s website – with little of the contradictory reports mentioned.  

Why do the media (with the notable exception of the Wall Street Journal in this case) distort or even lie about facts, to make Iran look good and strong and make America look bad and weak?

Well played, Mr. President

Posted on by
2

In what is already being called “The 12-Day War,” the bad guys have surrendered.

It took a bit longer than its namesake, The Six-Day War, but it was every bit as heroic. Israel beat an opponent that outnumbered it nine to one. An opponent that was on the verge of nuclear weapons to make good on its decades-old threat to obliterate Israel from the River to the Sea. An opponent that has fomented terrorism throughout the Mideast. An opponent that militarily, financially and logistically supported the horrible October 7 pogrom, a slaughter of unspeakable cruelty.

This time, Israel got some help in the end. Only one country on earth is willing to publicly ally itself with the Land of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Fortunately for Israel and the world, that country is the United States of America, a country still armed with the most powerful military in history – a country that is still the arsenal of democracy.

Israel pilots (the second best in the world), Israeli intel, and Israeli stones did the dirty work of neutralizing the Iranian air defenses.

Then, it was the U.S. of A. that destroyed the Iranian nuke sites with stealth bombers that Iran never saw coming and couldn’t have intercepted if they had, carrying bunker-buster bombs that went half way to China. (Are you listening, China?)

In a face-saving move of retaliation, Iran then lobbed a few missiles toward an American air base. Although there was no danger of them hitting their target, Iran made sure by phoning in an advance warning.

The Democrats and the Never-Trumpers have been waiting and praying for a catastrophe for 12 days now. Sadly for them but happily for the world, it seems there won’t be one. But they will continue to hope.

OK, it’s not technically a surrender by Iran. It’s merely a permanent cease fire. Technically, it’s possible that Iran could restart hostilities if they decide they’d like another dose.

I’m betting against that.

I’m also betting that Slo Joe and Kamala-lala would not have had the stones or the brains to pull this off. For that matter, I’m not sure George W. Bush or Richard Nixon would have.

President Trump did.

I admit that I’ve had my issues with Donald Trump. In fact, I recently expressed doubt that he would follow through on Iran. I’ve had other issues with him, as well.

But on balance I’ll take him over any of the alternatives. That – and this – is why I voted for him three times. God bless him.

Hurrah for the IDF, but does Iran already have a nuke in Tel Aviv?

Posted on by
4

This war has been distinctly one-sided so far. It’s been all Israel and no Iran.

But we won’t know for days or weeks how successful the Israeli Defense Forces were in their main objective of disabling Iran’s nuclear weapon program.

Israel says it intends to pound Iran for two weeks. If that pounding entails anything like the strikes yesterday which involved about 200 aircraft, and if Iran’s air defenses don’t improve (in fact, they are apt to deteriorate even more from the bombings) then Iran could be crippled for decades.

I’m all for it. But here are some known unknowns:

First, Iran might already have nukes. We think that’s not the case, but, as everyone now knows, that thought is only as good as our intel on the matter. When it comes to intel, remember Russiagate? Remember Hunter’s laptop? I’m betting that the Mossad has better intel operations than we do, but that bet is no sure thing.

Let’s assume the intel on Iran’s development of nukes is accurate – that they’re still weeks away from enriching uranium to bomb-level enrichment concentrations.

That doesn’t mean Iran doesn’t have a bomb. There are thousands of nukes in the world, held by bad guys that are friendly to Iran because Iran is hostile to the west. That includes North Korea, Russia, China, Pakistan and India on some days. Nothing would stop one or more of those bad guys from simply flying or trucking a nuke over to Tehran, especially if Iran paid them some real money to do so.

The explosion from a nuclear bomb is all out of proportion to its size. A bomb that fits in an ordinary truck – not even a semi – could easily take out Tel Aviv.

Ah, you say, but Iran lacks the hardware to mount this bomb-in-a-truck onto one of their thousands of ballistic missiles. So how would they deliver their bomb-in-a-truck to Tel Aviv?

In the truck.

The Ukrainians delivered truckloads of drones thousands of miles across Russia. Surely a single truck could be smuggled into Israel and parked in a storage unit in Tel Aviv.  

Nukes are most destructive if they are detonated a few hundred feet above the ground. So, this bomb-in-a-truck detonated in a storage facility in Tel Aviv would be only, say, 30% as destructive as it could have been if detonated a few hundred feet in the air.

It could still easily take out Tel Aviv.

Ever since I was an aerospace engineer for Boeing, I’ve been puzzled by the inordinate interest in bomb delivery vehicles. Cruise missiles can deliver a warhead across a thousand miles of complicated terrain by flying a few feet off the ground – under radar detection. That’s marvelous, I thought, but why don’t we just rent a U-Haul?

I assume (though I was never privy to such information even when I had a security clearance from Boeing) that we did indeed rent U-Hauls, and so did the Soviets. I assume that we had nukes tucked into strategic locations across the Soviet Union, and they similarly had nukes tucked into strategic locations across the U.S. I assume that Russia took over control of those nukes when the Soviet Union fell, as they took over the rest of the Soviet Union’s nukes. I assume that China, similarly, has nukes residing in the U.S.

It would be military malpractice not to. I’m afraid that the answer to the question I asked myself at Boeing – why don’t we just rent a U-Haul? – is, “Because Boeing doesn’t make U-Hauls.”

The million-dollar question is, does Iran have a nuke – or access to the detonator of a nuke – in Tel Aviv? We’ll probably know one way or another within days.

In a life prior to law school, Glenn Beaton was an aerospace engineer for Boeing.

Will it be on the watch of tough-talking Trump that Iran finally goes nuclear?

Posted on by
7

President Trump enjoys campaigning. The first campaign was in 2016 when he criticized the ill-advised deal that Obama had struck with Iran the year before.

Under that deal, Iran promised not to develop nukes – but only for a few years. Moreover, the inspection requirements were toothless, and Iran began violating them immediately by continuing its nuke program.

Trump rightly called that deal “a disaster” and “the worst deal ever” (which is saying quite a lot when it comes to deals made by Obama). After he was elected in 2016, Trump cancelled the deal.

And Iran continued its nuke program.

Trump’s second campaign was in 2020 when he promised that “as long as I am President of the United States, Iran will never be allowed to have a nuclear weapon.” Trump lost the election.

And Iran continued its nuke program.

Trump’s third campaign was in 2024 when he declared that if elected, he would exert “massive, maximum pressure” on Iran to end its nuclear program. He won that election.

And Iran continues its nuke program.

Trump’s “massive, maximum pressure” has not included new sanctions on Iran, even while the United States Senate is considering bipartisan bills to impose those sanctions whether Trump likes it or not.

Trump’s fourth campaign is ongoing as you read this. He seems unconcerned that there’s no election going on; campaigning is what he does. Tweets, anyone?

When it comes to Iran, his campaigning substitutes for governing. Tough talk substitutes for tough action – or even moderate action.

Even the tough talk gets watered down. A couple of weeks ago, Trump announced that he was “very close” to a new deal with Iran, as if he could close the gap with wishes and charm.

On Wall Street, stock traders evaluating the tariffs have an acronym. It’s “TACO,” which stands for Trump Always Chickens Out. In the face of a stock market rout, the tariffs Trump announced in April have quietly been withdrawn or at least re-drawn.

Note that Wall Street doesn’t say “TACO” as a political attack. They’re in the business of making money, not the business of politics. They say “TACO” in the same way they say, “Buy low, sell high.” It’s a truism.

Wall Street’s smart money has probably judged Trump correctly; being correct is why they’re on Wall Street while you and I are just on Main Street.

And so, we should expect a similar chickening out by Trump with respect to the Iranians. The Iranians themselves certainly do.

There will be a deal, alright. Trump will compromise to the point that it will be much the same as the 2015 deal that Obama struck. There will be promises by the Iranians, again, but no real teeth in the deal to enforce those promises, again. And there will be a zillion-dollar payment to the Iranians, again, which they’ll use to fund worldwide terrorism, again.

In short, the Iranians will get their nukes, and we’ll give them money to fund terror – and Trump will campaign on his success in striking a fake deal for them not to get their nukes.

Just like Obama.

In the big picture, western leaders have resigned themselves to a nuclear Iran. The fake deals are merely to mollify the masses. The leaders know that Iran will break the deals and get its nukes, and are already planning to say, “I’m shocked! They broke the deal!”

I’m not surprised that the Europeans act out this dishonest dance. Nor am I surprised that the Obama/Hillary/Biden crowd join in. But I expected something different from Trump – because he promised something different.

Ah, but there’s a wild card in this charade. It’s the Israelis. If the Ukrainians can take out a third of the strategic bomber fleet of Russia, imagine what the Israelis can do to the nuke program of Iran.

When it comes to the Jews saving the world, you know, there’s a precedent.

Will Trump punish Iran as much as he’s punishing Harvard?

Posted on by
3

Harvard deserves punishment. For years, they boasted in their published materials that they had a policy to favor certain ethnic groups.

Accordingly, they favored a Native American with the improbable name of Elizabeth Warren to fill a law professor position. When called out for their discrimination, they said that – in violation of their stated policy – they had not favored her.

Comically, it turned out Warren wasn’t Native American anyway. And so, in her case, Harvard failed at racial discrimination despite their best efforts. Usually, however, they’ve succeeded.  

One egregious area where they’ve succeeded is in discriminating against Jews and Asians. For Asians, their SAT scores had to be substantially higher than for whites and about 400 points higher than for Blacks.

Thankfully, the Supreme Court outlawed this discrimination against Asians in a decision two years ago. The suspicion is that Harvard has not stopped doing it, however, but has merely stopped advertising it.

Harvard’s discrimination against Jews is worse, if that’s possible. Harvard encourages Jew-hate. It’s probably not a coincidence that many of these antisemites are foreign students that pay full tuition.

But that’s not the only reason. The Jew-haters are egged on by many faculty members.

But at least Harvard has not promised to nuke the Jews. They may chant for the eradication of Israel (as in “From the River to the Sea”) but at least they are not advocating the eradication of Judaism, for the most part.

President Trump has rightly declared war on Harvard. He has cut off federal money until they comply with the Supreme Court rulings on racial discrimination, and protect Jewish students and other racial and ethnic groups.

Harvard has vowed to fight for their “right” to discriminate, and their “right” not to protect Jewish students, and their “right” to hate or love in admissions and hiring on the basis of skin color.

Naturally, they express this neo-Nazi skinhead language in more flowery terms – it’s all about academic freedom, they preen. To preserve their academic freedom to hate, they’ve filed lawsuits in their backyard of Boston in front of Democrat-appointed judges who are predictably disposed favorably to their position.

But it will go to the Supreme Court, and there will be supreme judgments, and Harvard will lose supremely.

Then there’s Iran.

Iran’s formal policy is not to fail to protect the Jews. It’s to kill them. For many years, they’ve armed proxies in the Middle East to do precisely that. Hezbollah, ISIS, Hamas . . . you name it. The Iranians see no group as too violent, too cruel, or too barbaric. The more violent, the more cruel, and the more barbaric, the better.

And so, on that horrific October 7, there were babies beheaded, grandmothers burned alive, young women raped in front of their husbands, and hostages taken, tortured and killed.

At Harvard, they cheered, and that was very bad. But in Gaza, it was even worse.

So, President Trump, will your punishment of the Iranians be at least as severe as your punishment of Harvard? Will you impose sanctions to cut off their funding, as you have with Harvard?

Moreover, will you put an end to Iran’s decades-long quest for a nuclear weapon to carry out their promise to destroy Israel?

Or is all your talk just . . .  big talk? Is it something like the tariff talk – a negotiation posture that you’ll climb down from and compromise on when the going gets rough?

It’s one thing to declare war on Harvard, but it takes some guts to declare war on Iran. The world is watching.

Hezbollah just received hormone therapy

Posted on by
4

One of the treatments for cancer is often hormone therapy. Men with prostate cancer sometimes get what might be called anti-hormone therapy.

Prostate cancer cells need testosterone. Take away the testosterone, and they mostly stop growing and stop multiplying. This is accomplished with drugs that eliminate testosterone. It’s usually not permanent.

This treatment is not without side effects. Testosterone aids in numerous male functions, especially muscular strength and emotional aggressiveness. It’s the main reason that “women” who are really modified men who have gone through male puberty have a big advantage in women’s sports.

Testosterone is manufactured in the testicles. Hence the expression “He’s got real balls” to describe male machismo.

Which brings us to the Mideast. There’s a cancer in the Mideast. It’s been there for centuries, but lately it has grown more virulent and malignant.

This cancerous terrorism came to Israel again last year, this time starting south of Israel, in Gaza under the regime there called Hamas. They invaded Israel and butchered the residents. They beheaded babies, raped women, and took hostages back to Gaza to torture, kill and display their mutilated remains in public and on the internet. The world has not seen such an exhibition of barbarous cruelty in generations. 

The terrorism sympathizers in Gaza cheered. So did the ones at Columbia and Harvard.

Israel is now surgically removing the Hamas terrorism from Gaza, but in the meantime a strain called Hezbollah has metastasized north of Israel. This Hezbollah strain rains missiles and bombs down on Israeli cities and towns. Lately, it has launched missiles targeting Tel Aviv a hundred miles away.

These bombs and missiles have no military objective. They are directed at civilians for the purpose of killing, maiming and terrifying them.

Hezbollah is officially a terrorist organization according to the U.S. State Department. Its stated aim is to destroy Israel, completely. And by any means necessary, as they say in the fever swamps of American college leftism.

Hezbollah receives about $700 million a year from other terrorists who own and operate the nation of Iran a thousand miles to the east, beyond Iraq.

The nation of Iran is Persian by ethnicity, not Arab. They have no natural interest in Israel or the Palestinian problem far to the west. 

Their interest is in simply hating on the Jews.

That hatred has little historical basis. It appears to be simply a gimmick. It’s designed to be a point for the people to rally round in support of the ruling theocrats who oppress women, toss gays off buildings, and commit other atrocities, all while keeping their people entrapped in the 11th century.

Iranian Jew-hatred thus has the purpose and methods of a giant pogrom. The Jews are a scapegoat for a failed regime, much as they were in post-WWI Germany and countless other times in history.

This nation of Iran that funds Hezbollah terrorism is the same nation of Iran to which Barack Obama’s outgoing administration delivered wooden pallets of about $1,700,000,000 in Euros and Swiss francs (the cash was in foreign currency in order to get around U.S. sanctions passed by Congress).

Obama assured us that Iran had assured him that none of this nearly-two billion dollars of cash would be used to fund terrorism. As if we’re all gullible enough not to know that cash is fungible.

Hezbollah has used its billions from America via Iran to construct a massive terrorism machine, directed mainly at Israel. It’s the biggest non-governmental military in the history of the world.

Israel has had to resort to hormone therapy to battle this cancer. Here’s the treatment protocol.

Hezbollah is apparently chock full of individuals capable of being infiltrated. The Israelis did so. They learned that Hezbollah was in the process of purchasing new smart phones and pagers. Israel intercepted the shipments, and either modified or replaced the phones and pagers with ones that were tricked out.

To explode. Israel then placed calls to the phones and pagers to detonate the implanted explosives. All at once.

People typically keep their phones and pagers in their front pocket. In men, that places them in proximity to the above-mentioned organ of the male body that produces testosterone. Most of the terrorists were not killed, but only injured. This was by design or by accident, but I suspect by design. The Israelis are not prone to accidents.

The end result is that the terrorists are now money-rich with Iranian funding but testosterone-poor with Israeli hormone therapy.

These much-reduced testosterone levels will probably cause the terrorists to be less aggressive in the future. (And their bosses may find it difficult to recruit replacements.)

But cancer is resilient. More treatment will likely be necessary.

N.B. No offense is meant to cancer patients. I’ve been one myself, though never a recipient of hormone therapy.

Iran humiliates itself

Posted on by
3

After months of saber-rattling, the “death-to-Israel” crowd in Tehran (an affiliate of the “death-to-America” crowd in Dearborn) finally made good on their threat to attack Israel.

The Mullah Maniacs launched something over 300 drones, cruise missiles and ballistic missiles toward Tel Avi. (Notably, none of these aircraft were piloted – even the Iranians are not that stupid.)

The Israelis along with Americans, Brits and other allies shot down 99% of them. The other 1% caused hardly any damage. No deaths or even injuries were reported.

It turns out the Iranian war machine is at about the level of . . .  those sabers they were rattling. Which are notoriously ineffective from a thousand miles away.

Like the dismembered knight in the Monty Python skit, the Iranians tried to spin the failure into a great success. It was “beyond expectations,” they crowed.

They may not be able to wage war, but they sure can manage their expectations.

As a strategic and public opinion matter, the Iranian air farce was indeed beyond expectations. They could not have expected their attack to be wholly thwarted by the Israelis. They could not have expected their attack to be such a moral booster to the Israeli military and citizenry.

They could not have expected their attack to consolidate public opinion in favor of Israel in civilized societies around the world. They could not have expected their attack to prompt some of those societies – and not just America – to join Israel in defeating the attacks.

They could not have expected their attack to reveal to the rest of the Middle East the pathetic inferiority of the Iranian war machine. If you’re Saudi Arabia or Egypt, which side do you want to be on?

The barbarians of the Middle East are tough in a surprise massacre of unarmed children and elderly women. Against the Israeli Defense Forces, not so much.