DL Open Thread: Saturday, Feb. 28, 2026
US AND ISRAEL ATTACK IRAN! Let’s see–three rogue states. Who ya got?:
The United States and Israel attacked Iran on Saturday in a major assault that threatened a broader regional conflict, with President Trump vowing to devastate the country’s military, eliminate its nuclear program and bring about a change in its government.
Large explosions shook the Iranian capital, Tehran, where people reported seeing smoke rising from the district that includes the presidential palace. Witnesses described chaos in the streets as Iranians rushed to seek shelter, find loved ones or flee the city.
Mr. Trump, who had threatened a strike for weeks, vowed that the “massive and ongoing” campaign would target not just Iran’s nuclear program, which was the focus of a U.S. attack last June. Instead, Mr. Trump said the United States would “raze their missile industry to the ground” and “annihilate their navy,” arguing Iran had refused to reach a deal with the United States that would have averted war.
Dozens of U.S. strikes were carried out by attack planes from bases and aircraft carriers around the Middle East, with officials saying the initial focus was military assets. The attack also targeted the Iranian leadership, according to three Israeli security officials briefed on the campaign. Satellite imagery showed a plume of smoke and extensive damage at the compound of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, in Tehran, though his whereabouts were unclear.
The campaign has the potential to ignite an even broader regional crisis, as Iran vowed “crushing retaliation.”
Iran fired waves of ballistic missiles at Israel, prompting booms as Israeli air defenses sought to repel them. The United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait — all of which host U.S. military bases — said they had come under attack, as did Jordan. Falling debris from an Iranian ballistic missile attack killed at least one person in the Emirates, according to its government.
Analysts warned that the fighting could easily devolve into a protracted war with no clear exit.
I searched in vain for an expression of ‘concern’ from Chris Coons. Perhaps you will have better luck.
Trump’s rationale for attacking Iran is ‘false or unproven’:
As they made their public case for another American military campaign against Iran, President Trump and his aides asserted that Iran had restarted its nuclear program, had enough available nuclear material to build a bomb within days and was developing long-range missiles that will soon be capable of hitting the United States.
All three of these claims are either false or unproven.
American and European government officials, international weapons monitoring groups and reports from American intelligence agencies give a far different picture of the urgency of the Iran threat than the one the White House presented in the days leading up to Saturday’s strikes.
Iran has taken steps to dig out the nuclear facilities hit during strikes last June by Israel and the United States, and it has resumed work at some sites long known to American spy agencies. But the officials said that there isn’t evidence that Iran has made active efforts to resume enriching uranium or trying to build a mechanism to detonate a bomb.
The stockpiles of uranium that Iran has already enriched remain buried after last year’s strikes, making it nearly impossible for Iran to build a bomb “within days.”
Iran has a large arsenal of short- and medium-range ballistic missiles capable of hitting Israel and American military bases in the Middle East, but American intelligence agencies believe Iran is probably years away from having missiles that can hit the United States.
Trump is insane and infirm. Who will step up to challenge him?
No Mandate, No Legal Basis, For Attacks:
The first war of Donald Trump’s Board of Peace era has begun – an unprovoked attempt at regime change in collaboration with Israel, with no legal foundation, launched in the midst of diplomatic efforts to avert conflict, and with minimal consultation with Congress or the American public.
Trump’s recorded eight-minute address after the first bombs had fallen, made clear that this would be no limited strike aimed at cajoling Tehran into concessions at the negotiating table. He warned that if Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) did not surrender they would be killed, and the country’s armed forces, its missile and navy would be smashed.
The way would then be open for the Iranian opposition and the country’s ethnic minorities to rise up and bring the regime down.
“It’s time for all the people of Iran – Persians, Kurds, Azeris, Balochis and Akhvakhs – to shed from themselves the burden of tyranny and bring forth a free and peace-seeking Iran,” Trump said.
Coordinating the message as well as the missiles, Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said his country had joined the war “to remove the existential threat posed by the terrorist regime in Iran”.
The attack on Iran is a clear violation of the UN charter, in any absence of any credible, imminent Iranian threat to the US. In an attempt at justification Trump spoke in generalities, denouncing the Tehran leadership as “a vicious group of very hard, terrible people” and 47 years of enmity between the US and the Islamic Republic.
Over that half century, Iran has arguably never posed less of a threat than now, weakened by the joint attack by the US and Israel last June which degraded its defences, decades of sanctions combined with economic migration which brought mass protests on to the street.
This is the most Wag The Dog battle ever. The results could be catastrophic. But, if it buries Trump’s sexual assaults aided and abetted by Epstein, it will have been worth it. To him:
Thanks to investigative reporter Roger Sollenberger – confirmed by NPR and other news organizations – the world now knows the story of “Jane Doe 4,” as found in the Epstein Files.
But the world does not yet know the story “Katie Johnson” – another 13-year-old girl who was allegedly raped by Trump ten years later at Epstein’s mansion in Manhattan.
Now that “Jane’s” story is making headlines, it’s time for “Katie’s” story to make headlines as well.
Because it’s exactly the same story – Trump allegedly raped at least two 13-year-old girls.
Pleasepleaseplease read the lengthy deposition of ‘Katie Johnson’. That’s Trump, pure and simple. Trump The Rapist.
President Trump on Friday ordered all federal agencies to stop using artificial intelligence technology made by Anthropic, a directive that could vastly complicate government intelligence analysis and defense work.
Writing on Truth Social, Mr. Trump used harsh words for Anthropic, describing it as a “radical Left AI company run by people who have no idea what the real World is all about.”
Shortly after Mr. Trump’s announcement, and 13 minutes after a Pentagon deadline, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth designated the company a “supply-chain risk to national security.” The label means that no contractor or supplier that works with the military can do business with Anthropic. Later on Friday, OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, said that it had reached an agreement with the Defense Department to provide its A.I. technology for classified systems.
The Anthropic designation was all but unheard-of, legal experts said. It stripped an American company of its government work by using a process previously deployed only with foreign companies the United States considered security risks.
What was the initial disagreement between Anthropic and the government, you ask?:
Anthropic said in a statement on Friday that it would challenge the move in court.
“Designating Anthropic as a supply chain risk would be an unprecedented action — one historically reserved for U.S. adversaries, never before publicly applied to an American company,” the statement said, adding, “We believe this designation would both be legally unsound and set a dangerous precedent for any American company that negotiates with the government.”
The statement went on to say that the company had tried “in good faith” to reach an agreement with the Pentagon, and that Anthropic supported “all lawful uses of A.I. for national security,” aside from two exceptions.
“We held to our exceptions for two reasons,” the statement read. “First, we do not believe that today’s frontier A.I. models are reliable enough to be used in fully autonomous weapons. Allowing current models to be used in this way would endanger America’s warfighters and civilians. Second, we believe that mass domestic surveillance of Americans constitutes a violation of fundamental rights.”
For days, Anthropic and the Pentagon had been locked in an escalating battle over how cutting-edge artificial intelligence technology would be used, and how it could aid military operations. The Pentagon demanded that Anthropic provide unfettered access to its A.I. system without the safeguards the company wanted.
Maureen Dowd: Why This Is Serious Shit. A must-read. Please read it.
Well. Once again the entire world has changed for the worse. All because of one man. And the unwillingness/inability of others to hold him accountable.
What do you want to talk about?
Nice deep analysis of unconstitutional War on Iran. Our senior Senator is silent as the Lambs as usual. I believe he is afraid of Orange Jesus. It’s not laziness. He allows 47 to make a mockery of the rule of law and i’m tired of this shit. Either 47 goes or he the senior senator goes. Hold hearings, do an investigation do your job Chris Coons scary cat senior senator that sucks up to a criminal and becomes a collaborator. What the _uck are you doing?
Iran isn’t a rogue state. It’s exactly what the U.S. government put into place fifty years ago.
The attacks aren’t a distraction from the Epstein files; this is part of what the files were meant to do, which is ensure that nothing stops Zionists from creating Greater Israel through blackmail. The parasitic billionaire class will get even more rich “rebuilding” and exploiting the region. And Congress will let it all happen because they are all almost old enough to remember what blowback they got when they voted for the Iraq aggressions. The learned it’s wiser to not vote to go to war and just let the president do it all.
Finally, Trump isn’t the problem, he’s just a symptom and his Democratic predecessors enabled this to happen. Until we get root out capitalism, Zionism, and billionaires, nothing will change. We the masses are the only ones who can stop this, because our bought-off elected leaders never will.
70 years ago, apologies.
Well, that’s just, like, your opinion, man.
Care to share any “alternative facts”?
Why bring facts into it at this point? He’s on a roll.
I don’t pretend to know shit that I don’t. YMMV.