News & views related to the war on Iran …

News & views related to the war in Ukraine …

Last week’s posts on Moon of Alabama:

• Sep 28 – British Authorities Mess Up Another Scare Mongering Scheme
  Related:
  – Let’s talk about…RAF Fairford & the False Flag that never was – Off-Guardian
  – Was Fairford the most embarrassing false flag of all time? – CouncilStateMedia
  – RAF Fairford big-scale attack try represents serious threat to US – Non Sense / Asia Times

• Sep 29 – ‘Rogue’ AI Agents Will Kill Billions?
  Related:
  – AI ‘godfather’ Yann LeCun has ‘zero concerns’ about human extinction, says Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is ‘deluded’ – Fortune
  “Many people working in AI safety “usually have an agenda to push,” LeCun says, and then clarifies that he’s talking about effective altruism, or EA, the philosophical movement that has been obsessed with the risks AI poses to humanity.”
  – How effective altruism conquered the world (archived) – Economist
  – Religious Scholars Met With Anthropic. What They Heard Stunned Them. (archived) – NY Times
  – Will America Spend 9% of Its GDP on AI? The Industry Is Counting on It (archived) – WSJ
  To justify staggering investment sums, Americans will have to spend as much of their income on this one technology as they do on food

• Sep 30 – Iraq is Not Yet Sovereign
  Related:
  – The Iraqi withdrawal: sovereignty, strategic infrastructure, and laying the groundwork for the next confrontation with Iran – Julia Kassem

• Oct 2 – Half(?) Crazy Man In A Golden House
  Related:
  – Inside Larry Ellison’s Wide Web of Power, Money and Politics – Vanity Fair

• Oct 3 – War On Iran: – Another Strike As Election Gimmick?
  Related:
  – Why Iran Escalate – Tehran’s Strategy to Drive America Out of the Middle East (archived) – Mohammad Ayatollahi Tabaar / Foreign Affairs
  – Ozempic in Iran – Esfandyar Batmanghelidj / LRB

—
Other issues:
Cont. reading: The MoA Week In Review – OT 2026-217

The war on Iran is yet unfinished.

I had stated previously that I, like others, expect another heavy attack on Iran. The general expectation is currently that such an attack would only happen in mid to late November – i.e. after the midterm election.

But why would Trump want to wait for that? Why not use an attack as a tool in the election – to demonstrate decisiveness or whatever other attribute Trump wants have associated with himself.

Axios, am outlet often used by the White House, was tasked with this announcement:

Trump’s top national security aides meet secretly at Camp David on Iran, Yemen

President Trump’s top cabinet members huddled for hours at Camp David on Friday to discuss next steps in the Iran war and the Saudi-Houthi conflict in Yemen, three U.S. officials told Axios.

The highly unusual meeting was not announced by the Trump administration. The last time a similar meeting took place was in June 2025, just days before Israel went to war against Iran.
…
Among the other participants were Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, White House envoy Steve Witkoff, CIA director John Ratcliffe and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine.

“Things were decided or at least deeply discussed,” one of the officials said, referring to the crisis in the Middle East.

The meeting was likely genuine. It could be a sign of planning for a new attack. There have however been no military moves like they usually appear before a large operation. (The recently announced aircraft carrier and amphibious readiness group deployment do not count. They are replacements for ships which have been deployed near Iran for more than six months and must soon turn home.)

The main question with regards to any new attack on Iran is: “Then what?”

Iran will hit hack. It will not capitulate. It is fighting for its existence.

What then can be achieved by another violent attack on it?

I for one can find no satisfying answer to that question.

What to do when someone has powers but no ethics?

Time has interviewed Trump:

Inside the Oval Office, Trump’s redesign is impossible to miss. There is gold everywhere, from the decorative plasterwork to the inscriptions on the ceiling and the gilded frames crowding the walls. The room is so dazzling you practically need sunglasses. Trumpian tchotchkes are scattered about: a FIFA “World Peace Prize” sits next to the Resolute Desk, where the President keeps a commendation given to his uncle during his years as an MIT professor.

At times, Trump’s train of thought was difficult to keep up with, his conversation moving in streams and eddies before circling back to familiar obsessions. He recounted conversations that sometimes sounded improbable.

One wonders how stable the man’s mind is:

Read the Full Transcript of Donald Trump’s 2026 Interview With TIME (archived) – Time, Oct 1 2026

Q: Last week, you said you might annihilate Iran. That was the word you used.

A: Yeah, I would do that. It’s possible.

Q: You’ve made versions of that threat before. You’ve also called yourself the president of peace.

A: Yeah.

Q: How can the president of peace be calling for the annihilation of an entire people?

A: Because by annihilating Iran, we’ve created peace in the world. With Iran, I don’t think you could ever have peace.

Also concerning:

What Trump Has Built (archived) – Time, Oct 1 2026

Trump spent hours asking Grok, Musk’s AI chatbot, questions about his presidency and legacy, according to an official present. At the time, Trump was ordering missile strikes against Venezuelan boats he alleged were smuggling drugs into the U.S. He asked Grok how Venezuelans would react if the U.S. captured Maduro. According to the official present, the chatbot responded that Maduro was a repressive and deeply unpopular dictator and that many Venezuelans would likely celebrate his downfall. After Trump ordered the mission to seize Maduro, the following month, celebrations broke out in the streets. Trump, according to officials, came away thinking Grok was ingenious.

I don’t remember or find any reports of celebrations in Venezuela after Maduro was kidnapped. Some Americans though were partying in Florida.

The pope was right to call for artificial intelligence to be “disarmed”.

News & views related to the war on Iran …

News & views related to the war in Ukraine …

News & views not related to the wars in Ukraine and Iran …

After more than 20 years of messing up the country U.S. troops have finally left Iraq:

The last U.S. troops left an air base in northern Iraq under a deal between Baghdad and Washington.
…
Baghdad touted the end of the U.S. mission as a sign of the country’s increasing strength and sovereignty.

The withdrawal was also celebrated by Iran-backed groups but raised concerns among some other Iraqis, particularly in the Kurdish region, where many fear a resurgence of IS as well as more attacks by Iran-linked groups, possibly emboldened by the departure of U.S. forces.

Meanwhile, questions loom around the future of the Iraqi militias, which the Baghdad government has sought to disarm, with little success so far.

The move is little more than symbolic. Iraq’s sovereignty is still in doubt.

There still are Turkish forces in the Kurdish areas, allegedly to hunt down Kurdish resistance forces hiding in the north of Iraq.

Militia aligned with Iran are still armed. Some of them are actively helping Iran in its war. This is in Iraq’s interest but makes them a target for U.S., Saudi and Israeli war planes.

Iraq has no air defenses. It is not yet capable to defend its own borders.

Most importantly though is its lack of control over its own financial resources:

Through Iraq’s U.S.-based bank account for oil payments, Washington controls the physical shipment of dollars Iraq earns and has shown itself willing to use that power after temporarily halting the flow this year.

Iraq needs a plan to solve those issues. Companies pumping or buying oil in Iraq should be forced to pay directly to Baghdad. If they are unwilling of so, because of U.S. pressure, Chinese companies should be invited to take their place.

Iraq will have to further rebuild its military before it can become a regular state.

It was a rainy day when I met Bill Gates. That was in late 1999 at a Microsoft event in Seattle. We had a short chat about an aquisition. My impression was that he was a smart guy, but not very intelligent. Later that day he gave a talk. His PowerPoint presentation promptly blue-screened. He was embarrassed and helpless.

Gates knows a bit or two about how to profit from monopolizing software. Seen in that light his recent demand for regulation by claiming that AI could ’cause a billion deaths’ may even make sense:

In an interview with NBC Meet the Press, Gates said AI developers should be required to implement safeguards and monitoring systems, arguing that voluntary industry self-regulation is not enough.

“You need law enforcement and the politicians to get into the discussion about what safeguards and monitoring look like,” Gates told the outlet. “And that has to be a required thing.”

World to Gates: We already have laws that prohibit doing bad stuff. We also have law enforcement agencies. We have courts and judges that penalize people for doing bad things.

Killing a billion people is bad. It is prohibited for good reasons. Attempts to do so are criminal. People who try will go to jail.

To claim that AI could kill a billion people is like claiming that fire could kill a billion people. Of course it could. But no, it doesn’t.

After some unauthorized attempts to break into non-public databases and websites there has been embarrassing talk about ‘rogue AI agents‘.

There is no such thing as a ‘rogue’ AI agent. There is only deterministic software, written and launched by humans, that wraps around Large Language Models.

To understand how that works lets look inside:

An AI agent harness is the software infrastructure that wraps around a large language model (LLM) and enables it to act on tasks, not just respond to prompts. The model reasons through a problem and decides what to do next. The harness connects it to the tools, systems, memory and execution environments needed to carry out those actions.

Agent = Model + Harness

Think of the model as the “brain” that generates reasoning and decisions. The harness is everything around it that helps the agent operate safely and reliably, including:

• Tools: APIs, code execution, search, databases and business applications
• Memory: Prior context, user preferences and workflow history
• Workspace: Files, data, environments and systems the agent can access
• Guardrails: Permissions, policies, approvals and monitoring

Without a harness, a model can answer questions, but it can’t reliably run code, call APIs, access files, remember prior work or complete multi-step workflows on its own.

An AI agent, tasked with whatever, can and will only break into a website, if its harness (and the computer the ‘agent’ is running on) fails to stop it from doing so.

Whoever has programmed that harness (or miss-administrates the underlying system) is at least negligent in his duty. It is that person which is accountable for the agents misbehavior. It is that person which, where appropriate, should go to jail.

There is a very simple way for preventing AI agents from OpenAI or Anthropic from going ‘rogue’. Harshly penalize the CEOs of these companies, Sam Altman and Dario Amodei, each and every time their agents do.

AI systems do not think, feel, want or understand. They don’t go ‘rogue’.

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Today the British authorities seemed to have run one of their usual scams to keep the population in line of the official scare mongering narratives. This was a bit unusual as the target of this operation was not Russia, but Iran.

ENEMY TARGETS Inside Iran’s alarming campaign of revenge as brutal regime puts UK in its crosshairs after ‘bomb plot’ at RAF base – The Sun

RAF Fairford on terror alert as nearby residents evacuated and multiple men arrested – Daily Mail

‘Iran bomb plot’ at RAF base foiled by farmer’s 999 call: Five arrested in early hours after three vans spotted near air base used by US bombers – Daily Mail

999 call, bomb squad, 5 held: UK police probe suspected RAF Fairford terror plot; Iran link eyed – Times of India

Five men arrested over RAF ‘terror bomb plot’ are all British nationals from London and aged in their 20s – as Iran ‘categorically rejects’ involvement – Daily Mail

Police were alerted by chance after a farmer living in the nearby village of Whelford noticed three vans blocking a quiet country road surrounding the base as she drove home from a party in the early hours.

Confused, she turned her car around. As she did so, she saw ‘Middle Eastern–looking’ men in balaclavas and hooded tops scattering into the trees and across the fields towards the base.

The quick–thinking hero accelerated away and called the police at 12.45am, before messaging her local WhatsApp group, warning people to lock their doors.

Police were on the scene within 15 minutes, arresting the five men minutes later.

According to authorities this was a ‘major incident’ which even required a ‘Cobra meeting’ at the highest government level.

But the time references given are suspicious.

As someone pointed out:

Something about the RAF Fairford timeline deserves serious scrutiny.

At 23:18 on Saturday, World Source News reported that the Pentagon had intelligence pointing to a threat at Fairford and that security had been raised to its highest level.

Less than two hours later, at around 00:45, police received the 999 call from a local resident reporting suspicious vans.

Yet UK police say the operation was not intelligence-led.
Then Trump said: “We had them under investigation… we had them under view for a long time.”

So which is it?

What did US intelligence know, and when did it know it?
That’s a question worth answering before anyone confidently tells us the full story.

The tweet referred to:

World Source News @Worldsource24 – 23:18 BST(UST+1) · Sep 26, 2026

The Pentagon has obtained reliable intelligence pointing to a threat at RAF Fairford in England.
Over the past few days security at the site has been raised to the highest level.

Meanwhile the five men, which turned out to be British, in their 20s and from London, were released on bail.

I am not sure what to make of this nonsense.

News & views related to the war on Iran …

News & views related to the war in Ukraine …

Last week’s posts on Moon of Alabama:

• Sep 21 – A Useless Attack On Yemen, Ordered By Trump, Was Called Off
  Related:
  – The Seven-Day Lightning Offensive That Changed Yemen’s War – New Lines Magazine
  – Ansar Allah (Houthis) has released a six-minute compilation showing attacks (vid) – OSINTwarfare

• Sep 22 – New York Times Misreports Gen.Sec. Guterres’ UN Speech

• Sep 24 – On Granting Anonymity Where It Does Not Belong
  Related:
  – The CIA — Or Rather, Some Unidentified Person in the Lithuania — Warns of Russian Drone Attacks – Naked Capitalism

• Sep 25 – War On Iran: Economic Pressure Is Not A One-Way Road
  Related:
  – Trump’s ‘Economic D-Day’ Against Iran Risks U.S. Ties With China – Foreign Policy
  – America’s farmers are rethinking their loyalty to the GOP – WSJ via MSN
  – When America walks away (archived) – Economist
     For decades America has enjoyed hegemony over the Middle East. That is about to end

• Sep 26 – What Was This Xi Visit About?
  Related:
  – Why We Must Prepare for the Chinese Communist Party’s Collapse – Some Lunatic / Hudson Institute
  – America Is Blundering Toward War With China (archived) – Robert D. Kaplan / NY Times
  – Would Beijing Accept Taiwan on These Terms? – Pekingnology
  – George Yeo and Kishore Mahbubani – Singapore’s View on an Increasingly Multipolar World (video) – Bloomberg
  – Speech by Minister for Defence Chan Chun Sing at the 13th Xiangshan Forum on 16 September 2026 in Beijing, China – MinDef Singapore

—
Other issues:
Cont. reading: The MoA Week In Review – OT 2026-211

There was some pomp around China’s President Xi’s visit and talks in Washington DC. There were however no results.

One wonders then why it at all happened.

A somewhat racist remark in a NY Times report seems to imply that it was Xi who needed the visit:

The trip was certainly a propaganda boost for Mr. Xi, who has sought to cast himself as an equal to Mr. Trump on the world stage.

In my view its exactly the other way around. It was Trump who needed the propaganda boost.

(BTW – in what category and by what measure is the U.S. still superior to China?)

The only outcome of Xi’s visit that will have some consequence is an agreement to prolong the current trade truce between the countries by two months. The visit was unnecessary to achieve that. The agreement on that was made two days before Xi arrived.

The Chinese had hoped for a full year extension of the deal. But the U.S. still seems to think it has leverage. It wants China to buy more of its agricultural products:

“Beijing wanted a much longer period of predictability, while Washington has preserved an early opportunity to test Chinese performance and reassess its leverage,” Singleton said. “By January, the administration should know whether China actually delivered on its agricultural commitments.”

“This is less about buying two months of calm than making China earn the next extension,” he added.

But the U.S. has no leverage to press China into buying more soybean – at least not now. When Trump put sky high tariffs on China the country blocked its rare earth exports. The U.S. urgently needs those minerals and has no way to produce them itself. After the rare earth exports were blocked tariffs were lifted. Trump had had to chicken out.

That situation has not changed today and will not have changed a year from now. It is also unlikely that the next two months will give the U.S. more leverage.

Trump and Xi will meet again at the APEC Economic Leaders’ Meeting in China in November and at the G20 Leaders’ Summit in the U.S. in December. There is thus ample chance to further prolong the trade deal.

Everything else, seen from China’s perspective, can wait for some time.

China can continue to sit back and look on while Trump helps the U.S. empire to dismantle itself.

During talks at the recent meeting of the UN General Assembly Iran has repeated its proposal for reopening the Strait of Hormuz:

Abbas Araghchi, the foreign minister, told reporters at a press briefing at the United Nations General Assembly that the proposal closely mirrored the commitments laid out in a so-called memorandum of understanding that was struck between the United States and Iran in June but quickly unraveled.

He said Iran was ready to begin putting the plan into effect as soon as Washington agreed to it.

“We have introduced a plan to the United States through the intermediators that if certain conditions are met, the Strait of Hormuz would be open on the end of the seventh day and talks would restart,” Mr. Araghchi said.

The offer is a return to the MoU which is then to be executed in a compressed timeframe:

Iranian officials said that while the proposal was effectively the same as the memorandum of understanding made in June, it was designed to move at a much faster pace. In the earlier agreement, a 60-day time frame was set for reaching nuclear negotiations.

Under the conditions that Iran has set for the agreement, according to Mr. Araghchi, during the seven days all hostilities would end, including in Lebanon; the U.S. would release Iran’s frozen assets — estimated at at least $12 billion — waive sanctions on Iranian oil and lift the naval blockade on Iran. Then, on the last day, the Strait of Hormuz would be opened.

Talks on the nuclear issue would follow thereafter.

Iran is expecting the Trump administration to pick up on this. Foreign Minister Araghchi will stay in New York until Monday, presumably to facilitate further talks.

Agreeing to Iran’s condition is likely the last chance for President Trump to lower energy prices before the midterm elections, especially for gas and diesel.

But there are various forces which will try to hinder him. The Zionists want Iran destroyed. Any attempt to a peaceful solution is intolerable for them.

Some of the Gulf countries, in silently collaboration with Israel, are also opposed to an agreement:

Cont. reading: War On Iran: Economic Pressure Is Not A One-Way Road

The Trump administration has revoked the White House press passes for several news outlets.

One reason it has given for doing so is false and funny.

But it also reveals the prevalent sycophancy of mainstream media reporting.

The White House cited anonymous quotes in Politico ban. It was the source. (archived) – Washington Post, Sep 23 2026

The White House told Politico in a letter Tuesday that it had taken the unusual step of revoking its press passes last week because the news organization had violated professional standards, including by using anonymous sources and “trafficking in verifiable falsehoods about national security … and publishing sensitive or classified information.”
…
One of Politico’s six alleged offenses, according to the White House letter, is a June 2026 article that begins by quoting a “senior administration official” who details a push to end the war in Iran.
…
The source in Politico’s story was not speaking against the White House’s wishes, but spoke in an authorized call during which reporters were instructed to attribute information to a “senior administration official.”

The ‘senior administration official’ in the call was Vice President Vance who was claiming that there was a high chance of signing an agreement with Iran. (A few days later a Memorandum of Understanding was signed. The U.S. immediately infringed on it.)

It is understandable that the Trump administration does not like Politico‘s reporting. (I don’t either.) But to accuse it of using anonymous sources while demanding anonymity for what it wants to be put out is highly hypocritical.

My beef however is with the outlets which allow the White House to make ‘anonymous’ media calls.

There is no valid reason to grant anonymity on a White House arranged call with a Vice President who is promoting White House policies. None! At! All!

If the VP wants to be heard, or published about, let him hold an public press conference. Don’t write about him if he doesn’t.

Granting anonymity to a media source should be reserved, solely, for those sources who reveal misdeeds which otherwise would not become public.

Anyone else, especially those who try to sneak self serving partial information, opinions or views into the public while demanding anonymity, should be publicly called out – or at least ignored.

In the early 2000nds the mainstream media were regularly publishing false information about Iraq. By granting anonymity to lying officials they pushed the public opinion towards favoring war on that country.

There followed a wide ranging mea-culpa and discussion of the miss-use of anonymous sources. The NY Times public editor and other media critics often wrote about it:

Just about everybody is in agreement about the use of anonymous sources in news stories. Readers deplore it, public editors shake a finger at it, Times editors and reporters say they try to minimize it. …

There was, for short time period of time, a real effort to avoid anonymous sources.

But the public editor positions are gone. So is the reluctance to let people claim anonymity while they promote official positions.

I hope that Politico, and other media involved in this spiff, will learn from it.

Granting anonymity where its does not belong is pure sycophancy.

It does not pay off.

News & views related to the war on Iran …

News & views related to the war in Ukraine …

News & views not related to the wars in Ukraine and Iran …