Author: admin

The Antiquities Authority confirmed that the figurine represented Hathor, an Egyptian goddess associated with fertility, strength, protection and wisdom.

By Pesach Benson, JNS

A woman strolling on Israel’s Palmachim Beach south of Tel Aviv found a 3,000-year-old figurine of an Egyptian goddess, which she turned over to archaeologists at the Israel Antiquities Authority.

Lydia Marner, 74, a resident of Lod and an Azerbaijani immigrant, said she and her husband noticed an object emerge from the sea one stormy day “about a month ago.”

Understanding she had found something significant, Marner contacted friends who were knowledgeable in archaeology, then reached out to the Antiquities Authority via its Facebook page.

Inspectors Dror Citron and Idan Horn were dispatched to examine the ancient figurine. After examining and cleaning the statuette, the Authority announced the find on Tuesday.

“I can’t believe I had the privilege of finding this. At first my husband laughed at me, but today the whole family already knows the amazing story that happened to me. I’m very happy that the honor of finding it fell to me,” Marner said.

The Antiquities Authority confirmed that the figurine represented Hathor, an Egyptian goddess associated with fertility, strength, protection and wisdom.

According to Amir Golani, an expert on the Bronze Age at the authority, “The Canaanites used to adopt ritual and religious customs of the Egyptians, who ruled our region at the time. Just like homes today, where you install a mezuzah or hang a picture of a saint on the wall, they used to place ritual figurines in a central place in the house, for good luck and protection from bad things.”

The statuette was made of clay that was embedded into a stone pattern, a process allowing people to quickly produce numerous such figurines, he explained.

“It can be recognized that this is Ella Hathor by her hairstyle, which simulates the horns of a bull, and by the prominent eyes and ears that were designed for her,” Golani said.

Marner’s discovery coincides with the launch of the Antiquities Authority’s “Return Them With a Click” campaign to encourage Israelis with artifacts in their homes to turn them over to the state.

The post Woman on Israeli beach finds 3,000-year-old figurine appeared first on World Israel News.

Some time ago I was introduced, by two of my funniest friends, to Winner’s Dinners, a web archive of British film director Michael Winner’s restaurant column published in the Sunday Times between 1993 and 2012. Recounting meals taken everywhere from the Hyatt Carlton Tower to Sir Bernard Ashley (husband to Laura)’s Llangoed Hall, usually with […]

Recently declassified documents have exposed former Mexican president José López Portillo as a CIA asset. The revelations are a reminder of his ignominious contributions to Mexico’s brutal “dirty war” against left dissent during the Cold War.

Mexican president José López Portillo at a press conference on May 19, 1980. (Michel ARTAULT / Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)

A stack of declassified documents in April revealed that the late Mexican president José López Portillo, who governed from 1976 to 1982, had been a CIA asset “for several years” before taking office.

The serendipitous discovery in the recently released documents, which pertained to an investigation into the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, contained a memo in which US intelligence official Bill Sturbitts disclosed this information to colleagues. According to the memo, he had been “an informant in a ‘joint US-Mexico wiretapping operation,’” and “secretly recorded calls on dozens of telephone lines in the Mexican capital.” However, the details of López Portillo’s collaboration with the CIA remain mostly a mystery.

While the circumstances of the revelation came as a surprise, the fact that the former president had ties to US intelligence agencies didn’t — at least not for those familiar with the history of US-Mexico relations during the Cold War. López Portillo is the fourth Mexican president to have confirmed CIA ties in a lineage that includes all three of his immediate predecessors — Adolfo López Mateos (1958–1964), Gustavo Díaz Ordaz (1964–1970), and Luis Echeverría (1970–76) — all of whom governed during the Cold War and belonged to the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), which held power uninterrupted for seventy-one years.

Over the past decade, several pathbreaking scholarly and nonacademic works in Spanish and English have used declassified government documents in both Mexican and US archives to clarify Mexico’s place in the Cold War. López Portillo’s exposure as a CIA operative punctures another hole in the long-established official narrative that downplays Mexico as a prominent regional actor and stakeholder in the global Cold War and its own dirty war against leftist dissenters.

Portillo’s Dirty War

Regarding López Portillo in particular, the power elite have generally downplayed his campaign against political dissent, when in fact the former president was a hawkish, iron-hearted Cold War warrior and a major human rights offender. Instead, the former president is mostly recognized for presiding over runaway inflation and ballooning foreign debt.

López Portillo belonged to a triumvirate of former presidents — all of whom also had connections to the CIA — who waged a “dirty war” against leftist political dissenters and armed revolutionary organizations between 1964 and 1982. Under these three presidents, the Mexican Armed Forces, the Dirección Federal de Seguridad (or DFS, the notorious secret police), and paramilitary groups committed egregious human rights violations. Agents and soldiers were left to their own devices to track down, torture, rape, and kidnap peasants and students, terrorize rural communities and wreak havoc on their crops, and perform extrajudicial executions and disappearances. Today many victims’ whereabouts remain unknown, though it’s likely that security forces dumped many bodies into mass graves or cast them into the Pacific Ocean from military aircraft in what were known as vuelos de la muerte (death flights).

The chance revelation of the recently declassified memo offers a propitious opportunity to reexamine López Portillo’s legacy and expose his role in the counterinsurgency against revolutionaries.

Echeverría and Díaz Ordaz’s reign of terror on political dissent and their human rights violations are common knowledge, but they have eclipsed López Portillo’s contributions to the dirty war, for which he mostly avoided public castigation and legal consequences during his lifetime. Like his predecessors, López Portillo expressed guttural hatred toward radical militants and leftists. He also made the dirty war his own, contributing to the further professionalization of the national security apparatus and amplifying state repression out of personal spite.

The chance revelation of the recently declassified memo offers a propitious opportunity to reexamine López Portillo’s legacy and expose his role in the counterinsurgency against revolutionaries whose true cost of life we’ll likely never know.

Origins of a Cold Warrior

José Guillermo Abel López Portillo was born in 1920 to a family with an impressive political and intellectual pedigree dating back to the Spanish colonial era. Reportedly, López Portillo loved telling people he was “raised in the nobility.” In 1945, López Portillo joined the PRI but didn’t formally engage in politics. Instead, he practiced law for several years, landed a billet at his alma mater, and taught at the ​​National Polytechnic Institute. Allegedly inspired by then president Adolfo López Mateo’s rise to power, he stopped practicing law in 1960 to initially hold minor positions in government offices.

From then on, López Portillo enjoyed an active political life and secured high-ranking positions in the government, such as under secretary of the presidency under President Díaz Ordaz. Of course, none of these milestones would have been possible without his childhood friend, Luis Echeverría, who facilitated his entrance into the power elite club and whose leverage came in handy throughout his political career. Under Echeverría’s administration, he served as the director of the Federal Electricity Commission (1972–73) and then secretary of finance and public credit (1973–75).

Like other priístas (members of the PRI), López Portillo subscribed to a double standard that characterized Mexico’s Cold War politics. State functionaries and presidents at the height of the Cold War loved to boast about Mexico’s democratic institutions and condemn military regimes in the Southern Cone. President Echeverría — famous for his role in the dirty war — proclaimed Mexico a champion of the Third World and a supporter of all oppressed people. The country maintained an open-door policy toward political exiles escaping persecution, mainly from Chile and Argentina.

However, this outward depiction of Mexico as a champion of social justice hid a sinister reality. At home, the Mexican government employed counterinsurgency methods that mirrored those of military regimes in South America against homegrown movements that threatened the existing social order and aspired to transform society from the ground up. Between 1940 and 1982, the PRI government repressed rural resistance in the state of Morelos, a railroad workers’ strike, two guerrilla movements in Guerrero, a student movement in 1968, and urban guerrilla movements.

In 1976, López Portillo ran for president unopposed, even as a small handful of other political parties were also allowed to run candidates, to succeed his childhood friend. Upon taking office, he had to grapple with a flagging economy, an unhappy industrial class, continual calls for political reform, and urban guerrilla resistance that, despite waning, kept the counterinsurgency in the cities busy.

The Dirty War as Personal Vendetta

In Our Man in Mexico: Winston Scott and the Hidden History of the CIA, author Jefferson Morley chronicles the agency’s heyday in Mexico under the tutelage of Station Chief Winston “Win” Scott, speaking to the centrality of Mexico in the United States’ anti-communist crusade. With the onset of the Cold War in the late 1940s, the Soviet Union and the United States vied to establish a foothold in Mexico — an objective that became ever more crucial after the Cuban Revolution. Against this backdrop, the US government transformed the CIA station in Mexico City into one of its most important offices and Mexico into a Cold War battleground. According to Morley, Mexico City “became a labyrinth of espionage, a city of intrigue like Vienna or Casablanca with the spies of at least four powers angling for advantage: the United States, the Soviet Union, Cuba, and Mexico.”

Amid the political convulsions in Latin America, the Mexican government enjoyed flaunting its democratic system. So when guerrilla movements began to emerge in force in the 1970s, it refused to admit they existed. US intelligence memos and cables, however, tell a different story, one of a state worried about the growth of armed revolutionary groups threatening its democratic facade. Given their history and familiarity with US intelligence, Echeverría and López Portillo knew that it mattered that Mexico could show it could handle the problem.

The US government transformed the CIA station in Mexico City into one of its most important offices and Mexico into a Cold War battleground.

The counterinsurgency that fought rural and urban guerrilla movements during the 1970s involved all branches of Mexico’s national security machine. In the mountains of Guerrero, the Mexican Army viciously wrestled against two guerrilla movements — the Asociación Cívica Nacional Revolucionaria and the Partido de los Pobres — laying waste to poor peasant communities. Soldiers torched villages, kidnapped alleged guerrilla conspirators, and committed sexual violence.

Law enforcement and the unit known as the White Brigade, an elite squad of about two hundred agents, supervised by the ruthless Miguel Nazar Haro (aka “El Turco”), operated primarily in the cities. Created in the summer of 1976, the brigade hunted down and neutralized guerrillas, particularly members of the Liga Comunista 23 de Septiembre, Mexico’s most prominent urban guerrilla organization at the time. With the DFS deeming “the death of police officers and soldiers as terrorism,” agents became obsessed with exterminating ligistas by any means.

Of course, López Portillo didn’t need additional motivation to prolong the dirty war — at least not until August 11, 1976, when members of the Liga’s Red Brigade tried to abduct his sister, Margarita, just over a month after he won the presidential election. According to reports, a car driven by revolutionaries intercepted Margarita’s small escort in the Condesa neighborhood of Mexico City. David Jiménez Sarmiento “Chano,” the prominent urban guerrilla figure and leader, emerged from the car wielding a machine gun and began spraying the Rambler Classic of the president-elect’s sister with bullets. In the end, Margarita López Portillo survived, but one bodyguard died, and two others were wounded. For the Liga, the action proved costly. Chano didn’t survive the gunfight, inflicting a devastating blow on the organization and exacerbating its already fragile situation.

The attempted kidnapping of a member of the elite would have compelled López Portillo to respond swiftly. But the fact that the target had been his sister made it personal. López Portillo unleashed the White Brigade against the Liga. From then on, the urban counterinsurgency started to measure its success less on apprehending revolutionaries and more on eliminating them.

López Portillo’s Rightful Legacy

Yet López Portillo, like his predecessors, had to maintain Mexico’s democratic facade unspoiled. He espoused a mellower foreign policy compared to Echeverría, even denouncing President Anastasio Somoza of Nicaragua and expressing support for the Sandinista revolutionaries fighting to overthrow him. He also enacted the 1977 Electoral Political Reform and the 1978 Amnesty Law.

The former was purportedly meant to democratize elections, opening the door to opposition parties, namely the revolutionary left, to participate in elections, while the latter granted amnesty to many guerrilla fighters, who generally didn’t rejoin the revolutionary underground for legal and personal reasons. Still, the Liga remained active for another few years. Reportedly, López Portillo was up in arms that the remaining organizations didn’t disintegrate soon after his reforms, and he vowed to do away with them once and for all.

In the long term, these reforms at least succeeded in concealing the gravity of López Portillo’s human rights violations. Indeed, Echeverría and Díaz Ordaz have borne the brunt of criticism from human rights groups, victims, former revolutionaries, academics, and the ordinary citizens who clamored for justice until their deaths. When Díaz Ordaz died, people lamented that he never faced the music for the 1968 student massacre. When Echeverría passed in mid-2022, at the age of one hundred, people flooded social media with messages attacking him and wishing he had lived to see the inside of an international criminal court for crimes against humanity. Ultimately, a court did place Echeverría under house arrest in 2006 for his part in the 1968 student massacre, but, in 2009, a Mexican federal court cleared him of any responsibility.

López Portillo’s death in 2004, on the other hand, didn’t generate much public outcry. Instead, newspapers made López Portillo’s deplorable economic policies the focus of their reporting, especially the $76 billion external debt and the 215 percent inflation rate he left in 1982. The media, for the most part, glossed over his human rights violations.

But the CIA didn’t make López Portillo an asset for no reason: they identified him as a Cold War warrior who would keep radical leftists at bay and take the necessary measures to eliminate subversive threats to the capitalist order in Mexico. As with Díaz Ordaz and Echeverría, CIA agents found their guy in López Portillo.

…

The post Diez años después de sus filtraciones: El heroísmo de Snowden sigue brillando appeared first on Global Research.

Dean Sudha Setty’s applause for a valedictorian’s speech that incited hatred of Israel “is a profound failure of her duties,” say S.A.F.E. CUNY and the Jewish Leadership Project.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

Two organizations are now calling for the removal of the City University of New York (CUNY) School of Law’s dean after she showed approval for the antisemitic contents of a valedictorian’s speech at commencement last month.

“We were the first, or among the first, to report that we believed the speech was seen by administrators and approved,” said Jeffrey Lax, Business Department chair at CUNY’s Kingsborough Community College and founder of S.A.F.E. CUNY, a non-profit that advocates for Zionist Jews systemically discriminated against and excluded by the university and its union.

“We now believe that it was seen not only by admins at CUNY Law, but also across other CUNY units. We cannot say for sure that Dean Setty herself reviewed the document. but that is irrelevant to us, as she is seen on stage standing and applauding the speech after it was given,” he told World Israel News.

This was unacceptable behavior for the woman who took over as dean last February, said Lax, who previously noted that the school had wiped the livestreamed event from their website in order to hide it.

“Dean Setty’s enthusiastic applause to a speech that bordered on incitement to violence was a profound and vulgar failure of her duties both as a legal scholar and as the Dean of a law school,” he charged. “SAFE CUNY demands the immediate termination of Dean Setty from her role as dean of CUNY School of Law.”

Upon assuming her position, Dean Sudha Setty said that the “mission” of the school was “social justice lawyering and tackling the structural barriers to justice that exist in so many contexts.”

The valedictorian, Fatima Mousa Mohammed, had railed against “capitalism and racism, imperialism and Zionism,” and falsely claimed that Israel indiscriminately killed and tortured Palestinians.

It took over two weeks for CUNY’s chancellor and board of trustees to label the address as “hate speech” and to condemn it, but no further action was demanded. Chancellor Felix Matos Rodriguez also failed to appear via Zoom earlier this month at a meeting of the New York City council that discussed allegations of antisemitism throughout the city’s 25 campuses of higher public education.

CUNY’s law school faculty and student government has endorsed the BDS movement, although New York is one of dozens of states that have anti-BDS laws on their books.

When  video of Mohammed’s speech came out, Congressman Mike Lawler (R-NY) tweeted that he was “finalizing legislation to strip universities of their funding if they engage in and promote antisemitism.”

“CUNY should be ashamed of itself – and should lose any federal funds it currently receives,” Lawler wrote.

The Lawfare Project, which represents victims of discrimination and terrorism in court, has applied to the Committee on Character and Fitness at the New York Supreme Court Appellate Division demanding that Mohammed be blocked from becoming a lawyer due to her hate- and lie-filled rant against Israel.

Noting that it was not the first time she had expressed such views, the Project’s COO and director of research Ben Ryberg tweeted, “It’s our belief that a person who has proved themselves to be a bigot is not fit to practice law…. You have to wonder if it had been any other minority-protected group, would this even be a question?”

The post NPOs calls for CUNY law school dean’s removal appeared first on World Israel News.

Cornel West has a compelling message. Instead of running a third-party campaign most voters won’t notice, he should grab the spotlight by challenging Joe Biden for the Democratic nomination.

Cornel West speaks at Harvard University on October 22, 2019 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. (Paul Marotta / Getty Images)

Cornel West is running for president. He announced last Monday in a short video referencing issues including Medicare for All, “decent housing,” abortion rights, the war in Ukraine, and ensuring that everyone has “access to a job with a living wage.”

Dr West has a record of writing and activism on many of these issues that stretches back several decades. And he has a way of talking about them that conveys not just a political perspective but a deeply compelling moral vision. I can hardly think of anyone I’d rather see replace the deeply mediocre Joe Biden as president of the United States — to, as West said in a recent appearance on Democracy Now, become “the head of Empire to help dismantle it.”

Unfortunately, West is planning to run on the ballot line of an obscure third party. I doubt that as many as 1 percent of American voters even know that the “People’s Party” exists.

That’s a shame. West’s message is important, and if he’s going to spend the next year pouring his considerable energies into a run for the presidency, he should do it in the place where he could bring it to the largest audience that’s realistically available to him. He should challenge Joe Biden in the race for the 2024 Democratic nomination.

Cornel West Is Good, Actually

Writing in the Nation, Joan Walsh recites a litany of familiar liberal objections to West and concludes that it’s a terrible idea for him to run for president.

At one point, Walsh insinuates that West — a lifelong socialist — is becoming friendly to the political right. Her main piece of evidence is that he coauthored a short op-ed praising Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s decision to let high school seniors apply for a state-funded scholarship by submitting their scores from the “Classics Learning Test.” While DeSantis is a deeply odious figure, the idea that West’s convergence with him on this relatively minor issue represents some sort of lurch to the right is absurd.

West has spent decades writing about the value of getting students to read Plato and Aristotle and Thucydides, which explains his support. And he’s very thoroughly on record as disagreeing with most of what DeSantis stands for — as he said to Amy Goodman, he thinks DeSantis is the kind of person who would have sentenced Socrates to death. But he still sees value in the governor encouraging Florida students to read Socrates’s words. It’s a bit much for a supporter of Joe Biden, who just finished working with Republicans to negotiate a bipartisan debt ceiling deal that shrinks the welfare state, to get upset about Cornel West giving a Republican credit-where-credit’s-due for encouraging more Florida students to read Greek philosophy.

Walsh also floats the possibility that West’s turn against Barack Obama after 2008 was motivated by pique at personal sleights, like not being invited to the inauguration. But West’s hostility to Obama’s Wall Street–friendly administration is rooted in a worldview he’d held since at least the 1970s. West was an academic before he was a public figure, and his doctoral dissertation has long since been republished as a book called The Ethical Dimensions of Marxist Thought.

Ultimately, Walsh’s most basic objection to West’s run for president is that he’ll undermine Joe Biden and thus, she thinks, help Republicans.

He will only take votes away from Biden and help elect a Republican.

But even if he were to run as a Democrat, like [Marianne] Williamson and the deeply off Robert F. Kennedy Jr., he would still hurt Biden, because a primary gives the bored, supine media a reason to hype “Dems in disarray” stories.

There’s a tactical discussion to be had about whether socialists who live in states whose electoral votes are meaningfully “up for grabs” should hold their noses and vote for the lesser evil. But blaming third-party candidates or their voters when Democrats lose elections shifts blame away from politicians whose job it is to put forward a message that appeals to those voters. And the argument that even challenging Biden in the primaries is out of bounds because it would lead to news stories embarrassing to the incumbent is deeply antidemocratic.

Breaking the Duopoly?

Some socialists have the opposite objection to the idea of Dr West running as a Democrat. They object to America’s quasi-official “two-party system” and hope that a third-party run would undermine that system.

If that’s the goal, West would be better off running with the Green Party than the People’s Party. The latter is a pretty dubious outfit with a history of scandals and nothing resembling structures of internal democracy. And it has ballot access in far fewer states.

But the larger problem is that the two-party system can’t just be willed out of existence. It’s deeply entrenched. The Green Party got 3 percent of the vote two decades ago when it ran Ralph Nader and neither the Greens nor any other left-wing third party have come anywhere near replicating that result since.

Skeptics about the Democratic-primaries route often point to what happened in 2020, when the Democratic establishment lined up to stop Bernie Sanders from getting the nomination. But this is an odd argument. Bernie was getting about 35 percent of the vote in the primaries. That was enough to carry him to victory in the first three states. He lost because he couldn’t translate it into a majority when Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar dropped out and Bernie was facing a two-man race against Biden. If West got 4 percent as a candidate of the People’s Party, on the other hand, that would be little short of miraculous.

I agree that a real multiparty democracy — on the model of countries where it’s common to have a number of different parties jostling for power and occasionally forming coalition governments — would be far preferable to the narrowly constricted choices typically available to American voters. But I see very little evidence that third-party runs under present circumstances add up to any sort of contribution to making that vision a reality. It would probably take deep changes in the way American elections work, some of which would require amending the Constitution.

The last time a new major party came on the scene was Abraham Lincoln’s Republican Party, which grew out of the antislavery wing of the Whigs. That was long before many of the current obstacles to new parties, like deeply unfair ballot access laws, were put in place. And even without those obstacles, the most likely scenario for the appearance of a new major party would be the same one that played out in the 1850s — a new party emerging out of a struggle within one of the existing major parties. There’s nothing even remotely resembling a precedent for one emerging from an act of will by a tiny band of activists.

Even if West runs as a Democrat, no one should deceive themselves — we’d still be talking about a very long shot. It’s legitimate to ask whether the Left’s energies would be better invested on other projects.

But West’s message is vitally important to the future of American democracy, and he’s a gifted messenger. If he’s going to do this, he should grab the biggest megaphone available to him. That means taking on Joe Biden for the Democratic nomination.

Post Content

We all know the saying ‘better late than never,’ but for Bella Montoya, the expression would prove to be especially true. After falling into an unconscious trance-like state and being declared deceased, the 76-year-old Ecuadorian woman was heard banging on her coffin during the wake she was being laid to rest. The bewildering incident, which occurred just four hours after Montoya was pronounced dead on Friday, has left many stunned and shocked.

Medical examiners had attributed Montoya’s death to a cardiopulmonary arrest. A doctor soon declared her dead after trying to resuscitate her. Astoundingly, video evidence shows medical personnel attending to Montoya while she lies out of her casket – very much alive. Her own son, Gilbert Balberán, described the event as a “miracle from God,” claiming that he was still getting to grips with what had transpired.

The elderly Montoya is now in stable condition, receiving care at the same hospital which declared her deceased. Ecuador’s Ministry of Health has set up a technical team to investigate why Murray’s death certificate had been emitted incorrectly. The grieving experience of Bella Montoya is not an isolated incident either – just last year, the same thing happened to the family of a 3-year-old Mexican girl at her funeral viewing.

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.

To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.

Click the share button above to email/forward this article …

The post Video: War in Ukraine and Media Lies. Prof. Michel Chossudovsky appeared first on Global Research.

Donald Trump’s indictment was the biggest news of the week, but what was lost in the typical Trump absurdities of documents in ballrooms and bathrooms is the revelation of US plans to attack Iran.

Former president Donald Trump at a Georgia state GOP convention at the Columbus Convention and Trade Center on June 10, 2023 in Columbus, Georgia. (Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images)

The blockbuster news of the past week was Donald Trump’s latest indictment, this one on more robust ground than his first for the unprecedented act of prosecuting a former president. It’s worth reading the whole indictment, if for no other reason than the high comedy of Trump’s cartoonish levels of lawbreaking and self-incrimination: placing boxes upon boxes of classified documents in his bathroom and on stage in his ballroom in full public view, privately discussing how to lie to and mislead the FBI, and constantly telling visitors how very, very secret his documents are and how he shouldn’t even be showing them to people.

The case has monopolized national attention the past few days, with a broad range of commentators expressing outrage and condemning Trump for potentially compromising US nuclear secrets, weapons capabilities, defensive vulnerabilities, and plans for waging war on Iran.

Wait — war with Iran?

Yes, in a detail that’s been almost entirely glossed over, central to this case are a set of secret government plans for attacking Iran. Other than as a pure factual matter or to stress how recklessly Trump treated classified information, this has been little remarked upon, even as forthright condemnations of wars of aggression and paeans to international law have taken center stage in US political discourse over the past year.

The issue stems from Trump’s apparent frustration with what he claimed was a false narrative being pushed by the press: that after losing the 2020 election, under the advice of then–Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu (who was briefly removed from power before returning last November) and the coterie of Iran hawks he’d surrounded himself with, Trump was dangerously close to ordering strikes on Iran that could have triggered full-scale war, and had to be talked down from it by chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley.

According to the indictment, in a recorded interview Trump gave at his New Jersey golf club in July 2021 to a writer and publisher working on an upcoming book, the former president maintained the reality of the situation was the exact opposite: that it was Milley and the Pentagon who were pushing for an attack on Iran on a reluctant Trump and that the classified documents he had kept were proof of this. Specifically, Trump showed them a “pages-long” set of plans for attacking Iran that he said were independently drawn up by the military and presented to him.

“This totally wins my case, you know,” Trump allegedly said, according to the indictment. “Except it is like, highly confidential.” (Hilariously, Trump also went on to say that “as president I could have declassified it” but “now I can’t,” one of many instances in the indictment of Trump effectively doing prosecutors’ job for them).

It’s difficult to know what to believe here. The original New Yorker article, which came out of interviews conducted by author Susan Glasser and her husband, New York Times reporter Peter Baker, points to reporting from the Wall Street Journal’s Michael Bender and the Washington Post’s Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig as corroboration, each of whom put out their own books about the final years of Trump’s presidency. But neither of those books features that particular episode.

In fact, while Rucker and Leonnig’s I Alone Can Fix It alleges that Milley told a confidante that he viewed preventing war with Iran before the 2021 inauguration as one of his “missions,” it also depicts Milley as one of the advisors urging on Trump’s drone assassination of Iranian Quds Force commander Gen. Qassem Soleimani — the one-year anniversary of which fell on January 3, 2021, which was the reason there were fears of some kind of Iranian attack in Trump’s lame-duck period at all to begin with. Baker’s own reporting on that assassination at the time didn’t depict Milley in the best light, as he justified the reckless strike on the basis of reportedly vague intelligence about threats that didn’t actually come to pass.

On the other hand, Milley has been a voice of restraint on other wars, including during Joe Biden’s presidency, and Trump is a relentless, career-long liar.

Whatever the case, the bigger point here is that there are US war plans for Iran at all. One could argue that the military has to draw up potential plans for all kinds of contingencies (even if the fact that they allegedly passed it on to Trump suggests this was more than just a hypothetical, break-glass-in-case-of-emergency document filed away in obscurity).

But this comes in the midst of years of ratcheting up tensions between not just Iran and the United States, but maybe more dangerously, Iran and Israel. The latter’s government has been pushing the Biden administration to take a more aggressive posture posture toward Iran for years, pressure that has been ratcheted up under Netanyahu’s current hard-line government, which has carried out its own strikes inside Iran and done several major and threatening joint exercises with the US military, including one just last week.

More recently, the Discord leaks of Pentagon intelligence revealed that the CIA itself doesn’t know how serious Israel is about its threats to attack. Even so, the White House has signaled it would approve of whatever Israel decides to do, even if Israel ends up sparking a regional war or even drags the United States into the fray — a radical reversal of US posture under President Barack Obama.

And while Washington and Tehran have thankfully made recent progress in nuclear talks that Biden himself declared “dead” last year, that may not matter. Netanyahu, no doubt emboldened by the White House’s “ironclad” support, has more or less explicitly said that whatever agreement is struck, Israel won’t be bound by it and won’t consider Iran’s nuclear program stopped, justifying unilateral strikes regardless — even as the Pentagon’s own National Defense Strategy paper openly states that Iran not only doesn’t have a nuclear weapon but isn’t even currently pursuing one.

The existence of US war plans for Iran suggests it wouldn’t take much for Israeli attacks to draw the United States into yet another disastrous war, particularly if Iran retaliates, particularly if it winds up killing Americans in the process, whether intentionally or not. Any such war would be a calamity, not just for innocent Iranians but around the world, further destabilizing oil prices and adding to the economic havoc from the war in Ukraine that’s already caused much secondary human suffering, while potentially creating the conditions for a much bigger and more dangerous confrontation. Iran’s deepening alliance with Russia, after all, could draw Moscow into the war, turning the country into the second front of a global proxy battle between two nuclear superpowers, the United States and Russia, while adding a third nuclear power, Israel, into the volatile mix.

We’re not nearly there yet. But it’s incumbent on all peace-loving people in the United States to work now, proactively, to stop this scenario from coming to pass — not just to ensure the past year’s rhetoric about illegal wars, imperialism, human rights, and international law isn’t mere hollow, cynical posturing, but to prevent even more needless death and suffering. Unfortunately, what seems like collective disinterest in the US-Israeli march to war in the press and otherwise doesn’t bode well for these efforts.