The second US war on Iran in less than a year has raised a burning question in popular media: What is the rationale for the war and why is it changing? Is it because negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program were not progressing? Is it because Iran was close to developing nuclear weapons? Is it because Iranian ballistic missiles were going to reach the US soon? Is it because Israel was going to attack Iran and the US took pre-emptive measures to ensure the safety of Americans? Is it because the Iranian government was violating human rights? Or is it something else? The press in the US has not been able to make sense of this changing justification. But this is curious. Was the media asleep over the past few decades? More

Eleven months. That’s how long it took DHS to admit that one of its immigration agents killed Ruben Ray Martinez as he sat in his car on South Padre Island on the Gulf Coast of Texas. And even then, they lied about it, claiming that Martinez, a 23-year-old American citizen, had run over an immigration officer, hurling his body onto the hood of his car. A newly released video extracted by a lawsuit against the Texas Department of Public Safety shows that Martinez didn’t run over anyone. Like Renee Good, he was executed as he was trying to follow the conflicting orders given by Texas police and federal agents and then slandered as a potential cop killer. More

In coverage of the war against Iran, a familiar choreography is playing out again, one that the media have carefully refined to exploit the perceived credibility of diaspora groups in order to push war and empire. This phenomenon of selectively and specifically amplifying diaspora voices who will cheerlead for war is now a well-documented feature of the American media ecosystem. For months in the lead up to this new illegal and unconstitutional war, high-profile American “news” outlets featured almost exclusively Iranians and Iranian-Americans who argued for regime change through ground invasion, a position arguably even more extreme and reckless than that of Donald Trump. More

Although Washington’s unrestrained militarism, which enjoys bipartisan support, is indeed cause for alarm, the erosion of the pretense of commitment to liberal-democratic values, human rights, and international law did not begin with the Trump administration. The live-streamed Israeli genocide in Gaza, enabled and backed by the Biden administration, has made this difficult to deny. Moreover, the assault on Gaza highlights how the U.S.-European axis has normalized impunity for systematic violence against non-combatants. This erosion of professed liberal values within that axis has helped consolidate a political climate in which the Trump administration could intensify its offensives against Venezuela and Cuba and pursue a war of aggression against Iran. More