Free Republic

The US carried out a cyber attack on Thursday night, just after Iran downed an American surveillance drone, The Washington Post reported. According to the Post, the targets were computers and systems responsible for missile attacks. The attacks were planned for weeks, if not months, but proposed only after the attack on two oil tankers earlier this month. The White House and US Cyber Command refused the Post's request for comment, but Pentagon spokeswoman Elissa Smith said, "As a matter of policy and for operational security, we do not discuss cyberspace operations, intelligence or planning." .....

President Donald Trump said Saturday the United States would impose “major additional sanctions” against Iran on Monday, after calling off military strikes against the Islamic Republic over concerns about the loss of life. Trump said he would discuss tensions between the U.S. and Iran at Camp David this weekend. “We want to be proportionate,” Trump told reporters Saturday. However, the president also said he has not ruled out using military force against Iran in the future. “It’s always on the table until we get this solved,” he said. “We have a tremendously powerful military force in that area.”

Evidence Iran has offered to ‘prove’ that an American RQ-4 Global Hawk drone was in its airspace when it was shot down this week is completely fraudulent. In particular, a photo Iran has published supposedly showing the drone tumbling from the sky in flames to indicate where it was when it was targeted destroys any remaining credibility the Islamic republic had. The state-run Islamic Republican News Agency published a photo of what the outlet claimed was the RQ-4 tumbling from the sky...

President Donald Trump said Saturday he's still considering military action against Iran after it downed an unmanned U.S. military aircraft, saying the use of force is "always on the table until we get this solved." The president said he aborted a military strike set for Thursday after learning 150 people would be killed. "I don't want to kill 150 Iranians. I don't want to kill 150 of anything or anybody unless it's absolutely necessary," he told reporters as he left the White House for a weekend at the Camp David presidential retreat. Trump said "we very much appreciate" a decision...

Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) compared President Donald Trump to his predecessor, former President Barack Obama, for calling off a military retaliation against Iran’s regime. “So I’ll wait to see additional information on it, but I think it’s important that people recognize that the United States is going to keep its word and not go down the path that President Obama went down,” Cheney told a CNN reporter on Friday.

President Trump called off a military strike against Iran in mid-mission Thursday, and his supporters and even some of his critics are hailing it as an act of restraint and courage. The question for American interests is whether Iran and other adversaries will see it instead as a sign of weakness and indecision. “We were cocked & loaded to retaliate last night on 3 different sights when I asked, how many will die. 150 people, sir, was the answer from a General. 10 minutes before the strike I stopped it, not proportionate to shooting down an unmanned drone,” Mr. Trump...

The somewhat disturbing news from last night involved Iran once again. Yesterday I was pondering what our response would be to Iran shooting down one of our drones. Surely some sort of meaningful action was called for, but what form would it take? Now we may (or may not) have found out what was on the agenda before allegedly being rejected at the last minute. Assuming the reporting of the New York Times can be taken at face value (a big assumption, which I’ll get to in a moment), we were set for air strikes against Iran until the President...

For more than a year we’ve known that Obama’s secretary of state and longtime U.S. senator, John Kerry, has been attempting to undermine President Donald Trump’s foreign policy with the Islamic republic of Iran. In May 2018, we posed the question: “What is John Kerry doing talking to the Iranians?” We noted: Reports … revealed that former Obama Secretary of State John Kerry is trying to ‘save’ the Iran nuclear deal he helped negotiate by holding secret meetings with Iranian diplomats. The Boston Globe reported that Kerry began his secret meetings as reports spread that President Donald J. Trump was...

There are several truisms about the Iranian regime. It is a deeply intolerant, religiously fanatical regime with a death grip on power through suppression and a corrupt system of bribes, payoffs and family connections.Tony Soprano has nothing on the mullahs’ regime.Like any insular group of Mafiosos, the mullahs ruling Tehran are a deeply paranoid bunch. They regularly suspect traitors in their midst and engage in periodic purges that would do Josef Stalin proud; right down to public hangings.They also desperately manipulate—sometimes clumsily—social media and the Internet in general in a vain attempt to trash opponents and to stifle debate about...

Amid mounting tension between the U.S. and Iran, the White House earlier Thursday invited House and Senate leaders and Democrats and Republicans on the House and Senate Intelligence and Armed Services Committees to meet with President Trump in the White House's secure Situation Room. Others who arrived for the meeting included CIA Director Gina Haspel, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Joseph Dunford, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan and Army Secretary Mark Esper, whom Trump has said he'll nominate as defense secretary. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., told Fox News that "we...

Iran executed an ex-contract employee on charges of spying for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, Reuters reported Saturday. Jalal Hajizavar left his post at the aerospace organization of the Iranian defense ministry nine years ago. He was convicted by a military court after an investigation which discovered documents and spying equipment at his home, according to Reuters, which cited an IRIB news agency report. Hajizavar was reportedly executed at the Rajai Shahr prison in Karaj, west of Tehran.

In love, war and making money, timing is everything. But unlike love and money, war is always a last resort. Ever since President Carter decided to abandon the Shah of Iran in 1979, Iran has been a thorn in the side of the United States and much of the West. Instead of a pro-West Shah, we now deal with a group of crazed Muslim clerics headed by the craziest of them all, Sayyed Ali Hosseini Khamenei who, like his predecessor, is determined to keep Iran in the 7th century, and conducts an orchestra of millions that regularly sings ‘Death to...

President Trump said Saturday Iran was “very wise” not to shoot down a manned plane when it decided to down an unmanned U.S. surveillance drone. “There was a plane with 38 people yesterday, did you see that? I think that's a big story. They had it in their sights and they didn't shoot it down. I think they were very wise not to do that. And we appreciate that they didn't do that. I think that was a very wise decision,” Trump told reporters Saturday. The Associated Press reported Friday that an Iranian Revolutionary Guard general said a manned U.S....

For some, you could hear the sound of war drums. It was coming. Iran had shot down a surveillance drone in international waters. President Trump did not mince words, saying Iran made a huge mistake, though was cagey about military action. He told the press “you’ll find out” when asked. President Trump has taken action before, firing cruise missiles at an airfield in Syria in 2017 after a horrible chemical weapons attack struck the town of Khan Shaykhun. The airfield was the staging ground. Reports trickled in last night that air strikes were ordered against Iran but were halted by...

White House counselor Kellyanne Conway's husband unleashed another attack on President Trump on Friday, blasting his "incompetence" and calling on him to resign after, at the last minute, he backed away from strikes on Iran. "Resign. If you didn’t know this until it was almost too late, you’re even more of an idiot than people think you are," Conway tweeted. "Do the country and the world a favor. Go back to real estate, where the worst you can do is kill banks." [snip]

Non-interventionist Trump allies are cheering President Trump's Thursday night decision to buck his most senior advisers and abandon an airstrike on Iran, saying the decision could help him win reelection while preventing a major regional war. Trump canceled the bombing of Iran after authorizing it, saying via Twitter he learned 150 Iranians might die, and that it would not be proportional to the loss of one U.S. drone. National security adviser John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo reportedly favored the attack, after issuing aggressive recent statements on Iran. “He doesn’t trust them. He felt that they were cornering...

Last month, when Trump dispatched the USS Abraham Lincoln Carrier Strike Group to the Persian Gulf region, it was reportedly the Israeli Mossad that tipped off the U.S. “on an Iranian plan to attack either a US or a US-allied target.”If so, the warning has already been borne out as just a week later Iran—trying to bully and threaten its way out of the Trump administration’s economic chokehold—attacked Norwegian, Emirati, and Saudi oil tankers, and last week attacked a Japanese and a Norwegian oil tanker.It’s not the first time Israeli intelligence has warned of impending attacks by Iran or...

The Shin Bet revealed an attempt by Iranian intelligence to set up an espionage infrastructure in Israel and arrested Taar Shafoot, a Jordanian citizen born in Hebron. During the Shin Bet interrogation, it was revealed that Shafoot, a Jordanian businessman, had entered Israel on behalf of Iranian intelligence to carry out missions intended to promote the establishment of infrastructure in Israel and in Judea and Samaria that would serve secret activities of the Iranians. The connection between Shafoot and Iranian intelligence began in Lebanon, where he met two Arabic-speaking handlers from Iranian intelligence, who called themselves Abu Sadek and Abu...

The Senate voted to block President Trump’s Saudi arms deal on Thursday, paving the way for a veto clash with the White House. The Senate voted 53-45 on resolutions to block two of the sales, with GOP Sen. Susan Collins (Maine), Lindsey Graham (S.C.), Mike Lee (Utah), Jerry Moran (Kansas), Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), Rand Paul (Ky.) and Todd Young (Ind.) joining Democrats. They voted 51-45 to block the additional 20 arms sales. Murkwoski flipped to vote for the sale, while Lee did not vote. The 22 arms sales, estimated to be worth more than $8 billion, would provide weapons to...