Tuesday 15th of July 2025
Home » Blogs » Gus Leonisky's blog

overblown old briefings from the Israeli military and mossad.....

A Trump official tells The Grayzone that Israel’s Mossad is using CIA Director John Ratcliffe and US CENTCOM’s Gen. Michael Kurilla to influence Trump with cooked intelligence on Iran’s nuclear program. Inside the White House, dissenters have been isolated, setting the stage for a regime change war that could cost American lives.

Listen to/watch Max Blumenthal read this article here.

An official in the administration of President Donald Trump has told The Grayzone that CIA Director John Ratcliffe and US CENTCOM Commander Gen. Michael Kurilla have become vehicles for Israel’s Mossad and military as they seek to manipulate the US into attacking Iran. The Trump official referred to Ratcliffe as “Mossad’s stenographer.”

According to the official, Ratcliffe and Kurilla have pressured Trump to join Israel’s war more directly by regurgitating overblown briefings they received from the Israeli military and Mossad director David Barnea – but without informing the president that the intelligence was derived from a foreign third party.

During the Trump administration’s meetings with Israeli intelligence officials including Barnea, the official said the Israelis have demonstrated a single-minded focus on regime change, clamoring for authorization to assassinate Iran’s leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The Israeli officials have emphasized that the moment to take out Khamenei is now.

The issue of Iran’s nuclear enrichment capacity is of secondary concern in the Israelis’ presentations, which the official characterized as tactless, hyper-aggressive exercises in fear-mongering. At one point, the Trump official recalled, an Israeli intelligence briefer declared that Iran could transfer a nuclear weapon to Yemen’s Houthi militia in less than a week.

According to the official, Trump’s lead negotiator with Iran, Steve Witkoff, has been pushing the president to preserve the diplomatic track. However, an Israeli assassination of Khamanei would almost certainly be the nail in the coffin of nuclear negotiations – which is precisely why the Israelis seem so determined to do it.

If the US enters the war by attacking Iran, the official fears that Iran will activate IRGC-backed Popular Mobilization Units to attack US troops and bases in Iraq and Syria, leading to American casualties and triggering escalation well beyond the initial scope of Iran’s nuclear program.

Having launched a damaging war of attrition with Iran, Tel Aviv is deploying every mechanism at its disposal to compel the US to lurch headlong into the conflict it initiated, but which it can not finish on its own.

Inside the Trump administration, the source told The Grayzone that top officials who have questioned the logic of attacking Iran, such as Director of Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and her deputy, former CIA officer and director for the National Counter-Terrorism Center Joe Kent, have been excluded from meetings by White House Chief of Staff Suzie Wiles.

Taking the lead in briefing the president is a highly suggestible CIA director groomed by Israel since he first entered Congress.

AIPAC director boasts of influence over Ratcliffe

This April, The Grayzone released exclusive audio of remarks by AIPAC CEO Elliot Brandt to an off-the-record Israel lobby session in Washington DC. Boasting of his organization’s success in recruiting members of Congress, he described CIA Director John Ratcliffe as a “lifeline” inside the administration.

“You know that one of the first candidates I ever met with as an AIPAC professional in my job when he was a candidate for Congress was a guy named John Ratcliffe,” Brandt recalled. “He was challenging a long time member of Congress in Dallas. I said, this guy looks like he could win the race, and, we go talk to him. He had a good understanding of issues, and a couple of weeks ago, he took the oath as the CIA director, for crying out loud. This is a guy that we had a chance to speak to, so there are, there are a lot – I wouldn’t call them lifelines, but there are lifelines in there.”

Besides Ratcliffe, AIPAC CEO Elliott Brandt also named Marco Rubio and Mike Waltz, two former Republican congressmen cultivated by AIPAC in advance of their appointment to key national security positions in the Trump administration.

“They all have relationships with key AIPAC leaders from their communities,” said the AIPAC CEO. “So the lines of communication are good should there be something questionable or curious, and we need access on the conversation.”

This May, Waltz was outed by colleagues for secretly coordinating with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to orchestrate a US attack on Iran, costing him his job as National Security Council director. Secretary of State Rubio assumed the role of acting National Security Director, granting him control over more cabinet level positions than any US official since Henry Kissinger. Meanwhile, Ratcliffe quickly emerged as the key channel of Israeli influence in the administration.

The CIA director has come a long way since entering politics as the mayor of a backwater Texas town with a population of 7000.

A small town Texas mayor becomes big time Israeli asset

With no experience in the US military or intelligence, Ratcliffe spent the early part of his political career as mayor of Heath, a small town outside of Dallas, which was broken by a year-long stint as a US Attorney between 2007-08. He entered Congress in 2014, and emerged two years later as one of Trump’s fiercest attack dogs on the Judiciary Committee. The backbencher also served on the House Intelligence Committee.

Trump rewarded Ratcliffe’s loyalty by nominating him as Director of National Intelligence in 2019, but quickly withdrew the nomination after Ratcliffe was exposed for lying about his role in several federal terrorism cases.

His most absurd embellishment was on the prosecution of the directors of the Dallas-based Holy Land Foundation, in which he boasted that “he convicted individuals who were funneling money to Hamas behind the front of a charitable organization.” In fact, Ratcliffe played no discernible role in the case at all, prompting several Republican senators to withdraw support for his nomination when the lie came to light.

It is notable nonetheless that Ratcliffe sought credit for taking down the Holy Land Foundation, as the case was one of the most politicized and legally dubious prosecutions of the Bush-era “war on terror,” leading to life sentences for Palestinian American defendants whose only crime was sending charitable donations to organizations in the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip which were not on any government watchlist, and which also received support from the International Committee of the Red Cross and USAID. What’s more, the case was heavily influenced by Israeli intelligence.

Following a mistrial that proved embarrassing for the US government, Israel’s Mossad dispatched an agent to Texas to testify against the Holy Land directors. The judge allowed the agent to testify in secret, with the courtroom cleared, and under an assumed identity as “Avi.” The agent proceeded to brandish a series of questionable documents that supposedly proved the Holy Land Foundation was set up as the nexus of a vast terrorist financing network that had enabled several suicide bombings by Hamas.

While Ratcliffe’s fantastical claims about his role in the case tanked his nomination in 2019, Trump successfully installed him as DNI the following year, paving the way for his nomination as CIA director upon Trump’s re-election.

In 2024, the Jewish Daily Forward listed Ratcliffe among “Trump’s Jewish advisors and pro-Israel cabinet.”

Chief of Staff Suzie Wiles isolates Trump with “Israel’s favorite general”

The Trump official told The Grayzone that White House Chief of Staff Suzie Wiles has ensured that the president remains surrounded by Ratcliffe and Gen. Michael Kurilla in briefings related to Iran.

 

Ratcliffe is said to take dictation from the Mossad and read the documents they’ve prepared to the president without any sense of critical detachment, or disclose that the assessments came from a foreign liaison rather than US intelligence.

Then there is Gen. Kurilla, who appears singularly focused in meetings with Trump on making the case for a US attack on Iran. In 2024, the pro-Netanyahu Israeli outlet Israel Hayon described Kurilla as “a vital asset to Israel.” The UK’s Telegraph referred to Kurillathis June as “Israel’s favorite general.”

Former Pentagon officials have even speculated that Israel’s decision to launch an unprovoked surprise attack on Iran this June 13 was partially influenced by Kurilla’s looming retirement in July, as Tel Aviv did not want to go to war without him present at CENTCOM.

The Trump official told The Grayzone that Wiles has excluded Trump’s Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, from crucial meetings where US intervention in Iran was discussed. That included a June 8 meeting at Camp David where Ratcliffe used a clumsy sports metaphor to insist that Iran was just days away from producing a nuclear weapon: “It’s like saying a football team marched 99 yards down the field, got to the one yard line and, oh, they don’t have the intention to score,” he argued to Trump.

Two days later, Gabbard released a social media video invoking the American military’s destruction of the Japanese city of Hiroshima with a nuclear bomb in 1945, and warned that a similar horror could soon unfold because “political elite warmongers are carelessly fomenting fear and tensions between nuclear powers.”

Trump was reportedly infuriated by her comments. Asked by a reporter about Gabbard’s testimony this March that Iran had not restarted its nuclear weapons program, Trump grumbled, “I don’t care what she said,” then echoed Ratcliffe’s view – and by extension, that of the Israelis: “I think they were very close to having [a nuclear weapon].”

This may explain why Gabbard released a June 20 statement on Twitter/X insisting that her views on Iran’s nuclear enrichment were faithfully aligned with Trump’s, and had been distorted by a “dishonest media” seeking to “manufacture division.” Though the statement reaffirmed her commitment to President Trump, her assessment of Iran’s nuclear program did not differ from the evaluation she delivered in March, which determined Iran was not currently pursuing a nuclear bomb.

“America has intelligence that Iran is at the point that it can produce a nuclear weapon within weeks to months,” Gabbard claimed on Twitter/X, “if they decide to finalize the assembly.”

According to the Trump official, Chief of Staff Wiles has also excluded Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth from meetings on Iran, relying instead on Kurilla to represent the US military.

Vice President JD Vance has held a parallel series of meetings on Iran, the official said. In contrast to those controlled by Wiles, Vance has encouraged robust debate and included diverse perspectives. In public, however, Vance is constrained by the obligation to demonstrate loyalty to Trump.

For his part, Trump’s views are said to be shaped by constant exposure to Fox News, which has transformed in the past two weeks into a 24/7 commercial for war on Iran. Fox News’ coverage has become so transparently influenced by Israel’s propaganda machine that Steve Bannon, the former White House chief of staff and intellectual architect of the America First movement, called for a Foreign Agents Registration Act investigation of the network.

As Trump heads back to Washington on June 21, Bannon lamented that “the party is on,” suggesting the president had decided to go to war on Israel’s behalf.

https://thegrayzone.com/2025/06/21/trump-cia-director-ratcliffe-and-centcoms-kurilla-mossad-stenographers-iran/

 

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

 

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

zionist cruz's cross.....

 Meet the Israeli fanatic running Ted Cruz’s office

BY 

After Ted Cruz’s humiliation by Tucker Carlson, attention has focused on a top staffer of the self-proclaimed “leading defender of Israel in the United States Senate.”

On June 18, former Fox host Tucker Carlson published a video which, though marketed as an interview, was more of a snuff film. Over the course of two hours, Carlson can be seen rhetorically disemboweling his debate opponent, US Senator Ted Cruz, on the politician’s determination to see the US attack Iran on Israel’s behalf.

While Cruz presents himself as a Christian Zionist moved by his own zealotry to support Israel, the politician’s Tel Aviv-driven policy line can also be traced back to his Senior Advisor for Policy and Communications, an Israeli-born Zionist lobbyist named Omri Ceren.

Before overseeing Cruz’s public relations, Ceren managed his foreign policy docket as his national security advisor. Prior to joining the Senator’s staff, Ceren served as the press director for The Israel Project, a Zionist pressure group which was forced to close downafter being exposed as a de facto Israeli government front by Al Jazeera’s groundbreaking undercover investigation, The Lobby. Before that, Ceren cut his teeth lobbying for Ivory Coast dictator Laurent Gbagbo, who relied on Ceren as a registered foreign agent lending his marketing expertise to the embattled regime.

Ceren has consistently opposed a nuclear deal with Iran since at least 2015, when he declared that any agreement would simply ensure Tehran was “able to cheat with impunity.” At a talk hosted by the neocon Hudson Institute think tank in 2018, he suggested Washington should continue preaching about “freedom” and encouraging Iranian protesters to pursue regime change while simultaneously maintaining Trump’s ban on Iranians entering the US.

 

Omri’s sister, Merav Ceren, previously worked under the supervision of the Israeli Defense Ministry, as well as another Israeli government cutout in Washington, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. The pair were born in Haifa, Israel, with Merav embarking on her career of Israel lobbying as a college student.

 

Upon Merav Ceren’s appointment to head the Israel and Iran desks of Trump’s National Security Council in April 2025, one Israeli publication declared her “One of Our Own.” The authors went on to boast that Ceren’s “presence… in the discussion rooms gives significant space to voice Israeli interests.” Just a month later, however, she was fired as tensions between the Republican Party’s America First and Israel First wings came to a head. 

While his sister looked for a new gig, Omri Ceren continued to represent his home country as the national security advisor to a senator who has pantomimed “America First” conservatism while zealously advancing Israel’s objectives. Cruz’s messaging since the US bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities on June 21 clearly bears his Israeli advisor’s imprimatur.

Since the attack, Cruz has posted 14 comments on Twitter/X. 12 of them consisted of breathless statements cheering the bombing or attacks on opponents of the war, whom he branded as “the death to America crowd.” The remaining two posts expressed affection for the senator’s hometown NBA team, the Houston Rockets.

 

https://thegrayzone.com/2025/06/23/israeli-fanatic-ted-cruz-office/

 

READ FROM TOP.

 

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

 

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

Rafael grossi......

 

THE ISRAEL-IRAN RELATIONS THAT WERE HIDDEN FROM YOU
Israel - Iran: The Confrontation
by Thierry Meyssan

 

The confrontation between Israel and Iran does not at all correspond to the image presented by the media. Its roots lie in a period before the Islamic Republic and has no connection with the construction of a nuclear bomb. Its outbreak today is intended to conceal the misdeeds of the Argentinian Rafael Grossi, director of the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Here we are: the confrontation between Israel and Persia has begun. Its origins lie not in the Islamic Republic, but in what preceded it. This war is expected to last until one of the adversaries is exhausted.

To understand what is happening and avoid falling prey to one of the two official narratives that mask the reality of the problem, several steps back in time are necessary.

IRAN’S ENEMIES IN THE 20TH CENTURY
All demonstrations in Iran against external enemies end with the inevitable "Death to the United Kingdom! Death to the United States! Death to Israel!" It is a cry that comes from the depths of the suffering of the Persians since the First World War.

• Indeed, while we in the West are unaware of it, Iran was the victim, in 1917-1919, of the largest genocide of the First World War [1]. 6 to 8 million people died of starvation out of a population of 18 to 20 million, or between a quarter and a third of Iranians. Iran, although neutral, was crushed by the British armies, against a backdrop of rivalry with the Bolsheviks and the Ottomans. This horror has left a traumatic memory that is still very present in Iran [2]. There is no doubt for an Iranian that the United Kingdom is his country’s primary enemy.

• The British, who had colonized Iran behind one of their officers, Reza Shah (1925-1941), overthrew him to place his son in power, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (1941-1979). Behind these screens, they plundered the country’s oil. However, in 1951 the Shah chose Mohammad Mossadegh as Prime Minister. The latter nationalized the oil to the detriment of London. This ensued a quarrel during which the British made a bad faith assault and a color revolution that they organized with the help of the United States. This was "Operation Ajax" [3]. The new regime was no longer held by London, but by Washington. The United States Embassy, which installed the telephone, placed derivations of the lines of all the ministers to listen to them without their knowledge, live. This system was exposed during the 1978 revolution. Iranians therefore have no doubt that the United States is their second enemy.

• When Mossadegh was overthrown, the British imposed General Fazlollah Zahedi in his place. Zahedi was a Nazi they had imprisoned in Cairo, but London was counting on him to restore "order." He therefore formed a secret police force modeled on the Gestapo. He recruited former Nazis to train it, and several hundred "revisionist Zionists" were sent by Yitzhak Shamir (then working for the Mossad) to supervise them. [4] The horrors of the SAVAK, the most terrible secret police in the world at the time, can still be seen in the museum dedicated to it in Tehran. [5] Iranians therefore have no doubt that Israel is their third enemy.

ISRAEL’S SOLE ENEMY IN THE 20TH CENTURY
Contrary to what the Israeli population believes after 25 years of "revisionist Zionist" propaganda, Iran—neither that of the Shah nor that of the Islamic Republic—never aimed to annihilate the Jewish population of occupied Palestine. As President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad made clear, the goal was to destroy the State of Israel as Russia had destroyed the USSR. [6] No, the only enemy of the State of Israel is the one that, for 80 years, has sabotaged any attempt at peace between Jews and Arabs: the United Kingdom. As I have often explained, when the Foreign Office drafted its plan, The Future of Palestine, in 1915, it specified that a Jewish state should be created in Mandatory Palestine, but that it should under no circumstances be capable of ensuring its own security. It was only two years later that David Lloyd George’s government drafted the Balfour Declaration announcing the establishment of the Jewish National Home, and that the Woodrow Wilson administration committed itself to creating an independent state for the Jews of the Ottoman Empire.

The author of this text, Lord Herbert Samuel, became British High Commissioner to Palestine. True to form, he favored Jabotinsky’s "revisionist Zionists" on the one hand and, on the other, appointed the anti-Semite Mohammed Amin al-Husseini as Grand Mufti of Jerusalem.

He was subsequently appointed Home Secretary in Archibald Sinclair’s government.
This policy continues unabated to the present day: the United Kingdom still supports the "revisionist Zionist" Benjamin Netanyahu on the one hand and the Muslim Brotherhood, of which Hamas is the Palestinian branch, on the other.

THE CONTINUATION OF THE CONFLICT BETWEEN THE "REVISIONIST ZIONISTS" AND IRAN
Immediately after the Second World War, US President Dwight Eisenhower expressed concern that his Israeli counterpart, Chaim Weizmann, was creating a "Greater Israel," that is, not the reconstitution of the Kingdom of Jerusalem (which was already largely included in the State of Israel), but of the ancient Assyrian Empire (i.e., from the Nile to the Euphrates). He asked his Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, to organize an alliance between Syria and Iran to balance Israeli influence.

It was at Washington’s request that Syrian President Adib Shishakli (SSNP) (1953-1954) signed a military cooperation agreement with Iranian ruler Mohammad Reza Pahlavi on May 24, 1953. [7] It is therefore foolish today to denounce this same alliance (now called the "Axis of Resistance") simply because both regimes have been decolonized.

Yet that is what we are doing. In 1979, President Jimmy Carter ousted the Shah of Iran and his claim to dominate the Middle East by acquiring an atomic bomb supplied by French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing and his Prime Minister, Jacques Chirac. [8] To replace him, on the advice of his security advisor, Zbigniew Brzeziński, he moved Imam Ruhollah Khomeini from France to Tehran. Israel initially supported Iran against Iraq, supplying it with weapons as needed. Tel Aviv even organized the Iranian part of the Iran-Contra scandal. Then, it gradually changed its strategy [9] while retaining certain remnants of the Shah’s period. Thus, the EAPC-B consortium, half-owned by each of the two states, continues, even today, to operate the Eilat-Ashkelon pipeline, essential to the Israeli economy. In 2018, the Knesset adopted a law punishing any publication about the owners of this company with 15 years of imprisonment [10]. Since the Anglo-Saxon invasion of Iraq in 2003, allegedly because of its role in the September 11, 2001 attacks, London and Washington began spreading rumors about an alleged Iranian nuclear weapon, just as they had done about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction [11]. At the time, London and Washington hoped to force Iran to help them against Iraq.

These intoxications led to the passage of United Nations Security Council Resolutions 1737 (December 23, 2006) and 1747 (March 24, 2007) [12]. The leader of the Israeli opposition, Benjamin Netanyahu, then seized on this propaganda. For twenty-five years, he continued to denounce the "imminent" Iranian construction of an atomic bomb, even as Tehran tabled a proposed resolution at the United Nations creating "a nuclear-weapon-free zone in the Middle East" [13].

In any case, in 2013, William Burns (Joe Biden’s CIA director at the time) negotiated the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPoA) with Iran in Oman on behalf of President Barack Obama. This was staged at the 5+1 meetings (i.e., the five nuclear powers of the Security Council plus Germany) in Geneva. But it was not signed in Vienna until two years later, with the United States and Iran reserving a long suspension to conclude a secret additional annex.

In a very long interview [14], just before the end of his second term, Barack Obama explained that he refused, as a precaution, to prevent Iran from embarking on the race for an atomic bomb, but that he was ready to intervene if Tehran pursued a military nuclear program. His Security Advisor, Susan Rice, declared: "The Iran deal was never primarily about trying to open a new era of relations between the United States and Iran. It was much more pragmatic and minimalist. The goal was very simply to make a dangerous country considerably less dangerous. No one expected Iran to become a benevolent actor." The United States’ position [15] has not changed. Certainly, during his first term, President Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew from the JCPoA and the secret annex that Barack Obama had negotiated, but he only verbally refused to allow Iran to enrich uranium, not during negotiations.

During this period, Iran began mobilizing Shiite communities in the Middle East to ensure its security. Then, with General Qassem Soleimani, Tehran returned to the Khomeini doctrine of aid rather than instrumentalization. Iran already had no more "proxies" before Israel destroyed Hamas, Hezbollah, and many others. Each had become independent.

THE EVENTS THAT TRIGGERED THE CONFRONTATION

It so happens that, on June 7, Esmail Khatib, Iran’s Minister of Intelligence, made public an operation by his secret services. They succeeded in stealing confidential documents on Israel’s nuclear program, just as the Mossad had managed, in April 2018, to steal Iranian documents on its nuclear research [16].

On June 12, the IAEA Board of Governors—under the chairmanship of Rafael Grossi—adopted a resolution [17] in which it noted that “the Director General, as stated in document GOV/2025/25, cannot provide assurance that Iran’s nuclear programme is exclusively peaceful.” It therefore considered that “Iran’s numerous failures since 2019 to comply with its obligations to cooperate fully and timely with the Agency regarding undeclared nuclear material and activities at multiple undeclared locations in Iran, as detailed in document GOV/2025/25, constitute a breach of its obligations under its Safeguards Agreement with the Agency within the meaning of Article XII.C of the Agency’s Statute;.” Accordingly, it referred the matter to the United Nations Security Council.

But while the Iranian documents seized by the Mossad revealed no military nuclear program [18], despite statements by Benjamin Netanyahu, the first Israeli documents seized by the Iranian Intelligence Ministry called into question the neutrality of Rafael Grossi, director of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), an Argentinian. They revealed that he had transmitted observations from his organization to Israel, even though Israel is not a member. Among the IAEA governors, Russia, China, and Burkina Faso opposed this resolution.

It turns out that Rafael Grossi has already been criticized for his strange silence during the Russian special operation in Ukraine: he revealed, during a speech at the Davos Forum in 2022, that the Ukrainian regime had stockpiled 30,000 kilos of plutonium and another 40,000 kilos of enriched uranium at the Zaporizhzhia power plant. Then, nothing more, despite Russian objurgations.

The day after the publication of the documents seized by Iran, Tel Aviv attacked Iran. This is exactly the same behavior as during the war against Lebanon in 2006. Israel claimed to be acting after several of its soldiers were captured by Hezbollah. In reality, it intervened to halt investigations by the Lebanese police and justice system into a vast Israeli espionage and terrorism network in Lebanon; investigations that could have led to a new interpretation of the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafic Hariri, as I showed in my book The Terrible Imposture 2 [19].

Thierry Meyssan
Translation
Roger Lagassé

 

https://www.voltairenet.org/article222523.html

 

READ FROM TOP.

 

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

 

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.