Guilty as Charged: How America and Israel Created the Iranian Nuclear Programme They Now Use as a Pretext for War

Guilty as Charged: How America and Israel Created the Iranian Nuclear Programme They Now Use as a Pretext for War

 

By Lim Tean

 

Lim Tean is the Secretary General of the People’s Alliance For Reform Singapore

Facts For Working People publishes this article for our readers interests and is not affiliated with the Alliance for Reform. on Facebook.

 

The Great Game

 

Ariel Sharon publicly called for IRAN’S VICTORY in 1982. Israel had 100 military advisers living in Tehran throughout the war. America supplied Iran with weapons-grade uranium. Now read what they say about Iran today — and ask yourself who the real rogue states are.

 

The Western narrative on Iran’s nuclear programme is built on a foundational lie — and the evidence to demolish it has been hiding in plain sight for decades. The United States and Israel, who present themselves today as the last guardians standing between a fanatical Iran and nuclear catastrophe, are in fact the two nations most responsible for Iran’s nuclear existence. 

 

They built it. They armed the state they now bomb. And the historical record convicts them on both counts.

 

Let the prosecution begin.

 

COUNT ONE: America Created Iran’s Nuclear Programme

Iran’s nuclear programme began under the Shah in 1957, after the United States and Iran agreed to a civilian nuclear cooperation arrangement known as the Cooperation Concerning Civil Uses of Atoms, through Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace programme. This was no accident of history. According to archival documents, a non-aligned Iran was viewed as a cornerstone in a deterrence strategy against the Soviet Union, and Atoms for Peace served to solidify Iran’s allegiance to the West. Tehran was not given nuclear technology out of benevolence — it was given nuclear technology as a Cold War bribe.

 

In November 1967, the Tehran Research Reactor went critical, initially fuelled with 93% highly enriched uranium provided by the United States. Read that sentence again. Washington supplied Tehran with weapons-grade fuel. The beneficiaries of the Atoms for Peace programme included Israel, India, Pakistan — and Iran, then ruled by the US-backed Shah. The same nations America would later spend decades accusing of nuclear adventurism were all schooled in the nuclear arts by Washington itself.

 

This programme was actively supported by the major Western powers, and the United States, France, and Germany sought lucrative power reactor sales to Iran. Lucrative. The word is important. This was never purely strategic calculation — it was commerce dressed as security policy.

 

COUNT TWO: America and Germany Built Bushehr

The Bushehr nuclear power plant was the idea of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who wanted a national electrical grid powered by nuclear plants. In August 1974, the Shah declared: “Petroleum is a noble material, much too valuable to burn… We envision producing, as soon as possible, 23,000 megawatts of electricity using nuclear plants.”

 

Washington did not object. Washington encouraged it. Preliminary agreements with Siemens KWU and Framatome for four nuclear power plants were signed. In 1975, construction of two reactors was started near Bushehr by Siemens KWU — modelled on Germany’s own Biblis B reactor. Some $3 billion was paid. Around 5,500 German nationals lived at the construction site. There had never been a German construction project abroad on that scale.

 

The Shah also sent dozens of Iranian students to MIT to study nuclear engineering in the mid-1970s, with the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran concluding a formal agreement with MIT in 1975 to provide a specialised master’s programme to train Iranian nuclear engineers.

 

America was not merely permitting this — it was actively shaping Iran’s nuclear scientific class. The engineers who today run Iran’s nuclear installations were trained, in no small part, by the United States of America.

 

Then 1979 came. The Shah fell. Washington’s man was gone. And the entire programme America had constructed — the reactors it had blessed, the engineers it had trained, the fuel it had supplied — suddenly became an existential threat. Nothing about Iran’s physical nuclear infrastructure had changed. What changed was the flag flying over Tehran.

 

This is not nonproliferation policy. This is geopolitics with a moral mask.

 

COUNT THREE: Israel Armed Khomeini’s Iran

Now we arrive at the most spectacular hypocrisy in modern Middle Eastern history.

 

Israel supported Iran throughout the Iran-Iraq War to provide a counterweight to Iraq, to re-establish influence in Iran lost with the overthrow of the Shah, and to create business for the Israeli weapons industry. Israel sold Iran $75 million worth of arms in Operation Seashell in 1981, including antitank guns, TOW missiles, and spare parts for tank and aircraft engines. 

 

Arms sales totalled an estimated $500 million from 1981 to 1983. Other experts placed the true figure at more than $500 million per year, with internal US government reports suggesting total Israeli arms sales to Iran approached $2 billion annually in the early 1980s.

 

This was not marginal, deniable activity. There were never less than around one hundred Israeli advisers and technicians in Iran at any time throughout the war, living in a carefully guarded camp just north of Tehran, where they remained even after the ceasefire. While Iranian leaders called for Israel’s destruction at Friday prayers, Israeli military personnel were embedded in the Islamic Republic’s war machine.

 

And what did Israel say about this arrangement? Israeli Defence Minister Ariel Sharon told the Washington Post in May 1982: “Iraq is Israel’s enemy and we hope that diplomatic relations between us and Iran will be renewed as in the past.” Four months later, he told a Paris press conference: “Israel has a vital interest in the continuing of the war in the Persian Gulf, and in Iran’s victory.”

 

Israel’s most celebrated military strategist — the man later to become Prime Minister — was publicly calling for Iran’s victory and hoping for renewed diplomatic relations with the Khomeini government. He was not some rogue voice. Israel’s participation in the arms transfers was approved by Prime Minister Shimon Peres. This was state policy, authorised at the highest level.

 

COUNT FOUR: Washington Covered for Israel While Publicly Blockading Iran

By 1982, it was evident to the US State Department that Israel was routinely selling American-made military material to Iran without Washington’s case-by-case consent, as was part of the original agreement between Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Secretary of State Alexander Haig. The Reagan administration’s response? It replenished Israel’s weapons stockpile — even as American weapons were visibly flowing to Tehran.

 

This wilful ignoring of Israel’s arms sales occurred despite the fact that the Reagan administration began in 1983 an aggressive public campaign, known as Operation Staunch, to stop worldwide weapons sales to Iran.

 

Operation Staunch — publicly strangling Iran’s arms supply while privately allowing Israel to sustain it. The cynicism is breathtaking.

 

THE VERDICT: Power, Not Principle

The prosecution rests. Let us state plainly what the evidence establishes:

America launched Iran’s nuclear programme in 1957. America supplied it with highly enriched uranium. America trained its nuclear engineers at MIT. America and Germany built the Bushehr reactor to near-completion. Israel armed the Islamic Republic throughout an eight-year war, with hundreds of its own personnel embedded in Tehran, while its Defence Minister publicly called for Iran’s victory.

 

Then — the moment Iran ceased to serve Western and Israeli strategic interests — the same programme became an abomination against civilisation. The same nuclear infrastructure became proof of genocidal intent. The same nation they had armed, trained, and enriched became the supreme threat to regional order.

 

What changed was not Iran. What changed was the calculus of domination.

Today, as Israel prosecutes a war that its own strategic class has long sought — the destruction not of Iran’s weapons but of Iran as a functional state, a war aimed at cementing Israeli military supremacy from the Nile to the Euphrates — we are asked to accept the framing that this is about nonproliferation. That this is about protecting the world from nuclear catastrophe.

 

It is not. It never was.

 

The rules-based international order has always been a legitimacy laundering operation — a mechanism by which the powerful dress their interests in universal principle. The history of Iran’s nuclear programme is among the most complete indictments of that system ever assembled. It was built by the West when Iran was useful, condemned by the West when Iran became independent, and is now being bombed by the West in service of a regional hegemony project its architects dare not name openly.

 

The architects of Iran’s nuclear existence are now its executioners. History will record the rank hypocrisy. When you hear Trump declare repeatedly that Iran will never have nuclear weapons, bring to his attention the facts I have set out in this post and laugh at him in his face!  

 

Lim Tean is the Secretary General of the People’s Alliance For Reform Singapore 

Social Democrats Win Big in New York City Democratic Primaries

Source: NPR

Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired

Anyone who reads this blog, and my occasional contributions to it, knows that I have long argued that the era of domination by the two major capitalist parties over U.S. political and economic life is drawing to a close.

 

It has been a long time coming. Americans are so disgusted with both the Democratic and Republican parties that in national elections tens of millions simply opt out, convinced that neither party represents their interests. It is important to recognize that even in the last presidential election, a little over 30% of eligible voters (including those that opted out) voted for Trump.

 

The statistics bear this out. A 2023 Gallup poll found that 63 percent of U.S. adults agree that the Republican and Democratic parties do such a poor job of representing the American people that a third major party is needed.

 

The desire for change extends beyond dissatisfaction with the political system. 

 

Around two-thirds of Americans believe that government should ensure health coverage for all. How this should be achieved varies, of course, and we have to take into account the decades-long propaganda campaign against any form of socialized service in the United States. When I arrived in this country 52 years ago, many workers told me they opposed a national health care system like that in Britain because they had been convinced it was communist and inherently inefficient.

 

Similarly, more than 80 percent of Americans believe that housing should be made more affordable. I could go on, but you get the picture.

 

Against this backdrop, Tuesday's Democratic primary elections in New York City amounted to a political earthquake. In addition to Zohran Mamdani's victory in the mayoral primary, the three congressional candidates backed by Mamdani all won their respective races.

 

The significance of these victories should not be underestimated. They reflect the declining authority of the Democratic Party establishment and the growing appetite for alternatives. Investigative journalist Ken Klippenstein summarized the scale of the defeat for the party leadership:

 

"In New York, the Democratic Party's heaviest hitters — all from the state — lost big. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries endorsed the incumbents and campaigned hard against the Mamdani slate. Chuck Schumer, the other great power of New York Democratic politics and Senate Minority Leader, said almost nothing about his own party's candidates, which tells you how eager he was to distance himself from the fight. Governor Kathy Hochul lined up behind Representative Dan Goldman in Manhattan.

 

Between the three, they couldn't deliver a single race."

 

All three victorious congressional candidates are members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), an organization that has grown substantially since Bernie Sanders' presidential campaign in 2016.

 

There is no denying that these results represent a major rebuke to the Democratic Party leadership and to policies that have failed to address the needs and aspirations of large numbers of Americans. Nor is this sentiment confined to New York City as some pundits have argued. Across the country, people are demanding change, and both parties of capitalism are widely distrusted. So it’s also possible that these results foreshadow broader gains for insurgent and progressive candidates elsewhere. 

 

However, I still do not see the Democratic Party as the vehicle through which major reforms can be won. Sanders had an opportunity a decade ago to break from the party and attempt to build an independent left reform alternative. Whether such a project could have succeeded is impossible to know, but his campaign demonstrated that there was a substantial audience for it.

 

Who might have joined such an effort is also impossible to say. Perhaps Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, perhaps Ilhan Omar or Rashida Tlaib—politicians who have shown considerable courage at various points. Ocasio-Cortez has since become a rising star within the Democratic Party and is unlikely to return to the position she once expressed when she observed that only in the United States would she and Joe Biden belong to the same political party.

 

The larger question concerns the limits of reform in the era of late-stage capitalism. I do not believe that major reforms can be won, nor that a genuinely independent working-class political alternative can be built, without a mass movement capable of confronting the capitalist offensive in a serious and sustained manner.

 

Such a movement would inevitably seek its own political expression. In my view, any durable independent working-class political force is more likely to emerge from mass struggle, organization, and collective action than from electoral maneuvering within the framework of the existing parties. 

 

It is from such movements that an independent political alternative will ultimately arise.

Editorial: what will a Burnham leadership mean?

L Keir Starmer R Andy Burnham

From the UK Socialist Website Left Horizons

Editorial: what will a Burnham leadership mean?

24 June 2026Posted by Editor

Short of an unexpected natural disaster, it looks like Andy Burnham will be Labour leader and new Prime Minister, perhaps be the end of July. Labour conference looks like being a coronation, there being little likelihood of any right-wing opposition to Burnham from the parliamentary Labour Party, most of whom are only too happy for a chance to salvage their political careers under a new leader.

Before considering the implications of Burnham ascendancy, it is worth noting that he will be the seventh Prime Minister in ten years – a record for the British capitalism state and one that marks it out as the least stable in western Europe in recent times. Moreover, the dumping of a Labour Prime Minister, less than two years into the parliament has never happened before in more than a century of Labour history.

Starmer’s resignation speech was a master-class in self-righteousness, lies and hypocrisy. He claimed to have inherited a party “that was politically, financially and morally bankrupt”. In fact Labour was the biggest party is western Europe, awash with money from its membership dues. Starmer squandered this money on pointless litigations over alleged antisemitism.

As for “morally” bankruptcy, Starmer glossed over ditching his “ten pledges” as soon as he was elected, and the tens of thousands of pounds-worth of “gifts” he received from rich backers immediately on coming into office. And there was no greater absence of morality in helping empower Netanyahu in his genocidal attack on the people of Gaza.

The key question that faces socialists

The key question that faces socialists today is this: to what extent will the Labour Party revive under Andy Burnham? If the Labour Party is pretty much a moribund organisation now, with few activists and largely demoralised or  quiescent membership – not to mention the plague of CLP suspensions and closures – will it revive again in the future, and will it once again, a place where real socialist ideas can be aired and get a hearing? The answer to that, as we will explain, is a heavily qualified‘yes’. Qualified, only because the scale of change and the pace of change are impossible to predict.

There is a spectrum of opinion on the left as to what difference Burnham will make. On one end of the spectrum is the Marathon to Snickers view: the name and wrapper was changed, but the content was exactly the same. On the other end of the spectrum, some on the left think that Burnham will ‘save’ the Labour Party from a defeat at the hands of Reform. The truth probably lies somewhere in between, but where precisely it lies on that spectrum remains to be seen.

In times of social and economic crises, class conflicts and struggles are sharpened to a higher degree, through strikes, demonstrations, occupations and even riots. As economic uncertainties and insecurities intensify, so also do political reactions to them. But clash of opposing class interests is always reflected inside the labour movement – in the trade unions and the Labour Party – in the form of more bitter and angry conflict between left and right, over what is the correct course of action.

Such is the period that is opening up at the present time. We can more or less identify the pressures that will be put on Andy Burnham from both right and left, once he takes the keys of Ten Downing Street.

The worst Parliamentary Labour Party in its history

Burnham will be under the sway of a Parliamentary Labour Party which is the worst in the Labour Party’s entire history – nine-tenths of ‘Labour’ MPs with little connection to working class people, and out only to further their own careers and prestige.

Burnham, let us remember, has been adopted by the PLP right wing as the only hope of saving their careers. Josh Simons, who stood down as Makerfield MP to let Burnham stand, is an arch right-winger. He was the director of Labour Together, that toxic factional organisation that spent hundreds of thousands of pounds to undermine Jeremy Corbyn and then promote Starmer for the leadership. (See analysis of that by-election, here)

Much of the huge sums of money given to Labour Together was illegal – not declared to the Electoral Commission, for which the organisation was fined – but as director, Josh Simons spent tens of thousands more to put private detectives onto the journalists who were researching that illegality. (On this, see the excellent book Fraud, by Paul Holden).

This PLP of carpet-baggers and chancers only want Burnham to save their necks. But in the process, they will also push him towards ‘moderation’ and against too much ‘radicalism’ – like the rest of Labour’s right-wing, they have no understanding of real politics and their political horizons cannot see beyond the capitalist system.

In pushing from the right, the PLP will be backed up by the media and the establishment in general, including the civil service, the judiciary and the defence procurement monopolies who want to make billions more in profit from an expanded defence budget.

The biggest of these pressures on Burnham, however, will be the insistent and remorseless pressure of the market system itself. Over recent months, even the smallest threat of Starmer’s resignation led to the bond markets being in a panic, pushing up interest rates. There is a constant threat from this quarter that ‘unfunded’ government expenditure will lead to a massive rise in interest rates – as happened under the ill-fated premiership of Liz Truss – and an economic crisis.

The imperatives of capitalism – more austerity

The consensus in all the representative journals of capitalism – like the Financial Times and the Economist – is that there need to be strict controls on government expenditure and that increased spending on defence comes out of spending on welfare. For capitalism, these policies are an imperative.

These, therefore, will constitute the pressures that will push Andy Burnham in the direction of the Marathon/Snickers metaphor – a new label, but the same confectionary underneath. In response to hints about public spending, Burnham has already been making some suggestions that he will abide by the same ‘fiscal rules’ – ie limit public spending – as has Rachel Reeves.

But on the other hand, what will be different for Burnham, as compared to Starmer, is that expectations are different. Burnham has been catapulted into high office precisely because there is a perception within the labour movement that he will represent working class people better. To some extent, although often vaguely, he has articulated the needs of working class people – for example, by talking about “forty years of failed neo-liberalism” and the need for public ownership of utilities.

Most trade union leaders, with a few honourable exceptions, cravenly supported Keir Starmer heaving the Labour Party to the right. With the assistance of the then general secretary, David Evans, the left was attacked mercilessly. Labour conferences – with the support of right-wing union leaders – backed constitutional changes that shifted the balance of power to the right wing. Corbyn was isolated and not allowed to stand. MPs were suspended for supporting measures like abolition of the two-child benefit cap (a measure Starmer was eventually dragging kicking and screaming into doing away with) and thousands of members were expelled or walked away.

For the 2024 general election, scores of right-wing candidates were parachuted into seats over the heads and usually against the wishes of local party members, and all of this was accepted by most of the trade union reps on Labour’s NEC.

TULO showing signs of life

That may no longer be the case, however. The organisation of affiliated trade union members, TULO, has so much clout in the Party and on the NEC that it could lift its little finger and make the Party leadership jump. They are supposed to represent four million affiliated members but in the Starmer years, TULO misrepresented them.

Now, however, TULO seems to be waking up. In its recent statement it said, in part, “Labour’s affiliated unions are deeply concerned by the Party’s catastrophic election results. They show a stark disconnect between this Labour Government and the working people.”

How can it be otherwise? The trade union leaders understand – even though they may sometimes pretend not to – that the surge of votes for Reform, which threatens the careers of MPs and the rights of workers in general, is not due to a wave of millions of voters become racist. It is due to the overwhelming gut feeling of millions of workers that their economic prospects are getting worse year on year.

Andy Burnham will be under enormous pressure to deal with these very real concrete issues. Working families are less secure. The services on which they rely, especially the NHS, is falling apart in front of their eyes. Their children and grandchildren are getting married but there is no decent affordable housing available. Good, well-paid jobs exist only for a few, while most jobs do not provide enough to live on week by week. Reform UK and the rag-bag assortment of racists and xenophobes have no answers – socialists are well aware of that – but it is easy to understand why so many voters are seduced into thinking that ‘someone’ else, ie migrants, are getting more resources than them.

To take one more relevant example, The Guardian published a story only yesterday about child poverty. “Four hundred thousand children in the UK”, it reported, “were supported by baby banks in 2025, an 11% increase from the year before, prompting warnings from charities that they “cannot continue to absorb the impact of child poverty on this scale” without government support”. And this is under a ‘Labour’ government.

What we need to understand is this: it was not due to parliamentary chicanery or manoeuvres in the corridors of power that Starmer is being booted out. It is due to the bread and butter issues that face millions of working class families and the impact these have had on electoral politics.

And it is in this respect that there will be expectations put on Burnham that were not put on Starmer – in the streets, in the workplaces and in the communities. There are expectations that he will have to provide some answers, something different, even if it means challenging the wealth, power and privileges of the billionaire-class.

If, as seems likely, the right wing of the parliamentary party is not willing to stand a candidate against Burnham, it is because they know that their candidate – Darren Jones, or Wes Streeting, for example – would be utterly crushed in any contest. That is a measure of the feelings of the Labour and trade union grass roots.

Left Horizons believes, therefore, that the Burnham leadership and premiership will mark a new stage in the life of the Labour Party, a small beginning of change, but only a beginning. It does not mean a return to the old conditions, where the two-party system dominated utterly and Labour was the only serious party on the left. The Green Party, with a radical leader and policies as left as Corbyn’s ever were, is here to stay in the short and medium-term at least. It is a party with many good socialist members, thousands of them driven out of Labour by Starmerism.

Labour is today a desert, but things might change

But the idea that the Labour Party is near ‘death’ is a long way from certain. In fact, that argument has been made and proven too many times in the past, and at least at the moment it still rests on the affiliation of four million trade union members.

If an early period of promise and hope under Burnham eventually gives way to a period of disappointment, because of the pressure of capitalism and his inability or unwillingness to resist that, even then that will not necessarily mean the end of that party.

Such disappointment in the present circumstances is far more likely to lead to a revolt within the affiliated unions, and through that, to a revolt in the Labour Party in general. Where the Labour Party is today a political desert, with little activity and discussion, Burnham’s accession to power represents the very early beginning of a change, at first particularly inside the unions.

We live in a period whereby the crisis of the capitalist system is more demanding and intense than it has been for generations. Socialist ideas – the programme of democratic control and management of the commanding heights of the economy and a rational economic plan in the interests of all – are more relevant today than at any time. Such ideas will find a far greater echo in the future, but particularly in the organisations where workers and youth gather to discuss left-wing politics.

Labour has not been such an organisation for some time, but that could be about to change. How much it changes, and how quickly, we cannot say, but in the life of this very important political party, Burnham’s rise could mark an important turning point. 

Opinion: Marco Rubio embarrasses himself — and America — on Iran

Marco Rubio embarrasses himself — and America — on Iran

Lim Tean *

06-23-26

On Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/PeoplesVoiceSingapore

 

The US Secretary of State has just told the world that Iran’s foreign policy is driven by “pure theology” and that “no one has ever been able to do a successful deal with Iran.”

 

Both claims are demonstrably false. Both reveal a man profoundly unqualified for the office he holds.

 

Abbas Araghchi is one of the finest diplomatic minds operating in the world today. A career diplomat of thirty years, he was the technical architect of the JCPOA — mastering every clause, every verification mechanism, every sanctions schedule across eighteen months of gruelling negotiation with the world’s major powers. He does not need briefing notes. He is the briefing note.

 

When Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner sit across the table from him to negotiate, the contrast is almost painful to witness. Here is a man who has spent three decades studying the granular architecture of nuclear nonproliferation, sanctions law, and regional security arrangements — facing two real estate developers from New York who cannot tell a centrifuge from a footnote. 

 

Araghchi has every detail at his fingertips: the technical specifications, the legal precedents, the diplomatic history, the red lines and their rationale. His American counterparts are essentially improvising.

 

This is not negotiation. This is a doctoral examiner sitting down with students who have not read the syllabus.

 

Iran has concluded deals — repeatedly. The 2015 JCPOA was negotiated with five permanent Security Council members plus Germany. It was verified by the IAEA. It worked. It was America that tore it up.

 

And then there is Rubio himself. Anyone who has watched him testify before Congress will know exactly what I mean. What you witness is not statecraft. It is a man who has made a career of spouting propaganda and ideological talking points — recycling neoconservative slogans in place of analysis, substituting bluster for knowledge, and confusing belligerence with strength. He has never demonstrated a serious understanding of Iran’s political structure, its factional dynamics, its strategic doctrine, or its negotiating history. 

 

The words in that image are not merely wrong — they are terrifying in what they reveal about the man now simultaneously occupying the offices of Secretary of State and National Security Adviser. That such extraordinary concentration of foreign policy power should rest in hands this ignorant is one of the most alarming facts about American governance today.

 

What Rubio is actually revealing is not Iranian irrationality. He is revealing Washington’s own incapacity — its inability to honour commitments, sustain agreements, or treat adversaries as strategic actors deserving of serious engagement.

 

The most dangerous diplomats are not the radical ones. They are the ignorant ones — those who mistake their own ideological blinkers for geopolitical insight.

 

In my assessment, Rubio is the most ignorant and incompetent Secretary of State the United States has produced since the Second World War. That is not hyperbole. It is a considered judgment from someone who has studied American foreign policy across eight decades.

 

The world deserves better. So, frankly, does America. 

Lim Tean is Secretary General and founder of the People's Voice Party of Singapore

Ken Klippenstein: Minnesota “Antifa” Terrorists Charged

 Minnesota “Antifa” Terrorists Charged

Federal prosecutor can't explain why or who Antifa is

Ken Klippenstein June 23 2026

U.S. Attorney for Minnesota Daniel Rosen

NSPM-7 is a scandalously under-covered story, please subscribe so I can cover it more

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Last week’s federal indictment of 15 anti-ICE protestors in Minnesota as alleged “Antifa” members — and thus domestic terrorists — is a masterclass in how the FBI is now practicing “pre-crime,” arresting normal citizens beforethey commit a crime, or without regard to whether they’ve committed a crime at all.

It is one of the first cases where presidential national security memorandum 7 (NSPM-7) has been explicitly referenced by the Justice Department as directing arrests, a new practice that began this month. U.S. Attorney for Minnesota Daniel Rosen said that the directive established Joint Task Force Vanguard to “prioritize politically motivated violence,” which to the Trump administration of course means its opponents. The directive, Rosen, also said, directs federal investigators “to investigate, prosecute, and disrupt those who engage in political violence and intimidation.” 

Rosen was asked at the press conference how the Justice Department defines Antifa, and basically had no answer. “What is Antifa goes beyond, goes beyond, I think, the scope of what this indictment is,” he replied. “But what I can tell you is that we have plenty of people that self-identify in that way, and you might wanna ask them that question.”

And as to whether anyone was actually hurt, here too Rosen stumbled. “Whether or not they actually, at the end of the day, caused bodily harm is not the measure of whether or not they committed a serious federal crime,” said, sounding like a kid who hadn’t done the homework being called on in class.

In other words, the federal government is prosecuting a group it cannot even define.

The Trump administration’s war on its opponents finds its solid form in the war on Antifa. Because President Trump “designated” Antifa as a terrorist group, “counterterrorism” rules apply. Think of the modern day FBI objective as preventing another 9/11: that is, following the doctrine of the past two decades, which is to stop an attack before it happened.

Though they don’t say it explicitly, Task Force Vanguard is in the business of pre-crime. Under NSPM-7, the feds require no crime to actually have been committed. They only need “indicators.” The indicators are broad enough to sweep in millions of Americans: “anti-Americanism,” “anti-capitalism,” “anti-Christianity,” “extremism on migration,” as I’ve previously reported.

Trump’s NSPM-7 Labels Common Beliefs As Terrorism “Indicators”

KEN KLIPPENSTEIN · SEPTEMBER 27, 2025

With the mainstream media distracted by the made-for-TV drama of James Comey’s indictment, Trump has signed a little-noticed national security directive identifying “anti-Christian” and “anti-American” views as indicators of radical left violence. Called National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, it’…

Read full story

Antifa as an indicator is absurd. At protests I’ve covered over the past couple of years, when I asked people what they thought of Antifa, the answer I heard again and again — from moms, from grandpas — was “I’m Antifa!” Some of the protestors were being playful, some were being defiant. But what they didn’t mean was that they were part of some organization as Washington imagines it. When I asked them why Antifa, the answer was universal. They are anti-fascist, which in non-national security terms is what they thought the word simply meant.

That confusion has produced mishaps that would be funny if the stakes weren’t what they are — like the time federal law enforcement was convinced it had identified the “leader of Antifa,” who turned out to be some random guy in Portland, as I reported.

U.S. Attorney Rosen announced at his press conference:

“Today, a federal indictment was unsealed charging 15 defendants with conspiracy to impede or injure federal officers and other charges related to efforts of two Minneapolis-based Antifa groups that violently opposed the enforcement of federal law in our state. The defendants are members and associates of Direct Action Minnesota… These defendants have been charged not for what they said, but for what they did. They all joined an agreement, a conspiracy, to interfere with lawful immigration enforcement operations.”

“Conspiracy” sounds to me like an awful lot like civil disobedience or free speech. Note, for instance, that the most vivid piece of evidence Rosen actually presented to reporters was a video of one defendant, Kyle Wagner, using violent rhetoric — speech — which sits awkwardly beside Rosen’s insistence that nobody was being charged “for what they said.”

NSPM-7 was signed in September 2025, three days after Trump’s executive order designating Antifa a domestic terrorist organization. It directs the government to disrupt networks supposedly “animated” by beliefs that include anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity, and “extremism on migration.” Attorney General Pam Bondi’s implementation memo — titled “Ending Political Violence Against ICE” — pointed that apparatus squarely at people accused of impeding immigration enforcement. Joint Task Force Vanguard is now the enforcement arm with a much broader target.

In its zeal to arrest and convict its political opponents, the Trump administration has so far been unsuccessful. In January, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem proudly announced that ICE had survived “an attempted murder of federal law enforcement” in north Minneapolis, suggesting protestors were directly threatening law enforcement officers. What she described as federal officers “ambushed and attacked by three individuals who beat them with snow shovels and the handles of brooms,” forcing one officer to fire “a defensive shot,” ended up being two Venezuelan DoorDash drivers with no violent records.

Then the video surfaced. City surveillance footage showed a scuffle lasting about 12 seconds, with no snow-shovel beating; a shovel sat on the ground the entire time. Authorities had the footage within hours of the shooting. Prosecutors didn’t bother to watch it until weeks after they’d charged the men and put an agent’s sworn account in front of a judge. In February, Rosen’s own office moved to dismiss the charges with prejudice — meaning they can never be refiled — citing evidence “materially inconsistent” with the affidavit. A federal judge agreed. Two ICE agents were placed on administrative leave for apparently lying under oath. 

Minneapolis’s police chief offered the epitaph: the agents “hung themselves.” 

This was no one-off. The local CBS affiliate in Minneapolis combed throughcourt filings and found at least 18 Minnesotans whose assault-on-an-officer cases were dropped, with a judge dismissing charges for 15 of them. The sworn affidavits of a single ICE agent turned up in roughly ten of the dismissed cases. In one case Rosen himself moved to drop charges, the defendant said federal agents had shackled him to a hospital bed for days without access to his phone.

Another case collapsed after a judge found that Bondi had publicly named arrested protesters in a social-media post — violating the court’s sealing order and, the judge wrote, “likely” several Justice Department policies.

And the pattern isn’t confined to Minnesota. In Chicago’s “Operation Midway Blitz,” prosecutors charged the “Broadview Six” — a group that included a Democratic congressional candidate and a Democratic candidate for the state legislature — with conspiring to “impede” an ICE officer outside a detention facility. A federal judge tossed the case over prosecutorial misconduct, including allegations of jury tampering and misleading the court.

Of 22 prosecutions in the Chicago area under the federal impeding-an-officer statute, 16 have been dismissed or never reached indictment, according to a Chicago Sun-Times tally cited by CNN.

In Los Angeles, the government has lost all five such cases that reached trial — five straight acquittals.

None of this is slowing down the White House. “Trump Administration Delivers Another Crushing Blow to Antifa Terrorist Network,” the White House announced with the Minnesota arrests. The release details federal cases against “Antifa” individuals in states including Minnesota, Oregon, Texas, Washington, New Jersey, California, and Indiana.

Trump spews and the machinery of government plods along behind. Yes Noem, Bondi, and Kash Patel can tweet as if there is both a threat and the feds are quickly responding, but Task Forces have to iron out their budget and their letterheads before they can get to the X (née Twitter) on-ramp.

Rosen closed by calling political violence “a national scourge in our times.” Not gas prices. Not rent. Not the cost of healthcare. Or childcare. That’s what you get when the imperatives of “national security” are allowed to set a society’s priorities — especially once “national security” has been redefined to mean almost anything the government wants it to.

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