9/11 at 25: Trump finds new targets for America's endless war on terror

 Middle East Eye

On 11 September 2001, I was driving to work on the freeway in Austin, Texas when I heard the news on the radio that planes had crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

As I went about nearly crashing my own car while trying to phone my best friend in New York City, I remember thinking that we were going to be hearing a lot about this particular date for a long time to come.

Sure enough, a quarter of a century has now passed since 9/11, and the events of that day continue to shape daily existence in the US - as trite as it sounds to say it.

Those of us who are old enough may remember the pre-9/11 panorama, when it was still possible to go through airport security with your water bottle and shampoo and Muslims could go to mosque without being pursued by FBI informants.

And while the US was never exactly all it was cracked up to be in terms of democracy and respect for basic rights, 9/11 definitively obliterated the right to privacy and other civil liberties upon which the country was supposedly founded. READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.

Is Trump making Latin America great again?

 Al Jazeera English

The calamitous war on Iran and continuing failure to rein in Israel have brought United States President Donald Trump collapsing approval ratings and growing public animosity at home. Yet there is one area of his foreign policy that is perhaps serving as a consolation: Latin America.

Over the past year and a half, a slew of right-wing leaders has taken power in the region through electoral victories for which Trump has more or less taken personal credit. These leaders appear eager to facilitate the resurgence of US power projection in what Trump has, with characteristic pompousness, called the “Donroe Doctrine”. This, to put it mildly, is not great news for the average Latin American.

One need only glance at the extensive history of US collaboration with right-wing Latin American regimes in the ostensible fight against leftist politics and “narco-terror” to assume that what is coming will entail a whole lot of civilian casualties.

In Colombia, for example, where far-right millionaire businessman and former criminal defence lawyer Abelardo de la Espriella was just sworn in, the US track record of funnelling heaps of money to a homicidal army joined at the hip with right-wing paramilitary outfits produced a good deal of bloodshed. And what do you know: De la Espriella amassed a portion of his lawyerly fortune defending paramilitary leaders.

In addition to having charmingly pledged to “disembowel” the left, de la Espriella is obsessed with jumpstarting fracking and pursuing other environmentally destructive projects. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Israel's 'pilot zones' turn Lebanese sovereignty on its head

MIDDLE EAST EYE

Imagine, for a moment, that Country A is conducting an illegal occupation of Country B and regularly slaughtering its inhabitants despite an alleged ceasefire agreement.

By any modicum of logic, a resolution to the situation would first require Country A to stop occupying and slaughtering people in Country B, right?

Wrong - at least if Country A happens to be Israel, which has never felt compelled to abide by international legal or moral standards. Israeli impunity is most egregiously on display in the Gaza Strip, where Israel's genocidal war has killed at least 73,375 Palestinians - or one out of every 33 people - in less than three years, with thousands more buried under the rubble.

Now, Lebanon has also been cast in a Country B role with the help of the so-called "Trilateral Framework" signed in June between the Lebanese government, Israel, and Israel's genocidal sponsors in the United States.

As per the fanciful hallucinations of US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the agreement "establishes a clear and structured process to restore Lebanon's sovereignty, disarm Hezbollah and dismantle its terrorist infrastructure, and enable Israel to return to its borders once that threat to its citizens is removed". READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.

Is Spain being punished?

Al Jazeera English

Earlier this week, at least 57 migrants died while trying to cross the border from Morocco into Ceuta, one of two Spanish enclaves located on the African mainland. In a span of just 24 hours, tens of thousands of people entered Ceuta in what Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez denounced as a “violation of territorial integrity”.

Many of the migrants interviewed in news reports claimed they had been encouraged to undertake the journey by social media posts. 

Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Danny Danon, wasted no time in taking to X to whine that “Spain, which never misses an opportunity to lecture Israel, has declared a state of emergency in Ceuta following the crisis over its immigration policy.”

Indeed, the Sanchez government has been increasingly critical of Israel, labelling it a “genocidal state” and cancelling major arms deals accordingly. In 2024, Spain recognised the State of Palestine.

Now, in the aftermath of the Ceuta episode, Israel – a country where hypocrisy might as well be declared an official state policy – has jumped at the chance to call the Spaniards out for alleged hypocritical behaviour. In his X post, Danon went on to argue that “maybe before [Spain] continues lecturing us, it’s time it explained to the world why it still maintains colonial enclaves in Africa.”

Of course, you can’t get much more hypocritical than complaining about “colonial enclaves” when your own country is perpetrating not only a straight-up genocide of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip but also a brutal colonial occupation that has given way to a de facto annexation of the West Bank. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Media Cheering a Deal That Puts Lebanon on the Chopping Block for Israel

 FAIR

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on June 26 triumphantly announced the “signing of the Trilateral Framework between Lebanon, Israel and the United States.” The document allegedly “builds a realistic path out of endless conflict between Israel and Lebanon—“the inheritors of ancient civilizations that date back to the time of the Bible.”

According to Rubio: “This agreement establishes a clear and structured process to restore Lebanon’s sovereignty, disarm Hezbollah and dismantle its terrorist infrastructure, and enable Israel to return to its borders once that threat to its citizens is removed.”

The framework also creates a cool-sounding “Military Coordination Group for Lebanon (MCG4L), facilitated by the United States.”

As should be immediately clear to anyone who has paid minimal attention to politics over the past 80 years, any US-brokered agreement between the two inheritors of ancient civilizations will automatically be designed to screw over Lebanon in favor of Israel—which has harbored designs on Lebanese territory from the get-go.

As Amnesty International noted, the agreement “betrays victims of war crimes in Lebanon” by essentially blocking their right to seek justice in international forums. It also signs off, Amnesty said, on the “prolonged and indefinite forced displacement of tens of thousands of residents of vast swathes of southern Lebanon occupied by Israeli forces.” READ MORE AT FAIR.

Inside the Darién Gap: A Capurganá Diary

Counter Punch

Plastered onto the side of the glassed-in immigration office at the dock in Necoclí – the northwestern Colombian city just across the Gulf of Urabá from the Darién Gap – is a poster warning of the hazards of northbound migration. Over recent years, more than 1.2 million people from a mind-boggling array of countries have risked their lives to cross the Gap, the 106-kilometer stretch of roadless territory and formidable jungle that spans Colombia and Panama and constitutes the only land bridge between South and Central America. Most of them hoped to reach the United States, the very country that makes much of the world unlivable in the first place while simultaneously criminalizing migration, thereby forcing the global have-nots down increasingly lethal routes. 

The protagonists of the poster are the Díaz family – mom, dad, and two young daughters – whose portrait appears superimposed over an image of a small boat packed with passengers. According to the poster, which is in Spanish, la familia Díaz had set out “in search of a better future,” boarding just such a boat as they made their way toward los Estados Unidos: “Two days later, a rescue team found their lifeless bodies, together with 59 other people who had also succumbed to the river’s fury.” 

When I last visited Necoclí in January, the sign had already lost its intended audience. Hardly any migrants transit the Darién Gap these days, a result of the decision by current gringo sociopath-in-chief Donald Trump to effectively shut down the US border with Mexico and dispense with the concept of asylum. In the first three months of 2026, for example, Panama recorded a total of 92 arrivals from Colombia via the jungle; in August 2023 alone, there were 81,946. I, however, certainly found myself thinking a lot about la familia Díaz over the two-hour course of a high-speed, spine-shattering boat ride from Necoclí to the village of Capurganá, which lies inside the Darién Gap and which along with the nearby village of Acandí served as the principal points of departure for migrants entering the jungle. 

This was my second visit to Capurganá, the first having taken place in January 2024, when I, too, entered the jungle as a “migrant.” READ MORE AT COUNTER PUNCH.

Israel and the US are erasing Iran and Lebanon's ancient heritage

Middle East Eye

In early 2001, the Taliban blew up two giant Buddha statues in the Bamiyan Valley of Afghanistan, which dated from the sixth century.

The world erupted in outrage at the destruction of cultural heritage, and western media engaged in handwringing over the loss of statues that most people presumably had not known existed in the first place but were nonetheless symbolic of our "collective humanity".

Philip T Reeker, deputy spokesman for the State Department of the United States, issued a press statement declaring the US to be "distressed and baffled" by the Taliban's decision to demolish the Buddhas and other ancient artefacts: "Deliberate destruction of statues and sculpture held as sacred by peoples of different faiths is incomprehensible."

Of course, when the US launched the so-called "war on terror" later that same year and undertook to bomb Afghanistan to smithereens, there was no similar distress over the "deliberate destruction" or the mass slaughter of "peoples of different faiths". . . .

Since October 2023, the US-backed genocidal war on Gaza has officially killed more than 73,000 people, although the true death toll is undoubtedly much higher.

But it's not just about killing. In both Gaza and Lebanon, genocide, ecocide and historicide are inextricably linked. And as Israel continues with US help to pursue the annihilation of peoples and cultures, it's also an annihilation of the very pretence of a collective humanity. READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.

The US border runs straight through the World Cup

On June 11, the FIFA World Cup 2026 kicked off in Mexico, which, along with the United States and Canada, is cohosting this year’s tournament in an ostensible display of continental unity.

From the get-go, the whole shared hosting concept was rather ludicrous, given that one of the hosts is particularly bad at playing with others. For starters, the US maintains a system of overzealous visa restrictions and “travel bans” for citizens of an array of nations, which renders an already socioeconomically exclusive event even more so and shatters the illusion of international camaraderie that the World Cup is supposed to embody.

The US also presides over an insanely militarised frontier with cohost Mexico, a country US commander-in-chief Donald Trump has repeatedly threatened to bomb and invade. In other unsportsmanlike behaviour, Trump has referred to Mexicans as criminals, drug dealers and rapists; in 2019, The New York Times reported his suggestion that US soldiers shoot migrants and that an alligator-filled moat be installed along the border. . . .

For its part, Mexico’s decision to cohost an abominably expensive tournament – rather than devote such vast resources to, say, tracking down the country’s more than 134,000 disappeared persons – has been seen as a slap in the face by many Mexicans. Most of the disappearances took place following the US-backed launch of the so-called “war on drugs” in 2006, which has amounted to a war on the poor. . . Meanwhile, FIFA’s lengthy history of corruption, greed, hypocrisy and assorted other vices has been dutifully upheld by the organisation’s president, Gianni Infantino, who in December presented Trump with the very first “FIFA Peace Prize – Football Unites the World”.

The prize was apparently spontaneously invented by Infantino in a shameless act of brown-nosing to coax Trump out of his tantrum at having been denied the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize. And who better to receive the inaugural FIFA award than the number one backer of Israel’s genocide in the Gaza Strip. READ MORE AT ALJAZEERA ENGLISH.

Western Media Normalize Ethnic Cleansing of Lebanon by Viewing It Through Israel’s Eyes

 FAIR

In October 2024, one year into Israel’s genocidal war on the Gaza Strip and attendant assault on Lebanon, the Israeli army did a thing. It invited journalists from major Western corporate media outlets on an incursion into Lebanon’s ravaged south, accompanied by Israeli military personnel who would interpret the wreckage in Israel’s favor—not that the Western media have ever required much assistance in this regard.  

Reporters from the New York Times, Washington Post, Associated Press, Reuters, BBC, Fox News and a handful of other special guests signed up for the cross-border sortie. . . . Never mind that it is entirely illegal for journalists or anyone else to enter Lebanon from Israel—what’s one more illegal invasion from a country that has been invading Lebanon pretty much since its founding? . . . 

The Israelis certainly hit the jackpot with the coverage, as reporters excitedly discovered boots and helmets allegedly belonging to Hezbollah—clear proof that the group had been plotting a nefarious attack on Israel. . . . And in report after embedded report, Israel’s chosen journalists faithfully transmitted the tiresome and counter-logical notion that Hezbollah was somehow the aggressor in the arrangement—as opposed to the army that was busily slaughtering thousands of people in Lebanon while implementing a scorched-earth strategy. 

While the October 2024 embed was one of the more preposterous embodiments of Western corporate media’s special relationship with Israel, outlets continue to do a fine job of sanitizing Israeli brutality even when their reporters are not physically viewing the region from inside an Israeli armored vehicle. Since March of this year, Israel has killed at least 3,613 people in Lebanon and displaced 1.2 million, obliterating entire villages and otherwise expanding the ecocidal policy honed in the Gaza Strip. READ MORE AT FAIR.

The US, Israel and the normalisation of scandal

Al Jazeera English

In late April, the Hondurasgate platform and the Spanish media outlet Canal Red began leaking incriminating audios regarding recent machinations by the United States and Israel in Latin America.

One batch of audios, for example, indicates that Israel financed the release from prison of former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez, who was serving a 45-year sentence in the US for drug trafficking and other transgressions. As per the write-up on the Hondurasgate website, Hernandez will now play a key role in carrying out US-Israeli military and economic designs in the region. . . . 

The second, perhaps, is that the world has reached such a distinctly abominable state that nothing really shocks us any more. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.