Exclusive: How Trump tried to bribe the head of the IRGC

Empire of Chaos, Lies, Plunder, Piracy. And bribes.

By Pepe Escobar

Mike Pompeo, former aspiring Tony Soprano, admitted: “We lie, we cheat, we steal.” And we bribe.

A Transition Protocol source, as we revealed live, is unequivocal: The President of the United States – despite having “won” the war on Iran countless times, at least in the Vociferation stakes – made a major attempt to induce IRGC Commander-in-Chief Gen. Ahmad Vahidi and senior Iranian military leadership to break with the government in Tehran through enormous financial inducements.

So here we have POTUS playing good ol’ Divide and Rule – which the Brits learned from the Roman Empire – to fracture the IRGC from the inside.

This was not a mere exploratory diplomatic contact. Trump did not merely want to determine whether Vahidi supported U.S.-Iran negotiations.

According to our source – placed in the tight inner circle of Leader Mojtaba Khamenei – this was a full leadership-buyout operation, modeled on the Venezuela playbook, to fracture the Iranian state.

The attempt miserably failed.

Because Ahmad Vahidi completely rejected it.

The Trump administration had already created a somewhat direct conduit to Vahidi through Nechirvan Barzani, the President of the Kurdistan Region in Iraq, way back in May 2026. Then-DNI Tulsi Gabbard contacted Barzani – fully authorized by Trump and Vice-President JD Vance – and an encrypted connection to Vahidi was subsequently established through Erbil in Iraqi Kurdistan.

The channel stayed dormant – or in coma, for nearly 3 months. This time though Trump attempted to turn the channel into a de facto fracturing of the Iranian leadership, employing the conceptual precedent in Venezuela: isolate the central command; handsomely bribe those immediately around it for “cooperation”; and create the internal conditions for regime decapitation.

The source describes “billions of dollars” being waved as inducements to several members of the senior IRGC leadership through Vahidi. All that while Trump was on Hardcore Vociferation mode threatening Tehran and spinning his “control” of the Strait of Hormuz.

Nothing so far has been independently confirmed in public. And probably will not. But that does not mean the source is not credible.

The source is part of Leader Mojtaba’s tight inner circle; heard all about it directly from Vahidi; and later was fully authorized to disclose the extremely sensitive information to Pakistani mediators, especially Field Marshal Asim Munir, who Trump keeps calling virtually every day asking for “help” getting the Iranians back at the negotiating table (when he in fact blew up the negotiating table).

I bribe, therefore I am

Vahidi is not a peripheral military figure. Far from it: he is the commander of the IRGC – the institutional center of gravity of Iranian hard power. The Trump administration wanted access to the top of the IRGC itself.

But they bet on the wrong man. The number two man in Iran right now, overseeing everything including top IRGC decisions, is Mohsen Rezaee: the new secretary of the Supreme National Security Council (SNSC) and personal representative of Leader Mojtaba Khamenei.

Mohsen Rezaee is a former IRGC commander and his leadership is uncontested – as proven by the trust placed in him by the Leader. The overarching framework guiding his decisions – and people like Vahidi – is the Shi’te sense of moral duty, ethics, self-sacrifice and the spirit of Sovereign Resistance, values completely alien to an Empire of Grifters.

It’s no wonder that a crass neo-Crassus in War-a-Lago/Washington actually believed that a battle-tested military leader – and those around him – could sell the fate of a civilization-state for a mere bribe, and induced to defect, stand aside or facilitate regime change.

Applying the exact same Venezuela methodology means that the Trump administration actually believed they could translate it to a Shi’ite Iran context. That proves once again an astonishing degree of cultural stupidity.

The methodology may work for corrupt Latin American political/military elites: History tells us it happened so many times.

But to believe that offering protection, political survival, loads of money and/or a future share of the spoils to an IRGC that is far from being a loose political entourage around a vulnerable presidential palace fully demonstrates how the Empire of Grifters has no clue about the institutional cohesion of the Iranian security state.

All across the Global South, this will be regarded for what it is: another episode of the neo-Crassus Art of the Deal.

Complementing another recent episode, where the capo fraternizes with the DPRK then asks South Korea – “I asked for $10 billion” – for protection money.

That’s the pizzo. Not to be confused with pizza. Pizzo is Sicilian slang for extortion money.

Mafia, piracy, bribing, extortion: talk about a flexible Empire at work.

~ Pepe Escobar is an Independent geopolitical analyst, writer and journalist.  

Our next monthly coalition rotating protest in Maine

Join us if you can. This spot at the foot of the Wiscasset bridge on US Hwy 1 is a tourist magnet where we will see license plates from all over the country and people from around the world.

Now more than ever we need to be as public as possible about our resistance to endless war$ and the genocide US-Israel are perpetrating on Palestine (Gaza & the West Bank), Lebanon, Yemen and across the African continent.

We've been holding these monthly protests at busy traffic spots all over Maine - north & south, east and west since early 2022.  

Our demands:      

•     End U.S. aid to racist apartheid Israel
•     Stop US-Israeli wars for 'Greater Israel' on Palestine, Iran, Lebanon, Yemen, & Syria        
•     U.S. hands off Latin America & Caribbean (Cuba, Venezuela, Columbia, Nicaragua, Puerto Rico, Haiti)     
•     Peace in Ukraine - No weapons, no money for the Ukraine War         
•     Abolish NATO/No expansion into Asia Pacific         
•     Fund people’s needs, not the war machine         
•     Stop Pentagon climate crimes         
•     Fight racism & bigotry not war        
•     End AFRICOM         
•     No new arms race in outer space

Co-sponsors: 

Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space, Maine Natural Guard, PeaceWorks of Greater Brunswick, Communist Party of Maine, Maine Green Independent Party, Citizens Opposing Active Sonar Threats (COAST), Party for Socialism & Liberation Maine, Peace & Justice Center of Eastern Maine, Veterans for Peace - National, United National Antiwar Coalition (UNAC), Maine Voices for Palestinian Rights (MVPR), and Diaspora Pa’lante Collective. 

Cleaning up Havana with solar

Havana has a garbage problem. El Rampeño has a solar-powered solution.

Meet the Cuban initiative using renewable energy to collect garbage with tricycles in the face of fuel shortages caused by the U.S. oil blockade. 

Trump's new sanctions on Iran, IDF rampages in West Bank and Lebanon

• Firefighters and residents of south Lebanon have accused the Israeli military of lighting wildfires in the region, as forested areas burned down in blazes sparked by Israeli bombing. Environmental groups said the fires in recent weeks were part of a longstanding Israeli practice of targeting Lebanon’s natural environment. On Tuesday, the Israeli military dropped flares in a wooded area outside Khiam, in south Lebanon, sparking blazes. When firefighters attempted to extinguish the flames, a drone struck close by, forcing them to withdraw, said the head of the civil defence in the Nabatieh region, Hussein Fakih. “Most of our missions are now related to fires,” he said. “There are enormous areas of woodland that have burned, I don’t have the exact figures, but in the areas close to the [frontline], around 30-40% of the land has been affected by fires.”
• Iran’s top negotiator & Parliament Speaker, Ghalibaf, says Strait of Hormoz will remain closed until US abides by its MoU responsibilities. 

• Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur: Apartheid Israel doesn't just fake content to cover its crimes; it now pays to launder them through AI with the pro-IDF feeds of the fake think tank "Hanover Institute". Legacy media enabled this inganno (deception) for decades. Will @OpenAI, @perplexity_ai, @claudeai, etc, do the same?

• The Gaza Holocaust will continue: Jared Kushner, after meeting with Netanyahu, says that the US won't "restrict Israel's right to defend itself." He says that if Hamas doesn't disarm over the next 60 to 90 days it'll show "they're not genuine about peace," and it'll give Israel cover to "go and finish the job."
• Yanis Varoufakis: The transformation of Greece into an Israeli satellite is proceeding at breakneck speed. This bodes ill for the majority of Greeks, for peace in our region and for Europe and West Asia more broadly. It must be resisted.

• Israeli forces raided the grounds of a hospital in the city of Bethlehem in the southern occupied West Bank on Monday evening and assaulted patients and visitors, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry. In a statement, the ministry said that “Israeli forces raided the grounds of the Arab Society for Rehabilitation Hospital, terrorized patients and visitors and assaulted some of them.”  

• Former Israeli PM Naftali Bennett on Gaza: 'We will kick Qatar and Türkiye the hell out of Gaza and bring Egypt in instead. Anyone who allows Qatar and Türkiye to manage Gaza is preventing the disarmament of Hamas. Understand this basic point. You don’t have to be a genius. Egypt detests Hamas. It detests the Muslim Brotherhood. Deeply. If you bring Qatar and Türkiye in to manage the situation, they will strengthen Hamas. If you bring Egypt, together with Israel, in to manage the situation, we will eliminate Hamas.'

• Sovereignista on Mecca Defense Pact: Contradictions around Egypt expose rifts in the alliance. Just one day after the signing of the trilateral defense agreement in Mecca between Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan, Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan stated that Egypt could become the next participant. Later, President Erdogan made a similar statement in an interview with journalists. However, media reports suggested the opposite. Two versions emerged: Egypt itself does not want to join the alliance and has adopted a wait-and-see position. Reasons? Egypt avoids military blocs to maintain freedom of maneuver. Membership could allegedly harm its relations with the UAE and the US. But most importantly, there is a conflict with the 1979 peace treaty with Israel, which prioritizes obligations to Tel Aviv. Saudi Arabia is opposed. The Kingdom fears that Egypt is too close to the UAE—Saudi Arabia’s main regional rival. The Saudis also see Turkey’s haste as an attempt to seize leadership in the alliance. What does this mean? There are serious disagreements among the participants of the Mecca Defense Pact: Turkey wants Egypt to give the alliance Arab and religious legitimacy. Egypt is the historical center of the Arab world, and Cairo hosts Al-Azhar University, the main spiritual center of Sunni Islam. Without Egypt, the alliance is a “club of wealthy monarchies”; with Egypt, it becomes the “voice of the entire Arab nation.” Additionally, Egypt opens markets for Turkey’s military industry. Saudi Arabia does not want Egypt because it itself claims leadership in the Arab world. In recent years, Riyadh has surpassed Egypt in financial and diplomatic power and does not want to share authority. Egypt’s inclusion, especially in alliance with Turkey and the UAE, would weaken Saudi influence. Riyadh believes that money and military power (Pakistan and Turkey) matter more than Egypt’s cultural authority. Egypt has not yet decided, weighing all the risks, the main one being the legal conflict with the Israeli peace treaty. 
• Thirteen students were arrested (amongst the many at the protest) after occupying OpenAI’s new D.C. lobbying office. During the protest, the lobbyists fled the building in shame. They didn’t want to face a group of young people who demand a brighter future, where our elections aren’t bought by the very company destroying our communities. If politicians say they’re speaking for us, they need to stop accepting bribes from OpenAI’s super PAC “Leading the Future.” It is on track to spend $200 million in the 2026 midterms. Students like these are leading the future, NOT power hungry greedy corporations and their congressional lackies.

• BBC: Britain's new Prime Minister Andy Burnham has said London will continue "to support Ukraine 100%", after Moscow warned of "consequences" following confirmation that British-made drones were used in recent Ukrainian strikes inside Russia. "We are not fair-weather friends, we will be there in Ukraine's hour of need and that won't change," he said. The Russian embassy in the UK earlier accused Britain of "deliberately opting for an escalation of the Ukraine crisis", saying "the deeper its involvement in the conflict... the higher the price it will pay".

• Washington Post: US debt has hit $40 trillion months earlier than expected. Faster borrowing — driven in part by lost revenue from invalidated tariffs and endless war$ — means the next debt-limit fight is also likely to arrive ahead of schedule.  

• With a over a trillion-dollar Pentagon budget, serving our troops rotten food and making them use moldy bathrooms is a choice, not an unavoidable hardship, as are the other decisions made during Pistol Pete Hegseth’s command of the most expensive military on the planet. A picture from aboard the moldy old USS George Washington, which recently underwent an incredibly expensive “complex overhaul” that took six years to finish.  

• Strategic Culture Foundation: There is a fundamental irony that American economists and strategists struggle to acknowledge openly: the dollar’s main enemy is not the BRICS, nor is it China, nor is it the renminbi. It is the foreign policy of the US itself. Every time Washington imposes financial sanctions - on Russia, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, or hundreds of private entities - it reduces the dollar’s appeal as a neutral and reliable reserve currency. The dollar’s comparative advantage lay precisely in its apparent neutrality: everyone used it because no one expected Washington to prevent its use for legitimate trade purposes. That neutrality has been irreparably compromised. Trump, with his threat of 100 percent tariffs on countries that promote alternatives to the dollar, has made explicit a tension that had always been implicit: maintaining the dollar’s centrality now requires active coercion, no longer merely market forces.  

• Ukraine has derailed the planned August 20-21 visit of IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi to the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant and the town of Energodar, the Russian Foreign Ministry said. All details had been previously worked out by the IAEA Secretariat and the Russian side. Russia provided the necessary security guarantees, which fully satisfied the Agency. However, Ukraine cynically threatened Grossi, explicitly stating that it could not vouch for his safety if he entered the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant via Russian territory. The Ukrainian threats have once again exposed the true nature of the Kiev regime, the ministry emphasized.

• What is ‘Ukrainianism’?: Pot head Nazi (in video below) explains why the former Ukrainian relationship with Russia will cease to exist. The woman announces alliance with WW2 Ukrainian Nazi collaborator Stephan Bandera who lead the killing of tens of thousands of Jews, Poles, Russians and Gypsies alongside Hitler's forces. These current Nazis predominate in western Ukraine near the Poland border. They were used by the US-UK-EU to attack the Russian ethnic Ukrainians in the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine - alongside the Russian border. The attacks began soon after the Obama-Biden-Hillary Clinton-Victoria Nuland orchestrated coup d'état in Kev in 2014. This terrorism, directed by CIA and MI6, has lasted to the present times. It is why Russia eventually went into Ukraine in 2022 after trying years of diplomatic efforts which included the Minsk 1 & 2 agreements that would have ended the war and kept the Donbass as part of Ukraine. Under those agreements (that were never honored by Kiev and its western backers) those in the Donbass would still speak Russian and have local autonomy. But that was not good enough for the US-UK-EU that instead wanted the break-up of Russia and the stealing of the vast resource base of Russia. Thus the war continues.

Army base in Georgia offers bribe to reenlist

This reveals how desperate the US military is these days to keep their war mongering ranks up to snuff. (Especially after the recent debacle onboard the USS Abe Lincoln. That story is enough to scare anyone away from joining the military.)

Personnel in the 9th Engineer Battalion though are being offered four days off in 'honor' of the release of the 'Grand Theft Auto VI'.

This 'deal' only applies to those within the battalion who 'are eligible for reenlistment'. 

Having been in the US Air Force during the US war on Vietnam, I saw my share of reenlistment gimmicks by the command structure. But this one tops the list.

The US is not backing down from its quest to take down Iran, Russia, China, Brazil, Cuba, Greenland and many other nations. The capitalist loving globalists, and their zionist pals, want to dominate the world and intend to keep the terror fires burning as long as they can.

Thus they need all the troops and sailors they can get their grubby hands on.

So they come up with these lame recruitment and reenlistment schemes in order to bribe unemployed, poor, and down and out men and women to join the military and to stay in for the long haul.

And if that doesn't work out they will likely return to a draft or they can take the ugly path that the Ukrainian government has chosen, where they just grab men off the streets.

Think about all the immigrants now being grabbed off the streets by ICE these days. I'd not be surprised if they began offering them 'citizenship' if they join the war machine. We know that many men from Mexico in the past were offered that deal, went to war for the US, and when they'd done their time, expecting to be citizens, were deported anyway. Breaking the promise of 'citizenship' made by Washington. 

The video below shows one man in Kharkov, Ukraine trying to disguise himself as previously injured. Will it work? 

Likely not since Zelensky’s goons now scroll social media for such things as they desperately have quotas to reach or likely be sent to the front themselves.

One other example, sad and horrifying, is the 2nd video below of the Zelensky goons trying to grab a kid who looks about 12 years old in Odessa, Ukraine. The kid fights back against the 'recruitment specialist'.

Bruce 

“Why can’t we see ourselves as we are?”

 

The ‘apocalyptic blindness’ of Americans

By Patrick Lawrence

The other night I watched a documentary called Coup 53, a brilliant treatment of the coup that deposed Mohammad Mossadegh as prime minister of Iran in the year the film notes in its title. Taghi Amirani, the director, has produced a superb piece of work, narrated in part by the estimable Steve Kinzer. Today, 19 August, marks the 73rd anniversary of Operation Ajax, as M.I.–6 and the C.I.A. named their covert assault on Iran’s first democratically elected government. 

How well I recall learning of the Iran coup during my teenage years, when my eyes were just opening upon how, by the mid–1960s, the United States (and in this case Britain) treated those in foreign lands whose misfortune was to possess resources the world’s newest imperium sought compulsively to control. And how well I recall discovering at the same time the remarkably pervasive ignorance of this conduct among all but a very few Americans.

Late one evening, I must have been 18 or so, this topic came up in conversation with my dear mother. “But no, we wouldn’t do that!” she exclaimed in a tone of anxious disbelief.

“But we did, Mother. If you know where to find the record, what we did is in it.”

My mother lowered her eyes and glanced away. I could see her mind was simply incapable of absorbing the information I had put before her. There was a sort of psycho-emotional blockage. The subject never again came up.

I have long been preoccupied, maybe since those days, indeed, with the question of seeing. And just as much if not more, with the question of not-seeing. This is only natural, it seems to me, given that seeing and not-seeing, the latter vastly more prevalent than the former, is so defining of who Americans are and what makes them so different from other peoples. In a recent interview in Consortium News, Patrik Baab, the conscientious and beleaguered-because-conscientious Berlin correspondent, writer, and podcaster, referred to the “apocalyptic blindness” he finds among Germans. I know this is so, especially among West Germans, having traveled among them recently. But in the way of collective blindness, I must suggest to my friend and colleague, no people are more addicted to total darkness than Americans.

What I saw in my mother all those years ago was a refusal—a refusal to see that could not even understand itself as an act of refusal. I cannot say whether this condition has worsened in the decades since the conversation I had with her in the mid–1960s, but I don’t think this matters much one way or the other. If I have to offer an answer, I think it is both: People see more now than then, people see less now than then. The though requires explanation, obviously.

Among those who watch Taghi Amirani’s film, and I hope many do, I imagine few will be as surprised to learn of Operation Ajax as my mother was. America’s lawless barbarism and all its messes are easier to see now. The plain-as-day defeats of April 1975 have something to do with this. So do digital technologies and the emergence of independent media. The invasion of Venezuela and the blockade of Cuba, the killings-from-the-air of fishermen in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific, the installation of a murderous jihadist in Syria, the genocides in Gaza and the West Bank, the illegal bombing of Iran: There is no missing any of this.

But there is one failure to see that remains, and its persistence is symptomatic, it seems to me, of an empire in its late, desperate phase. This is the steadfast refusal among most Americans to see their complicity in the imperium’s conduct. The two phenomena, the seeing and the not-seeing, go together in this case. People see more, but few are able to see, are honest enough to see, themselves—to see that Americans comprise “a perpetrator population,” a term I cite with admiration and which I will shortly explain.

~ The rest of this interesting article is pay-walled and found here

Israel & AI

We are all in grave danger if we humans let Israel and it's AI technology get away with murder.

zionists are buying up books and destroying them. They are privatizing source material.

Tools of power and control. Colonization of our minds.

Pay attention.

Spread the resistance.

Large protest at U.S. bomber base in UK that hits Iran

Hundreds united together in protest on Saturday, 15 August, at RAF Fairford (30 miles from Oxford), where the British government has been letting the US carry out brutal bombing raids of Iran.

We're calling on new UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham to stand up to Trump and end the use of British bases for this illegal war.

There are huge risks that this war will escalate again - and it is dragging the world deeper into economic crisis.

Burnham needs to redirect the hundreds of billions away from war and nukes into climate action, rebuilding our health service, our education system, our transport network and our emergency services. These are the solutions to the real threats we face today.

The Fairford base hosts US B-1 and B-2 bombers as well as U-2 spy planes.  

History lesson: 'Greater Israel' expansion across Latin America

For years Israel has been successfully expanding its influence in Latin America. 

Its trade volume with the region is growing, and the number of the countries that plan to transfer their embassies from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem is expected to increase in the near future. 

This video is a good background primer on 'Greater Israel' operations.

Zionist Argentinian President Javier Milei is sadly just one example among many how Israel has their hooks into the region.