By Caitlin Johnstone – Feb 24, 2026
In a post-Iraq invasion world, these sorts of reports deserve nothing but a scoff and a dismissal.
They’re not even trying anymore.
US middle east envoy Steve Witkoff told Fox News on Saturday that Iran is “probably a week away” from having the materials necessary to make a nuclear bomb — a line that Iran hawks have been falsely repeating for over three decades.
It’s such a transparently bogus claim that even The Jerusalem Post dunked on Witkoff for making it, quipping that “The US envoy left out that Iran currently has no access to its material, no machines to enrich it, and no weapons program to use it for any operational purpose.”
This is the guy supposedly assigned by the White House to the task of establishing peace in the middle east, churning out the most fuzzbrained justifications for war with Iran you could possibly imagine.
The New York Post has an article going viral right now with the flamboyantly propagandistic headline “Iranian forces hack out wombs of female protesters to hide horrific sexual abuse,” which would sound absurd at a glance even you didn’t know anything about atrocity propaganda. Like they said “Let’s mutilate these women’s reproductive organs so that nobody thinks we horrifically abused them!” How does that even make sense?
The article is of course based on no evidence whatsoever, citing nothing but a NewsNation report full of anonymously sourced assertions. The central claim of the New York Post headline is attributed solely to “An Iranian refugee who spoke to NewsNation under a condition of anonymity.”
Can the US Use This Ethnic Conflict To Break Iran From Within?
In a post-Iraq invasion world, these sorts of reports deserve nothing but a scoff and a dismissal. After all the lies we’ve been told about every US war of aggression over the years, any claims made about a government that Washington wants to topple need to be flatly rejected unless they are backed by rock-solid, independently verifiable proof. That proof never arrives. US wars are always justified by lies, psyops, and misinformation.
But these aren’t the usual caliber of lies. We normally get better-quality war propaganda than this. This slop is designed to appeal to the dumbest people in the dumbest parts of the United States, and to people who already want to go to war with Iran.
Consent for the Iraq invasion was manufactured by many months of high-energy media saturation designed to harness the power of post-9/11 hysteria about the possibility of foreign attacks on American soil. This is just a few propaganda rags and government officials farting into a microphone and calling us idiots.
And yet the war machinery is rolling out anyway. They’re preparing to unleash a horrific war of immense consequence which Americans overwhelmingly oppose, and they don’t even have the decency to tell believable lies about it.
It can’t say good things about the future that they’re not even pretending to care what the American people want anymore. The US empire is getting more and more bold about exposing its true tyrannical nature, feeling less and less need to manufacture consent before engaging in mass military slaughter.
I guess we can still have hope that this will help open some eyes to the dire need for revolution in the heart of the empire.
Caitlin Johnstone
Rogue journalist. Bogan socialist. Anarcho-psychonaut. Guerrilla poet. Utopia prepper.
