As I write, the Washington Post is carrying an obituary about the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei – or maybe it is about Santa Claus? You tell me. “With his bushy white beard and easy smile,” the Democracy-Dies-in-Darkness paper told its readers, “Ayatollah Khamenei cut a more avuncular figure in public than his perpetually scowling but much more revered mentor [Ayatollah Khomenei], and he was known to be fond of Persian poetry and classic Western novels, especially Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables… Some Iranians who knew Ayatollah Khamenei before he became supreme leader described him as a ‘closet moderate.’” Did they now? Many other Iranians, some say about 250,000, did not have a chance to describe him at all because they were murdered on his orders. “Les Misérables,” indeed.
Although the world is mesmerized by Iran, the wheels of justice in the United States continue their slow but meticulous revolutions
Twenty-four hours after Israel and the United States commenced their attack against the Islamist regime in Iran, the internet – which means the world – has room for no other news. Here and there one discovers tiny little squeaks of opposition to the strikes from the usual anti-Trump mouthpieces – AOC, Zohran Mamdani, Elizabeth Warren, the UN – but those “insects of the hour” with their “importunate chink” (thank you, Edmund Burke) are completely overwhelmed by the grateful celebrations of Iranians around the world. They are giddy with gratitude to President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu for ridding their country of the evil men who have oppressed them for 47 years.
No one knows exactly how Operation Epic Fury will unfold. All we know so far is that it was the product of immense patience, awesome military might and stunning intelligence. It seems that Mossad and the CIA knew (and know) the exact whereabouts of every senior Iranian official from the Supreme Leader on down. How? We do not really know. Some say that covertly anti-regime dentists implanted tiny trackers in their patients’ fillings, while anti-regime doctors did the same while performing colonoscopies or other procedures.
The opening salvo came at about 8:15 a.m. on February 28 as Khamenei and several of his top lieutenants gathered at his compound in Tehran. Security was high. It availed them nothing. An Israeli strike destroyed the compound and those within it. As of this writing, at least 40 top-tier functionaries of the regime are dead, including the defense minister, head of the IRGC and head of the judiciary. The goal is to break the grip of the Islamist regime so that the 80 to 90 percent of the population that loathe the mullahs and Sharia law can step in and form their own government. “When we are finished,” President Trump urged when announcing the strikes, “take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be, probably, your only chance for generations.”
Meanwhile, although the world is mesmerized by the events in Iran, the wheels of justice in the United States continue their slow but meticulous revolutions. Just a couple of days before the attack on Iran, Reuters broke the news that Joe Biden’s FBI had subpoenaed the phone records of Kash Patel and Susie Wiles. This was back when Patel, now director of the FBI, and Wiles, Trump’s chief of staff, were private citizens.
The agency hoovered up the phone records at the behest of Jack Smith, then special counsel in charge of the Obama-Biden administration’s vendetta against Donald Trump. They aimed to nobble Trump before the 2024 election. Remember all those arrests, fines, and indictments? Remember the raid on Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Palm Beach residence? The FBI made off with boxes of files about Obama’s involvement in the Russia collusion hoax. They were Jack Smith’s real target, though his chief goal, ostensibly, was to investigate whether Trump had interfered in the 2020 presidential election. That seems especially rich now as reams of evidence showing that Trump was the victim, not the perpetrator, of such interference is slowly but surely making its way into the public record. It’s kind of a miracle that this particular bit of the FBI’s surveillance against Trump world came to light. The phone records in question were buried in case files marked “Prohibited,” a procedure, Patel said, that was “designed to evade all oversight.” He has ended the practice of depositing case files in oubliettes marked “Prohibited” and has also dismissed “at least” 10 FBI agents involved in the targeting of himself, Wiles and others.
The news about the FBI’s surveilling Patel’s and Wiles’s phone records comes on the heels of Senator Chuck Grassley’s earlier revelation that the FBI also spied on eight sitting Republican Senators in the days leading up to the January 6, 2021 protest at the Capitol. Lindsey Graham, Josh Hawley, Ron Johnson, Marsha Blackburn and others had their phone records surveilled. “Based on the evidence to date,” Grassley said at the time, the “weaponization by federal law enforcement under Biden was arguably worse than Watergate… the FBI’s actions were an unconstitutional breach, and Attorney General Bondi and Director Patel need to hold accountable those involved in this serious wrongdoing.”
Will they? Accountability has hitherto been in short supply in the United States government, just as it has been on the international scene. It took Chuck Grassley more than three years and the cooperation of several whistleblowers to uncover the details about the FBI’s actions. It took Israel and the United States many months to uncover the details of the Iranian high command’s movement. Operation Epic Fury shows that patience, when backed up by power, can be rewarded. We can hope Pam Bondi and Kash Patel are honing their own version of Epic Fury.
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