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AI Firms Can and Must Face Liability for 'Dangerous, Unvetted Products,' Says Lina Khan
The former FTC chair spoke out as Republican leaders insisted the industry should be permitted to regulate itself.
Sep 13, 2026
As House Speaker Mike Johnson and President Donald Trump dismissed the idea—backed by the vast majority of Americans—that lawmakers should impose strict regulations on the artificial intelligence industry as insiders call for a slowdown of development, former Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan on Sunday issued a reminder that the federal government already has tools to rein in AI that poses a danger to the public, and demanded that officials use them.
"Law enforcers already have authority to charge companies and their CEOs for creating and releasing dangerous, unvetted, or defective products," Khan said on social media. "We shouldn’t let discussions about new legal regimes distract from the fact that there’s no AI exemption from laws already on the books."
Her call echoed that of Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), who said Saturday, "If you’re creating an AI that is doing illegal things, you either should face liability or criminal sanctions.”
Khan, who was recently appointed by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani to chair the city's Economic Development Corporation, posted the FTC's Staff Report on AI Partnerships and Investments, which the agency released shortly after Trump took office for his second term last year.
“As companies rapidly deploy generative AI technologies, enforcers and policymakers must stay vigilant to guard against business strategies that undermine open markets, opportunity, and innovation,” said Khan at the time.
On Sunday, Khan noted that the US already has "an extensive set of laws that govern dangerous and defective products," such as consumer protection laws, which releasing unvetted AI models or agents may violate.
Khan made her remarks after two incidents in which OpenAI's agents broke out of security test systems and committed cyberattacks. In July, hundreds of models broke out of confinement, hacked into systems of the AI startup Hugging Face, and conducted cyberattacks on targets they had not been instructed to attack.
Months earlier, it was reported on Friday, the company's models, which had not been given access to the full internet and were still in testing mode, broke out of confinement and hacked into an online coding service called RubyGems.
In the wake of those revelations, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on Saturday called for "pacing the frontier" with measures such as "embedded evaluators" who would have employee-like access and could "verify adherence to safety practices and commitments."
But Jacob Coxon, an Anthropic researcher who resigned last week and warned that AI's "superhuman systems" are capable of killing all of humanity "by the end of the decade," told NBC News' "Meet the Press" Sunday that companies should be permitted to regulate themselves until Congress can establish a regulatory framework, and Johnson insisted that Congress must resist "jumping in and imposing some sort of emergency moratorium," for fear that "China will overlap us" if the US imposes strict regulations on AI.
"Why did this man become a congressman, let alone speaker?" asked journalist Mehdi Hasan of Zeteo. "He literally never wants Congress to do anything about anything."
But Khan suggested that the reluctance of congressional leaders and the Trump administration to rein in the AI industry shouldn't stop the federal government from holding companies like Anthropic and OpenAI liable for the damage their products have already caused.
She acknowledged, though, that "the highly concentrated and interconnected structure of these markets" could be undermining accountability—for example, in the case of OpenAI and Hugging Face, which computer chip company Nvidia agreed to acquire earlier this month.
"Both federal and state enforcers should be scrutinizing these opaque relationships and interdependencies," said Khan. "We are already seeing how these relationships could undermine accountability. For example, OpenAI could face liability given the Hugging Face incident, but Hugging Face being bought up by Nvidia means that we’re unlikely to see it file a lawsuit over this—given Nvidia’s strong incentive to see OpenAI continue full speed ahead."
Basel Musharbash of the antitrust law and policy firm Antimonopoly Counsel said that Khan's post was the statement that current FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson "should be issuing to provide guidance the public on what the law requires in response to the AI situation, but he’s missing in action. Luckily, former FTC Chair Lina Khan is out here still doing the work."
Juliette Kayyem, the faculty chair of homeland security at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, told CNN that holding AI firms accountable is a matter of "pretty basic criminal law."
"We should start thinking about using our criminal laws," said Kayyem. "They are putting a dangerous substance into commerce and then saying, 'Well, we're smart enough to kill everyone but we're not smart enough to stop it.' And I think a lot of the American public is done with this."
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Trump Cannot Win the Iran War
The question, known before the war and abundantly clear now, is not whether the United States can inflict more damage on Iran. The question is how additional damage would produce a victory.
Sep 13, 2026
Six months into the second US-Israeli war on Iran, the Trump administration’s message is that Iran is weakening, the United States is winning, and the costs of war will be temporary. That narrative is hard to sustain as the war drags on, gas prices rise, US munitions stocks dwindle, and a majority of Americans oppose the war, opposition they will make known in the November midterm elections.
Despite overwhelming military and economic pressure, as well as the loss of a head of state, the Islamic Republic of Iran is still fighting, still capable of escalating, and still unwilling to surrender. The United States and Israel have caused enormous destruction, without compelling Tehran to accept Washington’s demands. The question, known before the war and abundantly clear now, is not whether the United States can inflict more damage on Iran. The question is how additional damage would produce a victory.
Last week President Donald Trump dismissed the conflict as “small potatoes,” minimizing a war that has lasted far longer and imposed greater costs than his administration initially suggested. The conflict has killed 18 American service members, wounded more than 750, and cost US taxpayers at least $37.5 billion.
The cost to Iran has been far greater. By June 10, at least 3,468 people had been killed and more than 26,500 injured in US and Israeli attacks, according to figures from Iran’s Ministry of Health. Civilian casualties have been recorded throughout the conflict, including in strikes on an elementary school in Minab in February and on a wedding gathering in southern Iran in September. The Iranian Red Crescent reported that more than 125,000 civilian units had been damaged by April, including approximately 100,000 homes. Iran also submitted a list of 134 damaged cultural sites to UNESCO, while Reuters documented damage to historic buildings and protected sites.
The United States can continue to destroy targets and degrade Iranian capabilities, but unless that pressure changes Iran’s political calculations, further escalation risks producing more destruction without producing a settlement.
Iran demonstrated that it can impose substantial costs on the United States. An analysis found that Iranian strikes damaged 15 US military sites across the region, including barracks, hangars, fuel depots, aircraft, radar systems, communications equipment, and air-defense systems.
US Central Command disputed descriptions of the damage. The strikes nevertheless exposed the vulnerability of fixed US facilities and the cost of defending them against sustained Iranian missile and drone attacks.
“The Trump administration—and likely the Pentagon itself—overestimated the ability of the United States and Israel to quickly subdue Iran’s military,” Harrison Mann, associate director for campaigns at Win Without War and a former US Army officer and intelligence official, told the International Policy Journal (IPJ). “They were never able to locate or destroy the majority of Iran’s drones and missiles, nor destroy enough of its air defenses that US aircraft could fly freely over the entire country.”
“Ultimately, Trump discovered it’s not possible to fight a prepared, 21st-century military—even one objectively weaker than America’s—and still conceal the costs from the public like previous US military interventions in the region,” Mann added.
This asymmetry is central to the war. Iran does not need to defeat the United States conventionally. To deny Washington a decisive political victory, it needs only to preserve its governing institutions, retain sufficient retaliatory capacity, and make continued warfare costly enough that the United States cannot impose its preferred outcome at an acceptable price.
The Trump administration says it has severely degraded Iran’s missile, naval, and nuclear capabilities. Tactical destruction is not itself a political end state. Iran continues to retaliate, to interfere with traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, and to reject Washington’s principal negotiating demands. Further escalation could reproduce the same stalemate at a higher price.
A growing resistance in the United States is skeptical of the war’s objectives, doubtful of its constitutional basis, and tired of the costs.
“Trump is facing unprecedented public and congressional resistance to his war on Iran. The possibility that he may not get an annual National Defense Authorization Act from Congress for the first time in the 65-year history of such legislation is a major governing failure reflecting his massive strategic failure in the Persian Gulf,” Dylan Williams, vice president of government affairs at Center for International Policy, told the IPJ.
While Trump started this war, Congress retains the power to stop funding it. Article I of the Constitution gives Congress the power to declare war and control federal appropriations. The House has passed its version of the fiscal year 2027 National Defense Authorization Act, which would authorize approximately $1.15 trillion, almost all of it for military and nuclear-defense activities. The measure has not completed the legislative process.
That legislation is distinct from the administration’s broader $1.5 trillion defense-budget proposal, comprising $1.15 trillion in discretionary defense funding and an additional $350 billion in proposed mandatory defense funding.
“Trump is clearly refusing to take the loss, but that doesn’t make it any less real or costly. Lawmakers opposed to this reckless military adventurism need to stand strong and continue to deny Trump’s record $1.5 trillion military budget request and other attempts to fund and deepen this disastrous war of choice,” Williams added.
Congress could condition further funding on explicit authorization, require the Trump administration to disclose the war’s true costs and objectives, or establish a deadline after which military operations could not continue without renewed approval.
Iran cannot match the United States and Israel militarily. But it benefits from geography, a strategy tailored to a stronger adversary, and the advantages of fighting on its own territory, as well as a leadership that views the conflict as existential and has shown a willingness to absorb enormous costs rather than surrender. After six months, that military pressure has still not brought Washington closer to securing its demands. The United States can continue to destroy targets and degrade Iranian capabilities, but unless that pressure changes Iran’s political calculations, further escalation risks producing more destruction without producing a settlement.
That does not mean Tehran has abandoned diplomacy. Iranian officials have said Iran is prepared to return to the June memorandum of understanding if Washington recommits to it, leaving open a negotiated path out of the war. If the United States does not return to the agreement, however, Tehran appears prepared to escalate until Washington either tires of the conflict or concludes that diplomacy is less costly than continued war. In this calculation, escalation is not an alternative to negotiations but a means of forcing the United States back to them.
Six months into the war, Trump has yet to present a path to political victory. He retains the ability to escalate, but without an achievable end state, further escalation risks deepening the costs of a war Washington still cannot conclusively end.
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The Supreme Court's Mail-In Voting Decision Could Determine the Future of US Democracy
If the court stays injunctions and allows the Trump administration's new main-in voting rule to be implemented, the impact will be devastating, especially for Democrats.
Sep 13, 2026
Donald Trump’s unconstitutional bid to turn the United States Postal Service into a weapon of voter suppression could determine the outcome of the midterm elections and the future of American democracy.
The president’s bid is now on the Supreme Court’s notorious shadow docket for a final showdown in two consolidated cases (US Postal Service v. California and Trump v. League of Women Voters) that center on the final regulatory rule on mail-in voting that the Postal Service issued on August 21. The rule—adopted in compliance with an executive order Trump promulgated in March to root out what he claims is fraudulent voting by noncitizens—requires state election officials to upload lists of mail-in voters’ names and addresses to an untested and secretly constructed USPS online portal and to redesign ballot envelopes to include bar codes that can be checked against the voter lists. If a state does not obtain envelope design approval, or does not upload voter information, the USPS will not deliver ballots to voters.
For now, the rule has been blocked in both cases by preliminary injunctions issued by Boston-based Federal District Court Judge Indira Talwani. If the Supreme Court stays the injunctions and allows the new rule to be implemented, the impact will be devastating, especially for Democrats.
Nearly 1 in 3 Americans voted by mail in 2024, including an estimated 37% of Democratic voters, but only 24% of Republicans. Five states—Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Utah, and Washington—hold elections almost entirely by mail. As the midterms approach, North Carolina has already begun mailing midterm ballots to some 260,000 voters. According to Democracy Docket, a host of others will follow suit in the coming weeks, including 5.1 million mailed ballots in Washington, 4 million in Colorado, and 3.2 million in Arizona. Next month in California, election officials are slated to mail over 23 million ballots.
Unlike the founders, Trump sees the Postal Service as a vehicle to negate democracy and maintain his personal grip on power.
Even if the Postal Service’s new rule were warranted to prevent fraud—and studies have repeatedly shown that voter fraud in the US is extremely rare—the states do not have sufficient time to retool their ballot infrastructures to securely meet the rule’s demands and deadlines.
“With fewer than 60 days to go before the November election, there is not a shred of evidence that states could comply with it without disenfranchising voters who rely on mail ballots,” said Sophia Lin Lakin, director of the American Civil Liberty Union’s Voting Rights Project, in a statement to the media. “Put plainly, this administration is racing to the Supreme Court to demand the right to enforce a rule that has no purpose other than to create chaos, undermine election integrity, and rob eligible voters of their essential right to make their voices heard in our democracy.”
This is not the first time Trump’s new postal system rule has reached the Supreme Court. On August 24, the six Republican sycophants on the high tribunal lifted earlier injunctions blocking the rule issued by Judge Talwani on procedural grounds, holding that the initial legal challenges to the rule were brought prematurely. Now that the rule has become final, that rationale no longer applies. This time, Chief Justice John Roberts and his GOP confederates will be forced to assess the rule’s legality.
As a matter of law, the issue is a true no-brainer. The Constitution’s “Elections Clause” (Article I, Section 4, Clause 1) gives states the authority to set the “times, places, and manner” of elections for House members and senators subject only to congressional oversight. Even under the strong version of the unitary executive theory that the Republican court majority has embraced, the president and the federal agencies under his control have no power to dictate how elections are run. The new postal system rule also runs afoul of the statutory framework governing the USPS, which requires the agency to have as “its basic function the obligation to provide postal services to bind the Nation together through the personal, educational, literary, and business correspondence of the people… [by means of] prompt, reliable, and efficient services to patrons in all areas and… to all communities.”
In addition, the rule conflicts with the postal system’s history as an impartial institution operating in the national interest to support democracy. That history dates back to the colonial era when Benjamin Franklin and others worked to replace the primitive courier system controlled by the British crown with an integrated service designed to unite the 13 colonies. Those efforts paved the way for the formation of the legendary committees of correspondence and for the first official post office established by the Continental Congress under the Articles of Confederation, with Franklin as the first postmaster general. The Postal Service was formally organized under the Constitution, which granted Congress the power “To establish Post Offices and post Roads.”
Unlike the founders, Trump sees the Postal Service as a vehicle to negate democracy and maintain his personal grip on power. In his first term in office, he tried to gut the service by backing Louis DeJoy, an obsequious campaign donor, to become postmaster general. Among other measures, DeJoy eliminated overtime pay for postal workers, banned late or additional trips to deliver mail, and removed highly efficient mail-sorting machines from facilities throughout the country to impede mail-in voting. In May 2025, the Postal Service replaced DeJoy with another Trump loyalist, former FedEx board member David Steiner, who oversaw the adoption of the new mail-in voting rule.
In the Supreme Court, the administration is represented by Solicitor General D. John Sauer, who gained Trump’s favor defending him in Trump v. United States, the landmark 2024 case on presidential immunity. In his brief to the court on mail-in balloting, Sauer argues that “the Postal Service’s final rule imposes only modest envelope-design and addressee-information requirements for federal-election ballots sent via US Mail,” and that claims of voter disenfranchisement are overblown.
Sauer has likened mail-in ballots to the mailing of cremated remains and replica explosives, which the Postal Service can strictly regulate under federal law. He has also cited the service’s authority to reject unstamped mail and heavy parcels with insufficient postage, an argument that has nothing to do with the blanket prohibitions the new rule would impose.
Sauer and his arguments deserve to be laughed straight out of court.
But this is the Supreme Court of John Roberts, who has devoted his career to destroying the Voting Rights Act and conferring near-total immunity from criminal prosecution on Donald Trump. It is also the court of Samuel Alito, who wrote the majority decision overturning Roe v. Wade, and Clarence Thomas, who has spent his career accepting unreported luxury vacations paid for by billionaire Republican donors. It is also the court of three Trump appointees—Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett “I Like Beer” Kavanaugh. As recent history confirms, no argument is too absurd for this junta to embrace as long as it furthers the interests of Trump and the MAGA movement.
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Federal Court Blocks Trump's 'Loyalty Question' on Civil Service Job Applications
A union member testified that she was "afraid" answering the question about the president's executive orders honestly would "hurt her application."
Sep 12, 2026
A court's decision to block the Trump administration from including a "loyalty question" on federal job applications was a win not only for the nonpartisan civil service, but also for the communities public employees serve, said one labor leader whose union was among the plaintiffs in the case against the Office of Personnel Management.
Patrick Moran, president of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) union, said Friday that the loyalty questions the OPM placed on job applications for public servants were a "blatantly illegal attempt to hire partisan cronies who would endanger our communities by putting politics before people, rather than dedicated, qualified public service workers."
The question was added to applications in response to one of President Donald Trump's first executive orders of his second term, titled “Reforming the Federal Hiring Process and Restoring Merit to Government Service." The OPM was directed to develop a “Federal Hiring Plan that brings to the Federal workforce only highly skilled Americans dedicated to the furtherance of American ideals, values, and interests."
Several essay questions were added to job applications for the civil service as a result, including one that asked: "How would you help advance the president’s executive orders and policy priorities in this role? Identify one or two relevant executive orders or policy initiatives that are significant to you, and explain how you would help implement them if hired."
Over 70,000 job postings have included the question, and the plaintiffs in the case—including AFSCME, the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), and the National Association of Government Employees (NAGE), argued that its inclusion compelled applicants to make political statements and chilled the speech of those who may not agree with Trump's executive orders.
The US District Court for the District of Massachusetts found that continuing to include the question would cause "irreparable harm" to workers applying for government jobs.
Judge George A. O’Toole Jr. said the plaintiffs' arguments that the OPM had violated applicants' First Amendment rights and the Administrative Procedure Act were likely to succeed in court.
A sworn declaration from an AFGE member figured prominently in the case. The employee said she "was afraid" that answering the loyalty question with an honest response about her personal views on Trump's executive orders would "hurt her application."
O'Toole wrote that the question's plain language "calls for the applicant’s personal views on a political topic, and directly links that personal view to the duties of the desired civil service job."
Everett Kelley, AFGE national president, said that "requiring federal job applicants to answer politically motivated questions goes against the very nature of the nonpartisan civil service, and we are pleased the judge has put an immediate stop to the administration’s loyalty questions. Federal employees should be hired based solely on their ability to perform the job—not their allegiance to any particular administration."
O'Toole denied the unions' request for a preliminary injunction blocking the government from incorporating answers that applicants have already provided into hiring decisions.
Still, Skye Perryman, president and CEO of Democracy Forward, which represented the plaintiffs, said the ruling "protects the Constitution, the civil service, and the people who depend on a professional, nonpartisan federal workforce.”
“For more than a century, civil servants have been hired based on their merits, not based on allegiance to a partisan political agenda,” said Perryman. “Today’s decision—stopping the Trump-Vance administration’s required loyalty question for public servants—reaffirms the importance of a nonpartisan civilian workforce that serves the American people."
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Iran Is Just the Latest in a Long Line of US Mideast Failures
Washington’s present predicament cannot be explained solely through depleted arsenals, poor military planning, Trump’s impulsiveness, or Netanyahu’s manipulation. Nor can it be understood simply as the result of underestimating Iran.
Sep 12, 2026
The US government continues to double down, even as its stubbornness costs it dearly—not only in material terms, but also in geopolitical influence. Washington is rapidly losing power and status in the Middle East, a decline that could produce a wider domino effect, reverberating around the world.
The latest expression of this hubris came from US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. Speaking at a G20 gathering of finance ministers in Asheville, North Carolina on September 1, Bessent declared that within two years, the Strait of Hormuz would become “a worthless piece of water,” as oil would instead be transported through overland pipelines.
Bessent is now promoting a new narrative that shifts the emphasis from the military war to an economic one. In an August 23 article for the Financial Times, he announced that “an economic D-Day is coming for Iran,” threatening countries that continue to trade with Tehran with severe economic consequences.
This sounds less like a serious foreign-policy strategy than an admission of Washington’s inability to alter the course of the ongoing war.
The deeper failure lies in Washington’s attempt to impose an outdated model of regional domination on a Middle East—and a world—that has fundamentally changed.
Two dominant schools of thought have emerged to explain how Washington found itself in this position.
The first, promoted largely by sections of the US media, former officials, and retired military commanders, argues that the war on Iran was a mistake from the outset and that Washington lacked the military and logistical preparedness necessary to wage it.
The second explanation places Iran at the center. It argues that Washington fundamentally underestimated Iran’s military capabilities, political resilience, and regional reach, treating the country as though it were another Venezuela that could be subdued through sanctions, threats, and limited military pressure.
Both explanations contain elements of truth. Neither, however, provides the deeper, less defensive, and more historically grounded understanding required to explain the scale of the present American failure.
John J. Mearsheimer, the prominent American political scientist and international relations scholar, has been among the boldest critics of the US war.
“Trump is trapped and has no way out,” Mearsheimer said on July 15, reiterating an argument he had advanced repeatedly since the beginning of the war. “All of this is to say that the decision to attack Iran on 28 February 2026 is one of the greatest blunders in the history of US foreign policy,” he added.
Mearsheimer, like Jeffrey Sachs, Scott Ritter, and other critical American voices, often—and understandably—analyzes these “great blunders” from a US-centered perspective. For millions of people in the Middle East, however, this collective analysis is not an intellectual or strategic exercise. It describes their everyday reality. They have lived through these catastrophic miscalculations and paid the human cost of US intransigence, militarism, and political failure.
The history of US foreign policy in the Middle East offers countless examples of this destructive pattern. Washington’s support for Israel—the region’s greatest destabilizing force—remains the most enduring example.
Palestinians, Lebanese, Syrians, and other peoples of the region require no new strategic framework to reach a conclusion similar to Mearsheimer’s. They have experienced the consequences of US power directly: wars, invasions, occupations, sanctions, political interference, and unconditional support for Israel.
The United States also established a disastrous record through its invasion and occupation of Iraq. It succeeded in overthrowing Saddam Hussein’s government in 2003, but failed catastrophically to govern the country, stabilize it, or restructure the Middle East according to the "vision" it had proclaimed.
The outcome was not a new American order, but the devastation of Iraq, prolonged instability, and the rise of political forces Washington had neither anticipated nor controlled.
Washington’s Western allies were also drawn into what became known as the Iraq quagmire, paying considerable political, military and financial costs for a war whose premises proved false and whose consequences remain unresolved.
Naturally, those former partners have little appetite for participating in a much larger and potentially more destructive war against Iran for an indefinite period—particularly when the crisis is being managed by Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, two deeply unpopular, impulsive, and widely distrusted leaders.
But the Middle East has changed. Regional states now possess greater political agency, more diversified alliances, and far more at stake than they did in 2003. They are no longer operating within a regional order in which Washington represents the only meaningful center of global power.
Chinese President Xi Jinping’s recent visit to Egypt provides one of numerous examples. “We must uphold the principle that the people of the Middle East are the masters of their own affairs,” Xi said during his September 2 meeting with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. He also urged countries to oppose “external interference” and strengthen regional dialogue on peace and security.
Like Egypt, other regional powers are similarly diversifying their partnerships rather than relying exclusively on Washington.
Key Middle Eastern leaders understand that a prolonged war against Iran would not remain confined to Iran. It could destabilize the entire region, devastate economies and infrastructure, threaten vital energy routes and generate interconnected wars whose consequences could endure for decades.
This brings us to Israel. Historically the cornerstone of US strategy in the region, Israel is itself considerably weaker. It is militarily overstretched, politically fragmented, socially divided, and unable to decisively conclude any of the wars it has opened, despite Netanyahu’s repeated declarations of victory.
Washington’s present predicament, therefore, cannot be explained solely through depleted arsenals, poor military planning, Trump’s impulsiveness, or Netanyahu’s manipulation. Nor can it be understood simply as the result of underestimating Iran.
The deeper failure lies in Washington’s attempt to impose an outdated model of regional domination on a Middle East—and a world—that has fundamentally changed.
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Never Forget Is Bad Spiritual Advice
There is wisdom in honoring one’s pain and setting it aside, to live. I still believe that. I no longer know if it’s possible when the country doing the wounding has stopped bothering to hide it.
Sep 12, 2026
"The well-prepared heart has hope during adversity and fear during prosperity.”—Erica McAlpine
Twenty-five years, and the day keeps getting bigger instead of smaller. Three thousand dead in a single morning, then some multiple of that across the wars launched in its wake, then a shifting count out of Gaza that outpaces anyone’s will to keep totaling it. I did not expect grief to go on collecting interest this long. I did not expect to still be bitter, on a date this rehearsed, in a country this practiced at looking away.
I have written some version of this before. On some earlier September, I posted this: “#NeverForget is bad spiritual advice. Especially, when one has exacted revenge that far exceeds initial loss. To spell it out, honor your dead but remember, too, the 100,000+ Iraqi civilian noncombatants murdered in a vengeful, unjust ‘war.’ It is unseemly to keep one’s wounds open, while downplaying those of others that we’ve inflicted. There is wisdom, humility, and self preservation in honoring one’s pain & setting it aside, to Live.” Under it, I’d put a line from Friedrich Nietzsche, “Without forgetting it is quite impossible to live at all"; another, unattributed, “If the other person injures you, you may forget the injury, but if you injure him you will always remember"; and closed with Kahlil Gibran: “Hate is a dead thing. Who of you would be a tomb?”
This is not the only year I have said some version of it. Social media keeps a ledger I never asked for: one friend calling it the voice of reason, another admitting he’d learned the hard way that making this case got him nowhere with people he knew, a third telling me the 9/11 Memorial & Museum has a final section on the wars that followed, built into the same ground as the names of the dead. “We can always do better,” I wrote back to that last one, which was as much comfort as I had that day.
Then there is the exchange that still says more than anything I could add to it. A commenter, spoiling for a fight, wrote that we were lucky the whole Middle East hadn’t been leveled. “You’re a funny guy,” I wrote back, “and I’m too fond of you to take seriously your outrageous comment,” and sent him “a great big, virtual hug, until I can give you one in person.” Another commenter played along just long enough to ask what exactly had been won. Afghans and Iraqis, he answered himself: more Americans dead in the war on terror than in the towers, “them” and “us” collapsing into the same casualty list. “Yes,” I wrote back, “it’s always civilian casualties,” which is the whole essay in four words, if I am honest, and everything since has only been me finding 400 more ways to say it.
I could republish that old post today, and only the arithmetic would need updating. Ammiel Alcalay, writing this same week, names the habit outright: Keep what happens abroad in one room and what happens at home in another, so neither has to answer to the other. Brown University’s Costs of War project puts the toll of these 25 years, direct and indirect combined, at 4.5 to 4.7 million and still counting. Alcalay draws the line forward, to what he calls, correctly, “the genocide in Gaza and seizure of land in Palestine.” The number I gave my friends, a decade or more ago, was 100,000. It never got revised. It got buried under the next one, and the next. There is no exchange rate for human suffering. The afterlife of September 11 was not measured abroad alone. At home, Muslims remained available for suspicion: The Council on American-Islamic Relations recorded 8,683 complaints in 2025, its highest annual total. This week, Rudy Giuliani went on television to say the city’s current mayor, its first Muslim one, shouldn’t attend Friday’s ceremony, then said Muslims are taught from childhood that they want to “dominate us.” Twenty-five years on, and grief still comes with a loyalty test.
What has changed since is the camouflage. Richard Nixon needed Henry Kissinger to bomb Cambodia in the dark. Barack Obama needed kill lists and a “disposition matrix,” a targeting database mapping how terrorism suspects would be captured or killed, dressed up in the calm language of due process. Donald Trump needs none of it. He says the part that used to need a translator, calls it winning, and the bombs land anyway, in the same places they always did. He is the pattern finally caught without its coat on, a confession the country has been rehearsing since before I wrote that old post, only now said out loud.
It was a friend, in that same 2018 thread, who was already flagging the collusion with Saudi Arabia over Yemen: American weapons, sold for profit, into a war just as unjust as the ones carrying our own name. I hadn’t known. I said so. Eight years on, Britain has announced plans, not yet law, to ban imports from illegal settlements and create powers to sanction companies that support, facilitate, or profit from them. It is a small thing. It is also an acknowledgment, however belated, that complicity can carry a price.
I wrote, once, that there is wisdom in honoring one’s pain and setting it aside, to live, that what is spiritually true for us as individuals is also true for us as nations. I still believe that. I no longer know if it’s possible when the country doing the wounding has stopped bothering to hide it, or if honoring the dead, now, requires that we stop setting anything aside at all.
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Fresh Calls to End Iran War After Trump Reportedly Denies MBS Request to Bomb Houthis
"Imagine if we had just built on the JCPOA and created a stable Middle East through cooperation instead of these endless wars," said one observer.
Sep 11, 2026
Calls to halt the Iran War and avert yet another US bombing campaign in Yemen intensified Friday after President Donald Trump reportedly declined a request from Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to launch airstrikes against Houthi forces amid their stunning advance toward a vital global shipping lane.
According to Axios' Barak Ravid, Mohammed bin Salman, who is also the Saudi prime minister, made two urgent calls to Trump on Thursday as Houthi forces captured the strategic Yemeni port city of Mocha and advanced toward the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, one of the world's most important maritime chokepoints. MBS reportedly pressed Trump to intervene militarily, but the president declined to order US attacks at this time.
"With Iran already disrupting traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, Houthi control of Bab el-Mandeb could give Tehran a powerful new point of leverage over the US and its Gulf allies," Ravid wrote.
However, he added that "US officials stressed the administration has no plans to intervene directly against the Houthis for now."
Understanding that Trump's apparent refusal of MBS' request could be temporary, opponents of a wider Middle East war are urging the US leader to refrain from any further strikes on Houthi targets.
Instead of attacking Yemen, Matt Duss, executive vice president at the Center for International Policy and a former foreign policy adviser to US Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), said on social media that a "better idea" would be to "end the war on Iran and remove US forces from the Middle East."
California-based Israeli academic Shaiel Ben-Ephraim said on social media that "Trump wisely decided not to get involved in the Yemeni civil war. Stop expanding all these wars."
"Imagine if we had just built on the JCPOA and created a stable Middle East through cooperation instead of these endless wars in Syria, Yemen, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, and Gaza," he mused, referring to the Obama-era Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the Iran nuclear deal unilaterally abandoned by Trump during his first term, despite Tehran's full compliance with its terms.
Drop Site News national security and foreign affairs reporter Murtaza Hussain called on the Gulf Arab states—which have borne the brunt of Iranian counterattacks—to circumvent the United States and negotiate an agreement with Tehran.
The Houthi victories give the group—officially called Ansar Allah—a commanding position near the Bab el-Mandeb Strait. The narrow waterway links the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden and carries an estimated 12% of global goods, including approximately 4-5% of the world's total seaborne-traded oil and petroleum products.
Saudi Arabia launched Friday airstrikes on Mocha's airport, while the Houthis attacked targets including Saudi pipeline infrastructure used to circumvent the Strait of Hormuz. The Houthis said that maritime traffic would be safe except for Saudi vessels.
Oil prices surged more than 6% on Thursday, with both major benchmarks trading at over $100 a barrel amid the Houthi advances and continued instability stemming from Iran's effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz despite over six months of unsuccessful efforts by the US military and Trump administration to reopen the vital waterway, through which around one-fifth of the world's oil previously transited.
The average US price of a gallon of gasoline reached nearly $4.30 on Friday, a 37% increase from when Trump—who promised both no new wars and $2 gas—entered office in January 2025.
US forces have carried out airstrikes and ground raids on al-Qaeda and other militants in Yemen for decades. According to the UK-based casualty monitor Airwars, an estimated 445-643 Yemeni civilians have been killed by US forces since 2009.
Starting under then-President Barack Obama in 2014, the US provided arms and support to the Saudi-led coalition during Yemen's civil war. International experts attribute more than 150,000 Yemeni deaths to a US-backed, Saudi-led bombing campaign and blockade, which has fueled mass starvation and disease in the country of approximately 43 million people.
A report published Thursday documented more than 500 Yemeni civilian casualties caused by US attacks between December 2023 and May 2025. All but seven of 46 strikes covered by the report occurred during Trump's presidency, including massacres at the Ras Isa oil port and at a detention center for African migrants in Saada.
During Israel's war on Gaza, the US, Israel, and the United Kingdom carried out repeated airstrikes in response to Houthi attacks on commercial and military vessels in the Red Sea that the group said were intended to pressure Israel as it killed tens of thousands of Palestinians.
Responding to the latest developments, UK political commentator Bushra Shaikh said that "America went to war for Israel, seeking to dominate the Middle East."
"Now Trump is negotiating with Iran, Saudi Arabia is looking towards regional diplomacy, Pakistan says the Mecca Pact won't be used against Yemen, and the Ansar Allah Houthis retain leverage over Bab el-Mandeb," she continued.
Shaikh added: "The ultimate humiliation? America will come out of this war having failed to defeat Iran while pushing the very region it wanted to control towards strategic independence from Washington."
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Inflation Could Soon ‘Get a Lot More Painful’ as Trump’s Iran War Drives Diesel Over $6 a Gallon
"Diesel touches almost everything Americans buy," said one expert.
Sep 11, 2026
The price of diesel fuel hit another record high on Friday, thanks in large part to President Donald Trump's illegal war with Iran.
New data released by the American Automobile Association showed the average price of diesel in the US increasing to $6.06, a 14% increase over the average price one month ago and a 64% increase from the average price one year ago.
In a Friday social media post, petroleum industry analyst Patrick De Haan reported that the price of diesel "is not slowing down," hitting an average of $6.07 as of 10:34 am ET.
De Haan also projected that Americans will collectively spend $711 million more on gasoline and diesel on Friday than they did a year ago, and warned "this number will continue to grow and could soon be $1 billion per day."
Rising diesel prices often portend higher inflation because it is the fuel used by trucks to ship goods across the country.
In an interview with The Associated Press published Friday, David Ortega, professor of food economics and policy at Michigan State University, warned that US consumers are likely in for another painful round of cost increases if the price of diesel stays at record highs.
“Early on, much of the cost increase gets absorbed along the supply chain through existing freight contracts and retailer margins,” said Ortega. “But as contracts reprice and fuel surcharges take hold, more of that cost makes its way to the grocery store.”
Ortega's analysis was echoed by Mark Tepper, CEO of Strategic Wealth Partners, who wrote in a social media post that "inflation could be about to get a lot more painful" if the price of diesel doesn't come down soon.
"Diesel touches almost everything Americans buy," Tepper explained. "Coming out of the pandemic, rising diesel prices were a leading indicator for the inflation that followed."
Diane Swonk, chief economist at audit services firm KPMG, said rising diesel costs, combined with the latest Consumer Price Index report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showing continued elevated inflation, made it likely that the US Federal Reserve will hike interest rates.
"The Fed will begin hiking in September, removing what it gave us in rate cuts in late 2025," Swonk predicted. "We now expect three rate hikes by early 2026. The probability that the vote will be unanimous just rose."
The record diesel prices, and their subsequent impact on inflation, come less than two months before the midterm elections.
The social media account for Democrats in the US House of Representatives pounced on news of higher diesel prices, which they said would mean "higher delivery prices, more expensive groceries, and surging electric bills."
"Trump's war with Iran did this," the House Democrats added.
Alex Jacquez, senior vice president of policy, advocacy, and research at Groundwork Collaborative, also took a shot at the president's policies, noting that in recent weeks he has "imposed further tariffs on one of our closest trading partners and continues escalation in Iran."
"Trump promised to lower costs and improve daily life for Americans," Jacquez added. "He’s not only failed to deliver on that promise, he’s driven our economy over a cliff."
Willamette University historian Seth Cotlar argued that the spike in diesel fuel could have significant impact on the US Senate race in Maine, where Republican incumbent Sen. Susan Collins is vying for a sixth term in office.
"Home heating oil season is about to start up," Cotlar observed. "In Maine, about 50% of homes use heating oil which is almost identical to diesel. How’s that GOP affordability agenda coming Senator Collins?"
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Demagogue Trump Makes Supporters 'Pledge' to 'Cheat Like Hell' in 2026 Midterms
"Having people pledge allegiance to himself is the most on-brand Trump thing to do," said one progressive critic. "And it shows how cult-like the base is that they did it."
Sep 11, 2026
Far-right President Donald Trump on Thursday night asked his Republican supporters at a party convention event to raise their right hands and vow fealty directly to him in a mocking version of the "pledge of allegiance" in which he also called on them to "cheat like hell" at the ballot box in November in order to secure a midterm win against Democrats.
"Please right your right hand," Trump told attendees at the first-ever GOP midterm convention in Dallas, Texas.
"I pledge to the greatest president in the history of the United States—that loves us so much he can't even breathe—that I will go out with my family, my friends, I'll do it any way—I don't care if I'm registered or not, I'm going to try to cheat like hell like [the Democrats] do... there's never been bigger cheaters, they don't care."
President Trump led his Republican Party in a mock pledge during their political convention in Dallas, telling them to ‘cheat like hell’ and vote whether they're ‘registered or not’ in November's midterm elections https://t.co/JgD3J8BdV9 pic.twitter.com/tCDKAi3FBo
— Reuters (@Reuters) September 11, 2026
"Having people pledge allegiance to himself is the most on-brand Trump thing to do," said Jonathan Cohn, political director of the grassroots advocacy group Progressive Mass. "And it shows how cult-like the base is that they did it."
Trump has built the second half of his political career around lies related to false claims of voter fraud and stolen elections. With the midterms less than two months away, and early voting starting soon in some states, the GOP fears losing both the House and Senate because of a crippled economy and historically low approval numbers for the president.
While the president is not on the ballot, Trump has asked his base to pretend that he is in order to help Republican prospects in races nationwide. However, not all political observers are convinced that Trump will be the turnout booster for his party that he claims to be.
In his speech on Thursday—a night after he said that he would issue $5,000 checks to every US adult if the Republicans win in the midterms—Trump told the crowd that those who don't vote this year would "go to hell" as punishment.
"Night One: Trump offers $5k bribes to get people to vote for Republicans," said Amanda Carpenter, a writer for the nonpartisan group Protect Democracy United. "Night Two: Trump tells his supporters they'll go to hell if they don't vote. Sounds like it's going well!"
" Donald Trump just replaced the Pledge of Allegiance with a pledge of allegiance to himself," noted Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom. "This November, the choice is yours on the ballot: America or Trump."
"Bro had his supporters raise their right hands and pledge to vote for him. Then told them they'd go to hell if they don't," said one online commentator.
"This shit is literally beyond parody!" exclaimed another.
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Victims of Our Post-9/11 Wars Deserve Remembrance, Too
Similarities between Reflecting Absence and an earlier German Holocaust “Counter-Monument” prompt reflections on accepting responsibility.
Sep 11, 2026
Few who pay their respects today in the hallowed plaza where the Twin Towers once stood will be aware that the September 11 memorial echoes a 1987 Holocaust “counter-memorial” in Kassel, Germany. Like our memorial, the German monument consists of a hollow in the shape of what had once been there, into which water flows.
But the scope of the remembrances evoked by the two memorials are revealingly different.
We Americans want only to recall our innocent dead and to honor them. Unlike the Germans, we spurn acknowledging the evils done in their name that came to be intertwined with our losses, the catastrophe we inflicted on an innocent nation, Iraq.
What We Can Learn From Kassel’s Holocaust Counter-Memorial
In 1939, the Nazis destroyed a 40-foot pyramidal fountain in Kassel, Germany because it had been built by a Jew, the entrepreneur Sigmund Aschrott. The elimination of “the Jews’ Fountain” was soon followed by the elimination of Kassel’s 3,000 Jews themselves.
The Aschrott Fountain (1908–1939) is shown.
Forty-five years later it was proposed to rebuild the fountain. But simply rebuilding the original fountain would have erased the memory of its destruction. So artist Horst Hoheisel designed a new fountain: “a mirror image of the old one, sunk beneath the old place in order to rescue the history of this place as a wound and an open question.”
The Memorial to the Aschrottbrunnen Fountain is shown. (Photo by Eistreter, CC BY-SA 4.0)
The September 11 memorial, which is called Reflecting Absence, evokes the missing Twin Towers by revealing their empty foundations. Hoheisel’s earlier Kassel counter-monument is, similarly, an emptiness in the shape of the missing original. “The pyramid will be turned into a funnel into whose darkness water runs down,” Hoheisel says.
“The sunken fountain is an invitation to passersby who stand upon it to search for the memorial in their own heads. For only there is the memorial to be found.”
The underground portion of the Aschrottbrunnen Fountain is shown. (Photo by Horst Hoheisel)
Kassel’s Holocaust memorial is one of many throughout Germany, part of the way the Germans have accepted responsibility for the crimes of the Nazi era. This small, local memorial compels us to think of those who were murdered, but also of those who murdered and those who stood by.
The installation of the Aschrottbrunnen Fountain is shown. (Photo by Horst Hoheisel)
We reflect on the small viciousness of destroying “the Jew’s fountain,” and the monstrous barbarity to which this was prelude. The small monument conjures the sadness of loss, and the responsibility of a people for acts that can never be made right.
Can America Accept Responsibility for the Mass Deaths Inflicted in the Name of Our “War on Terrorism”
The murder of thousands of Americans, the crime of September 11, 2001, spawned a larger tragedy for another people. Using the false suggestion of Iraq complicity as one of its pretexts, and treating the 9/11 “war on terrorism” as license for war on Baghdad as well as on Kabul, our government invaded Iraq, overthrew its government, and occupied the country.
In reality, as Bush White House anti-terrorism adviser Richard Clarke confirmed, Iraq was not responsible for 9/11 and our government knew it. “In the weeks immediately after 9/11,” Clarke explained, “the president… instruct[ed] the Pentagon to prepare for the invasion of Iraq... Even though they knew at the time from me, from the FBI, from the CIA, that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11.”
Knowing that Iraq had nothing to do with the al Qaeda attack did not matter because President George W. Bush’s government had begun targeting Iraq for invasion long before September 11. The very first meeting of Bush’s national security team on January 20, 2001 included a discussion of “military options” for Iraq and overthrowing its government.
It would represent no insult to the memory of the innocents murdered in America, 25 Septembers ago, were we to acknowledge and memorialize the carnage and catastrophe we unleashed in Iraq.
As a delegation from our British allies secretly reported to their government before the invasion, “The intelligence and facts were being fixed around the [Bush] policy” of going to war. “The case [for war] was thin.”
The American invasion, and the resistance and chaotic civil war triggered by the US occupation, likely took between 500,000 and 1 million Iraqi lives. It made refugees of millions more, and inflicted malnutrition, birth defects, and other health disasters on a generation of Iraqi children.
It would represent no insult to the memory of the innocents murdered in America, 25 Septembers ago, were we to acknowledge and memorialize the carnage and catastrophe we unleashed in Iraq.
To America’s 9/11 memorial we should add a wall on which we engrave, in a necessarily small font, the names of however many can be identified of the million Iraqi men, women, and children slain in the wars and sectarian strife our invasion precipitated. And since President Donald Trump has ensnared our nation in another pointless war, another war of aggression based on the excuse of “terrorism,” a Middle East war he has no plan to end, we should inscribe as well the names of the Iranian civilians killed in Trump’s war. The 100 children slain at the beginning of the bombing campaign. The wedding guests bombed in a small Iran town last week. They deserve remembrance, too.
Of course, this is unthinkable and will never happen.
It would be “too political” to acknowledge any connection between the horrors we suffered and the horrors we inflicted. In fact, even the suggestion will be said to “disrespect” our honored dead—as though their memories could be further sullied than they already have been by the evil perpetrated in their names.
Nonetheless, the proposal may be useful. As Hoheisel says: “That’s how a counter-monument works. People get angry, they write letters, but you have a discussion. Out of this void, the history begins to come out.” In America, such a provocation may be the only kind of counter-monument that is permitted.
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