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THE PLANE THEY LEFT BEHIND
In a follow-up to its original report on the operation, the Washington Post reported Wednesday that the CIA had low confidence in the Israeli intelligence that triggered last month’s extraordinary Air Force One deception. Israel told the agency Iran was plotting to shoot down Trump’s plane as he left the NATO summit in Ankara on July 8. CIA analysts did not find the information compelling and told the Trump administration so directly, before the White House proceeded with the operation anyway.
One US official described the intelligence to the Post as coming from Israel rather than US sources, and viewed as unreliable. A separate, more pointed allegation came from a different official, who said the episode fit a broader pattern of Israeli intelligence reporting some officials believe is “designed as much to shape presidential decision-making as to inform it.” A third official questioned how serious the threat could have been in the first place, given the tens of thousands of Turkish security personnel deployed for the summit.
There is now a specific, material motive attached to that allegation. Israel has been uneasy about Trump’s warming relationship with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and during the Ankara summit Trump indicated he was willing to lift sanctions on Turkey and clear the sale of F-35 fighter jets to Ankara, a prospect Netanyahu’s government opposed as a threat to Israel’s military edge in the region. Turkish officials, in reporting that predates the Post’s story, told Middle East Eye they viewed the Israeli warning as a ruse aimed at undermining Trump’s negotiations with Tehran specifically. Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, wrote on X that “worse than fake news is fake intelligence.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio was briefed on both the Israeli intelligence and the Secret Service’s planned operation in advance. He boarded the older Air Force One anyway, alongside Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and the traveling press pool, none of whom were told Trump was no longer aboard. Trump himself was moved by catering truck onto a military C-32 alongside Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
The response from journalists and former officials was sharp. HuffPost White House correspondent S.V. Dáte wrote that “everyone aboard the real 747 AF1 — crew, guests, press pool — was considered expendable.” Former Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger accused Trump of putting his own staff and press at risk to protect himself, dismissing the idea that the episode should be treated as clever tradecraft rather than a real breach of trust. CNN’s Jake Tapper said he had spoken to no officials who had ever before heard of using a plane full of staff and journalists as a decoy during an active threat. Former State Department spokesperson Ned Price argued the White House could have informed reporters once the threat had passed, and said the administration instead chose to keep misleading them for weeks afterward.
There is a direct historical comparison, and it does not favor the Trump White House. When Bill Clinton used a similar decoy operation flying into Pakistan in 2000, his team briefed the head of the White House Correspondents’ Association, USA Today’s Susan Page, off the record, before the flight. Page, breaking a 26-year silence on the arrangement this week, said officials told her about “the extraordinary security procedures being taken because of the dangers in flying there, including use of the decoy plane.” No equivalent arrangement was made for anyone aboard the Ankara flight.
Not every account supports the idea that those left behind were unprotected. Robert McDonald, who spent 21 years with the Secret Service, told NPR he found it hard to believe the two Boeing 747s were left to “fend for themselves” without military escort, though he acknowledged he could not confirm this. A pool report later established that fighter jets did escort the decoy plane to England, and that Secret Service agents ordered the press cabin’s window shades kept closed throughout the flight. Trump has separately argued that his own plane, not the decoy, carried the greater risk. "I think actually the plane that I flew on was at greater risk," he told reporters, "because that would be the plane, I think, that they would be more likely to go for." Former Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer defended the operation outright, writing that the Secret Service and military deserved credit for protecting the president, and that he was “sorry if the press felt deceived.”
The CIA declined to comment on its assessment of the Israeli intelligence, and the Israeli Embassy in Washington did not respond to a request for comment on the Post’s reporting.
🌍 TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: This is not a two-country story anymore. Turkish officials had their own read on Israel’s motives before the CIA’s skepticism became public, and it was harsher than anything in the American reporting: that Israel manufactured or exaggerated a threat specifically to derail Trump’s diplomacy with Iran. Iran’s own foreign minister is now publicly mocking the credibility of Israeli intelligence on X. Israeli outlets, meanwhile, have run the CIA’s doubts prominently without softening the allegation that Israel meant to shape Washington’s decisions, not just protect the president. Three governments are now openly questioning what Israel actually told Washington and why, a dimension almost entirely absent from US coverage, which has largely stayed focused on the press-safety story.
🇺🇸 What American readers need to know: The White House ran an elaborate deception operation, involving senior cabinet officials who were briefed in advance and reporters who were not, based on intelligence its own CIA doubted and that a NATO ally believes was designed to manipulate US foreign policy. There is a documented, better precedent for handling this exact situation, and the Trump White House did not follow it.
Sources: Washington Post (US — CIA low-confidence finding, “designed to shape presidential decision-making” allegation, Erdogan/F-35 tension context, Rubio’s advance briefing); Middle East Eye (UK-based — Turkish officials’ “ruse” assessment, Araghchi’s “fake intelligence” post); The Hill (US — Dáte’s “expendable” quote, Kinzinger reaction); Mediaite (US — Tapper and Price reactions, Hegseth’s presence on the C-32); Washington Post, via Yahoo News (US — Susan Page’s account of the 2000 Clinton precedent); Time (US — Trump’s “greater risk” quote); NPR (US — McDonald’s Secret Service assessment); Fox News (US — fighter jet escort, window shade order); Deseret News (US — Fleischer’s defense); Times of Israel (Israel, right-centre — Israeli press framing)
FRANCE’S REFUSED COMMISSION
Jean Sannier, a lawyer for the French child-protection group Innocence en Danger, appeared on CNEWS Sunday and accused French investigators of institutional indifference toward Epstein’s victims. “There are investigators everywhere who don’t like children,” Sannier said. He formally called for the opening of a full judicial investigation and a parliamentary commission of inquiry into the French dimension of the Epstein case.
France opened a preliminary investigation into Epstein in 2019, following a complaint from Innocence en Danger, after allegations surfaced that the financier had abused minors in France, including at his apartment on Paris’s Avenue Foch. That investigation has continued in fits and starts for seven years, reopening in February after the US Justice Department released a new cache of Epstein files that named several French public figures.
Innocence en Danger sued the French state in July, accusing it of “déni de justice,” a denial of justice, over what it describes as flagrant institutional inertia. The group points to the five weeks that passed between Epstein’s death in a New York jail in August 2019 and the search of his Paris apartment, a delay it calls incomprehensible and deeply troubling.
France’s parliament has twice tried and failed to open a formal inquiry into how French authorities handled the case. A resolution to create a National Assembly commission of inquiry was filed in February by lawmakers from La France Insoumise. National Assembly President Yaël Braun-Pivet rejected it directly, telling Europe 1 that creating such a commission “would lead to a confusion of powers” in a country built on separation between the legislature and the judiciary. She was notably more forceful on the underlying conduct than on the mechanism, separately calling it unacceptable and morally corrupting for politicians to accept private jets and paid vacations from wealthy benefactors, in comments tied to Jack Lang’s resignation from the Arab World Institute.
The following month, Republican Senator Henri Leroy and 15 co-signing colleagues sent a formal letter asking Senate President Gérard Larcher to open a similar inquiry into “the institutional implications and possible public dysfunctions linked to the Epstein affair.” Larcher declined in a written reply, arguing that any commission of inquiry not grounded in sufficiently specific and established facts would undermine the purpose of a tool meant to establish the truth. Because Epstein-related judicial proceedings had just been reopened following new complaints, Larcher wrote, it was not possible to open commission of inquiry work covering facts already under examination by the courts. Both refusals rest on the same underlying principle, that a parliamentary inquiry cannot proceed alongside active judicial proceedings covering the same facts, though the presidents differed in how directly they engaged with the substance of the allegations themselves.
Innocence en Danger has disputed that reasoning, arguing a parliamentary commission would not determine criminal responsibility and would not interfere with the courts. Its stated purpose would be narrower: examining how French institutions functioned, including the delay before Epstein’s apartment was searched and how the evidence seized there was subsequently handled, transmitted, and used.
The case’s French dimension widened again this week. A Le Monde investigation published August 8 reported that Epstein used Saint-Tropez, a seasonal hub for the fashion and luxury industries, as a second base for his activity in France, alongside the Paris apartment already under scrutiny. Separately, French officials have confirmed that no doubt has been raised over the authenticity of the 2022 prison suicide of Jean-Luc Brunel, Epstein’s close associate and a French modeling agent who was awaiting trial on rape and trafficking charges at the time of his death.
🌍 TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: This story has almost no footprint in American coverage, even though it concerns Epstein’s own French operation and two of France’s most senior lawmakers declining, in their own words, to open a parliamentary inquiry into it. French outlets, BFM TV and CNEWS in particular, are treating that refusal as newsworthy in its own right, not simply background to the criminal case. Worth noting in fairness to Braun-Pivet and Larcher: both grounded their refusals in a specific, stated legal principle, that a parliamentary inquiry cannot examine facts already under active judicial investigation, and Braun-Pivet was personally blunt about the underlying conduct even while declining the parliamentary mechanism. The institutional question French coverage keeps returning to is whether that principle, applied here, functions as a genuine safeguard or a convenient one.
🇺🇸 What American readers need to know: France ran its own Epstein investigation for seven years, largely out of public view internationally, and its parliament has twice refused to formally examine how that investigation was handled. For anyone hoping accountability might come from outside the US legal system, the French experience offers a caution: institutional resistance to scrutiny in the Epstein case is not uniquely American.
Sources: Titrespresse, aggregating BFM TV and CNEWS (France — Sannier’s CNEWS appearance and quote); Innocence en Danger (France, primary source — the July lawsuit against the French state, “déni de justice” characterization); France 24 (France, public broadcaster — Braun-Pivet’s own Europe 1 remarks, in full); Public Sénat (France — Leroy’s Senate letter, its exact wording, timeline); Égalité et Réconciliation (France — Larcher’s written reply to Leroy, quoted directly); Assemblée Nationale (France, primary source — February resolution text); Al Jazeera (Qatar, state-funded/editorially independent — background on Jack Lang investigation, French files fallout)
DUELING CLAIMS OVER HORMUZ
Iran and the United States gave the world flatly contradictory accounts of who controls the Strait of Hormuz on Thursday. The commander of Iran’s Basij paramilitary organization, Hojjatoleslam Hossein Taeb, said the strait is “under the management and control of the Islamic Republic,” a day after President Trump claimed the United States was in total control of the waterway. Iran’s military separately rejected US claims that vessels are passing through the strait, saying none can do so without Iranian permission.
Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, went further, saying Trump “has long miscalculated due to intelligence failures.” War Secretary Pete Hegseth countered from Panama, telling reporters the US Navy can maintain its blockade of Iranian ports indefinitely by rotating ships in and out of the region.
The dispute is not merely rhetorical. Traffic through the strait has fallen to its lowest level in nearly three months, and the International Energy Agency warned this week that reopening the waterway is becoming more urgent as the world burns through its oil stockpiles. A Reuters source inside the Iranian government said no breakthrough has been reached in reviving the interim peace deal struck in June, with the two sides still divided over the terms of ending the five-month war.
Iran has separately begun pressing an environmental claim tied to the broader compensation fight. Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmail Baghaei pointed to an oil slick that washed ashore this week on Iran’s Qeshm Island, near the strait, saying it was only one visible example of pollution that has degraded the Persian Gulf and imposed trillions of dollars in damage on Iran’s coast over decades. “Who bears responsibility for compensating these damages?” Baghaei asked. The cause of the Qeshm spill has not been established; Iranian officials say a marine source is among the possibilities under investigation.
An Iranian military adviser told PBS this week that the country could “prolong” the war with the United States until Trump is out of office, a timeline measured in years rather than the weeks both sides have suggested publicly.
🇺🇸 What American readers need to know: The US and Iran are now making mutually exclusive claims about who controls one of the world’s most important oil chokepoints, and the practical evidence, collapsed shipping traffic and a growing global fuel crunch, suggests neither side has the clean victory it’s claiming. Every day this standoff continues costs Americans at the pump, regardless of whose rhetoric is winning.
Sources: Al Jazeera (Qatar, state-funded/editorially independent — Taeb quote, military rejection of US transit claims); Fox News (US — Araghchi’s “miscalculated” quote, Hegseth’s blockade remarks); CNBC (US — Reuters sourcing on stalled peace deal, PBS adviser interview); CNN (US — IEA stockpile warning, Baghaei’s compensation remarks, Qeshm spill details)
QUSRA UNDER OCCUPATION
The siege of Palestinian homes in the West Bank village of Qusra escalated sharply Thursday, four days after it began, when the Israeli military seized 16 Palestinian homes in and around the village and converted them into military posts. Israeli forces imposed a curfew across the town, ordering commercial establishments closed and sealing off access points.
US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, a longtime defender of Israeli settlements, broke with that record Thursday morning, calling the siege “an act of terror” and condemning those responsible in unusually harsh terms. Hours later, Huckabee partially walked the comment back on X, writing that settlers are not the problem in the West Bank and that a “very small minority” of “unsettlers” do great damage to both Palestinian families and to Israel’s own standing.
BBC first reported that Israeli soldiers responding to the siege were filmed greeting the settlers warmly and joining them in prayer rather than removing them, a detail ROTWR included in an earlier edition this week. CNN has now independently confirmed it. Loui Ridi, an American relative of the trapped family watching remotely from Ohio via security camera, told CNN he contacted Israeli authorities in disbelief as he watched the interaction unfold. His brother Qusai and nephew Ahmed remained trapped inside, relying on a temporary solar system and leftover well water after supply lines were cut.
Israeli soldiers and border police did attempt to intervene Wednesday, dismantling the settlers’ tent and trying to clear the area, but the effort failed and settlers remained. Turkey’s Anadolu Agency reported the Israeli army told Qusra’s mayor the military operation will continue until Sunday morning. The Palestinian Colonization and Wall Resistance Commission said the occupiers have obstructed the delivery of food, water, and medicine to the besieged homes throughout the week.
Defense Minister Israel Katz said separately Thursday that Israeli forces will not withdraw from occupied “security zones” in Lebanon, Syria, or Gaza, even as airstrikes injured several people in southern Lebanon this week amid what Lebanese officials describe as ongoing ceasefire violations.
🌍 TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: The most striking new detail this week didn’t come from a rights group or a foreign correspondent. It came from Israel’s own ambassador. Huckabee’s “act of terror” comment, and how quickly it was partially retracted, is being read across Israeli and Arab press alike as evidence of how uncomfortable this episode has become even for Israel’s staunchest American allies. Al Jazeera’s correspondents on the ground continue to center Palestinian accounts of the siege as an attempt at land seizure; Israeli outlets are increasingly framing it as a question of whether Israeli security forces have lost control of extremist elements in the West Bank entirely.
🇺🇸 What American readers need to know: A four-day siege has now become a military occupation of sixteen homes, and the US ambassador to Israel, someone who has spent his career defending Israeli settlements, called the underlying act terrorism before partially taking it back within hours. That is not a story about outside critics. It is a story about how far this has gone that even Israel’s most reliable American defenders are struggling to defend it cleanly.
Sources: Al Jazeera (Qatar, state-funded/editorially independent — Huckabee’s “act of terror” quote); Times of Israel (Israel, right-centre — Huckabee’s “unsettlers” walk-back post); CNN (US — Ridi’s account, prayer detail, Wednesday intervention attempt); Middle East Monitor (UK-based, pro-Palestinian editorial lean — 16-home seizure, Colonization Commission statement); Anadolu Agency, via Yeni Safak (Turkey, state-affiliated — curfew details, Katz’s “not withdrawing” statement, Sunday deadline)
THE TANKER NO ONE OWNS
Greenpeace told CNN Thursday that an oil spill from a stranded Russian tanker off the coast of Oman has grown to an estimated 500 square miles. It now threatens to become a major ecological disaster in the Arabian Sea. The spill has spread to reach mainland Oman, roughly 120 miles from the wreck itself.
The tanker, Caroline Bezengi, ran aground June 30 on rocks near the Hallaniyat Islands, a protected marine reserve off southern Oman, while carrying an estimated 800,000 to 1 million barrels of Russian crude bound for Asia. It is part of Russia’s so-called shadow fleet, aging tankers Moscow uses to keep exporting oil despite Western sanctions, and had been flying a flag since revoked for fraudulent use. The vessel first reported difficulties on June 8 off Yemen; two maritime security sources told Reuters an onboard explosion may have caused the damage, though no party has claimed responsibility and the cause remains officially unconfirmed.
The spill has grown significantly since it was first detected in early July. By August 4, Greenpeace's satellite analysis found the affected area had reached roughly 230 square miles, a fourfold increase in just two days. Oman's government put the figure lower less than a week later, estimating roughly 150 square miles on August 10, using its own separate assessment method. Greenpeace's newest analysis, delivered to CNN Thursday, now puts the spill at roughly 500 square miles. Oman's environment authority did not respond to CNN's questions about the gap between the two sets of figures or the spill's current scale.
The sanctions status of the vessel has created a genuine accountability gap. Christopher D’Elia, an oil spill specialist and professor emeritus at Louisiana State University, told Al Jazeera the roughly 800,000-barrel spill qualifies as “fairly large.” He noted that illegal shadow-fleet tankers do not comply with the “polluter pays” principle that underpins how the US and other developed nations regulate spill cleanup. “In this case, there is no responsible party,” D’Elia said.
Risk management firm Ambrey is coordinating a salvage operation, deploying vessels, aircraft, and roughly 100 metric tons of specialized equipment, though it has not named the international oil spill response company carrying out the work. Oman’s government has told citizens to avoid fishing in affected waters and to report unusual odors or oil sightings. The monsoon season currently affecting southern Oman is complicating diving and containment operations around the wreck.
🌍 TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: Gulf and international outlets are treating this primarily as an environmental and accountability story, not a geopolitical one, a framing largely absent from what American coverage exists. Al Jazeera’s reporting centers the sanctions loophole itself: a tanker sailing under a fraudulent flag, carrying sanctioned Russian crude, has caused a disaster no government or company is legally obligated to pay for. That gap, not the war context surrounding it, is what regional environmental reporting keeps returning to.
🇺🇸 What American readers need to know: A sanctioned Russian tanker has caused what may become one of the region’s worst oil spills in years, and there is currently no party legally responsible for cleaning it up. This is happening in the same waters where the US and Iran are fighting over oil shipping rights, a reminder that the war’s economic and environmental costs extend well beyond the headline conflict.
Sources: CNN (US — current spill size, Greenpeace figures, Omani government response); Al Jazeera (Qatar, state-funded/editorially independent — D’Elia quote, spill growth timeline); Jerusalem Post (Israel, centre-right — salvage operation details, Ambrey coordination); NBC News (US — tanker cargo figures, June 8 damage report, shadow fleet background)
NUMBERS AT PUBLICATION
🇮🇷 Iran: 3,636 killed
🇱🇧 Lebanon: 4,333 killed
🇮🇱 Israel: 1,200+ killed, ~5,400 wounded (includes 472 killed, 3,004 wounded in Gaza)
🇺🇸 US military: 18 killed, 687 wounded
🇵🇸 Gaza: 73,381+ Palestinians killed, 174,231 wounded
🛢️ Brent crude: $86.94/barrel
⛽ US gas: $4.07/gallon Sources: HRANA (Iran), Lebanon MOPH, INSS (Israel), DCAS (US, disputed — see Aug 4 story), OCHA (Gaza), OilPrice.com, AAA.
“Whenever the people are well informed, they can be trusted with their own government.” — Thomas Jefferson, 1789
