This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.
The U.S.-Israeli war on Iran has entered its 28th day. Iranian officials say the war has killed nearly 2,000 people in Iran. Earlier today, Israel’s defense minister said Israeli attacks on Iran will escalate and expand.
Meanwhile, President Trump has extended his deadline for Iran to fully reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Trump is now threatening to “obliterate” Iran’s power plants on April 6th if the strait isn’t reopened. Trump claimed talks with Iran are going well. This is Trump speaking during Thursday’s Cabinet meeting.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: They now have a chance to make a deal, but that’s up to them. And they’ll tell you, “We’re not negotiating. We will not negotiate.” Of course they’re negotiating. They’ve been obliterated. Who wouldn’t negotiate? They are begging to make a deal. We’ll see if we can make the right deal. And if they make the right deal, then the strait will open up, Hormuz Strait will open up.
AMY GOODMAN: Iran has repeatedly denied it’s engaging in direct talks with the U.S. Earlier today, Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said friendly countries have conveyed messages between the two countries, but no dialogue has occurred. On Thursday, supporters of the Iranian government rallied in Tehran.
PROTESTER: [translated] Trump’s whole approach is psychological warfare. He’s only playing psychological and media games and making a mockery of himself in front of the world. Everyone knows that Trump is a bluffer and a major liar. That has been proven to everyone.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined now by Jeremy Scahill. He’s been closely following the war in Iran and the reports about negotiations. Jeremy is co-founder of Drop Site News.
Hi, Jeremy. Thanks so much for being with us. Why don’t you start off with the latest news that yesterday President Trump said, at Iran’s request, he’s extending the deadline for bombing Iran’s infrastructure by 10 days?
JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, Amy, within minutes of Trump posting that message on Truth Social, I spoke to a senior Iranian official who told me immediately that Trump is not being truthful and that Iran made no such request. And if it is the case that Trump is lying about this, it’s part of a multiweek pattern that has extended basically throughout the duration of this war that the U.S. and Israel initiated on February 28th.
What I’m told by Iranian officials is that on roughly the third day of the bombing, Steve Witkoff, President Trump’s special envoy, began sending WhatsApp messages and other messages through intermediaries to Iranian officials asking for talks about winding down the war. This is just in the initial first few days.
And, you know, there’s some indication that Trump believed that by assassinating Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and other senior Iranian officials, that somehow the Iranian government was going to collapse quickly. And it seems that they really underestimated both Iran’s will to fight this war, but also its capacity to continue striking. Almost every day, you have War Secretary Pete Hegseth standing before the American people at the Pentagon and saying, “Iran’s missile capacity has been degraded by 90%, its drone capacity degraded by 95%.” And Iran continues to strike at U.S. military facilities across the Persian Gulf and is intensifying its attacks against Israel, while Hezbollah, which the world was also told was decimated by Israel a year ago, has continued to fire missiles and to inflict deaths and other casualties on Israeli occupation forces.
So, the U.S. is the party that has been consistently asking for talks. And early last week, I did a story, Amy, where I learned from Iranian officials that Steve Witkoff had been directly text messaging Abbas Araghchi, the Iranian foreign minister. And when I went for comment to the White House — just to say, typically, when I ask for comment from the White House, they respond by saying, “We direct you to the last Truth Social post of Donald Trump or the comments he made on Air Force One.” But this time, the White House went ballistic and accused Drop Site News of carrying water for Islamic terrorists, called us abhorrent, said that we’re engaged in, quote, “America last behavior.” And then they quickly leaked to Barak Ravid of Axios and some other journalists an alternative, Bizarro World version of this story, where they said it’s actually the Iranians that have been begging Steve Witkoff for talks.
So, then what happened is that a few days ago the White House began saying that — Trump himself said it — that there are direct talks happening between Iran and the White House. I spoke to Iranian officials. They said this is completely false, that, once again, the U.S. is asking for talks and is sending messages through Pakistan, Turkey and Egypt. And so, it’s clear here that Donald Trump is not being truthful. You could say at some points he’s just blatantly lying. But the question is: Why?
It’s possible, as the Iranians allege, that a large part of this is market manipulation, you know, that people are making a lot of money off of these announcements, but also trying to calm oil markets. It’s also possible that the United States is trying to float these ideas to sort of spy on or do surveillance on the Iranian chain of command to see who the actual deal-makers are. It’s also possible that given the fact that the United States has bombed Iran twice in the past year while claiming to be in negotiations, that this entire thing is a front, a facade, that is being presented, albeit in a clumsy, Trumpesque way, because the U.S. is planning some sort of a larger escalation or operation against Iran.
AMY GOODMAN: And again, the whole issue of the deploying thousands of U.S. paratroopers to the Persian Gulf, the possibility of a land invasion of perhaps Kharg Island?
JEREMY SCAHILL: You know, Amy, I’ve looked closely at these deployments, and, you know, I don’t think that the United States has a large enough presence of troops and other weaponry to engage in a full-scale invasion of Iran imminently. There certainly are the types of forces that would be used — Tier 1 operators, special operations forces, you know, rapid expeditionary units of the Marines — to engage in some sort of limited incursion or attempt to seize a part of territory, or perhaps even to do some kind of a special operations raid.
I’ve heard from some sources that there are concepts of operations that have been worked up by the Pentagon to explore possibly a targeted operation at Iran’s enriched uranium discs. And the purpose of such an operation — you know, you could call it like a spectacular operation, something akin to an Osama bin Laden night raid — is because Trump has painted himself into a corner. He is undoubtedly in a quagmire. They completely underestimated Iran’s military capacity. And so, part of what may be happening is that the Pentagon is giving Trump options where he could sort of declare a fake victory by having something tangible to point to. There’s also been a series of really bizarre, cryptic posts on the White House’s Twitter feed over the past 24 hours or so, with these pixelated images and then a video that, if you play it backwards, says that, like, you know, a surprise is coming. It’s possible that the White House is contemplating some form of a raid or special operation that they believe would give Trump an ability to say, you know, “We’ve won our victory.”
The Iranians have repeatedly said, both publicly and to me also in private, that they would welcome an attempt by the United States to actually seize part of Iranian territory, because it would allow Iran to use shorter-range weapon systems. It would almost certainly inflict deaths and casualties on American occupation forces. While it’s possible that the U.S. may want to try to seize Kharg Island, while they may want to do some massive military operation in the Strait of Hormuz — which, by the way, remains open. Despite the U.S. saying it’s closed, it remains open. The Iranians are making arrangements with what they call friendly countries that want to pass ships through the Strait of Hormuz. If the U.S. does do something like that, it would, again, put them in range of close-range missiles of the Iranians, ground troops and other weapons that are not available to the Iranians to strike at the U.S. with right now. But it could also be that the U.S. has been implying that it wants to do an operation in the Strait of Hormuz or Kharg Island as a distraction, because they have some other military operation planned.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, isn’t that the present that President Trump is talking about? He said Iran has given him a present, and it’s worth a lot of money. It’s allowing, what, tankers to go through.
JEREMY SCAHILL: He said that Iran offered him to allow Pakistani-flagged vessels. He said, “They wanted, you know, to give me eight of them. But I said, you know, it can be” — or, “They originally wanted to give me 10. I said, ‘No, it’s OK. You can give me eight.’” But when open-source researchers started looking at the traffic through the Strait of Hormuz — this is all publicly traceable — it doesn’t seem like those tankers that Trump is referring to actually passed through at all. And, in fact, the Iranians have said that they offered him no such gift whatsoever. The speaker of the Iranian parliament, who the U.S. has implied it’s negotiating with, has been one of the most aggressive posters on X, kind of poking at the United States and posting memes about Donald Trump’s claims and saying that all of this is total nonsense. So, it’s reminiscent, in a way, of some of the lies that were told during the so-called negotiation process related to Gaza.
But I think that we now have to recognize the very public record, which is that Donald Trump has made a mockery of the word of the United States when it comes to negotiations, because he’s twice bombed Iran in the middle of negotiations. So, they’re using the veneer and, you know, previous, I guess, credibility of the United States in an effort to try to lure Iran into a position where they think that they have time because they’re negotiating, and then launch a surprise attack. Iranian sources have told me consistently they’re aware of this. They have not responded to U.S. requests for direct talks, that they’ve essentially left a lot of Steve Witkoff’s messages on two checks without them lighting blue, you know, on WhatsApp, because they know that this is the U.S. game plan.
AMY GOODMAN: What does Iran want?
JEREMY SCAHILL: You know, it’s interesting. The Iranians said that this talk of a 15-point plan, you know, the White House is making it sound like Trump has sort of extended an olive branch, he’s put on paper 15 points, and it’s the Iranians that are rejecting it. Iran does acknowledge that the U.S., through intermediaries, has sent position points, but they said that from different intermediaries, they’ve gotten different messages.
So, let’s take it as a whole and say that roughly the 15 points that the U.S. claims are the conditions that Trump has set are in some way based in some form of reality that has been communicated to the Iranians. The Iranians are not responding and saying, “Oh, in point number six, can we edit this? Or point number 10, if we could edit this?” That was the process that the U.S. was supposedly engaged in in February, when the U.S. decided not to bring a single technical expert on nuclear enrichment to the talks and just sent two businessmen, one of whom is the son-in-law of President Trump, and both of whom are deep in investments in the Middle East.
And so, what the Iranians did is they said, “Here’s our conditions for ending the war.” The Iranians do not seem like they’re in a panic, despite what the White House says. In fact, the Iranians are saying they think that Trump is in deep, deep trouble with his Gulf allies, who are in utter panic about what Iran has been able to do to their economies, how easily Iran is able to strike, that Trump is causing political problems for his own party in the United States with the midterm elections coming up. And so, what they’ve said is, “Any end of the war can’t just be a ceasefire. We’re not going to repeat June 2025 again,” when the Israelis and the Americans asked for an unconditional ceasefire to end the June attacks that were launched against Iran. They say that they’ll only accept a comprehensive settlement on the war that would include not only Iran, but also the other fronts of resistance, meaning Lebanon, Iraq, and more recently they’ve added Palestine. They haven’t gone into detail about what that means, but that’s their first term.
The second term is that they’re saying that they want compensation paid by the United States for the damage done by the United States and Israel. That could come in the form of direct payments or the unfreezing of Iranian funds. They also want long-term guarantees that there isn’t going to be a resumption of the war, and they want it certified by the United Nations Security Council and guaranteed publicly by both Russia and China.
And then, on the issue of nuclear enrichment, the Iranians are not so much publicly messaging this, because they have to do their own domestic messaging to their public, but what I understand is that they are willing to make agreements about enrichment that would solely be dedicated to medical purposes or nonmilitary purposes. But interestingly, a senior Iranian official told me that as much as the U.S. focuses on its ballistic missile program, that after any deal is made, Iran is going to continue and, in fact, advance its ballistic missile program, because they say that that has proven to be the only deterrent that Iran actually has on a military level against the U.S. and Israel.
So, Iran’s position — and they said this publicly from the beginning. Trump says, “Oh, no one knew that they were going to attack the Gulf.” They said it to me, they said it publicly, they said it to other journalists, that this is exactly what they were going to do. And so, Iran — the sense that I get from Iranian officials is that they want to cause enough pain to the world economy, because of its ties to the Gulf countries and because of the United States’ dominance in the world, that any nation that thinks of attacking Iran again is going to do so knowing that these are the consequences.
Now, Iran could also be engaging — and I’m sure this is true — in its own form of kind of maximalist demands. They’ve said, “We want the U.S. to withdraw all of its military bases from the region.” Now, they’ve damaged an enormous quantity of them. The New York Times even acknowledged it this week. They’ve had to move their soldiers into hotels. And by the way, the United States — you know, you can make an argument the U.S. is putting its soldiers in Gulf countries’ hotels and effectively using those civilian objects as human shields, which is exactly what the Israelis claim Hamas — although it was false about Hamas — Hamas and other Palestinian resistance groups were doing in hospitals and elsewhere.
So, I think, at the end of the day, the Iranians are going to be flexible when it does come to negotiations on certain issues, but I don’t think that the U.S. is going to get the terms it could have gotten in February, when Trump could have declared victory and said, “I did what Barack Hussein Obama never could have done.” He had terms in that deal that went far beyond the 2015 JCPOA. And instead, they used it as a veneer of negotiation to then launch a surprise attack against Iran.
AMY GOODMAN: Jeremy, what’s the point of President Trump saying this on Fox News, being questioned by Jesse Watters?
JESSE WATTERS: You kind of suggested that we had knocked out Ayatollah Jr. Have we? And did the CIA tell you that Ayatollah Jr. is gay?
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Well, they did say that, but I don’t know if it was only them. I think a lot of people are saying that, which puts them off to a bad start in that particular country, you know?
AMY GOODMAN: Your response, Jeremy?
JEREMY SCAHILL: This is part of a long pattern of the U.S. and Israel claiming, “Oh, we found pornography at this person that we’ve declared the next Hitler’s headquarters,” or sort of implying the, you know, immorality of various enemies of the United States. I mean, this is a classic U.S. propaganda campaign that is just sort of a naked attempt to try to further dehumanize the Iranian side or to try to raise some issues that have nothing to do with the fact that the U.S. and Israel are waging a war of aggression. This is part of U.S. psychological operations for many, many decades.
AMY GOODMAN: And the latest news, as we wrap up, that oil futures contracts worth around $580 million were traded minutes before Trump’s social media post about alleged peace talks?
JEREMY SCAHILL: I mean, this is remarkable. This has happened throughout Trump’s presidency, both going back to the Gaza war and the Iran war. It is very, very clear that this is White House Incorporated, that Trump is not just representing the American people or the American government. It’s the most naked form of corruption that we’ve ever seen in the White House. Always corruption is part of the United States. We have legalized bribery in our election system because of the role of corporations. But Donald Trump is the extra version of the most heinous aspects of American imperial history and corruption
AMY GOODMAN: Jeremy Scahill, co-founder of Drop Site News. We’ll link to your recent piece, “Iran Blasts Trump’s Claims of Direct Talks as ‘Fake News’ Aimed at Manipulating Markets.”
Up next, two landmark trials have just found Big Tech liable for harm caused by their social media platforms, especially to children. Stay with us.
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AMY GOODMAN: “Pa’lante,” performed by Hurray for the Riff Raff at Democracy Now!‘s 30th anniversary at Riverside Church. We’ll hear more from them in a minute.
