I was born in Poonch (Kashmir) and now I live in Norway. I oppose war and violence and am a firm believer in the peaceful co-existence of all nations and peoples. In my academic work I have tried to espouse the cause of the weak and the oppressed in a world dominated by power politics, misleading propaganda and violations of basic human rights. I also believe that all conscious members of society have a moral duty to stand for and further the cause of peace and human rights throughout the world.
The former congressman tells Robert
Scheer that a provision buried in the 2027 National Defense
Authorization Act could integrate the United States and Israel at the
highest levels of military technology—without meaningful public debate
or congressional scrutiny.
Former Congressman Dennis Kucinich has
spent decades warning about the machinery of permanent war. But in a new
conversation with Robert Scheer, he argues that Congress is now on the
verge of crossing a line without precedent in American military history.
At the center of Kucinich’s warning is
Section 219 of the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act, a provision
he says would formally integrate key areas of U.S. and Israeli military
development, including artificial intelligence, autonomous weapons,
quantum sensing, cyber and electronic warfare, biotechnology, missile
defense, drones and directed-energy systems.
“They call it integration, but I call it a merger,” Kucinich tells Scheer.
The implications, he argues, go far beyond
traditional military aid or weapons sales. Kucinich warns that the
provision could create new counterintelligence risks, deepen U.S.
dependence on Israel’s military infrastructure and technology, blur
questions of war powers and further entangle Washington in Israel’s
expanding regional conflicts.
Even more alarming, Kucinich says, is how
little debate the proposal has received. Rather than being considered
through a separate treaty or subjected to extensive congressional
hearings, the provision has been folded into a massive defense
authorization bill that lawmakers will face enormous political pressure
to support.
“This provision has been smuggled into the bill,” Kucinich argues. “There’s never been any debate.”
For Scheer, the contradiction is
impossible to ignore. At the moment the United States marks 250 years
since declaring its independence, Washington may be moving toward an
unprecedented military dependence on another state—one whose conduct in
Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon has placed it at the center of
international accusations of genocide and grave violations of
international law.
In this urgent edition of Scheer Intelligence,
Scheer and Kucinich examine what Section 219 could mean for American
sovereignty, constitutional government and the future of war—and why a
provision of such consequence has received so little attention from
Congress, the Democratic opposition and the mainstream press.
The Strait
of Hormuz will never be opened by “war, evil, and American aggression”,
the Iranian army’s spokesperson, Brigadier General Mohammad Akraminia,
was cited as saying by the Tasnim news agency.
The country’s
armed forces will not relent over the key waterway, Akraminia added.
Respecting the rights of the Iranian people is the only way to open the
Strait of Hormuz, he added.
“We are obligated to avenge the blood of the martyrs, especially the martyred leader of the Islamic Revolution,” Akraminia said.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Monday announced what he characterized as a “campaign to dismantle” the International Criminal Court, the Hague-based tribunal tasked with investigating and charging individuals with war crimes and other violations.
In a video posted to social media,
Rubio accused the international court of “waging a war against our
country—not with bullets or missiles, but with statutes, compacts, and
the force of so-called international law.” The top American diplomat threatened that the US “will teach the ICC the full meaning of American resolve.”
The US State Department said in a statement
that Rubio’s new campaign against the ICC would “feature a
whole-of-government response to systematically disable” the court’s
“ability to operate, target American servicemen or officials, or
otherwise threaten American sovereignty.” The US is not party to the
Rome Statute, the 1998 treaty that established the ICC.
US President Donald Trump and his subordinates, who have been accused of myriad violations of international law, have adopted an increasingly aggressive posture toward the ICC since taking power last January.
In a February 6, 2025 executive order, Trump declared “a national emergency to address” the purported “threat” posed by the ICC and announced sanctions against court officials, including its judges. The president’s order cited the ICC’s “investigations concerning personnel of the United States and certain of its allies, including Israel,” which is also not party to the Rome Statute.
Rubio warned in an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal on Monday that US officials accused of international crimes could be next to face ICC action.
“Border Patrol agents working to remove
violent criminals from our country, US Marines risking their lives to
restore order in the Western Hemisphere, federal prosecutors working to
dismantle terror networks plotting attacks on the American homeland—all
would face the constant risk of persecution for the ‘crime’ of defending
our country,” Rubio wrote. “Using all the tools at our government’s
disposal, working beside every ally with whom we can make common cause,
we will dismantle the ICC—brick by brick, if necessary.”
Raed Jarrar, advocacy director of the human rights group Democracy
for the Arab World Now (DAWN), said in response to Rubio’s op-ed that
“when the world’s most powerful country aims to dismantle the world’s
only permanent international court, it sends the message that the
powerful are above the law.”
“It is not the ICC that Rubio is
dismantling brick by brick, but the rules-based international order that
grew out of the ashes of World War II,” said Jarrar. “Rubio’s attack
doesn’t just underscore US hypocrisy, but undermines access to justice
across the globe, from Ukraine to Sudan and could amount to obstruction of justice, a crime under the Rome Statute in and of itself.”
In his op-ed, Rubio pointed to DAWN’s call earlier this year
for Iran and other Middle East nations to grant the ICC jurisdiction to
investigate apparent war crimes committed during the conflict launched
in late February by Trump and Netanyahu.
Omar Shakir, DAWN’s executive director,
said Monday that Rubio mischaracterized the group’s call as focusing
solely on actions by US personnel. That move, said Shakir, “begs the
question: Is the secretary of state worried because he knows US
personnel committed war crimes in Iran?”
Under Rubio’s plan, the State Department
is threatening to impose “increased sanctions against the ICC and
affiliated organizations,” hit court personnel with “visa revocations
and travel bans,” and pressure other nations that aren’t party to the
Rome Statute to “leverage their diplomatic networks to take similar
actions alongside” the Trump administration.
Kenneth Roth, the former executive director of Human Rights Watch who has demanded international accountability for the Trump administration over its illegal assault on Iran, wrote Monday that Rubio “can’t even make an honest case for attacking the International Criminal Court.”
“He makes it sound like the ICC acts out
of the blue anywhere it wants when in fact it acts only against crimes
committed on the territory of states that have invited it,” Roth wrote.
“He never explains why the United States should be able to commit crimes
on the territory of those states with impunity, contrary to the desire
of their sovereign governments for an international backstop to
reinforce justice for such crimes.”
USS
Boxer (LHD 4) and USS Portland (LPD 27) transiting the Indian Ocean,
June 30, 2026. . The Boxer Amphibious Ready Group (ARG) and embarked
11th Marine Expeditionary Unit are currently operating in the Middle
East. [Photo: US Central Command]
The US military bombed Iran throughout the
weekend, striking about 140 targets Saturday night—the largest single
barrage of the week—and launching at least two more rounds on Sunday. In
all, the Sunday New York Times reported, US forces have struck some 310 targets in Iran over the past week.
Late Friday, US President Donald Trump
once again threatened to destroy the entire country in a post on Truth
Social. “1000 Missiles are Locked and Loaded and aimed at the Islamic
Republic of Iran,” he wrote, declaring that the US military stood ready
“for a one year period of time, subject to extension, to completely
decimate and destroy all areas of Iran—PRAISE BE TO ALLAH!”
The weekend attacks completed the
abrogation of the “ceasefire” Washington and Tehran signed on June 17.
“The United States has stated to them, in no uncertain terms, that the
Cease Fire is OVER!” Trump wrote Friday.
The “ceasefire” itself marked the failure
of the American campaign to overthrow the Iranian government and
dominate the Strait of Hormuz. The Washington Post’s editorial
board wrote Wednesday that of the four objectives Trump named in
March—destroying Iran’s missile capabilities, destroying its navy,
denying it a nuclear weapon and cutting off its proxies—“None of these
objectives is fully complete.”
Even as Trump sought a temporary
negotiated settlement, both factions of the US political establishment
condemned it for conceding too much to Iran.
Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina—who died Saturday at age 71—told CBS’s Face the Nation
on June 21: “If this deal fails, President Trump is going to take the
Strait of Hormuz over by force,” adding, “If Iran contests control of
the Strait of Hormuz by the United States, we will obliterate them.”
Senator Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire,
the ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, said June 17
that Trump had “offered concession after concession to the Iranian
regime for next to nothing in return.”
The attacks continued over the weekend,
with Democrats excoriating Trump’s failure to achieve the aims of US
imperialism in the Middle East.
Representative Jim Himes of Connecticut, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, told CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday that “all of the nuclear materials are still there. They’re just buried behind a bunch of rubble.
“The more concerning question, Jake, is
the regime survived what the president promised us would be a
regime-ending attack on them,” Himes told host Jake Tapper. “By the way,
it’s not dust. The president keeps talking about nuclear dust. It’s not
dust. This stuff is down there and recoverable.
“So my concern is that, on the backside of
this war, Iran is going to be more motivated than they were a year ago
to actually produce the weapon that they know will forever take off the
table an attack on their country,” he said.
Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Yechiel Leiter, told CBS’s Face the Nation
on Sunday that Iran had “forced the US to go back into kinetic
activity,” and pledged: “We’re a partner, we’re an ally. If the United
States calls on us to rejoin kinetic activity against Iran, we’re going
to be there for the United States.”
Under the June 17 memorandum, Washington
ended the blockade it had thrown around Iran’s ports in April and
licensed Iranian oil sales, while Tehran pledged safe passage for
commercial ships through the Strait of Hormuz, toll-free for 60 days.
US warplanes hit some 80 sites on July 7
and roughly 90 the next day, and the U.S. Treasury canceled the waiver
that had let Iran sell its oil. On July 9, US strikes severed the rail
line to Mashhad during the burial of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme
leader the United States and Israel assassinated, along with members of
his family, in the war’s opening attack.
On Sunday, six ships transited the strait,
against more than 130 a day before the war. CNN reported Sunday that
the United States has expended half its THAAD interceptors, nearly half
its Patriot interceptors and about 30 percent of its Tomahawk cruise
missiles—stocks earmarked for a future war with China. Gasoline, at
$3.88 a gallon, costs 30 percent more than before the war, and the White
House has asked Congress for another $87.6 billion in emergency war
spending.
Launched by the United States and Israel
on February 28, the war is now in its 135th day. Iranian authorities
counted more than 3,400 dead by mid-June, before the past weeks of
bombing, and Amnesty International has documented at least 39 political
executions and more than 6,000 arrests inside Iran since the war began.
The World Bank called the choking of the Strait of Hormuz “the largest
oil supply shock on record,” and the International Monetary Fund cited
the war’s energy shock this month in cutting its forecast for world
growth this year to 3 percent.
The assault on Iran unfolds alongside
Israel’s continuing onslaught against Gaza and Lebanon. Gaza’s Health
Ministry put the death toll there at more than 73,000 as of July 6. In
Lebanon, where a truce nominally took effect June 21, an Israeli drone
strike on July 6 murdered a school principal, her mother and two others,
and Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz declared on July 9 that
Israeli troops would remain in Gaza, Lebanon and Syria.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi speaks at a press conference in Baghdad, Iraq, on June 28, 2026.
(Photo by Murtadha AL-Sudani/Anadolu via Getty Images)
Iran’s Foreign Ministry accused the Trump
administration of “rendering futile all efforts made over the past
several months to reduce tensions and restore stability.”
The Iranian Foreign Ministry on Sunday condemned the United States’ latest round of airstrikes as a “flagrant violation” of international law that threatens to permanently derail efforts to achieve a peaceful resolution to the war, which US President Donald Trump launched earlier this year in coordination with the Israeli government.
This past weekend, said
Iran’s Foreign Ministry, the US carried out “brutal attacks” and “acts
of aggression” that pose “a serious threat to international peace and
security, rendering futile all efforts made over the past several months
to reduce tensions and restore stability in the West Asia region.”
On Saturday and Sunday, the US military bombed dozens of targets across Iran, which retaliated with strikes on American military installations in Kuwait, Bahrain,
and other Middle East nations. Iran’s Foreign Ministry accused those
nations of illegally serving as launch pads for US strikes.
In response to the new wave of bombings, Iran announced the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, blaming the US for causing “insecurity” in the critical waterway. Trump claimed in an interview on Sunday morning that the strait is “open” after the US “bombed the hell out of” Iran the previous night.
“The US ruling establishment continues its
campaign of disinformation and the dissemination of fake news in an
attempt to distort the facts and justify its unlawful actions,” said the
Iranian Foreign Ministry, accusing the Trump administration of undermining talks between Iran and Oman regarding commercial traffic through the Strait of Hormuz.
The Iranian statement also voiced “regret” over what it described as the head of the United Nations’ “unconstructive approach” to the Trump administration’s “blatant lawlessness and bullying.”
“The Ministry of Foreign Affairs
underscores the responsibility of the UN secretary-general and the
Security Council to address violations of international peace and
security,” the statement reads. “It calls for the aggressor parties to
be held accountable and for those who ordered and carried out the crimes
committed against the Iranian nation to be brought to justice and
punished.”
Earlier Sunday, Stรฉphane Dujarric, a
spokesperson for UN Secretary-General Antรณnio Guterres, voiced concern
over the “serious escalation and renewed military confrontations in the
Gulf, including the Iranian attacks on ships in the Strait of Hormuz,
the attacks by the United States on Iran, and the attacks by Iran on
targets in the neighboring countries.”
“These attacks must all stop,” said
Dujarric. “The secretary-general reiterates that a return to full-scale
hostilities would have catastrophic consequences—for the peoples of the
region, for international peace and security, and for the global
economy. He further reaffirms the need for the restoration of full
freedom of navigation in the Strait of Hormuz.”
The military exchanges came less than a month after
the US and Iran signed a memorandum of understanding aimed at
facilitating a permanent end to the war. Last week, Trump declared the
agreement “over” and said negotiations were “a waste of time,” even as
the US and Iran agreed to continue talks.
The National Iranian American Council (NIAC) noted
Sunday that “Iran and the United States have once again entered a cycle
of direct military confrontation,” adding that “what was presented as
an end to the war now appears to have been little more than a temporary
pause.”
“The continued evisceration of diplomatic
agreements will make any attempt to restore peace extremely difficult,”
NIAC argued. “Iran, fresh off new US attacks amid the late supreme
leader’s funeral ceremonies, will view any US pivot back to diplomacy
with even deeper distrust. US hawks will likewise paint Iran’s actions
as the predictable irrationality of radicals, even if US actions have
helped trigger Iranian retaliation every step of the way.”
A group of extremist Jewish settlers
equipped with US-made M4 rifles detained US lawmaker Ro Khanna and his
group during their visit this week to the southern occupied West Bank,
the Democratic representative disclosed on 9 July.
“We were at a village that Israeli
settlers had destroyed; they had destroyed the school, they had
destroyed that village, and we were just looking at it,” Khanna told Reuters on Thursday.
“And these hoodlums come in with machine
guns – M4, an American-made machine gun – and they detain us. They block
off the road.” Khanna said, adding, “And then they call the IDF and
the IDF is on their side, not on the side of the Americans.”
Khanna’s aide, Cameron Kasky, said the
delegation was held for over an hour near Khirbet Zanuta, a Palestinian
hamlet ethnically cleansed by Israeli settlers in 2023, before appealing
to the US Embassy in Jerusalem to free them.
Khanna’s visit to the occupied West Bank
comes as support for Israel splits Democrats ahead of the US midterm
elections in November, with the issue contributing to primary defeats
for incumbent lawmakers financed by the American Israel Public Affairs
Committee (AIPAC).
Israel’s favorability rating among
Democratic voters has fallen from 59 percent in 2018 to 22 percent in
May 2026, according to recent polls.
The US lawmaker’s confrontation with
extremist settler groups occurs amid a broader campaign of
state-supported settler violence that, by mid-2026, has escalated into
systematic ethnic cleansing and land theft in the occupied West Bank.
As of July 2026, illegal settler outposts effectively control 18 percent of the occupied West Bank, following an “unprecedented” expansion directly backed by the Israeli government.
Former Israeli officials have characterized the current escalation as a “systematic campaign” of “Jewish terrorism” intended to facilitate de facto annexation of the Palestinian territories.
An Oxfam analysis
based on UN data revealed that since 2023, Israeli forces and settlers
have killed at least 1,244 Palestinians, exceeding the total from the
previous 17 years combined, and forcibly displaced nearly 46,000 people.
Over 540 settler attacks were reported in
the first quarter of 2026 alone, alongside a record 925 movement
obstacles that restrict Palestinian life.
Amnesty International concluded,
based on independent investigations, that the Israeli government is
implementing a policy of ethnic cleansing, supported by digital
evidence, satellite imagery, and field investigations.
Iran Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi and his Omani counterpart
discuss “appropriate mechanisms” for safe passage of ships through Strait of Hormuz during talks in Muscat.
In his first message since the funeral
of his father, Iran’s Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei has pledged to
“avenge [his] innocent blood”, adding that “revenge is the will of our
nation”.
Earlier, the US president said 1,000 missiles are “locked and loaded
and aimed at the Islamic Republic of Iran” with thousands more to
follow if it tries to assassinate him.
Israeli air attack have hit areas of southern Lebanon.
(Photo credit: Ammar Awad /Reuters)![Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi [File: Manish Swarup/AP]](https://www.aljazeera.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/ap_6a3107ab2fbf0-1781598123.jpg?resize=730%2C410&quality=80)
