AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

The United States is continuing to bombard Iran amidst an intensifying standoff over the Strait of Hormuz. On Sunday, U.S. Central Command said the U.S. had struck 140 targets in Iran. In retaliation, Iran’s Revolution Guards said they had targeted U.S. military facilities in Bahrain and Kuwait, destroyed radar systems in Oman and hit fuel tanks and ammunition depots at Prince Hassan Air Base in Jordan.

The escalating attacks come after Iran announced the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and President Trump declared the ceasefire over. On Monday, Iran’s foreign minister said the United States had violated various parts of the MOU, the memorandum of understanding, since the ceasefire began, including regarding control of the Strait of Hormuz.

ESMAIL BAGHAEI: [translated] Under Article 5 of the memorandum of understanding, our effort was to work with Oman to establish a mechanism to ensure the safe passage of ships through the Strait of Hormuz. Unfortunately, this did not materialize because of overt and covert U.S. pressure on Oman.

AMY GOODMAN: Meanwhile, the United States is claiming Iran had violated the MOU. This is the U.S. ambassador to NATO, Matthew Whitaker, on Fox News Sunday.

MATTHEW WHITAKER: Commercial shipping can’t be terrorized in the Strait of Hormuz. And obviously, the memorandum of understanding between the parties was always performance-based, and that President Trump, if shipping is attacked or if — if the Iranians want to act belligerent, then he will respond with overwhelming force.

AMY GOODMAN: For more, we’re joined by investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill, co-founder of Drop Site News. He’s been closely following the negotiations.

Thanks so much for joining us again, Jeremy. As the U.S. hits missile and defense systems and paramilitary Revolutionary Guard boats in a new round of attacks, and Iran retaliates by hitting, quote, “additional enemy bases in the region,” is this an escalation?

JEREMY SCAHILL: Without question, it’s an escalation. In fact, Donald Trump, quite bluntly, multiple times over the past few days, said that the ceasefire is over. He also implied that the memorandum of understanding that was signed between the United States and Iran was effectively dead in the water, but then he backtracked from that and falsely claimed that the Iranians were again begging him to talk. This has been a recurring narrative, where Trump, for reasons that have to do with market manipulation or wishful thinking, promotes to the public the idea that the Iranians are somehow just sitting in Tehran begging Donald Trump to come back to the table, when reality paints a very different picture.

Let’s back up and summarize what’s happened here. On February 28th, based on a combination of tainted Israeli intelligence, wishful thinking, imperial hubris and a belief that the United States can use its military to achieve any objective around the world, Donald Trump, for the first time since the Islamic Revolution in 1979, stood as the American president that openly vowed to wage a war of regime change against Iran using military means. The Iranian government had said for months leading up to that February 28th initiation of this war that it was not going to just calibrate its response and engage in back-channel communications with the United States when it decided to attack U.S. military sites in the region, because prior to this February 28th war, Iran had tried to have its responses to the U.S. and Israeli attacking it be proportionate and aimed at not spurring or sparking a bigger war. This time, they said they weren’t going to do that. And for weeks on end, the Iranians fought back, not one, but two nuclear powers.

Pete Hegseth and other American officials, including Donald Trump, were every day proclaiming that the Iranian ballistic missile capability had been overwhelmingly wiped out, that its drone capability had been overwhelmingly wiped out, that the Iranians were begging Donald Trump to make a deal, and all of that was just one massive lie. And so, what happened is that Donald Trump was facing a very severe crisis with his quagmire, and what he did is engage in a memorandum of understanding that quite overwhelmingly favored the Iranian position. And I think what we witnessed here was that Trump did this because he felt like “we’ll let the Iranians think they’re getting away with it, but we have no intention of actually abiding by the terms of this memorandum of understanding.”

That’s why you immediately saw the United States try to open a parallel track in Lebanon. Lebanon was supposed to be party to this agreement that the United States signed, and instead, what the U.S. and Israel have tried to do is to coopt the Lebanese to have its armed forces serve as an Israeli-U.S.-directed and -backed “counterterrorism,” quote-unquote, force that is responsible for dismantling and disarming Hezbollah. And in fact, that framework that they thrust upon the Lebanese government allows the Israelis to remain indefinitely in southern Lebanon.

The other aspect of this, Amy, is the situation in the Strait of Hormuz. There is no question, objectively speaking, that it’s the United States that’s been violating the terms of this agreement. It is quite explicit that Iran is supposed to have managing authority of the Strait of Hormuz, that it had deferred imposing any kind of fees for a 60-day period, and that a long-term solution was going to be the result of bilateral negotiations between the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Sultanate of Oman, the two literal states in the Strait of Hormuz. And what Donald Trump and the United States tried to do was say, “Well, we’re going to now cut a side deal with Oman, and we’re going to open this other corridor. And yeah, the Iranians can be in charge of this small slice of the Strait of Hormuz that happens to be just off their coast, but we’re actually going to have unrestricted access that completely obviates or eliminates any kind of Iranian management.” And the Iranians have made clear that they’re not going to accept this. And so, the broader narrative is somehow that Iran wakes up one day and decides to just start attacking vessels in the Strait of Hormuz. From the Iranian perspective, the United States is in systematic violation of multiple terms of the memorandum of understanding.

You know, I spoke over the weekend to a senior Iranian official who said that what the United States and the Trump administration did over the past few days was to engage in a psychological operation using prominent media organizations in the United States, specifically Axios and CBS. The stories that were pushed by the White House was that Iranian officials had somehow come to Trump and confessed to him that these strikes on these vessels in the Strait of Hormuz were the result of a rogue faction of the IRGC and that it doesn’t represent the policy of Iran, and that the Iranians plan to make some announcement with the Omanis that they’re going to allow an opening of an alternative corridor that’s not going to be under Iranian control. And the Iranians told me — and these are Iranian officials that are directly involved with these negotiations — that all of this was just a concoction of the United States.

And then, in fact, the Omani government — which, by the way, Trump threatened to wipe the state of Oman off the map not that many weeks ago — that Oman has enormous pressure being put on it by the United States. And so, you know, Iran typically has good relations with Oman. But I think it’s notable that in the response, the retaliatory strikes that Iran launched over the past couple of days against U.S. military bases in Kuwait, in Bahrain, in Jordan, they also struck targets inside of Oman.

Now, you know, the Pentagon is often very secretive, throughout Democratic and Republican administrations. But what we’ve seen under the Trump administration is that U.S. CENTCOM, Central Command, and the Pentagon at large have concealed the impact of Iranian strikes, in some cases entirely — we don’t know the facts to this day of certain things that happened in the first days of this war in terms of U.S. damages taken in the region — but also slow walking any public revelations. The Iranians are claiming that they struck a number of key strategic drone facilities and missile launch sites in the Persian Gulf.

And so, in summary, what I would say is that Trump, I think, has dramatically underestimated the Iranians from the very beginning. He’s engaged in imperial hubris, wishful thinking. He certainly is announcing that this ceasefire has blown up. But the reality at the end of the day is that Iran is not going to capitulate. Trump is used to his bullying tactics working on a domestic political level, certainly within the Republican Party, but also on a global level in other deals that he’s pushed through. He engages in blackmail, bribery, coaxing and lying and, most of all, threats of force to try to achieve his agenda. Look what he’s done with NATO countries.

So, the Iranians are really the first major power that has stood up to Trump and said two things: “We’re not going to give you some kind of fake victory narrative just so” — you know, all this stuff that goes on behind the scenes is they say to the Iranians — and I get this from Iranian sources — “Just give Trump this. You know, just toss him this chip, and everything is going to be OK.” And the Iranians are saying, “No, we’re not going to do that.” Quite to the contrary, the Iranians have shown that they are willing to face the prospect of Trump reescalating this to a dramatic degree, because they believe that they won this war on a tactical level and that they don’t need to concede anything to Donald Trump.

AMY GOODMAN: This is the U.S. Ambassador to NATO Matthew Whitaker telling CNN’s Jake Tapper on Sunday that President Trump is a “peacemaker” and Iran is “controlled by a bunch of crazy people.”

MATTHEW WHITAKER: President Trump’s a peacemaker, Jake, and he wants a deal with Iran. He wants to make sure that they never have a nuclear weapon, that they join the world as a contributor and a normalized country. But right now it’s — you know, as President Trump has said and Marco Rubio has also stated, you know, this country is controlled by a bunch of crazy people. And ultimately, you know, they’re going to have to understand the United States is very serious about this and will continue to be clear-eyed on the threats.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s U.S. Ambassador to NATO Matthew Whitaker. Jeremy?

JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, as I’ve talked about on this program before, you know, the Iranians some weeks ago started enlisting the services of senior psychologists to help them, help the Iranian negotiators, in their communications to Donald Trump, because they think that he is clinically mentally ill, that they’re dealing with a sociopathic, erratic individual. And I think, just objectively, anyone who witnesses the public conduct of Donald Trump and then compares it to the quite — whatever you think about the Islamic Republic of Iran’s politics, its internal policies, you can’t argue that it’s not a set of rational actors with institutions that operate in a quite predictable manner. The Iranians have a track record during this war of saying what they mean and then doing what they’ve said. Donald Trump is all over the map. He has multiple times threatened to bomb a multimillennia-old civilization. He threatened to wipe out an American ally, Oman, the premier, multidecade mediator between the United States and Iran on the nuclear issue. Donald Trump is functioning as a toddler throwing a tantrum, and then some incredibly dangerous warmonger in the world, where he’s raising the specter of wiping out entire civilizations, of bombing the clearly identified civilian infrastructure of countries.

So, I would say, at the end of the day, you know, what I think kind of captures the essence of this is when we’ve had negotiations between the United States and Iran, the Iranians have shown up with a team of people, most of whom have Ph.D.s and are subject area experts. Donald Trump, with the exception of JD Vance, sends people that overwhelmingly are showing up with last week’s golf scores and their investment portfolios.

And so, I think the situation that we find ourselves in right now is that Donald Trump is again throwing this tantrum. He’s threatening all sorts of things. He’s saying that the deal is off. My understanding from Iranians, Iranian officials, is that the mediators are saying that he really does want an off-ramp in this. He doesn’t know how to handle it. He can’t fabricate a victory narrative. And they’re asking the Iranians to help in that effort. And I just don’t see the Iranians doing it. I think they’re going to remain entrenched in their position that it’s the United States that needs to deescalate, and that Iran has discovered — and it’s known this for years, but it never deployed it — that a weapon more powerful, in many ways, than a nuclear weapon in the hands of the Iranian state is their ability to impact the global economy by their management and domination of the Strait of Hormuz.

AMY GOODMAN: Jeremy, before we talk about the death of South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, I just wanted to ask you very quickly about the Justice Department subpoenaing four journalists at The New York Times, delivering these subpoenas to their homes on Friday night, after they reported President Trump’s new Air Force One lacked key security features, including advanced anti-missile capabilities. This is the Boeing aircraft donated to Trump by Qatar, which he’s taking with him after he leaves, says it’ll be at the Trump Presidential Library. He flew the plane to NATO, but didn’t fly it back. He took the Air Force One home due to security concerns. Now, a number of news organizations have reported this, but the Times has been subpoenaed, and, very interestingly, subpoenaed by Jay Clayton, the U.S. attorney here in Manhattan, who’s been nominated by Trump to serve as director of national intelligence. His confirmation hearing is on Wednesday. Jeremy?

JEREMY SCAHILL: You know, I mean, what we’re seeing here is an escalating war against journalists. I mean, we, of course, saw this under President Bush, President Obama, the use of the Espionage Act. But what we’re seeing here really is the kind of organized crime family kingpin-in-chief, and Donald Trump believes that he can use the levers of American power to settle his personal scores. You know, he’s — it’s like the equivalent, the journalistic or free speech equivalent, of putting out a hit on the free press. That’s really what we’re witnessing here. You know, today they come for The New York Times, and tomorrow they’re going to come for other news organizations and other journalists. I mean, we are facing a very dire threat to press freedom under President Donald Trump right now. There’s no question about it, Amy.