UPDATE: Watch: Iran can never get a nuclear weapon
I, DONALD J. TRUMP, President of the United States of America, in order to take additional steps with respect to the national emergency declared in Executive Order 12957 of March 15, 1995, in light of the actions of the Government of Iran and Iranian-backed proxies, particularly those taken to destabilize the Middle East, promote international terrorism, and advance Iran’s ballistic missile program, and Iran’s irresponsible and provocative actions in and over international waters, including the targeting of United States military assets and civilian vessels, hereby order:
READ: Executive Order
The omnipotent ayatollah commands a private militia and intelligence agency, which are outside the jurisdiction of any other arm of government. The budgetary and financial assets at his disposal and of the heads of bodies operating in his “office” are separate from all over governing mechanisms in the county, including even the Revolutionary Guards autonomous economic empire.
Khamenei’s “key financial resources” are believed to be kept in a secret fund and run into tens of billions of dollars.
READ: NEW sanctions on Iran specifically target Ayatollah Khamenei
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UPDATE: US struck Iranian military computers this week
WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. military cyber forces launched a strike against Iranian military computer systems on Thursday as President Donald Trump backed away from plans for a more conventional military strike in response to Iran’s downing of a U.S. surveillance drone, U.S. officials said Saturday.
The cyber attacks — a contingency plan developed over weeks amid escalating tensions — disabled Iranian computer systems that controlled its rocket and missile launchers, the officials said. Two of the officials said the attacks, which specifically targeted Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps computer system, were provided as options after Iranian forces blew up two oil tankers earlier this month.
The action by U.S. Cyber Command was a demonstration of the U.S.’s increasingly mature cyber military capabilities and its more aggressive cyber strategy under the Trump administration. Over the last year U.S. officials have focused on persistently engaging with adversaries in cyberspace and undertaking more offensive operations.
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"I am in no hurry"
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And so a watching world comes to understand that who lives or dies in Iran is decided by the American President .. not by the petty rulers of that imprisoned country.
Oh how these desperate leaders hate this President of the United States, who steals their authority, who speaks a word and saves the lives of their Iranian people .. lives that mean nothing to these ayatollahs, who use their people as fodder, as human sacrifice:
******
They wear the blood-red headband and a small metal key into battle. ''Sar Allah,'' (''Warriors of God''), some of the headbands read in Farsi script, identifying the wearers as divinely designated martyrs who will use their keys to go directly to heaven if killed in the holy war against Iraq declared by their leader, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
The headbands and the keys are worn by young boys, aged 12 to 17, who are recruited by local clergy or simply rounded up in the villages of Iran, given an intensive indoctrination in the Shiite tradition of martyrdom, and then sent weaponless into battle against Iraqi armor. Often bound together in groups of 20 by ropes to prevent the fainthearted from deserting, they hurl themselves on barbed wire or march into Iraqi mine fields in the face of withering machine-gun fire to clear the way for Iranian tanks. Across the back of their khaki-colored shirts is stenciled the slogan: ''I have the special permission of the Imam to enter heaven.''
In dozens of interviews conducted by this reporter in recent weeks with Iranian exiles, academics and government and intelligence officials in the United States and Europe, the blind faith of these teen-age martyrs was frequently cited as symbolic of the fanaticism that is part of life today in the Islamic Republic of Iran.
An East European journalist who witnessed one of these human-wave assaults, in which tens of thousands of young Iranians have gone willingly to their deaths, could hardly believe what he was seeing, as first one boy, and then another, detonated a mine and was hurled into the air by the explosion.
''We have so few tanks,'' an Iranian officer explained to the journalist, without apology.
Source: Terence Smith, "Iran: Five Years of Fanaticism", The New York Times, February 12, 1984
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