By Dr. Kevin Barrett
Shortly after assuming office in 1961, then-president John F. Kennedy approved a U.S. invasion of Cuba. The subsequent Bay of Pigs debacle, during which almost all of the U.S. forces involved were killed or captured, is still considered one of the worst-ever American military defeats.
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Following the disaster, Kennedy ordered the construction of the White House Situation Room, a 5,000-square-foot secure intelligence and communications complex in the West Wing basement that never shuts down. Dedicated to crisis management and high-level national security meetings, it allows the president to securely monitor events, communicate with world leaders, and command U.S. forces worldwide.
On Feb. 11, 2026, at 11 a.m., President Donald J. Trump summoned his top advisors to the Situation Room. That meeting resulted in the ill-fated decision to attack Iran.
But the decision was not driven by Trump, nor by any of his American advisors. According to a New York Times account, based on insider sources who were present, the boss in the White House situation room that day was none other than Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu:
Mr. Trump sat down, but not in his usual position at the head of the room’s mahogany conference table. Instead, the president took a seat on one side, facing the large screens mounted along the wall. Mr. Netanyahu sat on the other side, directly opposite the president. Appearing on the screen behind the prime minister was David Barnea, the director of the Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence agency, as well as Israeli military officials. Arrayed visually behind Mr. Netanyahu, they created the image of a wartime leader surrounded by his team.
Netanyahu delivered a hard-sell pitch demanding that the United States attack Iran. He claimed, absurdly, that Iranians would love having America attack them, so desperate were they for “regime change.” Even more bizarrely, Netanyahu insisted that the son of Iran’s dethroned U.S.-puppet Shah—who in reality is despised by virtually all Iranians—would be acclaimed as Iran’s new, U.S.-backed, Israel-friendly leader.
Netanyahu’s sales talk was wildly divorced from reality, but Trump knows little about Iran, and what little he knows is wrong, because it comes from Netanyahu.
Indeed, Trump decided to run for president in 2016 primarily because Netanyahu’s billionaire friends incited him against President Barack Obama’s nuclear agreement with Iran, promising lavish funding in return for embracing Israel’s Iranophobia.
On Feb. 11, in the Situation Room, Trump swallowed Netanyahu’s nonsense hook, line, and sinker. The result—an immoral, unwinnable, economically and strategically disastrous U.S. war on Iran—may go down in history as the worst decision ever made by a U.S. president … except that it really wasn’t made by a U.S. president but by an Israeli prime minister.
The White House Situation Room isn’t the only American national security institution dominated by Israel.
The Israelis also apparently have free run at the Pentagon. Popular conservative commentator Tucker Carlson, who has high-level sources in the Trump administration, told economist Jeffrey Sachs, during the June 2025 12-day war on Iran:
Ask anyone who worked at the Pentagon. They enraged American Pentagon staff by barging into meetings, giving orders, making demands, and no one did anything.
It is extraordinary that a hostile foreign regime that has repeatedly attacked the United States can basically walk in and take over America’s national security apparatus. These false flags attacks include the 1954 Lavon Affair (the failed Mossad operation in which Israeli intelligence agents recruited Egyptian Jews to bomb American, British, and Egyptian targets in Cairo and Alexandria and blame it on Egyptian Muslims), and the brazen 1967 assault on the USS Liberty.
Israel is also suspected of assassinating a long list of American leaders, including the Kennedys and young conservative activist Charlie Kirk. In addition, a majority of Republican congressional staffers believe Israel was behind 9/11, according to a New Yorker source.
How long have the Israelis enjoyed such privileges?
According to Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, formerly Gen. Colin Powell’s right-hand man, the Mossad took over the Pentagon after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington. Wilkerson described the situation after 9/11:
I watched Mossad take over the Pentagon in 2002. The Pentagon was infiltrated by Mossad. They did not need any identification to get through the river entrance to the building. They went upstairs to Douglas Feith, the undersecretary of defense for policy, the third most powerful man in the Defense Department. Occasionally they went to the second most powerful man, Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of Defense, and they had run of the Pentagon.
Donald Rumsfeld, the secretary of Defense, said to my boss one time “Hell, I don’t run my building, Mossad does!” And it’s unquestionable that the Epstein business was … “heavily influenced”—let me put it that way—by Mossad.
Does “the Epstein business” explain Netanyahu’s privileged access to the Situation Room—and his usurpation of warmaking powers that the Constitution delegates to Congress? Have the Israelis blackmailed so many American leaders that they virtually own the Pentagon?
It seems that the White House and the Pentagon are in fact Israeli-occupied territory.
