The Trump Administration appeared to plagiarize its official justification for its war on Iran, copying almost word-for-word adocumentoriginally produced by the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD), a pro-war think tank with close ties to Israeli intelligence which was originally founded to “enhance Israel’s image.”

The FDD document wasauthoredby Tzvi Kahn, the formerassistant director for policy and government affairs at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

AMarch 2, 2026 statementissued by the White House accusing Tehran of 44 instances of terrorism against American citizens is “virtually identical” to the list published by FDD in June 2025, analystStephen McIntyre notedThursday.

While the White House did make superficial alterations to the text, they largely consisted of appending the label “Iran-backed” to every mention of groups like Hezbollah and Hamas. In the few instances where Trump administration officials bothered to make significant changes to the original FDD list, the edits were almost always made in service of “ratcheting up the underlying allegation,” McIntyre concluded.

Among the most egregious examples was a 1996 attack on the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, which FDD originally said merely that Hezbollah al-Hejaz was “deemed responsible” for. In the White House version, however, the group’s responsibility was “asserted as factual,” explained McIntyre, noting that serious questions about the incident remain unanswered to this day. “Clinton’s Defense Secretary William Perry subsequently wondered (along with many others) whether Khobar Towers should have been attributed to Al Qaeda,” he wrote.

A2009 investigationby journalist Gareth Porter based on interviews with over a dozen former CIA, FBI and Clinton administration officials demonstrated that the FBI’s inquiry into the Khobar Towers attack was precooked to blame Iran, when Al Qaeda was mostly like the culprit. Porter found that Shia citizens of Saudi Arabia had been tortured into confessing to the crime by Saudi secret police.

While the White House declined to join FDD in blaming Iran for the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks, it echoed the Israel-oriented organization in blaming Tehran for 603 military deaths in Iraq, which both documents attributed to “Iran-backed militias.” But there are major discrepancies with the figure, which amounts to 60% of the total US combatant deaths attributed to Iran. As McIntyre noted, such a claim is “not made in the State Department annual reports on Global Terrorism.”

At least four of the Americans the Trump administration claims were killed by Iran had served in Israel’s military. These included a US citizen who died while invading Lebanon in 2006 and two Americans in the IDF’s Golani brigade who were killed while invading Gaza in 2014. The fourth American, who was born in Israel and had also served in the Golani brigade, was killed amid violent reprisals against settlers in the West Bank in 2015.

A number of the claims are undermined by the very sources they cite, including a December 2019 incident in which the Trump administration insisted “Iran-backed Kataib Hezbollah terrorists killed an American civilian contractor and wounded several U.S. service members in a rocket attack at K1 Air Base in Kirkuk, Iraq.” But the Reuters article cited by the White House as proof that Iran was responsible made no such claim, explicitly cautioning that “no group has claimed responsibility for the attack.” In reality, Reuterssuggestedthe attack was the work of “Islamic State militants operating in the area [who] have turned to insurgency-style tactics.”

The White House’s claim that “Iran and its proxies” were responsible for killing 3 US soldiers in a 2024 drone attack on a US base in Jordan is also highly questionable. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austinsaidat the time that “we don’t know” how operationally involved Iran was in the January 28 attack that killed three US troops, “but it really doesn’t matter.”

Source: The Grayzone