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Department of Energy employee arrested in Washington for allegedly trying to aid Iran-backed Houthis
A Department of Energy employee in Washington state was arrested Thursday for allegedly attempting to support the Iran-backed Houthi terrorist organization, with federal prosecutors accusing him of using his electrical engineering expertise to help improve the group’s communications capabilities.
According to the Justice Department, Ashton Hamed Ellaboudy, 51, of Richland, is charged with attempting to provide material support or resources to the Houthis, a designated foreign terrorist organization. Investigators also allegedly uncovered purchases of chemicals used to make explosives and components for building drones.
“As alleged, a U.S. government employee traveled overseas and used his specialized expertise in an attempt to aid the Houthis, a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization backed by Iran,” said Assistant Attorney General for National Security John A. Eisenberg. “Additionally, Ellaboudy acquired materials for the construction of explosive material and drones capable of delivering these explosives. These allegations are so deeply disturbing that they almost defy imagination.”
According to the Justice Department’s account of court records, the FBI began investigating Ellaboudy after receiving information that he had purchased precursor chemicals, components, and other materials commonly used to construct homemade explosive devices. Investigators subsequently found that he had also purchased parts used to build drones and remotely operated aerial systems.
The complaint alleges that in December 2024, the FBI learned Ellaboudy had taken sick leave from work, claiming exposure to highly concentrated nitric acid, a chemical commonly used in making explosive materials.
In September 2025, Ellaboudy allegedly traveled from Richland to Oman using an official passport previously issued to him while he worked for the US Army Corps of Engineers. Prosecutors say he used the same passport to cross into Yemen, intending to travel to the Houthi-controlled capital, Sanaa.
When he returned to the United States, Ellaboudy allegedly told Customs and Border Protection officers that the trip had been official government business. His Department of Energy supervisor subsequently told investigators that Ellaboudy had no authorized official travel to that region.
During the investigation, Ellaboudy communicated with an FBI confidential source who claimed to be acquiring communications equipment for a Houthi “Colonel,” according to the release. The equipment was supposedly destined for a mobile communications center in Yemen.
25 Years After 9/11, NYT Continues to Rationalize Catastrophic Wars
The 25th anniversary of September 11, 2001, occasioned retrospectives on both the attacks carried out against the US that day and on the wars that the US prosecuted in their aftermath.Ft In its editorial remembrance, the New York Times (9/11/26)—which played a critical role in dampening skepticism of the “Global War on Terror”—rationalized the cataclysmic violence the US unleashed after 9/11, and assigned greater value to American lives over those of other people.
Under the headline “How a Heroic Response Went Awry,” the editorial board asserted:
The war against the Taliban and the Qaeda forces there was a justified and necessary response to the attacks. Within months, the US military destroyed Al Qaeda’s camps (even if killing Osama bin Laden would take nearly a decade) and drove the Taliban from power.
To say that a policy is “necessary” is to say that there is no alternative. But there was an alternative—namely, reaching an agreement with the Taliban for bin Laden to be extradited from Afghanistan, a possibility that existed before and immediately after 9/11.
The US, however, did not pursue this option as seriously as it could have. As the Washington Post reported on October 29, 2001:
Over three years and on as many continents, US officials met in public and secret at least 20 times with Taliban representatives to discuss ways the regime could bring suspected terrorist Osama bin Laden to justice.
Talks continued until just days before the September 11 attacks, and Taliban representatives repeatedly suggested they would hand over bin Laden if their conditions were met, sources close to the discussions said.
Throughout the years, however, State Department officials refused to soften their demand that bin Laden face trial in the US justice system.
A CIA administrator was quoted in the report: “I have no doubts [the Taliban] wanted to get rid of [bin Laden]. He was a pain in the neck.”
In addition, a former head of Saudi intelligence said that, in 1998, the Taliban agreed to hand over bin Laden to Saudi Arabia, a close US ally; the source said that the Taliban changed course after the US fired cruise missiles at an apparent bin Laden camp in Afghanistan and a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan, following attacks on US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania attributed to Al Qaeda (LA Times, 11/4/01).
Then, just a week after the US invaded Afghanistan, the Taliban offered to discuss handing over bin Laden if the US stopped bombing Afghanistan and provided evidence that bin Laden was involved in 9/11 (Guardian, 10/14/01).
In other words, far from being “necessary,” the Afghan War was a choice the US made when diplomacy appeared to be a viable option. And we now know that those 20 years of war had disastrous effects on Afghans (Jacobin, 9/11/21; Al Jazeera, 9/11/21), and resulted in the Taliban returning to power.
Border Agents Are Randomly Seizing Phones of US Citizens Who Support Palestine
Florida lawyer Jalal Shehadeh is convinced that the warrantless seizure of his cell phone by federal agents at the Newark International Airport after he returned from Palestine this September was not random.
Shehadeh, a Miami-based attorney and Palestinian rights advocate, was held for several hours for a secondary inspection and had his phone seized by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) after he refused to allow federal agents to search it.
“It’s just a wildly invasive thing to do to somebody with no individualized justifiable basis to do it,” Shehadeh told Truthout.
He suspects federal authorities targeted him for his activism. The lawyer is involved in a legal complaint against a federal judge in Florida over the judge’s anti-Palestinian statements.
Shehadeh is one of several Palestinian rights advocates who have been detained and had their personal devices searched by CBP while returning to the U.S. from international travel since the start of Israel’s war on Gaza in October 2023.
Other similar cases include Amir Makled, a lawyer from the Detroit area who was representing University of Michigan students involved in pro-Palestine activism, journalist Max Blumenthal, and Osama Abu Irshaid, the executive director of American Muslims for Palestine (AMP).
Jenin Younes, president of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), which filed a legal motion earlier this week demanding the return of Shehadeh’s phone, said CBP appears to be escalating phone searches against opponents of President Donald Trump’s agenda.
“Common sense tells us that they are targeting people who have pro-Palestine views,” Younes told Truthout.
She stressed that the searches are illegal. The Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution protects “persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.”
Younes said the “border exception” that allows searches to ensure that no illegal items are brought into the country should not apply to phones.
Younes, a civil liberties attorney, said the authors of the Constitution would have certainly opposed giving the government blanket authority to search people’s phones without cause.
“Law enforcement can search shipping vessels coming into the Boston harbor to make sure that they don’t have contraband. That’s a totally different thing from searching the contents of people’s smartphones,” she said. “I don’t think the framers would have thought that you could read the papers of somebody coming into the country in their suitcase, and likewise, a smartphone, which has so much more personal information.”
The case of Shehadeh and other Palestinian rights supporters targeted for searches at the border has reignited the debate over the application of constitutional protections at ports of entry.
The War Department’s Robot Army Is a Moral and Strategic Disaster
By any measure, September 30, 2026, was a dark day for American military ethics.
Standing at Quantico, War Secretary Pete Hegseth announced the creation of AUTOWARCOM – a new four-star command whose entire purpose is to accelerate the deployment of autonomous robots and AI-driven weapons onto the battlefield. He dressed it up in the language of innovation, citing Ukraine, promising speed, invoking “the fastest peacetime shift in modern military history.”
But let’s be clear about what he actually proposed: a military architecture designed to remove human beings from the kill chain. Machines that select targets. Machines that decide who lives and who dies. Machines that answer to no conscience, no court, and no law.
Amnesty International has been warning about this exact future for years. Fully autonomous weapons, the organization argues, are inherently incompatible with international human rights law. They cannot be held accountable. They cannot exercise mercy. They cannot distinguish between a combatant and a child who picks up a rifle out of fear. A machine has no empathy, no reason, no restraint – only code, and code carries the biases of whoever wrote it.
Hegseth’s answer to that concern? “We are putting on the full armor of God. Because while we wage physical war, we all know the real battle is spiritual.” That is not a policy justification. That is a sermon deployed to sanctify a killing machine.
And the timing is obscene. The United States is seven months into a war with Iran with no exit in sight. American troops are burning through missile interceptors defending against Iranian drones. The Strait of Hormuz is a stalemate. The Pentagon is begging for $74 billion for drones and counter-drone systems while contractors admit it will take **at least three years** to replenish basic stockpiles. And in the middle of that, Hegseth wants to stand up a new bureaucracy, hand it a four-star general, and call it strategy.
Worse still, he’s hollowing out the officer corps that would have to run it.
Hegseth confirmed he is doubling his earlier order to cut flag officers — from 10% to 20%.** That’s roughly 160 generals and admirals gone by January 2027. He calls it “accountability.” Senator Mark Kelly, a former Navy combat pilot, calls it what it is: a purge. “He’s purging a generation of great leaders of the military,” Kelly said, “and it’s going to take a generation to recover from it.”
Kelly is right. More than two dozen senior officers have already been fired or forced out – Brown, Franchetti, George among them. Many were women. Many were people of color. Many were simply not ideologically pliant enough for a secretary who seems to view the uniformed military as a personal fiefdom rather than a profession.
So here is the real picture: a secretary who has never commanded troops in combat is dismantling the professional military while building a robot army that no human being will be legally responsible for.
This is not strength. This is not innovation. This is moral cowardice dressed in techno-optimism.
Disgraced Team USA Gymnastics Doctor Larry Nassar Removed from Michigan Sex Offender Registry
The state of Michigan has erased thousands of sex offenders from its database, including one particular notorious name that many will immediately remember: Dr. Larry Nassar.
The move to scrub as many as 20,000 names from the state’s sex offender registry followed a Michigan Supreme Court ruling holding that “amendments issued in 2021 to the Sex Offender Registration Act can’t be used to retroactively require registration due to older incidents.”
This led to the removal of offenders whose crimes were committed before July 1, 2011.
Among those whose crimes precede that date is Dr. Larry Nassar.
Nassar was convicted of using his position as team doctor for USA Gymnastics from 1996 to 2014 and as team physician for Michigan State until 2016 to sexually abuse hundreds of young women.
Even though Nassar’s conviction wouldn’t come until many years after the July 2011 cut-off date, his name was still removed because many of his crimes predated July 2011, prosecutors explained.
While Nassar is no longer a threat to the public, as he is currently serving lengthy prison sentences which will likely ensure he spends the rest of his life in jail, the disappearance of 20,000 sexual offenders from the state’s database will remove the ability of Michiganders to use the registry as a way of determining whether people living among them were ever listed as abusers.
“The Eaton County Prosecutor’s Office also listed other offenders its office had prosecuted over sexual assault of minors, where the registration requirement was lifted. The Supreme Court could have applied a different interpretation upon hearing the case, the prosecutor’s office claimed, and allowed for certain sex offenders to remain on the list,” CBS News reported.
“While the effectiveness of such lists can be debated, that should occur in the legislature, not by decision of the court.”
Irregular: The Israeli Company with Intelligence Ties at the Center of the Rogue AI Incidents
On Friday, September 18, Google acknowledged that its Gemini artificial intelligence chatbot had “escaped its testing environment in May and hacked into three companies.”
According to Google, the AI models found passwords available online and logged into the online infrastructure of three companies. Once Gemini gained access to the companies’ real-world infrastructure, it recognized it was not in a simulated environment and ended the attacks.
The Gemini incident followed reports of similar attempted hacks or escapes by AI agents developed by Anthropic, OpenAI, and Meta.
These reports of AI agents attacking other companies and escaping their environments have led to a barrage of calls for legal action and warnings about impending doom. From claims that humanity is in danger of being killed by AI in the next decade to calls for a coordinated slowdown of AI research, fears that AI will negatively impact the future of the planet have gone mainstream.
While it’s important to take a sober look at the warnings from employees of the Big Tech companies developing AI models, as well as the CEOs, it is equally important to interrogate this narrative. Some skeptics have already claimed that the Big Tech companies are seeking to profit from the reports of the alleged danger posed by their AI models. Others speculate that the companies may be calling for regulation of their industry to shape government policies and potentially undercut future competitors and smaller AI firms.
To better understand whether these reports are genuine, represent an attempt at widening profit margins, or simply another sign of regulatory capture, we need a closer examination of the company at the center of several of these “rogue AI” incidents.
While nearly a dozen incidents have been reported in total, the “escapes” reported by Google, OpenAI, Meta, and Anthropic happened during tests designed to measure the capabilities of the AI bots. Each of those tests was being conducted by a company known as Irregular, an Israeli AI security firm that conducts third-party tests of frontier models.
Irregular has stated that the AI agents were able to take unapproved actions because internet access was “unintentionally made available.” They say the errors have been patched and similar incidents should no longer be possible.
Officials Are Keeping A LIST Of Brits Who Question Government Policy
The British state is compiling a list of people who criticise its own counter-terror programme. Ordinary X and Reddit users who questioned Prevent training, flagged a one-sided focus on the “far Right,” or simply criticised it have had their posts logged, stored and “investigated” by a Home Office-linked unit most of them have never heard of.
Officials spent more than a year trying to keep that database secret. They only released it after an appeal to the Information Commissioner’s Office. The public was never told their feeds were being trawled.
The Standards and Compliance Unit, or StaCU, was set up in February 2024 as an “opaque” body to handle complaints about Prevent, the safeguarding scheme sold as a way to stop people becoming terrorists. Documents obtained by The Metro and released by Rights & Security International show StaCU did more than wait for formal complaints.
Between March 2024 and February 2025 it made 77 “observations” of critical online comments, most of them from X, with others from Reddit and even articles in the Guardian and the Telegraph.
Jacob Smith, Freedom of Expression and Belief Team Leader at Rights & Security International, fought for a year to force the Home Office to publish the material.
“It is shocking that the government has been trawling X and Reddit to find out who has been critiquing Prevent – and then storing that information,” he said. “You should be allowed to criticise government policy without being put on a list.”
He added: “People should be able to express their views on social media without that being catalogued in government databases.”
Many of those logged, he said, had posted without thinking “that the government might be looking at their feed and taking that data. It is in an almost private setting.”
His conclusion was blunt: “It’s a stark reminder that, in the government’s eyes, anything you share online is fair game and could go into a file forever.”
A large share of the logged posts accused Prevent training of treating the “far Right” as the main threat while skating over Islamist extremism.
One X user was recorded after calling the training “complete bullshit.” They wrote: “Anyone’s who done the prevent training knows it only talks about the far Right. Islam extremism isn’t even mentioned.”
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth Taps Elon Musk for New Pentagon Role Focused on Futuristic Warfare
The world’s richest man, the legend, Elon Musk has returned to the Trump administration.
This time, the Tesla CEO is returning to the Trump administration in a new Pentagon role that could give him a direct hand in shaping the future of warfare.
On Wednesday, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announced that Musk will co-lead a new government project that is tasked with studying the future of warfare.
The new project is being called Project Meridian, and according to the Pentagon, its goal is to “identify the capabilities required to achieve absolute technological dominance on the next-generation battlefield”.
Per The Hill:
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Wednesday announced that SpaceXAI CEO Elon Musk, Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey and former Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) will lead a new Pentagon effort to study the future of warfare, dubbed “Project Meridian.”
The Pentagon chief said the project is meant to harness America’s innovators, senior leaders and technologists to look decades into the future and “forecast the creative solution for tomorrow’s conflicts.”
“It is futuristic on purpose,” he said of the project, noting it was not meant to develop new strategies or policies
“We should have the humility to recognize that the best forecasters of future conflict do not solely reside inside the Pentagon,” Hegseth continued. “There are obvious biases and risks to asking ourselves to both ask the questions and answer them.”
The Department of War revealed that Project Meridian will be completed in 120 days, and that its final report will be unclassified and presented to the public.
Protests Explode As France Arrests 625 Schoolchildren
As high-school students all over France are protesting the lack of teachers, crowded classes, long school days and wretched conditions in their schools, the French authorities have detained 625 people. Most of them were minors and were detained the day before in 356 schools throughout France.
The protests, which began last week in Paris, have been characterized by “an escalation of violence” including “projectiles, attempted arson and other forms of urban violence” against police, Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez said on Wednesday. In total, 83 police officers and gendarmes were injured, said the minister. Education Minister Édouard Geffray said that 119 students and staff members were injured by protesters since the start of the unrest, reported Reuters.
According to the education minister,Édouard Geffray, most of the injured staff were principals or teachers who were attacked as they tried to put a stop to the disturbances at their schools. Geffray claimed that “agitators” were “moving from school to school”. The students’ union, Unity for High School Students, a union of high school students, said that the disturbances were caused by a lack of teachers and other staff at schools, as well as by the poor conditions at many of them, including dilapidated buildings and overcrowded classes. A 16-year-old student in Paris told AFP that the education system was “completely broken” and that he and his friends were fed up with being forced to attend classes of 34 or more and with the overworked teachers who tried to teach them, added BBC.
In Marseille this morning a headteacher was attacked with petrol at Victor Hugo high school and seriously injured, the regional authorities said. Seven others including the school’s deputy head, its head of administration and four other managers were also attacked inside the school with petrol. At Saint-Exupéry high school hundreds of young people surrounded a fire truck called to the scene of a blaze and drove the firefighters out. Later a school fire was reported in Nantes. Meanwhile school and public transport have been attacked in Marseille with bus, tram and metro services suspended throughout the city because of damage to vehicles and attacks on drivers. French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu has called an interministerial crisis meeting at Matignon this evening to deal with the crisis. All ministers will be expected to cancel their travel plans for the night so that they can be with their regional prefects.
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