Tag: perpetual war

The UK’s Push For War With Russia Continues: Fishing Trawlers Are The Latest Excuse

Britain is building a case for another confrontation with Russia – this time a large fleet of fishing boats.

The Telegraph reported that Russian trawlers are mapping the seabed where many of the UK’s undersea cables travel. The paper’s analysis of four and a half years’ of satellite tracking data from Global Fishing Watch revealed that more than 500 incidents had been logged in which Russian vessels operated above, or followed the routes of, cables connecting the UK to Europe and the US. Of these, 17 ships had been tracked hovering in the same area for long periods at low speed in regions where cables ran through charted routes.

The examples given by the Telegraph are specific and detailed. For example, Ship A turned up near nine separate cables. North of Scotland, Russian fishing boats logged 337 hours over the Atlantic Crossing 1 cable, 322 of them in April 2023. Ship B crossed the Hibernia Express cable several times and sat for nearly an hour at under two knots. Ship C followed a decommissioned cable for 10 miles, reversed course, then slowed over Google’s Grace Hopper cable and the Amitie cable linking the UK to France and Spain.

Again, there is no proof of interference or damage to any cable. As ClashReport noted in its summary of the Telegraph findings, tracking data alone does not establish what equipment the boats carried. What’s left is anonymous sourcing and naval speculation. A NATO source told the Telegraph that some of the ships identified in the article “have never seen a single fish on their deck”. A senior naval officer who watched footage of one of the ships identified told the Telegraph that it “could be easily used for other activities to store an uncrewed surface vehicle or remotely operated vehicles (ROVs)”.

The government is presenting it as an urgent threat, to be answered by replacing the 140-year-old Submarine Telegraph Act. The new security measures proposed by the White Paper of the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology include up to 14 years in prison and unlimited fines for anyone who intentionally damages cables or pipelines. There will be new security duties placed upon telecoms companies, and the government will be granted new powers to instruct such companies on a national security basis. A 12 week consultation will be held upon the proposals of the new legislation.

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‘We Know Where It Is’: Treasury Secretary Threatens To Freeze $1B of Iran’s Crypto

The U.S. will seize $1 billion of Iran’s crypto this week, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has said. It isn’t clear which asset though.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has said the American authorities will soon seize $1 billion in crypto from Iran.

Speaking on Newsmax’s NPolicy Summit in Washington, D.C. on Thursday, Bessent added that economic sanctions on the Middle Eastern country were working.

Iran has been using bitcoin — and other cryptocurrencies — to skirt around U.S. sanctions. The U.S. in April started targeting crypto wallets linked to the Iranian regime, Bessent said at the time.

“What we have done has never been seen before,” Bessent said Thursday on Iranian sanctions.

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Shadow at the Door: Death and Dying in Palestine

The recent death in my family underscored for me the devastating impact of personal grief, illuminating the deep loss and constant state of mortality that Palestinian families endure every day.

To be Palestinian is to carry an inherited archive of loss. After nearly a century of forced displacement, military occupation and relentless aggression at the hands of a brutal colonizer, death in Palestine has not been a quiet end at the close of life. It is an ever-present shadow weaved into the tapestry of daily existence.

Across generations, grief has been more than individual sorrow, an occasional isolated tragedy, it is an ongoing shared reality written into the collective memory of an entire people.  For Palestinians, Israeli colonization has stolen more than land; it has robbed them of their sovereignty over mourning, honoring and burying their loved ones in peace.

For most of the world, dying young is an unbearable disruption of the natural life cycle; for Palestinians, living under systemic hardship, surviving into old age is a rare exception rather than the norm.

From the traumatic dispossession and ethnic cleansing of the Nakba (the Catastrophe) in 1948, to the ongoing genocide and ecocide of Gaza, and military occupation of the West Bank, every Palestinian family has experienced violent loss.

Forcibly displaced from ancestral villages in their youth, grandparents passed down keys to homes that were either stolen or destroyed, along with memories of family members lost to Israeli aggression.  Their children in the West Bank continue to endure innumerable hardships and indignities under Israeli apartheid occupation.  And in Gaza, their descendants, surrounded by death and destruction and the ever-present threat of another Israeli attack, are struggling to survive.

Long before entering a classroom, the children of Palestine absorb the vocabulary of military attacks, martyrdom and survival.  The ceaseless threat of loss forces families to adapt to living with constant vigilance that is passed down from parent to child.

To truly grasp the nature of Palestinian grief, is to see that profound anguish and resentment exists alongside an extraordinary reverence for life and human dignity.

A century of national suffering has made agony a constant in daily life. In Palestine, this collective sorrow has taken on uniquely powerful, visible traditions of survival and shared resistance.

When burials are possible, entire communities come together to bare witness, offer support and share the weight of collective trauma. Oral histories, street art, literature and music carefully document the names, faces, and stories of the dead.  Where physical spaces and lives are continually erased, memory becomes the ultimate sanctuary for preservation.

Writing, thinking, or speaking about death in Palestine means facing a reality where grief is both an individual sorrow and a shared national identity. In the face of continuous, devastating loss, the simple act of remembering those who have died becomes a powerful affirmation of their humanity.

The Palestinian ethos of Sumud (steadfastness) embodies this dynamic:  a collective determination to remain on the land and to defy every Israeli effort to erase their existence – to live is to resist.

Grief in Palestine is non-linear.  It has had no end.  It does not move from denial to anger, bargaining, depression and finally acceptance.  It does not follow an inevitable straight path, because the iniquitous conditions that produce it remain unaddressed.

From the graves of forced exile to the countless deaths in Palestine today, the international community has consistently failed to take decisive action. Watching Palestine die is more than witnessing a genocide; it is an indictment of the global conscience.  The perpetuation of statelessness and oppressive occupation ensures that each new generation will be born into a world where untimely death remains a shadow at the door.

The abiding refusal of the Palestinian people to be subjugated or forgotten is a testament to their inspiring steadfastness. It serves as a powerful example that the pursuit of true freedom is a sacred generational responsibility, worth defending at all costs.

Palestinian endurance is far from passive survival; it is an active, daily reclamation that refuses to let their history be rewritten or justice silenced. Across generations, through the relentless wear of exile, displacement and loss, the Palestinian spirit remains anchored to the land and in an unyielding insistence on dignity and self-determination.  In every quiet act of preservation and every resounding cry for liberation, they demonstrate that while Israeli brute force and unbridled cruelties inflicts profound suffering, it can never erase a people whose identity, hope and humanity burns so undauntedly bright.

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Two Israeli Soldiers Killed In Hebron Checkpoint Shooting As Netanyahu Orders West Bank Closure And Vows More Settlements

Two Israeli soldiers were killed and three others were wounded by Friday morning fire from two Palestinian gunmen at a checkpoint near Hebron in the occupied West Bank, just four days prior to the October 27 Israel election.

Staff Sgt. Ron Yonatan Roytman, 23, from Ashkelon and a squad commander, and Sgt. Yuval Shai Svilem, 20, from Hod Hasharon, were killed in the attack, the Israeli military said. The three Home Front soldiers wounded in the attack, who are part of the same battalion as the two killed, suffer from light to moderate injuries. The three are from the 775th “Ari” Battalion of the Search and Rescue Brigade of the Home Front Command.

The two Palestinian gunmen who opened fire at a checkpoint near Hebron in the West Bank this morning arrived at the Judea Junction on Route 35 in a car with Israeli license plates, armed with an M16 rifle and a pistol, Israel Today reported. The gunfight with the Israeli soldiers who responded to the attack was prolonged and lasted over 20 minutes during which both attackers were killed by the soldiers. A large amount of ammunition was found in the car the two gunmen arrived in, IDF Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir said. Netanyahu said it appeared Hamas terrorists were planning “a major attack aimed at murdering innocent civilians.” Both gunmen were members of Hamas, Israeli media reported, according to Israel Today.

The Israeli Prime Minister said he had instructed the military to “impose a cordon on the city of Hebron and to prepare for a full closure of the entire West Bank starting today,” DW reported. In the Hebron neighborhood where the two shooters came from, the IDF would apply the same model used in the refugee camps in the West Bank. “We will evacuate the residents, go from house to house, remove the weapons there, and address and demolish all terrorist infrastructure,” Netanyahu said. He added that Israel is placing a siege on the city of Hebron and its neighboring city of Halhul, and would consider applying the same model in other cities as well.

Netanyahu added that an even bigger operation is going to be carried out by the IDF in Judea and Samaria. “The Defense Minister and I have seen an IDF operation in Judea and Samaria on a very broad scale, unlike anything carried out since the Six-Day War. The IDF is ready to carry it out, and we will determine the timing, but it is coming.” He gave no date.

To the settlers in the area, Netanyahu declared, “You are an example to the people of Israel. You are an example to the State of Israel. We are going to destroy the terrorist infrastructure, and we are going to build the settlement infrastructure.” He continued that the government was advancing plans to build and legalize over 100 new communities and over 100 farms.

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich called for a large-scale military campaign in the West Bank. He said he wanted a campaign “exactly like in Gaza and Lebanon,” DW reported. Immediately he ordered the demolition of a row of what he called illegal Arab structures next to the spot where the attack took place.

The attack occurred at the end of the campaign, when the voting is due to take place in four days’ time, on October 27. According to DW, the vote is widely seen as a referendum on Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu. The polls have predicted a very tight race between the pro-Netanyahu camp and its opponents. Netanyahu connected the attack to threats that the election-season expects from his enemies. “We warned several weeks ago about attempts by our enemies to harm us, our civilians and our soldiers ahead of the elections. That is what they tried to do here,” he said.

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Don’t Pretend the ‘War on Drugs’ Has Anything to Do With Fighting Drugs

Addressing the UN General Assembly in September, Donald Trump gloated about his strategy toward “narcoterrorist” cartels, the menace du jour in the United States’ self-declared backyard. Pulling numbers out of his ass per usual, Trump claimed that the manic bombing campaign against alleged seafaring narcoterrorists (read: fishermen) in Central and South America has cut maritime drug trafficking by 97%, and called drug cartels the “ISIS of the Western Hemisphere.”

While it was by no means the president’s intention, he accidentally hit the nail on the head with the ISIS comparison. Both the Islamic State and Latin American drug trafficking outfits are a direct result of US policy—as well as a convenient excuse for the Americans to continue terrorizing people under the pretext of combating the very phenomena they caused in the first place. Just as ISIS owes its origins to the US invasion of Iraq, drug traffickers wouldn’t be in big business if not for—what else?—the US’s so-called “war on drugs” that renders the international movement of illicit substances so lucrative.

This year, the Trump administration has significantly ramped up its drug war beyond just randomly blowing people up in the ocean. In August, the Associated Press (8/17/26) reported on the government’s plans to expand operations to terra firma, quoting Secretary of War Pete Hegseth:

It will be “like you saw with the strikes on the drug boats,” Hegseth said during a military drill in the jungle in Panama. “Same effect on land.”

But since there are generally more people on land than in the middle of the sea, there will no doubt be far greater opportunities for extrajudicial execution in this new terrestrial phase of operations.

The escalated campaign takes place against the backdrop of the US-led “Shield of the Americas,” a hemispheric “anti-cartel coalition” inaugurated in March that now boasts the participation of 19 countries. Ecuador has been among the most gung-ho about joining forces with the US to launch “anti-cartel” raids, with such impressive feats to show for it as the joint bombing of a drug trafficking compound that turned out to be a dairy farm.

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The Pentagon is quietly building an elite new tech sabotage agency

The Pentagon has spent months quietly building an elite new tech agency to help covertly disrupt and sabotage foreign technology programs considered threats to American military superiority.

Neither Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth nor any other senior Pentagon official has publicly mentioned the agency since it was established this April — a conspicuous omission for a department that has reveled in announcing other major changes aimed at modernizing the military or adopting hard-nosed new policies against foreign adversaries.

Information on the Technology Support Office, or TSO as it is called internally, is nearly impossible to find on Pentagon websites, and the agency is mentioned by name only in several previously unreported Defense Department historical records and memoranda.

While the specifics of its work are highly classified, POLITICO spoke with 12 current and former U.S. national security officials with varying degrees of knowledge about TSO to understand how the agency came to be, the broad contours of its mission and why its operations are shrouded in secrecy.

Some of these people helped establish TSO or worked closely with it; others attended briefings or spoke with current Pentagon officials about it; and some were familiar with Defense Department intelligence programs now merged into TSO. All were granted anonymity to share sensitive details about the agency that have not been previously reported.

Deputy Defense Secretary Steve Feinberg, a private equity billionaire and former head of the White House’s Intelligence Advisory Board during President Donald Trump’s first term, led the push inside the Pentagon to create the new agency.

Tom Rakusan, a senior adviser to Feinberg at the Pentagon, has also been closely involved in setting up TSO. Rakusan is a longtime veteran of the CIA’s clandestine service, and most recently worked at Feinberg’s private equity firm, where he focused on emerging technology.

Hegseth and Feinberg established TSO quickly and without attracting outside scrutiny because they largely built the agency by reorganizing two classified Pentagon intelligence programs that have conducted similar clandestine tech-sabotage efforts at a smaller scale since 2023.

But by creating an agency dedicated to expanding that work, the Defense Department is signaling its intent to ramp up a range of aggressive covert activities abroad — potentially including cyberattacks, supply chain disruptions and disinformation operations.

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US evacuating Middle East bases – NBC

The US military has quietly begun withdrawing troops from bases across the Middle East, while Washington is ordering diplomatic personnel to leave several missions in the region, NBC News reports.

The moves come as President Donald Trump considers launching a new wave of attacks on Iran, and the withdrawals resemble preparations made by the Pentagon and State Department ahead of the initial US-Israeli strikes in February, NBC reported on Wednesday, citing two US officials and two people familiar with the matter.

US troops stationed in Jordan, Qatar, and Kuwait are among those being relocated, according to the report. Washington reportedly intends to maintain a limited presence at its regional bases, including personnel responsible for air defenses and security.

Ahead of the February 28 attack, the Pentagon withdrew large numbers of troops from potentially vulnerable bases to shield them from expected Iranian retaliation. Tehran accused Washington of using Gulf residents as “human shields” after thousands of US service members took shelter in civilian hotels and office buildings.

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Decoding Pro-Israel Buzzwords in a Time of Genocide

Nearly two years ago, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International released in-depth reports documenting that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza. Months later, Israeli human rights groups did likewise. Support for Israel has declined steeply among Americans, but its defenders continue to maintain a siege of buzzwords against Palestinian rights.

As historian Rashid Khalidi emphasized in his book Brokers of Deceit: How the U.S. Has Undermined Peace in the Middle East, “language matters.” Standard terms and tropes “are the essential building blocks of a lofty and solid edifice of denial of an entire narrative, of the existence of an entire people, which is basic to the affirmation of a formidable counter-reality.”

Prominent groups, notably the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee, AIPAC and Christians United for Israel – along with allies in Congress, the Executive Branch and the punditocracy – rely on the same buzzwords to defame critics of Israel and deny its systematic crimes against Palestinian people. For instance:

** “antisemitic”
At the top in the rhetorical toolbox, a blunt instrument for smearing Israel’s critics no matter how true their accusations – and no matter the absence of evidence of bigotry against Jewish people.

** “blood libel”
A high-dudgeon epithet for equating valid condemnations of Israel with 900-year-old antisemitic craziness.

** “held to a higher standard”
A catchphrase to evade realities of Israel’s ongoing large-scale crimes against humanity and the fact that Israel uses enormous U.S. military aid to impose apartheid, ethnic cleansing and genocide as matters of policy.

** “homeland for the Jewish people”
In other words: Palestinians will not replace us.

** “indigenous”
So, even Jewish Americans who recently moved to Israel are indigenous, unlike Palestinians whose ancestors have been living in Palestine for the last hundreds of years.

** “Jewish and democratic state”
It can’t be oxymoronic just because it’s an oxymoron.

** “peace process”
The process of Israeli expansion that has brought war and more war, with the U.S. government functioning as “Israel’s lawyer” while arming Israel with massive quantities of weapons and continuing to make Israel (in the words of a recent Congressional Research Service report) “the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign assistance since World War II.”

** “self-defense”
A term reserved for Israelis but certainly not Palestinians.

** “terrorism”
When Palestinians kill Israeli civilians but not when Israelis kill Palestinian civilians in vastly greater numbers.

** “renounce violence”
A demand routinely made of Palestinian organizations but not of the Israeli government.

** “Israel’s right to exist”
The standard gotcha question “Do you believe Israel has a right to exist?” can be answered with clear questions: “Do you think apartheid South Africa had a right to exist?” . . . “Do you think ethnic cleansing has a right to exist?” . . . “Do you think genocide has a right to exist?” . . . “Do you think the tens of thousands of Palestinian children killed by the Israeli military had a right to exist?”

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The Normality of Evil: Reflections on the “NAZA” Documentary

Hannah Arendt’s characterization of Eichmann as representing “The Banality of Evil,” the subtitle of her book Eichmann in Jerusalem, shocked many people. It was later criticized in the wake of the discovery of her protagonist’s antisemitic pronouncements, unknown during his trial. The new film NAZA, documenting the inner mechanisms of the Gaza genocide brings the concept of the banality of evil front stage again. Except that this time we have the testimonies of two dozen perpetrators who, unlike Eichmann, do not face a tribunal but share their experience mostly in a casual and relaxed manner, some with pride in their accomplishment, others with remorse. They sound like normal middle-class men and women conscientiously doing their challenging hi-tech job. These Israelis embody something different from the Nazis who tried to hide their crimes from their own people, whom they feared would not support them. The new film is about the normality of evil in a society that has largely accepted the genocide taking place less than forty miles south of Tel Aviv.

The twenty-four perpetrators interviewed in the film belong to elite intelligence units that harness the power of AI and total surveillance to destroy Gaza. They are not “Arab haters,” remarks one of the interviewees. Yet he believes he killed more women and children than the fiercest Arab hater. However abhorrent the ongoing West Bank pogroms against Palestinians by Zionist squatter-settler vigilantes taking place under the sympathetic gaze and occasional assistance of the IDF—the magnitude of mass murder of civilians in Gaza is incomparably greater.

The perpetrators come from privileged classes of upscale, glittering Tel Aviv, the visual background of the entire film. Among the leitmotifs of the testimonies are the readiness to obey orders and the delight of overcoming difficult technical challenges (technodélice, as the late Jean-Jacques Salomon defined it). “It was fun (kef),” admitted one of the perpetrators.

NAZA is a Hebrew acronym for collateral damage. The association with “Nazi” is not fortuitous; one of the perpetrators compares his experience with that of Nazis engaged in industrialized, albeit less sophisticated, mass murder in the early 1940s. When, like many young Israelis (and Jews from elsewhere), he was taken to visit Nazi extermination camps, he wondered how these Nazis could switch to normal life after killing thousands of people a day. Now, he admits, he knows. He would meet friends after a day of killing mostly women and children and enjoy his night out.

Initially, neither the Nazis nor the Zionists intended to commit genocide. In their exclusivist nationalist fantasies, German National Socialists wanted to expel the undesirables, to make the “purified,” expanded Germany great again and, in the case of the socialist Zionists in power in 1948 and 1967, when massive expulsions took place, to turn Palestine into a “Jewish state.” Both had land lust: the Nazis wanted fertile land in Eastern Europe ‘cleansed’ of most Slavs and all the Jews—while critics and political figures alike have described Israel’s territorial strategy as a pursuit of ‘a maximum of territory with a minimum of Arabs.’

From the turn of the 20th century, Zionist pioneers laid strong emphasis on breeding the intrepid and valiant New Hebrew Man who had broken with the victimhood of the past. In his eulogy for Theodor Herzl in 1904, Vladimir Jabotinsky, who established and shaped the now dominant stream of Zionism, defined the new creature thus:

It was only later, faced with resistance kindled by the settler movement, that Israelis assumed the role of innocent victims, forced to defend themselves. Visits to the Nazi extermination camps are essential components of the didactic tools used to forge hard-nosed fighters. No wonder most of them called the attack on southern Israel in October 2023 “the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.” Totally lost was the difference between powerless Jewish civilians targeted by the Nazis and the powerful Jewish state that had expelled and confined Palestinians in an open-air concentration camp in Gaza. Referring to the violence they unleash, the Israelis often use the expression ein brera (“there is no choice”), which preserves their self-image and justifies excesses. This is how the genocide has metastasized from Europe to West Asia.

The film’s protagonists explain how they use sophisticated technology to survey every telephone communication of the Palestinians. One of the phrases AI extracts from millions of conversations is “When does daddy come home?” This is how the decision is made to destroy the suspect’s home along with his wife and children. Behind their computer screens, those who determine such targets can later hear the cries of those wounded children who were waiting for their fathers a few minutes earlier.

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Pentagon Letter Lays Out Plan For Four-Star Autonomous Warfare Command

On October 19, the War Department put out a Pentagon letter on how they plan to build a four-star Autonomous Warfare Command. The letter, on Project Agincourt letterhead and signed twice by officials marked “CEO,” began by referencing the past attempt by the Army to transform itself in 1928.

The letter is titled “Building the Autonomous Warfare Command” and comes from the Direct Reporting Portfolio Manager for Unmanned Systems (DRPM-UxS), which leads Project Agincourt. The letter revisits a historical episode from the interwar years of the War Department’s attempt to build a unified mechanized force of tanks, armored trucks and motorized infantry. In 1928, Secretary of War Dwight Davis directed the Army to experiment with such a force. However, that force was soon disbanded, and the effort at mechanization was ultimately broken up and added as an afterthought to the various services. It required the German blitzkrieg in 1940 to force the creation of the U.S. Armored Force.

“We face an equally urgent revolution,” the letter says, pointing to low-cost drones that have changed the character, speed and economics of war. Instead of going down the path of 1928, it says, Secretary Pete Hegseth “chose the maximal path.”

Project Agincourt has two missions. The first is to stand up the Autonomous Warfare Command (AUTOWARCOM) by October 1, 2027, as the largest institutional change since the interwar years. The second mission of Project Agincourt is to continue the mission of the DRPM-UxS while pioneering a new acquisition model, which pairs autonomy and robotics companies with operational forces at the “edge.” “The goal is not a particular drone. It is a system built to adapt at scale,” the letter states.

Power projection since the Cold War has been based upon a limited number of very high-end, very expensive systems, and that model has been disrupted. The new advantage for the U.S. will come from the edge, adapting faster than adversaries with two key assets: its lead in superintelligence and an unmatched NCO corps.

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