Tag: perpetual war

Trump Admin’s Counterterrorism Strategy Targets Left-Wing Violence Biden Denied Existed

President Trump signed a new counterterrorism strategy identifying three primary threats to the United States: narco-terrorists and transnational gangs, global jihadists including al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, and violent left-wing extremists including anarchists and anti-fascists.

These categories are not as distinct as they appear. Domestic left-wing organizations have documented operational ties to Hamas-linked networks, with the same financial infrastructure financing campus encampments, Gaza flotillas organized by designated terrorist entities, and solidarity operations supporting hostile foreign governments.

Open borders and opposition to immigration enforcement, central tenets of the left-wing political program, directly enabled the transnational gangs and cartel networks responsible for human trafficking, drug trafficking, fentanyl overdose deaths, gang violence, rape, intimidation, and murder in American communities, making the three threat categories, in practice, mutually reinforcing.

The 16-page document reorients federal priorities away from the white supremacist organizations Biden designated as the primary domestic threat, groups that produced no operational terrorism record, and toward left-wing, jihadist-linked, and transnational criminal networks that were generating documented mass violence, territorial seizures, and attacks on federal law enforcement throughout the Biden years.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence annual threat assessments continued throughout Biden’s tenure to lead with China, Russia, Iran, and transnational terrorism, not domestic right-wing groups, as top-tier strategic threats.

The FBI’s 2021 congressional testimony declared racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists, specifically white supremacists, the top domestic terrorism threat, citing incident counts from 2018 and 2019, two years in which white supremacists were the primary source of lethal domestic attacks. The FBI did not disclose that in 2020, the year before that testimony, no lethal attacks were committed by white supremacists at all, and that three of the four lethal domestic extremist attacks that year were carried out by left-wing anarchist.

The most documented of those was the August 2020 killing of Patriot Prayer supporter Aaron Danielson in Portland by Michael Forest Reinoehl, a self-described “100% antifa” supporter who told a journalist he had no regrets.

The statistical case was methodologically flawed regardless, counting incidents rather than measuring organizational capacity, lethality, or coordinated group activity, and including lone actors with no organizational affiliation. The result was a picture that supported a political narrative without establishing that named organizations, the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, or KKK, were running operational terrorism campaigns inside the United States. None were.

Keep reading

Russian Drone Strikes Romanian Apartment Building During Attack On Ukrainian Port City Of Izmail Across Danube River

A Russian drone struck an apartment building in Galați, Romania, injuring two people. The drone hit the roof of a residential building near the Ukrainian border. At the same time, Russia was attacking the nearby Ukrainian port city of Izmail across the Danube River.

The Romanian Ministry of Defense says the Russian drone was not shot down because doing so could have posed a greater risk to civilians and infrastructure.

Officials said it was initially unclear whether the drone carried explosives or was a decoy, and concluded after reviewing the incident that there was no safe opportunity to intercept it. The Romanian Ministry of Defense said the Russian drone was tracked for only four minutes, leaving insufficient time for a safe interception, reported Clash Report.

The European Union seemed to relish the incident.

Keep reading

Special Forces officer who oversaw secret SAS missions ‘doctored damning document on possible war crimes’

A senior Special Forces officer responsible for overseeing secret SAS missions doctored a document about possible war crimes.

The commander deleted the most damning sentence from a report into night raids that resulted in scores of suspicious deaths.

His disturbing intervention was included in files released last night by a High Court inquiry into suspected Extra Judicial Killings.

The judge-led probe is exploring claims Special Forces executed captives in Afghanistan and destroyed evidence of wrongdoing.

At the time, the officer was working in a supervisory role at Special Forces headquarters in London.

In April 2011 he was sent a statistical analysis of SAS detention operations including, numbers of Enemies Killed in Action (EKIA) and weapons recovered.

The glaring disparity between EKIA and rifles and pistols found in suspected Taliban compounds gave rise to allegations that unarmed Afghans were being shot dead.

The analysis was due to be studied by a Senior Legal Advisor at the London HQ and the overall commander, the Director Special Forces (DSF).

It was then the officer removed the concluding paragraph that read: ‘In my view there is enough here to convince me that we are getting some things wrong right now.’ 

In a witness statement N1788 admitted deleting the sentence before the document was passed on. He said he was not ‘just gonna pass that on in an email’.

At the time the document was of vital significance as the DSF was deciding whether to alert military police to the suspicious shootings thereby triggering a murder inquiry.

In testimony, N1788 said he was not concerned that Special Forces soldiers were abandoning their Rules of Engagement and eliminating detainees.

Keep reading

Does Reporting Bad News About the Iran War Make You a Foreign Agent?

The Trump administration has made no secret of its desire to censor bad news about the Iran war. President Donald Trump even accused journalists of treason during the war. Now the administration has found a specific (if extremely tenuous) legal justification for his claims: the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA).

After The Bulwark journalist Tim Miller shared someone else’s paraphrase of an Iranian TV news report about the ceasefire negotiations, the official White House Rapid Response account on X commented that Miller is “starting to take Iranian state media as fact and peddle disinformation on their behalf. Maybe Tim should register under FARA for being an agent of a foreign country.”

On its face, Miller’s criticism falls far outside of FARA. All he did was comment on a public report. But it wouldn’t be the first time the federal government tried to weaponize FARA against domestic critics.

Passed in 1938 to root out Nazi agents, the law requires anyone conducting political activities “at the order, request, or under the direction or control” of a foreign power to register publicly or face jail time or fines.

In 1951, the Department of Justice tried to prosecute civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois under FARA for republishing an international communist-led petition against nuclear weapons. A judge threw out the case after prosecutors failed to present evidence of any concrete Soviet ties. Since then, the government has mostly used FARA to prosecute foreign spies short of the Espionage Act, to add another layer of red tape to foreign lobbying, and to throw the book at corruption schemes involving foreigners.

Still, the law is “strikingly sweeping, capturing much other conduct that most people would not think should be registrable,” according to a 2022 article in Just Security, which recommended narrowing the foreign-agent law to avoid abuse. The Department of Justice once required an American church to register as a foreign agent for bringing foreign congregants to the March for Life rally in Washington, D.C. Until 2024, the department also considered paid tourism promoters foreign agents.

The first Trump administration pushed Russian, Chinese, and Qatari news outlets to register as foreign agents. The nonprofit Committee to Protect Journalists accused the Department of Justice of using FARA as a political cudgel and undermining freedom of the press.

Keep reading

U.S. bears brunt of Israel’s missile defense, Pentagon assessments show

The U.S. military has depleted much of its inventory of advanced missile-defense interceptors after expending far more high-end munitions defending Israel amid hostilities with Iranthan Israeli forces used themselves, according to Defense Department assessments described toThe Washington Post.

The imbalance, according tothree U.S. officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive security matters, underscores the extent to which Washington has shouldered the burden of countering Iranian ballistic missile strikes duringOperation Epic Fury, and raises questions about U.S. military readiness and security commitments around the world.

The United States launched more than 200 Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, or THAAD, interceptors in defense of Israel — roughly half of the Pentagon’stotal inventory — along with more than 100 Standard Missile-3 and Standard Missile-6 interceptors firedfrom naval vessels in the eastern Mediterranean, said the U.S. officials, who, like others in this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive security matters. By contrast, Israel fired fewer than 100 of its Arrow interceptors and around 90 David’s Sling interceptors, some of which were used against less sophisticated projectiles fired by Iran-backed groups in Yemen and Lebanon.

Military analysts said the data describedto The Post offers a rare window into how the United States and Israel work together.

“The numbers are striking,” said Kelly Grieco, a senior fellow at the Stimson Center. “The United States absorbed most of the missile defense mission while Israel conserved its own magazines. Even if the operational logic was sound, the United States is left with roughly 200 THAAD interceptors and a production line that can’t keep pace with demand.”

The shortage of U.S. interceptors has alarmed U.S. allies in Asia, particularly Japan and South Korea, which rely on the United States as a deterrent to potential threats from North Korea and China. “That bill risks coming due in theaters that have nothing to do with Iran,” said Grieco.

U.S. and Israeli officials routinely tout their close cooperation and the strength of Israel’s multilayered air-defense system. But the Defense Department assessments suggest a more lopsided dynamic.

“In total, the U.S. shot around 120 more interceptors and engaged twice as many Iranian missiles,” said a U.S. administration official, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive security matters.

Keep reading

Netanyahu orders Israeli army to seize ‘70% of Gaza Strip’, violating ceasefire deal

Benjamin Netanyahu has said he has given orders to the Israeli army to seize control of 70% of the Gaza Strip in a move that threatens to torpedo an already fragile ceasefire and create catastrophic humanitarian conditions in the already devastated territory.

Under the US-brokered ceasefire in October, the Israeli army withdrew to a demarcation line which gave Israel direct control of 53% of the occupied territory. Since then, Israeli forces have steadily advanced their positions westward into the Hamas-controlled half of the strip, and declared an ever-expanded no man’s land west of that, within which they claim the right to decide who can enter and open fire on anyone perceived as a threat.

In recent days, Israeli-backed armed militias have taken a leading role in emptying the territory along the ceasefire line, telling residents to vacate their homes or shelters.

Throughout the eight months of the ceasefire, Israeli forces have continued to open fire on Palestinians within range of the “yellow line” splitting the strip, and carry out airstrikes deeper inside western Gaza, killing more than 900 Palestinians since the truce began.

Keep reading

The mainstream media is ignoring Israel’s role in the killing of journalist Amal Khalil

Amal Khalil was a brave Lebanese reporter who for the past two decades has reported from the often dangerous southern part of her country for the Al-Akhbar daily newspaper. On April 22, while doing her job, she died in agony — and there is compelling evidence that the Israeli military murdered her. She was 43 years old.

But once again, the mainstream U.S. media is guilty of sickening malpractice. Journalists are supposed to make special efforts to follow the story when their colleagues are killed in action, but the leading American cable news networks, so far, have mostly not reported her death at all. On MS NOW, the more progressive outlet, nothing on air. Ditto for CNN, (although the network’s “CNN International” subdivision did air a 2:16 report — which most American subscribers will have missed). Neither did the major legacy TV networks cover the story: nothing on ABC, NBC, or CBS.

(There was one honorable exception, on the PBS News Hour. Geoff Bennett raised the killing of Amal Khalil in an interview with Israel’s ambassador to the U.N., Danny Danon, and pressed Danon hard.)

Here’s what actually happened. Back in 2024, Amal Khalil had already received death threats from an Israeli media commentator with close ties to the military, who warned her to leave southern Lebanon. On April 22, 2026 she was reporting near the village of al-Tiri when an Israeli air strike hit the vehicle in front of her. As usual, she had been wearing protective equipment that clearly identified her as a journalist. She and a fellow reporter took refuge in a nearby home. That reporter, Zeinab Faraj, told the Associated Press “Amal was crawling, she was wounded — her nose and head and shoulder and leg.” Both women were able to speak by phone to family and other colleagues. 

Then, a second Israeli air strike hit their refuge. Rescue workers got to her colleague, but the Union of Journalists in Lebanon charges that Israeli forces used stun grenades to prevent further efforts to free Amal. She continued to lay in that rubble for hours, surely in pain. Six hours later, the rescuers finally got through. But she had already died.

Back to the mainstream U.S. media. Unlike television news, newspapers did not entirely ignore the killing of Amal Khalil, but their coverage was mostly minimal, with — so far — little or no follow-up. One New York Times report especially stood out for its grotesque contortions to try and hide the compelling evidence that the Israeli military had prevented her rescuers from saving her. 

The sub-headline to Max Bearak’s April 23 report telegraphed the paper’s concealment strategy. “Mourners paid respects to Amal Khalil, who remained trapped under rubble for hours before emergency medics recovered her body.” You had to read all the way down to the 7th paragraph to learn who had actually “trapped” her, and was stopping those “emergency medics.” And, astonishingly, here was the explanatory sentence: “The Israeli military denied in a statement that it had prevented rescuers from reaching the injured journalists, and said the incident was under investigation.”

This is quite extraordinary. The New York Times is reporting Israel’s denial before it even bothers to tell you what the charge is. 

Keep reading

The White House Intervened to Get a $620 Million Deal for a Company Tied to Donald Trump Jr.

When the Pentagon announced a $620 million loan last year to a small North Carolina startup linked to Donald Trump Jr., defense officials and the company tried to tamp down suspicions of cronyism. 

The president’s eldest son said through a spokesperson that he wasn’t involved. The Pentagon said Trump Jr. played no role in the record-setting deal. And the startup’s founder told reporters that his company, Vulcan Elements, received no political favoritism.

But interviews and Defense Department records reviewed by ProPublica show that the request to loan hundreds of millions of dollars to the firm linked to Trump Jr. was made by Peter Navarro, a White House adviser to President Donald Trump and a friend of Trump Jr.’s.

Of the dozens of companies the Pentagon was considering funding at the time, Vulcan’s was the only deal initiated by a top aide to the president, said an official at the Pentagon who was not authorized to speak publicly.

After defense officials got the White House request, they asked Pentagon staff to move at an unusually rapid pace, said another person who was involved in the deal at the Pentagon but not authorized to speak about it. The staff worked late nights and with little sleep to get the loan through in a matter of weeks, the source said.

“The call came from the White House: We have to get this done,” the person said. 

The deal is one of many actions by the Trump administration that have helped companies in which the Trump family holds stakes. Government contracts and other benefits have gone to various Trump-linked companies, prompting allegations of self-dealing by Democratic lawmakers and good government experts. But ProPublica’s reporting on the Vulcan loan represents the first time the awarding of a contract from a federal agency has been directly linked to White House intervention.

The loan was a massive financial commitment from the Pentagon in its effort to fund companies that could help the U.S. reduce dependence on China’s critical mineral supply chains. The deal was a dramatic win for Vulcan, a North Carolina rare-earth magnet company launched just two years earlier. Estimates of its valuation grew tenfold after the deal was announced. It was also a win for Trump Jr.’s venture capital firm, which took a stake of undisclosed size in Vulcan about three months before the Pentagon announced the deal. 

Keep reading

Severity Of America’s Depleted Advanced Weapons Stockpiles Detailed In New Report

During the 39-day war with Iran, the U.S. used so many key offensive and defensive weapons that it will take three or more years to rebuild some of these stocks to pre-war levels, according to a new report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). The report, compiled by Mark F. Cancian and Chris H. Park, highlights concerns we raised long before and during Operation Epic Fury about the rapid expenditure of critical munitions and how that could affect a potential future fight against China. U.S. military leaders have suggested that the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) could be in a position where it would feel confident in launching an invasion of Taiwan by 2027.

The warning light on America’s magazine depth was blinking red long before Epic Fury. The stockpiles, especially of Standard Missile-3s (SM-3) and Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) interceptors, were degraded by more than a year of combat in the Red Sea region with the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels and several efforts to defend Israel. U.S. support for Ukraine, meanwhile, drained off supplies of Patriot air defense interceptors. We will address these issues in more detail later in this story. The weapon expenditure figures in the CSIS report only address Epic Fury, not previous U.S. engagements in the Middle East.

The most drastic setback to U.S. inventories involved the use of Tomahawk Land Attack Cruise Missiles (TLAMs) and THAAD and Patriot interceptors, according to CSIS. The think tank derived its expenditure figures from an internal analysis, which TWZ cannot independently verify.

Keep reading

Army Wants More Sensor-Laden Surveillance Balloons Over The Pacific

The use of high-altitude balloons is becoming ever-more routine for U.S. Army units in the Pacific. The service is pushing to deploy more of these lighter-than-air platforms as a key component of a new persistent surveillance and reconnaissance ecosystem across the region. The same kinds of balloons could also perform these and other missions, including communications relay, electronic warfare, or even launching kinetic strikes, around the globe. This is all underscored by a recent contracting notice about the potential purchase of commercial-off-the-shelf high-altitude balloons, sensor packages, and datalinks connected to SpaceX’s space-based Starlink network.

“This is a commodity requirement for commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) or modified-COTS high-altitude balloon systems and associated equipment,” according to the contracting notice from the Army’s 921st Contracting Support Battalion, which was posted online earlier this week. “The required supplies and software licenses will be delivered to locations within the INDOPACOM AOR [U.S. Indo-Pacific Command area of responsibility] (specifically Hawaii).”

The notice stresses that the 921st is currently only conducting “market research” and that a “full and open competition” could follow, but is not guaranteed. The battalion is headquartered in Hawaii, but is the Army’s main contracting arm in the Pacific, and has elements spread across the region.

The “commodity requirement” the 921st outlined in the notice includes a call for 15 high-altitude balloons, five each of three different sizes (12-, 16-, and 24-gore). The term gore here refers to the individual segments making up the balloon’s exterior. A greater number typically translates to a larger inflated volume, and, by extension, to higher altitude capability and/or payload capacity. The contracting notice mentions a desired “burst altitude (90k–120k ft class)” for the 24-gore type, but does not otherwise lay out specific performance or payload requirements for any of the balloons.

The notice also includes a call for several different sensor packages, described as follows:

  • Five “EO/IR [Electro-optical/infared]” types with “resolution (1080p/4K/MWIR/LWIR); gimbal stabilization; telemetry bandwidth (Starlink/LTE/MPU5); power draw; onboard processing; environmental hardening.”
  • Five “Long Wave Infrared” types with “Spectral band (8–14 μm); NETD sensitivity (≤50 mK ideal); optics (germanium lenses, FOV options); thermal stabilization; data interface (Ethernet/SDI/USB-C).”
  • Seven “Electronic Sensing” types capable of providing “(RF/EM/atmospheric/SIGINT); frequency coverage; antenna configuration (omni/directional/array); data logging (local vs. downlink); EMI shielding for high-altitude ops.”

The Army would also want eight payload buses with Starlink connectivity and MPU5 radios, as well as seven more with Starlink only. This separately speaks to the growing prevalence of Starlink, and its government-focused cousin, Starshield, across the U.S. military, something TWZ just recently highlighted.

Keep reading