Tag: perpetual war

Days Before Iran Strikes, DOJ Charged Silicon Valley Engineers in Case Involving Tech Secrets Sent to Tehran

With the United States forces engaged in destroying the Iranian military, it’s easy for Americans to think the enemy is on the other side of the world.

But a Department of Justice operation that resulted in the arrests of three Iranian-born computer engineers on the virtual eve of Operation Epic Fury has a different kind of message:

The danger can be much, much closer to home.

As the New York Post reported Monday, two sisters and the husband of one of the women were arrested in mid-February, 10 days before military operations against Iran began, and charged with stealing trade secrets from Google and other Silicon Valley powerhouses.

A Department of Justice news release from Feb. 19 identified the trio as Soroor Ghandali, 32; Samaneh Ghandali, 41; and Samaneh Ghandali’s husband, Mohammadjavad Khosravi, 40.

The Ghandali sisters are former Google engineers who went on to work at another unidentified tech company; Khosravi worked at a third tech company, the release said.

And they apparently operated like trained professionals.

“As part of the alleged scheme to commit trade secret theft, the defendants used their employment to obtain access to confidential and sensitive information,” according to the DOJ release.

“The defendants then exfiltrated confidential and sensitive documents, including trade secrets related to processor security and cryptography and other technologies, from Google and other technology companies to unauthorized third-party and personal locations, including to work devices associated with each other’s employers, and to Iran.”

In official terms, the three are charged with “conspiring to commit trade secret theft from Google and other leading technology companies, theft and attempted theft of trade secrets, and obstruction of justice,” according to the news release.

But as the U.K.’s Daily Mail noted, “trade secrets” in this case sounds more like a euphemism for technology that can pose a direct danger to American troops, and the country itself.

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US Will Only Offer Ukraine Security Guarantees if Kiev Withdraws Troops From Remaining Areas It Controls in Donetsk Region

Kiev must stop the senseless slaughtering of its citizens and seek peace.

Now in its fifth year, the war between Russia and Ukraine has faded from the public’s attention, and though the Euro-Globalists still profess their complete support, even the UK press is noticing Volodymyr Zelensky’s ‘Panic’ due to the lack of perspective for his war effort.

Now, to worsen the situation even more, news arises that the US will only offer security guarantees for a peace deal in Ukraine if Kyiv withdraws from all the areas it still controls in Donetsk Oblast.

Reuters reported:

“With the U.S. focused on its own conflict with Iran, President Donald Trump is applying pressure to Ukraine in an effort to bring a quick end to the four-year war triggered by Russia’s 2022 invasion, Zelenskiy said.

‘The Middle East definitely has an impact on President Trump, and I think on his next steps. President Trump, unfortunately, in my opinion, still chooses a strategy of putting more pressure on the ​Ukrainian side’, he told Reuters.”

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Hungary to halt gas deliveries to Ukraine – Orban

Hungary will gradually halt natural gas deliveries to Ukraine until Kiev restores the flow of Russian oil through the Druzhba pipeline, Prime Minister Viktor Orban has announced.

In a video posted to his Facebook page on Wednesday, Orban said that Ukraine has been blocking the operation of the Soviet-era oil pipeline for 30 days. “As long as Ukraine does not provide oil, it will not receive gas from Hungary,” he said.

Orban stated that gas that would have been sent to Ukraine will instead be stored in Hungarian facilities, adding that the move is necessary considering that Ukraine “is also attacking the southern gas pipeline that supplies Hungary,” referring to the TurkStream route that brings Russian gas to Hungary via Türkiye and the Balkans.

“We will defend Hungary’s energy security, the protected petrol price, and the reduced gas prices,” Orban declared. He said the country has so far been able to “successfully defend against Ukrainian blackmail” thanks to the protected price scheme, adding that Hungarians pay the lowest prices at gas stations in all of Europe.

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Central Command Says Nearly 300 US Military Troops Injured in Iran War

Nearly 300 U.S. military service members have been injured since the start of the war in Iran, a military spokesperson said on Wednesday.

U.S. Central Command spokesman Navy Capt. Tim Hawkins told Fox News that “since the start of Operation Epic Fury, approximately 290 U.S. service members have been wounded,” referring to the military operation that was initiated on Feb. 28 and is ongoing.

“The vast majority of these injuries have been minor,” Hawkins  said, “and more than 255 troops have already returned to duty.”

Officials said earlier this week that more than 9,000 targets inside Iran have been struck by the U.S. military, and more than 9,000 flights have been conducted so far. Much of the country’s air force and navy have been destroyed in the strikes, President Donald Trump said on Tuesday.

Central Command, which oversees the Middle East, also on Wednesday released new video footage of its forces striking Iranian military infrastructure.

“U.S. forces are striking targets to degrade the Iranian regime’s military infrastructure and capabilities that have threatened American troops and regional partners for decades,” Central Command wrote in a post on X.

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Report Alleges Trump’s Daily Military Briefing Scrubs Out Iran War Setbacks

A fresh NBC report has alleged that President Trump is being presented with a very incomplete picture of how the Iran war is going, with the conflict now approaching its first month, and as Washington struggles to find an offramp amid global oil market disruptions.

The report says that his daily military briefing provided by the Pentagon features a roughly 2-minute long video update for President Trump that shows the biggest, most successful strikes on Iranian targets of the prior 48 hours. Negative developments frequently get omitted or glossed over.

Anonymous US officials have voiced fears that the video briefings, which the president tends to respond positively to, fail to represent the full scope of what’s going on. Also, Trump’s aides have reportedly voiced greater approval for the briefings, which feature Iranian military equipment and bases and sites getting blown up.

The NBC report, which has been rejected by White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, in essence suggests Trump is not getting properly briefed on major negative developments.

Or in other words, the fear is that briefers are simply favoring information that he wants to hear, and too afraid to deliver bad news. According to NBC:

They said the videos are also driving Trump’s increasing frustration with news coverage of the war. Trump has pointed to the success depicted in the daily videos to privately question why his administration can’t better influence the public narrative, asking aides why the news media doesn’t emphasize what he’s seeing, one of the current U.S. officials and the former U.S. official said.

Again, Leavitt has called all of this “an absolutely false assertion” from people who aren’t in the briefing room; however NBC does offer the following example which seems consistent with its reporting:

One example came this month when five U.S. Air Force refueling planes were hit in an Iranian strike at Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia, according to one of the current U.S. officials. Trump wasn’t briefed about the strikes, and he learned what had happened from media reports, the official said. When Trump inquired, he was told the planes weren’t badly damaged, the official said.

The official said Trump reacted angrily behind the scenes to the news coverage. Publicly he posted on Truth Social calling coverage of the strike misleading and accusing media organizations of wanting the U.S. “to lose the War.”

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$580 million in oil bets placed moments before Trump’s Iran post – FT 

Oil traders placed more than half a billion dollars in bets minutes before US President Donald Trump announced “productive” talks with Iran on Monday, the Financial Times has reported.

A burst of activity followed by a sharp price drop has raised questions about possible advance knowledge among market participants.

About 6,200 Brent and WTI futures contracts changed hands between 6:49 AM and 6:50 AM in New York – a one-minute flurry worth $580 million, based on FT calculations using Bloomberg data. Volumes in both benchmarks – Brent and US West Texas Intermediate – spiked simultaneously, about 27 seconds before 6:50 AM, while S&P 500 futures surged shortly after.

The trades came roughly 15 minutes before Trump said on Truth Social there had been “productive conversations” with Tehran to end the war in Iran.

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Pentagon Reportedly Preparing to Send 3,000 Airborne Troops to Middle East

The Pentagon is preparing to deploy about 3,000 troops from the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division to the Middle East, according to multiple reports.

Politico reported the deployment would add to thousands of Marines already heading to the region.

Two defense officials confirmed the planned troop deployment.

Pentagon officials said no decision had been made to send troops into Iran, The Wall Street Journal reported.

The U.S. currently has about 50,000 troops in the area.

The troop increase follows ongoing U.S. military operations against Iran.

U.S. Central Command said strikes have destroyed thousands of military targets since Feb. 28, when President Donald Trump announced the beginning of Operation Epic Fury.

The New York Times previously reported the Pentagon was considering deploying the 82nd Airborne Division to the area.

Iran continued drone and missile attacks in the region Tuesday.

Trump said he delayed additional strikes due to conversations with Tehran toward a peace deal.

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Did You See This Clip of Obama’s CIA Director Talking About Iran?

It’s beyond parody that a former CIA director could be so out of touch, simply because he disliked an election outcome. This was a gathering of the so-called ‘morons’ on MS Now—true, that’s often the case, but this time, it was a particular brand of idiocy. They had John Brennan, Obama’s former spy chief, who arguably went rogue during the Russia investigation, claiming he would trust Iran, the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism, over Donald Trump. 

John, are we experiencing dementia, or are you just getting your shots in before your probable indictment for giving false testimony about the Russiagate hoax, especially regarding the Steele dossier? 

Trump launched Operation Epic Fury almost a month ago, where we’ve destroyed Iran’s navy, its nuclear weapons ambitions, and the core of its political and military leadership. The cream of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps is gone. The Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, is dead, and his son is pretty much half dead. Its ballistic missile capability has been severely degraded; its infrastructure and manufacturing base are being dismantled. This regime will collapse. But there’s been a pause as talks reportedly resumed on a new deal between the US and Iran. 

“Well, I tend to believe Iran more than I do Donald Trump, because he could not acknowledge the truth even when it—he’s slapped in the face with it repeatedly,” said Brennan on MS Now.  

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Silicon battlefields: Why Big Tech is a target in the US-Israeli war on Iran

In traditional wars, armies directed their firepower toward visible strategic assets – military bases, weapons factories, airfields – where supply lines could be mapped and battle plans drawn with relative certainty. Combat effectiveness depended on numbers, firepower, and tactical maneuver. 

Today, however, the logic of war has shifted beyond the physical battlefield. Over the past two decades, the digital revolution has built a second layer of strategic infrastructure behind the front lines, quietly transforming how power is projected and how wars are fought.

Digital infrastructure has moved from the periphery of war to its operational core. Intelligence gathering, drone coordination, and battlefield decision-making increasingly depend on cloud systems and artificial intelligence (AI) platforms. The architecture of contemporary conflict is therefore built as much on corporate-run networks as on conventional military hardware.

This evolving reality shapes Iran’s strategic outlook as the war with Washington and Tel Aviv deepens. In Tehran’s assessment, the technological backbone sustaining western-aligned military operations in West Asia cannot be viewed as politically neutral. It constitutes an extension of the battlespace itself – a domain where economic assets, corporate platforms, and national security objectives intersect.

Corporate networks as instruments of war

In recent years, advanced militaries have woven digital platforms into every stage of warfare. Satellite surveillance systems feed data into cloud networks. Armed drones transmit high-definition video streams requiring immediate analysis. 

Signals interception capabilities generate vast intelligence flows that must be converted into rapid operational decisions. Military power, increasingly, is measured not simply by missile stockpiles or air superiority, but by the capacity to process information faster than an adversary.

Major technology firms now sit at the center of this process. Companies such as Amazon, Microsoft, and Google provide the infrastructure enabling governments and militaries to store, analyze, and deploy critical data. Their cloud platforms underpin intelligence assessments, battlefield logistics, and command-and-control coordination across multiple theaters.

This convergence of corporate technology and state power has reshaped how conflict is understood. Digital networks have become as vital as aircraft carriers or missile defense systems. In the context of the US-Israeli war on Iran, Tehran increasingly interprets this reality as evidence that global technology companies form an integral part of hostile operational environments.

That perception gained public visibility when Iranian media circulated a list of nearly 30 sites across West Asia, and especially the UAE, linked to major tech firms. 

They included regional headquarters, engineering offices, and large-scale data centers operated by firms such as Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Oracle, NVIDIA, IBM, and Palantir Technologies. In Tehran’s reading of the conflict, these facilities represent strategic nodes embedded within the operational ecosystem that sustains adversaries’ military capabilities.

Stretching from Tel Aviv to Persian Gulf cities such as Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Manama, these facilities host cloud services used by state institutions, intelligence agencies, and defense contractors. Some contribute directly to artificial intelligence development for surveillance and battlefield analysis. Others support regional digital economies whose stability indirectly underwrites military spending and technological innovation.

In an era where data flows shape combat outcomes, the infrastructures managing those flows may be viewed as legitimate strategic targets.

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Jewish settler gangs rampage through West Bank villages for three consecutive days

Illegal Israeli settlers continued their violent attacks across the occupied West Bank on 23 March, after several destructive pogroms targeted Palestinian villages over the weekend.

Palestinian farmers and shepherds in Masafer Yatta, south of Hebron, came under attack by settlers on Monday. 

“Muhammad Yahya Abu Aram, 35, and Elias Saeed al-Amour suffered from suffocation and fainting after colonists sprayed them with pepper spray following an attack on shepherds and farmers in the western part of Al-Rakeez village in Masafer Yatta,” anti-settlement activist Osama Makhameh told WAFA news agency. 

Groups of settlers also uprooted scores of olive trees in Beita, south of Nablus, on Monday, while also raiding a school in Huwara – spray painting graffiti on the walls and replacing the Palestinian flag with an Israeli one.

Overnight, a health clinic in Burqa, east of Ramallah, was torched by settlers. 

As the war on Iran rages and Tehran continues its large-scale retaliatory campaign against Israel, extremist settler violence against Palestinians – which was already at an all-time high – is now surging. 

Israeli settlers rampaged through multiple Palestinian villages in the occupied West Bank overnight on 21 March, smashing cars, burning homes, and attacking and injuring Palestinians who were defending their homes.

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