Tag: perpetual war

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Massacre at Minab: The School That Became a Grave

On the morning of Saturday, February 28, people across Iran began their day like any other. It was one week into the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, and people were preparing for their work and school week. Parents hustled their children out the door for school as the notorious morning traffic jams filled the streets of Tehran and other cities.

In the southern Iranian city of Minab, preschool teacher Hossniyeh Salem was getting ready to leave the house. “Like any other day, I got my child ready at 7 o’clock—because my son is in fifth grade and attended the same school,” she recalled. “I got Yassin ready and headed to school. Yassin went to the boys’ school and I stayed at preschool, in my own class.”

It was Salem’s seventh year as a teacher at Shajareh Tayyebeh, a well-respected, private school. “The upper floor was for girls and the downstairs was for boys. One section was for preschool. You can say there were three schools there. The preschool was in the same building,” she said. “There were students there from all walks of life—children from working class families, educators. We had all kinds of students there.”

Among the students at the school was 6-year-old Fatemeh Yazdanpanah from the fishing village of Gurzang, about eight miles from Minab. The village is well known for its daily fish market—a bustling, strategic hub where fishermen trade their catches from both the Minab River and the Persian Gulf. There is a girls’ school in Gurzang, but Fatemeh’s father, Yaghoub Yazdanpanah, saw gifts for poetry in his daughter and he wanted to secure for her the best education he could find.

“Fatemeh’s mother and I had noticed Fatemeh’s overflowing intelligence. I am a poet myself. When I would write poetry, edit poetry, I would repeat the poem. After hearing the poem once or twice, Fatemeh would immediately memorize it. When we would tell her a story, she would never forget the story and she would recite the story moment by moment, word for word,” recalled Yaghoub, who teaches Persian literature. “I wanted to find a school that would address Fatemeh’s needs and her active mind. I visited several schools myself. Certainly, you would do the same thing. Any parent would take their child to a good school for a brighter future,” he said. “Thank God,” he recalled thinking, “I found Shajareh Tayyebeh School.”

That morning, Yaghoub kissed Fatemeh goodbye before walking to the local school in Gurzang where he taught.

Iranians had gone to bed the night before with the news that negotiations between government officials and the Trump administration aimed at averting war were proceeding smoothly and a new round of technical talks would soon be held in Vienna. The foreign minister of Oman—the longtime mediator in the U.S.-Iran nuclear negotiations—was in Washington, where, after meeting with Vice President JD Vance, he announced that recent negotiations between the two sides had “yielded substantial, momentous, and unparalleled progress” that could pave the way for “an honorable agreement” to halt the U.S. drive to war.

“We were very optimistic about the negotiations that were taking place,” said Pouria Askari, a prominent Iranian international law expert, who recalled being stuck in his car that morning on his commute to the university where he lectures. “We were not expecting the beginning of the war.”

At Shajareh Tayyebeh in Minab, the little girls gathered that morning in the prayer hall in observance of the day when Shia Muslims across the world commemorate the passing of Umm al-Banin, the wife of Imam Ali and the mother of four martyrs who died at the battle of Karbala in the year 680.

After the prayers, Salem laid out for her students a breakfast sofreh, a traditional Iranian fabric placed on the floor to serve meals. The small girls of the preschool had not yet reached the age of fasting during Ramadan. They did some lessons and then went out to the playground for recess. It was around 9:30 a.m. when Salem received word that the U.S. and Israel had begun attacking Iran.

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16 U.S. Trucking Companies File For Bankruptcy In Less Than A Month As Diesel Prices Soar

Diesel prices have exploded over the past month, creating another major cost shock for an industry that was already operating on thin margins. The national average climbed from roughly $5.60 per gallon at the end of August to a record $6.53 in late September, an increase of about 17% in just a few weeks. Prices have eased slightly from that peak, but the EIA’s latest weekly reading still puts diesel at $6.38 per gallon, compared with $5.60 at the end of August.

Now the financial damage is beginning to show up. Sixteen American trucking companies have entered bankruptcy proceedings in less than a month, affecting more than 250 jobs, according to FreightWaves and the Independent. Eight filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, allowing them to continue operating while restructuring their debts, while seven entered Chapter 7 and are liquidating their assets and shutting down.

Among the larger companies seeking Chapter 11 protection are Xoco Transport and Globemaster. Neither specified the cause of its financial problems in federal court filings, and diesel is hardly the industry’s only problem. Carriers have also been grappling with rising labor, insurance, maintenance and regulatory costs, while seasonal slowdowns can leave them without enough revenue to absorb those increases.

But the sudden surge in fuel costs adds another layer of pressure because trucking companies have limited options when diesel jumps this quickly. They can absorb the expense and sacrifice margins, pass it through with higher freight rates and risk losing business, or cut workers and equipment. The latter can keep a company alive temporarily, but it also reduces shipping capacity and the amount of revenue the carrier can generate.

And for now, there is little reason to consider the diesel problem resolved. Prices remain near historic highs and are still heavily tied to the war with Iran and the resulting disruption to global energy supplies.

Even as crude shipments through the Strait of Hormuz have begun recovering, refined-product flows remain constrained, inventories have been depleted and damaged Middle Eastern refining infrastructure continues to limit supply. Until those disruptions ease materially, diesel remains another major transmission mechanism through which the Iran war is feeding directly into the U.S. economy.

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Polish Foreign Minister Says Ukraine War Should Keep Going No Matter What

The foreign minister of Poland, Radosław Sikorski, once more expressed the stance of his country in relation to the conflict in Ukraine, stating that it is not a war that needs to be ended.

The negative perception of Russia that can be gleaned from the comments of Sikorski and his country’s institutions, including their foreign policy and mainstream media, is part and parcel of the arguments currently employed by them in order to establish the view of Russia as a failed state. Furthermore, historical grievances which can still be utilized as tools to be employed against Russia in order to bring it to its knees are being consistently emphasized and brought to the forefront of Polish foreign policy.

Poland’s stance in relation to Russia is in lockstep with the remainder of the EU and the structures of NATO, the principal goal of foreign policy being to ensure the continued goals of these two organizations. In other words, as long as these are able to function in a suitable manner in the region from the perspective of their leadership, Poland will continue to support the war.

These comments reveal that Sikorski views Russia through the prism of economic underachievement. He once calculated the position that Russia would occupy had it developed at the same rate as Canada from 1913 onwards and arrived at the conclusion that by then it would have reached the level of the economy of the United States. Alas, we are told that, instead, the economy of Russia has been decreasing and is now even smaller than that of Italy.

The point Sikorski’s comments make is that of Russia’s economic underdevelopment and how it should be used in order to continually put even greater and greater pressure upon it, while, at the same time, also curtailing its existence. Sikorski would continue to advocate further degradation of the economy of Russia in order to force it to negotiate and to insist that any concessions that may be granted to it in terms of geography would in reality amount to nothing more than a reward to aggression on its part.

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The Usefulness of a Massacre

On Sunday morning, without notice, a private plane carried Benjamin Netanyahu out of Israel and into Abu Dhabi. Channel 12 broke the story while he was still on the ground. A day later both governments confirmed the meeting with Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, calling it a conversation about bilateral relations. The Israeli account gave the errand away. Netanyahu had gone to ask the Emirati president to deny publicly a report that he had telephoned Netanyahu days before 7 October 2023 to warn that Hamas was preparing a major assault.

A prime minister who wanted the record corrected would send a lawyer or a spokesman. This one flew across the Gulf in secret, a month before an election, to ask a foreign head of state to say a warning never happened. The method is the tell, and it points at everything the errand is meant to protect.

What October 7 opened is visible on the ground before it is visible anywhere else. By the reckoning of an Israeli newspaper, Israel has seized more territory from its neighbors since that day than in any comparable span in decades. The war did not stay in Gaza. It moved outward on every front where a border could be pushed.

In Gaza the army holds more than half the territory after the autumn ceasefire, and the plan for what remains was drawn up in Washington. A proposal built around Donald Trump would place the enclave under American trusteeship for at least a decade and rebuild it as a coastal resort on cleared land. Netanyahu’s cabinet approved the voluntary transfer of Gazans to third countries, and his defense minister ordered the army to prepare for a mass departure. A UN commission gave the campaign its legal name last September, finding that Israel had committed genocide and that its object was permanent control of Gaza and a Jewish majority across the land it holds. Israel rejects the finding. The International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu over the conduct of the war, which his office calls false.

The other fronts complete the picture. In the West Bank the finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, pushed through the E1 settlement, some 3,401 homes on the corridor that severs the territory, and said its approval buries any Palestinian state. His cabinet colleagues inaugurated two new settlements last week, and Smotrich has demanded the army wage in the West Bank what it waged in Gaza. In Lebanon the military sits on some 234 square miles of the south. In Syria, after the fall of Assad, it crossed the old disengagement line into the UN buffer zone and dug into nine positions, including the peak of Mount Hermon. The war opened on Iran this year runs on the same logic. The Atlantic Council, no enemy of Israel, describes an emergency response to October that has hardened into a permanent doctrine of forward defense. None of this was concealed as intent. Handed a map of the promised land on live television last August, Netanyahu said he felt very attached to the idea of a Greater Israel reaching into Jordan, Egypt, Syria and Lebanon.

A war that produces this much cannot be allowed to end, and it has not been. When the fighting began, the expectation across Israel was that it would close within months, the coalition would fracture, and Netanyahu would answer for the worst security failure in the country’s history. A New York Times investigation later set out how the opposite came to pass. He stretched the fighting past the point his own commanders judged necessary and added war aims as ceasefire talks matured. In April 2024 a six-week truce that would have freed more than thirty hostages reached the edge of a cabinet vote, and Smotrich ended it with a line, warning Netanyahu that if the deal passed, you no longer have a government. In March 2025 Israel broke a standing ceasefire, which brought the departed Itamar Ben-Gvir back into the coalition. The hostages were the cost, paid in installments.

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Trump’s Horrific, Illegal Iran War Has ‘Costs Us Billions While Making Us Less Safe’

A group of experts says that President Donald Trump’s illegal war with Iran, which has been massively expensive and has made Americans less safe, shows the need for a radical overhaul of US foreign policy.

Scholars at the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts on Wednesday are holding a webinar to present ideas for reducing the US military footprint and using the savings to invest in programs that will directly benefit working-class Americans.

In a video posted on social media ahead of the webinar, PERI experts advocated for making major changes to US foreign policy, which they argued has left the country overstretched.

“The Iran War costs us billions while making us less safe,” says a message accompanying the video on PERI’s social media account. “By reining in military spending and taxing the wealthy to pay their fair share, we can fund critical services like universal preschool, infrastructure investments, and Medicare for All.”

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Massive Gas Pipeline Blast Rocks Damascus Suburbs – 2nd Suspected Sabotage This Week

A huge explosion has rocked a Damascus suburb area on Wednesday evening (local), in what could be the second act of suspected sabotage against natural gas infrastructure in just a few days.

“A gas pipeline exploded Wednesday near the Tishreen power station in Syria’s Eastern Ghouta area in the Damascus countryside,“ Alikhbariah TV reported.

According to more per regional sources, “It said the loud blast heard in Eastern Ghouta was caused by the pipeline explosion near the power station.”

Unconfirmed images are already widely circulating…

Syria had reported at least two acts of major sabotage against its gas infrastructure in the prior six weeks.

One of these events happened Monday, and saw a fire rage out of control for many hours at a gas pipeline between al-Shola and Deir Ezzor following a mystery explosion.

For several years stretching through much of the last decade, Syrian cities – including the capital – have suffered intermittent and long power outages. It was especially during the tail-end of the proxy war to oust Assad that lack of fuel and electricity became a prolonged crisis.

Damascus residents, for example, often had a mere one hour of electricity in their homes per day – if at all. Entire remote villages and towns simply proceeded with daily life amid a total and persistent blackout.

This was to a large degree the result of a US-led sanctions war which in effect strangled the population. US troops had even for years directly occupied Syria’s eastern oil and gas fields, which had been crucial for meeting domestic energy needs.

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