Tag: perpetual war

Trump administration weighs drone strikes on Mexican cartels

The Trump administration is considering launching drone strikes on drug cartels in Mexico as part of an ambitious effort to combat criminal gangs trafficking narcotics across the southern border, according to six current and former U.S. military, law enforcement and intelligence officials with knowledge of the matter.

Discussions among White House, Defense Department and intelligence officials, which are still at an early stage, have included possible drone strikes against cartel figures and their logistical networks in Mexico with the cooperation of Mexico’s government, the sources said.

Still, the administration has made no final decision and reached no definitive agreement about countering the cartels. And unilateral covert action, without Mexico’s consent, has not been ruled out and could be an option of last resort, the sources said. It is unclear whether American officials have floated the possibility of drone strikes to the Mexican government.

If Mexico and the United States proceed together with drone strikes or other action, it would not be the first time they have launched a joint effort to take on the cartels, nor would it be the first time that American military and intelligence worked in concert with Mexico’s law enforcement and army.

But what the Trump administration is contemplating could be unprecedented both in the number of U.S. personnel involved and in the use of American unmanned aircraft to bomb cartel personnel and assets.

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NATO’s Operation Condor steamrolls onwards

O Liberté, que de crimes on commet en ton nom! ~ Madame Roland

Following what a friend calls my eloquent and excellent article regarding the fate of Ms Ozturk, he writes that we “need to shout loud and often about this growing suppression of free speech, because if we don’t, we will undoubtedly be faced with Operation Condor type disappearances at a future time”. As this article shows, though some of us have long been hoarse, that time is already upon us and, though Latin America is not as jam-packed as it once was with right-wing dictators and former high-ranking Nazis, below the surface, little has changed or will change until we make it change.

The fear factor faucet

As in ancient Rome, we must always be kept on edge, in fear that our “freedoms” are under attack by extraneous powers, Russia’s over-worked President Putin in particular, who is set to conjure up out of thin air a couple of million paratroopers to pop down in front of us and take those illusory freedoms away. To safeguard ourselves against that, we are being urged to stockpile food and, presumably, to give the Ivans a bloody nose with our cans of sardines when they kick in our front doors.

Although crass tommyrot like that is not worth a hearing, it works on its core target markets, most particularly those who are in receipt of State payments and/or who want to aimlessly drift through life, oblivious to the dangerous currents underneath the surface.

Although not all of them will believe that Putin’s paratroopers will shortly be dropping in for afternoon tea, or that every Arab baby is a suicide bomber or that every Latino is a drug dealing cut throat, because enough people will believe there is no smoke without fire, NATO’s charlatans can continue to get away with their scams until they are overthrown.

If one must worry about Putin, it is not his paratroopers that should concern us, but his vast array of state-of-the-art F35 bombers, about which the ordinary Joe is powerless. If we are worried about China annexing the Panama Canal, we should be more worried it is being gifted to Black Rock and the other parasitic companies that are the real powers behind NATO’s machinations.

But, then, fear is only one of our three primary choices, the other emasculating one being freeze, to which we now come and the preferable one being fight, which we will leave to last.

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The All-Devouring Machine: Pentagon Malfeasance and Insatiable Empire

The eyes of a new generation were opened in an episode that seemed like dark science fiction for those of a certain age, and an unyielding nightmare regardless: a genocide streaming into smartphones around the world in real time. Many American eyes were opened for the first time to the reality not only in Palestine, but in the places in the world that are meant to be forgotten, where the U.S. and its allies may tread at their will and pleasure. At the center of this system of license and aggression is the Department of Defense, as it is now euphemistically named. What we call “defense” spending in the United States is actually spending on weapons and war-making, and it has continued its unabated rise in both red and blue presidential administrations.

The U.S. spends far more on its military than any other country – it spends more than the next nine countries combined, and as a share of GDP, its military spending far outpaces that of other rich countries in the G7 group. The Department of Defense is massive, “with $4 trillion in assets dispersed across fifty states and over 4,500 locations worldwide,” and its sheer size is at the heart of pathological accounting failures in recent years. Last November, the Pentagon flunked its seventh audit in a row, again failing to properly account for its budget – over $800 billion. A Stimson Center policy brief published last July called the Pentagon’s wild spending “a budgetary time bomb set to explode in the next twenty years,” noting the explosion in Pentagon spending in the years since 9/11. “Adjusted for inflation, defense spending has increased more than 48% in just the first 24 years of this century.” The U.S. imperial military is a truly global enterprise. According to data compiled by political anthropologist David Vine at American University, there were about 750 bases outside of the United States as of 2021, scattered throughout the world in 80 countries and colonies. Vine points out that given the “sheer number of bases and the secrecy and lack of transparency” around the information, a complete list is impossible:

The Pentagon’s previously annual list of its bases, the “Base Structure Report,” is notoriously incomplete and, at times, inaccurate. The Pentagon has also failed to release the Congressionally-mandated annual report since the Fiscal Year 2018 version, making an accurate list even more difficult than in prior years. Most observers assume the U.S. military does not know the true number of bases occupied by U.S. forces. It is telling – but not a good sign – that when a recent U.S. Army-funded study evaluated the effects of U.S. bases on conflict globally, the study relied on my 2015 list of bases rather than the Pentagon’s list.

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Israeli Troops Blow Whistle on War Crimes in Gaza ‘Kill Zone’

An Israeli human rights group on Monday published a report in which Israel Defense Forces officers and soldiers who took part in the creation of a buffer zone along Gaza’s border with Israel described alleged war crimes including indiscriminate killing, as well as the wholesale deliberate destruction of civilian infrastructure in what multiple whistleblowers called a “kill zone.”

The new report from Breaking the Silence (BTS) details how Israel – which for decades has dubiously relied upon defensive buffer zones in territories it conquers or controls – decided on a policy of “widespread, deliberate destruction” in order to create a security perimeter ranging between roughly half a mile and a mile in width on the Gaza side of the Israeli-Palestinian border.

“To create this area, Israel launched a major miltary engineering operation that, by means of wholesale destruction, entirely reshaped about 16% of the Gaza Strip… an area previously home to some 35% of Gaza’s agricultural land,” the report states. “The perimeter extends from the coast in the north to the Egyptian border in the south, all within the territory of the Gaza Strip and outside of Israel’s internationally recognized borders.”

“The mission given to soldiers in the field, as revealed in their testimonies, was to create an empty, completely flat expanse about a kilometer wide along the Gaza side of the border fence,” the publication continues. “This space was to have no crops, structures, or people. Almost every object, infrastructure installation, and structure within the perimeter was demolished.”

“Palestinians were denied entry into the area altogether, a ban which was enforced using live fire, including machine gun fire and tank shells. In this way, the military created a death zone of enormous proportions,” the report adds. “Places where people had lived, farmed, and established industry were transformed into a vast wasteland, a strip of land eradicated in its entirety.”

“The testimonies demonstrate that soldiers were given orders to deliberately, methodically, and systematically annihilate whatever was within the designated perimeter, including entire residential neighborhoods, public buildings, educational institutions, mosques, and cemeteries, with very few exceptions,” the paper says. “Industrial zones and agricultural areas which served the entire population of Gaza were laid to waste, regardless of whether those areas had any connection whatsoever to the fighting.”

Palestinians who dared enter the perimeter, even accidentally were also targeted, including civilian men, women, children, and elders. The officers and soldiers interviewed by BTS struggled to explain whether noncombatants were informed of the no-go zone’s limits, with one saying civilians knew to stay away when they saw that “enough people died or got injured” crossing the unmarked boundary.

Some people who entered the perimeter out of sheer desperation were targeted. Israel’s blockade of Gaza has fueled widespread and sometimes deadly starvation, and Palestinians entered the “kill zone” to pick hubeiza, a nutritious wild plant, after the area’s farmland was razed.

“The IDF really is fulfilling the public’s wishes, which state: ‘There are no innocents in Gaza. We’ll show them,’” one reserve warrant officer explained. “People were incriminated for having bags in their hands. Guy showed up with a bag? Incriminated, terrorist. I believe they came to pick hubeiza, but… boom,” tank shells were fired at him from half a mile away.

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UN Exposes Systematic Israeli Rape of Palestinians

On March 13th, the UN Human Rights High Commission published a horrifying report exposing in oft-emetic detail how the Zionist entity has employed “sexual, reproductive and other forms of gender-based violence against Palestinians” on an industrial scale since the Gaza genocide erupted in October 2023. The UN concludes these hideous acts are a central component of Israel’s “broader effort to undermine [Palestinians’] right to self-determination,” their systematic nature pointing unambiguously to endorsement by Tel Aviv’s military and political leaders.

The report records, “sexual and gender-based violence is by no means a new element of the Israeli occupation.” However, in the wake of October 7th, there has been a “sharp increase in sexual violence against Palestinian women and men”, both by Zionist Occupation Forces and settlers. The UN encountered no obstacles collecting voluminous highly incriminating evidence of this vile abuse. In addition to a welter of victim and witness testimony, perpetrators often voyeuristically captured themselves and their confederates openly committing these crimes on camera.

Frequently, these abhorrent images were pridefully posted on the culprits’ personal social media accounts. Such actions amply attest to the culture of total impunity in which ZOF soldiers literally rape and pillage. “Despite the abundance of witness and digital evidence of Israeli soldiers committing crimes in Gaza,” the UN found “there have been no meaningful efforts by Israel to hold the perpetrators accountable.” Requests submitted to Tel Aviv for clarity on investigations into sexual violence committed by Occupation Forces have been ignored:

“The Commission has not seen any evidence that Israeli authorities have taken any effective measures to prevent or stop acts of sexual violence or to identify and punish perpetrators.”

By contrast, the UN documented multiple statements by Zionist entity officials actively supporting ZOF militants accused of sex crimes, and “legitimizing rape and other forms of sexual violence” against Palestinians, particularly detainees. That Israel’s rulers advocate sexually-charged attacks on Palestinians is further reinforced by a deliberate ZOF strike on a women’s rights centre in Gaza, in mid-November 2023. The UN noted the broadside’s “clear gendered dimension,” with soldiers daubing deeply offensive, sexist insults directed at Palestinian women on the building’s inner walls in Hebrew.

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Trump Administration Proposes Historic $1 Trillion Defense Budget to Bolster National Security

President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have unveiled plans for a record-breaking $1 trillion defense budget.

This landmark proposal signifies the administration’s unwavering commitment to national defense and global leadership.

During a press conference alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, President Trump emphasized the necessity of this substantial investment.

Trump:
“We have great things happening with our military. We also essentially approved a budget, which is in the facility — you’ll like to hear this — of a trillion dollars. One trillion dollars. And nobody’s seen anything like it.

We have to build our military, and we’re very cost-conscious. But the military is something that we have to build, and we have to be strong because you’ve got a lot of bad forces out there now.

So, we’re going to be approving a budget — and I’m proud to say, actually, it’s the biggest one we’ve ever done for the military.”

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Taliban denies reports of Bagram Airbase handover to the US

Bagram Airbase, once the center of U.S. military operations in Afghanistan, has been a focal point of strategic, political, and military significance. Located in Parwan province, it served as the primary logistics and operations hub for U.S. and NATO forces throughout the two-decade-long military engagement in Afghanistan. However, the departure of U.S. forces in 2021 and the subsequent takeover of the base by the Taliban has raised a series of critical questions regarding the future of this strategically important location and the larger implications for U.S. foreign policy and Afghanistan’s stability.

According to a report by journalist Zark Shabab on Medium, the Taliban has allegedly handed over control of Bagram Air Base to the United States. U.S. military aircraft, including a C-17, reportedly landed at the base, delivering military equipment and senior intelligence officials. The arrival of high-ranking CIA figures, such as the Deputy Chief, suggests significant U.S. intelligence interests in the region. This move has raised questions about possible secret diplomacy or strategic shifts in U.S.-Taliban relations.

Bagram’s Strategic Importance and Taliban’s Initial Refusal

Bagram Air Base was the largest U.S. military hub during the 20-year conflict in Afghanistan, and its control shifted when the Taliban seized it following the chaotic U.S. withdrawal in August 2021. The Taliban had initially refused to return the base, considering it a symbol of their sovereignty. However, recent reports suggest a possible handover to the U.S., raising speculations about the motives behind this shift, including potential counterterrorism cooperation or political maneuvering by the Taliban.

In a recent statement, Zabihullah Mujahid, the spokesperson for the Taliban’s Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, rejected reports of a U.S. military C-17 aircraft landing at Bagram Airbase. Mujahid called these reports “propaganda” aimed at misleading the public. He emphasized that the Taliban would not permit any foreign military presence in Afghanistan, stressing that there was no current need for such presence.

Mujahid’s comments came in response to widespread report and rumors circulating on social media and some media outlets suggesting that U.S. forces were returning to Bagram. He categorically denied these claims, reinforcing the Taliban’s stance on sovereignty and non-interference. “Such an event is impossible,” he said.

The U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, especially the handover of Bagram Airbase, remains a major issue in foreign policy discussions. Critics argue that the U.S. misjudged the Taliban’s strength, allowing them to gain critical military resources and raising questions about the need for continued U.S. presence in the region.

The Taliban’s control of Bagram and their denial of U.S. reentry highlight the shifting dynamics in Afghanistan. This development has wider implications for regional security and international relations, challenging global responses to the situation.

The reported handover of Bagram to the U.S. is likely to have significant geopolitical implications, especially for regional powers like Iran, China, Russia, and Pakistan. The presence of CIA officials at Bagram suggests a rebuilding of U.S. intelligence networks, which may indicate a new chapter in U.S.-Taliban relations. Analysts suggest this move could signal an evolving cooperation between the two parties, driven by pragmatism, regional security concerns, and intelligence coordination.

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Copperhead Torpedo-Like Underwater Kamikaze Drones Rolled Out By Anduril

Anduril has rolled out a new family of modular torpedo-like uncrewed underwater vehicles (UUV) called Copperhead. This includes kamikaze types designed with a particular eye toward arming larger uncrewed undersea platforms like the company’s Ghost Shark. Today’s announcement follows last week’s unveiling of the rapidly deployable Seabed Sentry submarine surveillance system that could also potentially be configured to launch UUVs, which TWZ was first to report on.

The Copperhead family of UUVs, which Anduril also refers to as autonomous undersea vehicles (AUV), currently consists of the 100 and 500-pound-class types, as well as “M” munition subvariants of each. The Copperhead-100 has an overall length of just under nine feet (approximately 2.7 meters) and is 12.75 inches in diameter, while the Copperhead-500 is just over 13 and a half feet (just over four meters) long and 21 inches wide. Exactly what kind of propulsion system either of the UUVs use is also not currently known, but the company says they can both reach top speeds in excess of 30 knots.

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Ukraine Captured 2 Chinese Soldiers Fighting for Russia, Zelenskyy Claims

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy claimed that his country’s army has captured two Chinese soldiers fighting for Russia.

On April 8, on his official Telegram channel, Zelenskyy wrote that this happened on “Ukrainian territory—in the Donetsk region.”

“These prisoners have documents, bank cards, and personal data,” he said.

“We have information indicating that there are significantly more Chinese citizens in the occupier’s units than just these two. We are currently verifying all the facts. Intelligence, the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), and relevant units of the Armed Forces are working on this.”

He said that he has instructed the minister of foreign affairs of Ukraine to “immediately contact Beijing and find out how China intends to respond to this.”

“Russia’s involvement of China—whether directly or indirectly—in this war in Europe is a clear signal that Putin intends to do anything but end the war,” Zelenskyy said.

North Korea has sent thousands of its troops to Russia to support Moscow.

Last year, South Korea’s National Intelligence Service (NIS) said that North Korean soldiers were being sent to Russia and are likely to be deployed to the front lines in Ukraine.

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Deadbeats! Saudis won’t pay $13.7M bill for US military fuel

Between 2015 and 2018, the United States supplied Saudi Arabia with tens of millions of dollars worth of jet fuel in support for the kingdom’s bombing campaign in Yemen. Seven years later, the Saudis refuse to repay most of their debt. And they are being rewarded for it.

A Department of Defense report that was sent to Congress last October, reviewed by Responsible Statecraft, and previously unreported suggests that Pentagon officials are becoming increasingly desperate to recoup an outstanding $13.7 million in fuel costs that Saudi Arabia owes the U.S.

“DLA energy and US central command will continue to engage the Saudi Ministry of Defense and Ministry of Finance through United State Military Training Mission – Saudi Arabia scheduled meetings, various MOD/MOF and DoD Key Leader Engagements, face to face meetings within the CONUS and Saudi Arabia, and through email correspondence until the SLC fuel debt is paid in full,” the report stated.

In 2018, the Pentagon realized it had made an accounting error. The Pentagon had undercharged Saudi Arabia and the UAE by $36 million for jet fuel and another $294 million in flight hours for U.S. tanker aircraft that refueled Saudi and Emirati warplanes in midair.

With Washington’s help, the arrangement allowed Saudi and Emirati jets — which, besides actual military targets, bombed hospitals, schools, marketplaces, and weddings — to stay in the air for up to three hours instead of a mere 15 minutes. But instead of the two oil-rich Gulf nations footing the bill for the aerial-refueling process, as is required by law, it was the American taxpayer.

Seven years later — while the larger flight hours bill has been paid — Saudi Arabia has yet to pay $13.7 million worth of its jet fuel debt. The UAE, which owed the U.S. around $15 million for jet fuel, has reimbursed Washington in full.

The kingdom certainly does not lack the funds. The Saudi sovereign wealth fund oversees $925 billion in assets.

Rather, Saudi Arabia appears to be pleading ignorance; the Intercept reported that Saudi officials told representatives of the Defense Logistics Agency and U.S. Central Command last year that they were “not aware of the outstanding debt and requested some additional time to investigate the issue.”

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