‘Deeply Complicit’: US Has Sent Israel Over 50,000 Tons of Weaponry in 11 Months

The Israeli government announced Monday that it has received over 50,000 tons of military equipment—including armored vehicles and munitions—from the United States during its assault on the Gaza Strip, where most of the population is now displaced and at growing risk of starvation.

The IMEU Policy Project, an affiliate of the Institute for Middle East Understanding, noted that according to the Israeli government’s figures, the Biden administration has on average sent the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) “a weapons shipment every 12 hours, for nearly 11 months”—arms “that are used to kill Palestinian civilians.”

The Israeli Defense Ministry said in a statement that the U.S. “equipment procured and transported includes armored vehicles, munitions, ammunition, personal protection gear, and medical equipment, which are crucial for sustaining the IDF’s operational capabilities during the ongoing war.”

Josh Ruebner, policy director at the IMEU Policy Project, wrote that the new shipment numbers underscore that “the U.S. is deeply complicit in Israel’s genocide.”

“Weapons to Israel violate U.S. laws and policies that are supposed to prevent atrocities,” Ruebner added.

Keep reading

Palestinian detainees electrocuted, raped with rifles by Israeli soldiers: HRW

Israeli troops are torturing Palestinians from Gaza, including through the use of electric shocks and anal rape using M-16 rifle butts, according to the testimony of a Palestinian medic published by Human Rights Watch (HRW) on 27 August.

Walid Khalili, a Palestinian paramedic and ambulance driver, was abducted by Israeli soldiers in Gaza in November and taken to the Sde Teiman and Negev (Al-Naqab) detention centers in Israel.

Israeli troops abducted Khalili after he was dispatched to the Tal al-Hawa neighborhood of Gaza City to rescue four wounded men.

When he arrived, he saw Israeli troops execute the men on Mughrabi Street, near the Labor Ministry building.

“I saw the four men being executed in cold blood,” Khalili said. “I saw it with my own eyes, I was three meters away. When they were shot, I hid under the ambulance, and next to it there was a building, so then I ran inside the building. The Israeli forces raided the building and started yelling at me to raise my hands.”

Soldiers kicked and beat Khalili with their rifle butts, breaking his ribs, before transferring him to the Sde Teiman facility in southern Israel.

HRW writes that Israeli soldiers dragged him on the ground, removed the cuffs on his ankles, and dressed him in adult diapers. They then took him to a warehouse where dozens of detainees, also in diapers, were suspended from the ceiling, with the chains attached to their square metal handcuffs.

Khalili said he was suspended from a chain so his feet would not touch the ground. The soldiers dressed him in a garment and a headband attached to wires. They shocked him with electricity and threw cold water on him every second day.

He told HRW, “The world was spinning around, and I fainted. They hit me with batons. I kept fainting and hallucinating. He kept asking me about the hostages, and moving Hamas hostages, and where I was on October 7. With every question I was electro-shocked to wake me up. He told me confess and we will stop torturing you.”

Every three days, he was taken to a new location and given an unknown drug in pill form before being interrogated further.

“The pill made me feel weird, it was the first time I have felt like this, as if my inner mind was speaking what was in my heart, not me. I felt like I’m flying. I saw hallucinations.”

An Arabic-speaking Israeli guard interrogated him, asking him about the captives taken by Hamas to Gaza on 7 October. Khalili said the interrogator knew “how many children I have, all their names, my address,” and threatened they would be killed if he did not confess.

Keep reading

Condoleezza Rice Won’t Learn

Condoleezza Rice recently wrote an article entitled “The Perils of Isolationism” in Foreign Affairs giving her thoughts on the United States’ place in the modern world. As the title implies, the article’s main theme is her fear that the United States will abandon its role as the global hegemon and turn inward. She claims a return to isolationism will result in Russia, China, and other tyrannical governments overrunning the world and oppressing its inhabitants.

Theoretically, this article should present a convincing argument. Rice served as national security advisor and secretary of state under George W. Bush, so she should be a foreign policy expert. Unfortunately, the biggest takeaway from the article is that Rice learned nothing from the failures of the Bush administration. She presents her case for more interventionism without meaningfully addressing the undeniable devastation caused by U.S. interventionist policies. The result is an article that reads like a fairy tale meant to comfort readers who wish to remain blissfully removed from reality.

Few passages demonstrate this lack of self-awareness more than Rice’s appraisal of U.S. involvement in the Middle East. When describing the benefits of the post-World War II global order, Rice displays what can only be described as denialism by writing, “As the United Kingdom and France stepped back from the Middle East after the 1956 Suez crisis, the United States became the guarantor of freedom of navigation in the region and, in time, its major stabilizing force.”

It is disturbing that any member of the Bush administration could describe the U.S. as a “major stabilizing force” in the Middle East. Decades of the American “stabilizing” the Middle East led to 9/11, the worst terrorist attack in our nation’s history. The Bush administration’s answer to this attack was not to focus on bringing the attackers to justice but rather to topple the governments of Afghanistan and Iraq. The United States paid a hellish price in money and lives in a vain attempt to spread democracy, but the result was a less stable Middle East. The Barack Obama administration expanded the destabilization by bombing and blockading even more countries despite his campaign promise to end forever wars.

Rice seems to hope her readers are willing to forget or ignore these foreign policy disasters. I can think of no other reason she would expect anyone to believe the U.S. has been a “stabilizing force” in the Middle East. The U.S. has stabilized the Middle East about as well as ten shots of Tequila would stabilize the decision-making skills of a college freshman.

Keep reading

Record Number of Journalists Killed in Gaza

“In war, truth is the first casualty,” said Aeschylus. In the modern era, this includes the journalists devoted to uncovering that truth. On Aug. 22, the Committee to Protect Journalists reported that at least 116 journalists and media workers have been killed in Gaza since hostilities began. This is the highest death toll in any conflict since the CPJ began gathering data in 1992. 

That number will likely expand in the coming weeks. The group is still investigating nearly 350 additional cases of potential killings, arrests and injuries of journalists and media workers in Gaza. These numbers dwarf those of much larger and longer conflicts. During all of World War II, 69 reporters were killed. In the Korean War, 17. Sixty-three were killed in Vietnam. In the Afghanistan and Iraq wars in this century, 65 and 282. 

The most recent deaths in Gaza investigated by the CPJ occurred on July 31. Ismail al-Ghoul, a 27-year-old Palestinian journalist, and Rami al-Refee, a 27-year-old Palestinian cameraman, were freelancing for Al Jazeera when Israeli missiles hit a car they were using in the Al Shatei camp near Gaza City. According to Al Jazeera, al-Ghoul and al-Refee had been investigating the killing of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, and had been parked in front of his home for five minutes, when they were killed. In a statement, Al Jazeera Media Network called the attack by Israeli forces “a cold-blooded assassination” and pledged to “pursue all legal actions to prosecute the perpetrators of these crimes” and that it “stands in unwavering solidarity with all journalists in Gaza.” 

Keep reading

Countdown To Crisis, Catastrophe, & Collapse

“All tyrannies rule through fraud and force, but once the fraud is exposed, they must rely exclusively on force.” – George Orwell

“The future’s becoming muddled. The lines of vision are narrowing. But now they’re desperate. All paths lead into darkness.” – Frank Herbert – Dune

Trying to decipher the path ahead becomes more difficult by the day. We are purposefully bombarded with misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda by the ruling class, designed to distract us from their real purpose, real agenda, and real plans to imprison us in their techno-gulag, eating zee bugs in our container sized hovels, using our government issued CBDCs to subsist, unless we dared to question the approved narrative – resulting in our social credit rating dropping into the domestic terrorist zone – getting us banned and shunned from society. This is the New World Order the Davos crowd has designed and will implement as a Great Reset, if they succeed in retaining and increasing control over the U.S. and the rest of the Western World in the next six months.

I know many bloggers/analysts depend on clicks, likes, and subscriptions to their websites/social media to make a living, so they constantly predict Armageddon within the next week, and it never happens. This “little boy who cried wolf” routine has resulted in even the critical thinking among us becoming complacent and unconcerned as we accelerate towards our dire rendezvous with destiny. We shrug off Ukraine invading Russia and bombing a nuclear power plant, while Belarus moves troops towards the Ukraine border, Putin bombs Kiev, and U.S. military equipment is employed by U.S. military personnel against Russia.

We discount the possibility of Iran actually mounting a devastating response against Israel, prompting an even larger response by Israel, and the U.S. getting drawn into the conflict with Iran, because we’ve been here before and nothing happened. And nothing may happen again in the next week, but Fourth Turnings NEVER de-intensify. There will be blood, death, and war on an enormous scale before this Crisis is resolved.

Keep reading

Secretive SR-72 Hypersonic Aircraft, Successor to Lockheed Martin’s Legendary SR-71, Could Soon Take Flight

In 2013, a feature article appeared on the website of legendary aerospace and defense giant Lockheed Martin that quickly had aviation buffs talking. The piece, titled “Speed is the New Stealth,” claimed that a new hypersonic aircraft was under development at the company’s famous Skunk Works facility, which would soon set a new standard for speed and stealth in American aerospace technologies.

“That’s because today,” the article explained, “engineers are developing a hypersonic aircraft that will go twice the speed of the SR-71.”

“It’s called the SR-72.”

It was a remarkable revelation since 2013 marked nearly 23 years since the fabled SR-71—once the pride of the American stealth reconnaissance arsenal—had been officially retired. The conclusion of the SR-71’s tenure in service resulted from several factors, including maintenance costs amid a shrinking military budget and new vulnerabilities presented by developments in Soviet surface-to-air missile capabilities.

Perhaps the most apparent issue the SR-71 faced was the implementation of newer, less costly, and more effective reconnaissance technologies. Chief among these were satellites that had already proven their resilience in collecting detailed information from the heart of Soviet territory by the final years of the 20th century. Then, in the early 2000s, the CIA began to deploy the first armed Predator drones for missions in Afghanistan, an early showcase for the power and capability of unmanned aerial vehicles as an American military asset in the new millennium.

Amidst such 21st-century realities, by 2013, Lockheed Martin seemed confident that its vision of a new unmanned hypersonic aircraft capable of flight at six times the speed of sound would soon become a reality. Citing cost-saving production methods and recent advancements made with Aerojet Rocketdyne to “integrate an off-the-shelf turbine with a supersonic combustion ramjet air-breathing jet engine to power the aircraft,” the 2013 article seemed to indicate that the forthcoming wonder machine that Aviation Week had already nicknamed the “son of Blackbird” would soon take flight.

The arrival of America’s next formidable stealth plane, in other words, was right around the corner. Yet despite all the buzz the SR-72 announcement generated at the time, the story eventually receded again into the shadows of the highly classified world of black projects.

Keep reading

NATO’s Arctic Strategy Is an Overreaction  

In July, the U.S. Department of Defense released its first Arctic strategy guide since 2019. Washington’s concerns peaked when American and Canadian jets intercepted two Russian Tupolev TU-95 strategic bombers and two Chinese H-6 bombers operating in international airspace around 200 miles off the coast of Alaska. While the United States must ensure the security of its territory, including Alaska, overreacting and developing a militaristic hyperfocus on the Arctic, where U.S. interests are limited, would be a blunder. 

The Arctic strategy document highlights the threat of recent Sino-Russian collaboration in the Arctic, citing PLAN and Russian Navy ships operating together in international waters off the coast of Alaska in 2022 and 2023. Russia, which controls the largest swath of Arctic territory of any Arctic nation, has expanded and modernized its Arctic military infrastructure. The region is of great importance to Moscow, as Russia aims to defend its second-strike, sea-based nuclear deterrent capability operating out of the Kola Peninsula to defend the homeland and protect its regional economic endeavors, including oil and gas megaprojects like the Yamal LNG and Vostok Oil ventures. 

Meanwhile, China’s activities in the Arctic have been mainly economic in nature. In the 21st century, China has invested over $90 billion in Arctic energy and minerals sector projects. Beijing’s economic activity aligns with its 2018 Arctic Strategy, which mentions Beijing’s aim to gain more influence in its claim as an Arctic stakeholder. As the U.S. strategy guide mentions, the PRC seeks to promote the Arctic region as a “global commons,” a statement that Washington perceives as an opportunity for China to shift governance of the region in its favor. 

Neither the modernization of Soviet-era military bases nor PRC attempts to construct a Polar Silk Road constitutes enough of a threat to warrant making the Arctic the next battleground of great power competition. Yet the NATO alliance, with Finland and Sweden recently becoming full-fledged members, is determined to confront the perceived threat in the Arctic region.

Although NATO has historically lacked an official position on the Arctic, following the start of the Russo–Ukrainian war in 2022, the Arctic region has become a larger security focus for the alliance. With Finland and Sweden’s ascension to NATO, the alliance’s Arctic presence increased significantly and has been accompanied by large-scale military exercises, such as Nordic Response 2024, which involved 13 NATO countries and 20,000 troops. Moreover, NATO’s new Arctic posture includes enhancing surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities, as well as improving interoperability among NATO member states.

Keep reading

Destroying Villages in Order To Save Them

A salient feature of the last decade or so has been the steady rise of bizarre cults with legions of fervent true believers, even though we have virtually zero rational grounds for believing in the central tenets of these secular religions. The weirdest thing about these cults is the way in which their true believers ardently sacrifice the very things they claim they wish to save. Consider the following:

1). COVID-19 illness presents close to ZERO risk to healthy children, but this hasn’t stopped the Vaccine Cult from demanding that children receive the dangerous, experimental shots that are neither effective nor safe. The most spectacular irrational outcome is the high incidence of vaccine-induced myocarditis among young athletes for whom COVID-19 posed zero risk.

2). Wind turbines are extremely inefficient producers of electricity that kill hundreds of thousands of migratory birds, wreak havoc in the marine environment when they are placed offshore, and ruin the physical beauty of the landscape. Nevertheless, the bizarre Climate Cult insists that wind turbines are a key weapon in our arsenal for reducing carbon emissions, which the Climate Cult fervently believes to be causing a rise in the earth’s temperature. Destroy nature in order to save it!

3). A human male will obviously have an unfair advantage over a female in almost all competitive sports. And yet, in their fervent proselytization of the bizarre Transgender Cult, votaries have largely succeeded in destroying women’s sports and the dreams of the girls and women who train for them.

4). Importing legions of young men from Arab countries into European countries in which these young men struggle to integrate and find gainful employment has resulted in a marked reduction of public safety in European cities, especially for young women. Yesterday here in Vienna, I had lunch with the former chief of police, who told me that stabbings are indeed much higher in certain districts of Vienna than they ever were in the past. The perpetrators are almost always young males who came to Vienna during the 2015 European migrant crisis.

And yet, the Diversity Cult persists in its bizarre, fetishistic belief that racial diversity per se is necessarily a good thing. Yesterday evening, while pondering the irrationality of the Diversity Cult, I saw the news that a young, foreign-born man stabbed 11 people and killed three at the “Festival of Diversity” that was underway in Solingen, Germany. Diversity will purportedly strengthen and revitalize Germany in the 21st century, even when it results in mass homicide.

5). Already in the year 2015, I began to perceive that the oligarchs who run Ukraine were making a huge mistake by getting into bed with the oligarchs who run the U.S. intelligence agencies, military-industrial complex, and Biden Crime Family. Cozying up with the U.S. military and intel establishment would certainly frighten the Russian Bear and make him aggressive. Far better for the poor people of Ukraine to tone down the nationalism and seek friendly and cooperative relations with Russia.

Note that the exact same reasoning has applied to every country in the Western Hemisphere in their relations with the United States government since President Monroe announced his Monroe Doctrine. As the former Mexican President, Porfirio Diaz once lamented: “Poor Mexico—so far from God, and so close to the United States.”

Keep reading

WWIII: Russia Continues Opening Investigations Into Foreign Journalists Who Kremlin Says Crossed Into Russia Illegally To Film Ukrainian Incursion

Russia’s FSB security service said it had launched a case against “foreign journalists Simone Traini and Stefania Battistini, who illegally crossed the State Border of the Russian Federation”, reported The Moscow Times.

It said the journalists had “carried out video shooting in the territory of the settlement of Sudzha”, a town in the region that Ukraine’s forces claim to control.

The Italian reporters were shown driving in an armored vehicle past Russian road signs before arriving in Sudzha, around 10 kilometers (six miles) from the border, where a journalist spoke to local people.

Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) has launched investigations into two more journalists, one German and one Ukrainian, who traveled to the town of Sudzha after illegally crossing the Russian border in the Kursk Region, the FSB said in a statement, reported Russian state news agency TASS.

“The Russian FSB has launched criminal investigations into Nicholas Simon Connolly, a reporter for the German broadcaster Deutsche Welle (designated in Russia as a foreign agent media outlet), and Natalya Nagornaya, a correspondent for the Ukrainian TV channel 1+1, who illegally crossed the state border of the Russian Federation and recorded video footage near the town of Sudzha in the Kursk Region. The FSB is conducting the investigations under Article 322.3 of the Russian Criminal Code,” the statement reads.

The article carries a penalty of up to five years in prison.

Keep reading

How Israel’s quadcopters traumatise, maim and kill Palestinians in Gaza

In the course of more than ten months, Israel unleashed an array of weaponry in its genocidal war on the Palestinians in the besieged coastal enclave, killing and wounding thousands. One of the most deadly weapons in Israel’s arsenal is the quadcopter. 

A drone with four propellers, the quadcopter follows its targets in different spaces, including narrow alleys of streets, tents, and inside houses. The 1.6-metre Quadcopter is electronically controlled remotely. It can easily take off and move vertically and horizontally for military or civilian service. It weighs about ten kilograms only. 

Usually, the Israeli army deploys quadcopters for intelligence purposes to facilitate its mission on the ground. Nevertheless, the Israeli army have equipped these drones with explosive devices, transforming them into deadly suicide attacks.

Dozens of quadcopters have so far killed hundreds of Palestinian civilians by launching guided missiles. 

“Quadcaptors have killed about 1,000 Palestinians, including 350 women and 150 children, during the current genocidal war,” the Palestinian health ministry in Gaza noted in a recent press statement. 

Keep reading