Tag: perpetual war

Firearms drive majority of veteran suicides, federal data shows

Veterans in the United States die by suicide at higher rates than the general population, and firearms are involved in most of those deaths, according to a new analysis of federal data.

The report, released by Everytown for Gun Safety, a gun violence prevention advocacy group, analyzed data from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and found that on average, approximately 18 veterans die by suicide each day, and about 13 of those deaths involve firearms.

By 2023, firearms were used in about three-quarters of veteran suicides, up from about two-thirds in 2001, according to the analysis. Although veterans make up a relatively small share of the U.S. population, they account for nearly one in five firearm suicide deaths nationwide.

The analysis found that the veteran firearm suicide rate increased by about 67% between 2001 and 2023, compared with a 35% increase among nonveteran adults.

The report points to differences in firearm ownership as one factor that may contribute to the disparity. About half of veterans report owning firearms, compared with roughly 20% of nonveteran adults, according to the report.

Some research suggests that access to firearms is associated with increased suicide risk. Studies cited in the report found that gun ownership is linked to roughly a threefold increase in suicide risk and that about 90% of suicide attempts involving a firearm are fatal.

“It could not be more clear that easy access to firearms is the primary cause of veterans’ high suicide mortality rates,” Chris Marvin, veteran lead at Everytown for Gun Safety and a combat-wounded military veteran, said in an email.

The analysis found that veterans ages 18 to 34 now have the highest suicide rate among veterans, a shift from earlier years when the highest rates were among middle-aged and older veterans.

Although men account for most veteran suicide deaths, firearm suicide rates among female veterans have increased more rapidly in recent years, according to the report. Women make up about 11% of the veteran population.

Other contributors to suicide risk among veterans include mental health conditions, substance use, chronic pain, financial strain and challenges related to the transition from military to civilian life.

Access to mental health care, housing stability and employment may also contribute to the risk, according to the report.

Keep reading

CONFIRMED: Barack Obama Was Involved in Creation of US Biolabs Handling Especially Dangerous Pathogens in Ukraine

On Sunday, March 6, 2022, Russian news agency Ria Novosti released documents they claim show Ukraine was working on “biological weapons” near the Russian border. Ria Novosti accused the US of instructing Ukraine to destroy the biological agents before the Russian invasion.

The Ministry of Health in Ukraine ordered the biological agents be destroyed in a February 24 memo.

Russia also released a list of the biological agents allegedly be stored in the lab for testing. The list included Salmonella and E. Coli.

Update: Upon further review Anthrax and The Plague were not listed in the documents as Russia claimed.  However, a US-funded labatory in Odessa, Ukraine was testing Anthrax and The Plague according to Tucker Carlson Tonight.

Hat Tip to CannCon for originally reported on the US-funded labs back on March 1.

And now we know who was funding the Ukrainian Biolabs. It was the US Department of Defense. A document from the US Embassy that was scrubbed from the internet was found in the Wayback Machine.

The document reveals the US Department of Defense was donating to the Ukrainian diagnostic biolabs.

Keep reading

China’s Biological Warfare Threat to the United States

On June 2, 2026, the Department of Justice charged two NIH researchers, Vincent Munster, 53, a Dutch national and Chief of the Virus Ecology Section at NIH’s Rocky Mountain Laboratory in Hamilton, Montana, and Claude Kwe, 38, a Cameroonian research fellow, with conspiracy to smuggle monkeypox virus into the United States and making false statements to federal law enforcement.

While Munster is Dutch and Kwe Cameroonian, neither is a Chinese national. However, the case’s connection to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) biological threat framework is well documented.

Sen. Rand Paul’s April 2024 letters revealed that Munster was a named partner in the DEFUSE proposal. The EcoHealth Alliance-DARPA grant application proposed engineering chimeric bat coronaviruses and listed the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) as a partner. Paul said the disclosure “appears to contradict” Dr. Fauci’s prior testimony that the NIH was unaware of the proposal.

The WIV operates under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, a State Council institution. A House Foreign Affairs Committee report found that local CCP leaders, including Director General Wang Yanyi and BSL-4 laboratory manager Yuan Zhiming, directly oversaw the WIV and its highest-containment laboratory.

The State Department further determined that the WIV has conducted classified research for the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) since at least 2017. Cables obtained by U.S. Right to Know cited the existence of “PLA shadow labs at WIV.”

The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence also linked the WIV to the Fifth Institute of the Academy of Military Medical Sciences (AMMS), which is part of China’s acknowledged biological weapons program. The committee concluded that SARS-CoV-2 may have links to that program.

This case is the latest in a documented series of biological-smuggling incidents involving China-linked research networks operating in the United States. Most of these cases have been intercepted at Detroit Metropolitan Airport. Several examples are detailed in the section below.

China’s asymmetric warfare toolkit includes numerous vectors designed to pressure the United States, including biological warfare. These components work together as part of a broader strategy.

For example, the cyber component, led by Chinese state-sponsored hacking groups Volt Typhoon and Salt Typhoon, has been confirmed to have penetrated U.S. power grids, water systems, and telecommunications networks.

On the economic and demographic front, Chinese chemical manufacturers supply fentanyl precursors that flow through Mexican cartels into American communities.

The State Department has assessed that China operated an offensive biological warfare program from the early 1950s until at least the late 1980s. During that period, China weaponized ricin, botulinum toxins, and the causative agents of anthrax, cholera, plague, and tularemia.

Keep reading

How US Media Gaslights Everyone Without You Even Knowing It

The most useful aspect of US media propaganda is how it acts like even recent history doesn’t exist. It’s a wonderful form of gaslighting. Even the slightly less pro-war, less pro-death-spiral articles vomited forth by Western media act like history started yesterday.

They run with headlines like “US Strikes Iran In Response To Downing of Apache Helicopter” or “Iran, US Exchange Fire As Ceasefire Seems To Be Breaking Down.” Those types of headlines. It’s nearly every article in the US media about Iran. For examples just look here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. And that’s just the past TWO DAYS.

None of the articles acknowledge that the US war machine went thousands of miles around the fucking world to fucking attack Iran in the first place despite Iran attacking no one. Despite the US and Israel having nuclear weapons and Iran having none. Despite the US and Israel committing genocide in Gaza while Iran commits none. Despite the US surrounding Iran with dozens of military bases while Iran has none outside their own country.

Leaving any and all of this out (or putting some of it in the last sentence that 95% of readers don’t get to), means that even a seemingly, somewhat, possibly, kinda“unbiased” article still serves US imperial propaganda.

Keep reading

Trump’s ‘narco‑terrorism’ war in Latin America evokes Reagan – then as now, it’s more about fighting leftists than drug runners

More than any other U.S. president in decades, Donald Trump has aggressively pursued military interventions in Latin America.

On Jan. 3, 2026, U.S. special forces captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro on charges of narco-terrorism. In the months before the operation, U.S. Southern Command began targeting small, fast-moving boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific. The death toll from the continuing war on these alleged narco-terrorists has risen to over 200 people.

At the heart of these events is the Trump administration’s stated goal of combating drug trafficking organizations. The White House and State Department have designated a plethora of guerrilla groups, drug cartels, gangs and criminal enterprises as “foreign terrorist organizations.”

Washington has also expanded security ties with Ecuador and El Salvador, which are led by right-wing Trump allies. At the same time, the administration has pressured left-wing governments in Colombia, Guatemala, Brazil and Mexico to join the U.S. war on drugs or else risk Trump’s wrath.

When it comes to opening legal avenues for the application of armed force, the narco-terrorism label is useful. Indeed, it is how the Trump administration justified Operation Absolute Resolve to capture and indict Maduro. Yet Trump’s decision to pardon a right-wing ally – former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández – who was convicted and sentenced to 45 years in prison for drug trafficking and related weapons offenses, appeared to some observers to be “at odds with Trump’s war on drugs.”

The history of that war on drugs, however, especially during the presidency of Ronald Reagan, shows that the narco-terrorism label has always been politicized. My research on Reagan and the drug war suggests that the nebulousness of the concept aided U.S. policymakers in achieving fundamentally anti-communist and anti-leftist political objectives.

Keep reading

Senate wants to force US to share sensitive intel with Israel

Buried deep inside a 192-page intelligence authorization bill is Section 622, titled “United States-Israel Intelligence Sharing Enhancement.” It would require the president, acting through the director of national intelligence and as necessary the secretary of defense, to “expand and enhance intelligence sharing with the Government of Israel” on a list of subjects that encompasses almost every topic of intelligence interest in the Middle East.

The bill, put forward by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, would prohibit any suspension, reduction, or limitation of such sharing “except on the basis of a specific and identifiable national security concern determined by the President.” Any such exception would require a report to Congress within fifteen days detailing not only the reason for the change but also the categories of information involved. The same report would require an assessment of the anticipated impact on regional security and various other matters.

This proposal is one of several recent moves by those in Washington who carry the Israeli government’s water to keep the United States tied to Israel despite plummeting support for the country among the American public. The most salient form of U.S. support to Israel has been more than $300 billion in economic and especially military assistance. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has tried to get ahead of the declining public support and avoid embarrassing losses by suggesting it would be fine with him to phase out the military aid.

Israel’s strategy and that of its U.S. supporters is now to rely on ties with, and support from, the United States that are not as salient as the military aid with its prominent price tag. The strategy includes forms of military integration that are less visible than congressionally appropriated grant aid and therefore less publicly accountable. Section 224 of a defense authorization bill currently in the House of Representatives embodies this form of integration.

The mandating of intelligence sharing carries this strategy further by moving it into the shadowy world of relations between intelligence agencies. That world is even farther removed from public visibility and accountability than the defense integration, and even less likely to stimulate thoughts about American taxpayers’ money going to a foreign country. So far, Section 622 of the intelligence bill has received less attention than Section 224 of the defense bill.

The notion of legislating an intelligence liaison relationship in this way, with any foreign country, is bizarre. Liaison with counterpart foreign services, including exchanges of information, is an important but complex part of the intelligence business. The nature of a liaison relationship depends partly on the temperature of the overall political relationship with the country in question but also on other factors known mostly to intelligence officers.

These include the collection requirements levied on them, their ability or inability to meet those requirements with national resources, their assessment of the foreign service’s ability and willingness to fill collection gaps, the role that any trading of information plays as quid pro quos in operational cooperation, and the risks of compromising intelligence sources and methods.

Moreover, no single liaison relationship exists in isolation. The U.S. intelligence services need to consider possible implications for their other foreign relationships. For example, one generally does not share with country A information about country B if the United States has a relationship with B that is about at the same level as it has with A.

Keep reading

Fully Autonomous Drones Have Killed Human Soldiers For the First Time

Longtime Slashdot reader MattSparkes shares a report from NewScientist, captioned: “For years we’ve had unconfirmed reports, rumors, hints… now we know.” From the report:Fully autonomous drones with no human oversight have killed soldiers on the battlefield for the first time. This is according to a senior figure in the Ukrainian defense industry, marking a watershed moment in warfare. The one-off test involved 10 AI-controlled “Terminator” drones on the front line of the Ukraine war. Russian soldiers were killed.

“We tried it,” says drone-maker Alexander Kokhanovskyy, who supplied the technology and spoke to New Scientist at a press event hosted by the Ukrainian embassy. “It’s a test. We never implemented it [more widely].” The test took place two years ago and involved quadcopter drones that were programmed to fly towards the front line, cover between 3 and 5 kilometres over around 10 minutes and then engage “Terminator mode,” in which an AI model searches for and intercepts targets. “We just launch it and we know everything will be dead — everything that will be found there in this particular area will be dead,” says Kokhanovskyy. “There is no connection to the drone at all, you cannot see the video, nothing… Everything it sees will be killed.”

With no way to tell what the automated drones had seen or targeted, human-piloted drones were sent into the area after the test to manually check results. Victims included “a couple of soldiers, one truck,” says Kokhanovskyy. While there is no recording of the automated drones attacking these targets, it was concluded that the drones had killed them. Kokhanovskyy says that he was not at the test personally but that it was carried out by an unnamed military unit near the cities of Bakhmut and Chasiv Yar as part of a Ukrainian counteroffensive push. The Ukrainian Ministry of Defence did not respond to questions about the test or the current legal position on the use of fully autonomous weapons.

Keep reading

US Investigating Iran War Critic Trita Parsi, Co-Founder Of Non-Interventionist Think Tank

The Trump administration has launched an investigation into prominent Iran war critic Trita Parsi, according to a report in the Free Press.

According to US officials and documents reviewed by the pro-Trump outlet, officials are looking into the possibility of deporting Parsi, who holds both Iranian and Swedish citizenship.

Parsi, who is co-founder and executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and co-founded the National Iranian-American Council (NIAC), has been a vocal opponent of the ongoing US attacks on Iran.

A Trump official told the Free Press that US Secretary of State Marco Rubio had been “very clear” in his intentions to tackle “people who support adversaries of ours and whose work furthers their agenda and undermines our security.

“Anyone who seeks to undermine the US, we’re taking a hard look at,” the official said.

Since the beginning of the US-Israeli attack on Iran in February, the Trump administration has increasingly targeted figures of Iranian descent in the US.

In April, Hamideh Soleimani Afshar and her daughter Sarina were detained and had their residency permits rescinded after they were – incorrectly – identified as relatives of former Iranian military commander Qassem Soleimani by far-right influencer Laura Loomer.

Despite denying their links to Soleimani, the pair remain in custody in Texas.

The US also detained and revoked the green cards of relatives of former Iranian minister Masoumeh Ebtekar in April.

Parsi is a critic of the Islamic Republic whose family fled to Sweden to escape persecution in Iran. He has faced attacks from Iranian monarchists and pro-Trump figures over his opposition to the conflict.

He has also been highly critical of US backing for what many call Israel’s genocide in Gaza and its attacks on Lebanon.

Speaking to Middle East Eye in May, Parsi warned that the US’s ability to secure a deal with Iran would ultimately come down to its ability to restrain Israeli attacks in the region.

“If Trump either cannot or will not do so, then the value of any agreement with Washington comes sharply into question,” he said.

Keep reading

War, What Is It Good For?

Historically speaking, consider it strange beyond compare. There may, in fact, be nothing like it in the imperial history of this planet. The United States, the greatest power on Earth from the moment it defeated Nazi Germany and imperial Japan in World War II, has never again actually won a war of any significance (or even come close). And that’s true despite the fact that it’s distinctly been the numero uno power on this planet for the last century-plus, with by far the most powerful and wildly over-funded military that has fought any number of wars during these decades, always against seemingly far less powerful adversaries.

Of course, in the atomic age, wars between imperial great powers, as in World War I and World War II, are no longer truly conceivable. Still, over more than a century of great-powerdom, my country has certainly fought a remarkable number of wars, some for endless years, without a single victory (not one!), which is no small… well, I can’t use the word “accomplishment” (but feel free to add whatever word you think might be appropriate).

From the Korean War in the early 1950s (at best a draw) to Vietnam (Cambodia and Laos) in the 1960s and 1970s, a distinct loss (despite the slaughter of literally millions of Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians, and 58,000 Americans); from the invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001 in the wake of the 9/11 attacks on New York City and Washington D.C., to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, both of which ended in dismal defeat (Afghanistan after 20 years of combat!), as did the full-scale Global War on Terror launched by President George W. Bush; and, in the era of Donald Trump, from the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean (where more than 60 random boats have been blasted out of the water) to the bombing of Somalia and Nigeria, and now the devastating air and naval war on Iran, the United States, despite its weaponry, has proven incapable of actually impressing its will on lesser powers in what might by now be considered an all-American militaristic tradition.

Phew! I’m already out of breath!

Keep reading

Trump’s Iran Predicament Is His Own Fault

Over the weekend, Iran and Israel launched direct strikes on each other for the first time since all parties agreed to a ceasefire back in early April.

It began with an Israeli strike on Beirut after a US-brokered ceasefire between Israel and the government of Lebanon was rejected by Hezbollah—the actual combatant that is fighting Israeli forces. Iran responded as they warned they would, with a wave of ballistic missiles aimed at targets in Israel. The Israeli government claimed all those missiles were intercepted—though videos posted to social media appear to show at least some getting through.

After the attack, Trump reached out to reporters and claimed he was going to call Israeli PM Netanyahu and tell him not to attack Iran in response. The president told a Financial Times reporter that he, not Netanyahu, was calling the shots.

However, a few hours later, Israeli forces did exactly what Trump had publicly demanded they not do and launched airstrikes on targets across Iran. Afterward, Trump called on both sides to “stop shooting” and, at the time of writing, it appears that both have for the moment.

But the situation remains just as fragile as it had been before the exchange.

One of the main sticking points holding back Trump’s attempt to reach a lasting peace deal continues to be the fighting in Lebanon. Days after US and Israeli strikes killed Iran’s supreme leader, the militant group Hezbollah began launching rockets into Israel, presumably to help exhaust interceptor stocks and to take some heat off their allies in Iran.

In response, Israel launched a ground invasion of southern Lebanon. The Israeli government ordered the evacuation of all territory up to the Litani River. Israel’s defense minister claimed none of the 600,000 residents would be allowed to return to their homes until Israel felt that its security was guaranteed (meaning when Hezbollah was no more).

Eventually, as US and Israeli interceptor stockpiles dwindled and the global economic consequences of the war became more acute, Trump backed down from his original demand of an “absolute surrender” and pursued a ceasefire with Iran.

However, despite all the tactical successes of US and Israeli forces, on the strategic level, time was more on Iran’s side. US and Israeli missile defenses were running dangerously low. And Iran had made it clear to everyone that they are the dominant power controlling the Strait of Hormuz and that it was rather straightforward for them to use that power to cause worldwide economic pain—something that gave them, arguably, even more leverage over their opponents than they had before Trump launched the war.

What appears to have convinced the Iranians to agree to a ceasefire despite a position that was getting stronger with time was both an assurance from Trump that the fighting would also stop between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon and some signaling that the US was willing to unfreeze Iranian assets or deliver some form of financial compensation to the Iranian regime.

Trump may have succeeded in convincing the Iranians of both, but that was the easy part. If he is genuine about wanting to reach a deal, he faces several difficulties that make a lasting peace agreement highly unlikely in the near future.

For starters, Lebanon, being a key part of not only a potential future deal but of the ceasefire itself, has kicked off what is, in effect, a game of chicken between Israel and Iran. The Israelis seem to want either for the war to restart and continue until the Iranian regime collapses or, at least, for Iran to abandon Hezbollah. And the Iranians appear to want the US to step in and restrain the Israelis. 

Towards those ends, Israel has continued to launch attacks in southern Lebanon. In fact, they have recently pushed north of the Litani River and occupied territory beyond the already massive “temporary” buffer zone they announced back in the spring. And Iran has launched strikes across the region in response to signal their continued support for Hezbollah and their willingness to return to a full-on war if Trump doesn’t keep the Israelis in line. As the Iranians probably intended, the current setup highlights and amplifies the differences between Trump and Netanyahu’s aims.

The regime currently in power in Tel Aviv has invested a lot of time, energy, and money in the last few decades into steering US military power towards Israel’s regional rivals. The American warfare state, which is always in need of new enemies to justify its existence, has been happy to oblige on a number of occasions.

Keep reading