Tag: perpetual war

The U.S. occupation of Gaza has begun

This week, Drop Site News revealed a draft resolution from Trump’s newly christened “Board of Peace.” The resolution outlines what is, in essence, Phase Two of Trump’s unrealistic peace plan that ushered in a new phase of horror in Gaza under the guise of a ceasefire. 

The actions outlined in the resolution ignore realities on the ground and paint a very grim picture of what the United States is planning for Gaza. Far from abandoning the ludicrous and offensive imagery Trump shared in that AI video from last year of himself and Elon Musk on a beach in an unrecognizable Gaza, this resolution is the battle plan to turn Gaza into the playground for the wealthy that Jared Kushner presented to the World Economic Forum at Davos last week. It’s a Gaza where the only Palestinians remaining are those chosen to be the servants in the new regime. 

It’s a Gaza under permanent American occupation. 

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US Expands Military Base in Kenya as It Escalates Air War in Somalia

The US has begun a $70 million military construction project to expand a runway at the Manda Bay airbase in Kenya near the Somali border as it continues to significantly escalate its air war in Somalia.

US and Kenyan officials held a groundbreaking ceremony on Thursday to launch the construction project, which is being funded by the US State Department. The ceremony was attended by Gen. Dagvin Anderson, the commander of US Africa Command, and US Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau.

The base at Manda Bay is seen as a key hub for US military operations in Somalia, where the US launched at least 25 airstrikes in the month of January alone, an unprecedented rate of US attacks. US strikes have targeted an ISIS affiliate in northeastern Somalia’s Puntland region and al-Shabaab in southern Somalia.

Back in 2020, the Manda Bay airbase in Kenya came under attack by al-Shabaab. The militant group targeted Camp Simba, a part of the base used by US forces, and killed one US soldier and two American contractors.

The US and its allies have been fighting against al-Shabaab since the group first emerged following a US-backed Ethiopian invasion of Somalia in 2006, which ousted the Islamic Courts Union, a Muslim coalition that briefly held power in Mogadishu.

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Trump Again Bypasses Congress To Advance Major Weapons Package for Israel

The Trump administration has approved $6.5 billion in new weapons deals for Israel that include Apache attack helicopters and military vehicles, a step Secretary of State Marco Rubio took without waiting for the normal congressional review process.

According to The New York Times, the approval of the arms deals marks the third time that the Trump administration bypassed Congress to send weapons to Israel.

The arms packages had been under review by the House Foreign Affairs Committee and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and the State Department is supposed to wait until the top two members of each committee approve the deals before advancing them, but Rubio didn’t, drawing a rebuke from Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-NY), the ranking member of the House committee.

“Just one hour ago, the Trump administration informed me it would disregard congressional oversight and years of standing practice, and immediately notify over $6 billion in arms sales to Israel,” Meeks said, according to Haaretz.

“Shamefully, this is now the second time the Trump administration has blatantly ignored long-standing Congressional prerogatives while also refusing to engage Congress on critical questions about the next steps in Gaza and broader US policy,” Meeks added.

According to the Pentagon’s Defense Security Cooperation Agency, the State Department approved a total of four potential arms sales for Israel, which will likely be funded by US military aid. The deals include:

  • AH-64E Apache Helicopters and related equipment for an estimated cost of $3.8 billion
  • Joint Light Tactical Vehicle and related equipment for an estimated cost of $1.98 billion
  • Namer Armored Personnel Carrier Power Packs Less Transmissions and Integrated Logistics Support, and related equipment for an estimated cost of $740 million
  • AW119Kx Light Utility Helicopters and related equipment for an estimated cost of $150 million

The US provides Israel with $3.8 billion in annual military aid under a ten-year Memorandum of Understanding, but since October 7, 2023, and the start of the IDF’s genocidal campaign in Gaza, the US has given Israel significantly more.

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IDF Proposes Limiting Aid Deliveries to Gaza to 200 Trucks Per Day

The Jerusalem Post reported on Thursday that the IDF has recommended restricting aid deliveries to Gaza to 200 trucks per day. The Israeli military claims that this is the amount of aid required to sustain the Palestinians, and additional aid is given to Hamas.

Under the deal between Hamas and Israel brokered by President Donald Trump in October, Tel Aviv agreed to allow 600 aid trucks to enter Gaza each day. Throughout most of the ceasefire period, Israel has kept aid deliveries to a minimum. Over the past week, 600 trucks per day have entered Gaza. 

While the Israeli military claims the Palestinians are “flooded” with supplies, aid agencies say the people of Gaza are still struggling to survive. Most people in Gaza are displaced and living in tents. Israel is refusing to allow temporary housing to enter Gaza, leading to several children freezing to death. 

The UN’s humanitarian affairs spokesperson, Olga Cherevko, said aid organizations were still facing “severe limitations.”

The assertion that Hamas is stealing a large portion of the aid that enters Gaza has also been debunked by multiple investigations. 

In addition to restricting the number of aid deliveries into Gaza, the IDF wants to maintain that all aid going to Gaza enters through Israel. Gaza’s border crossing with Egypt is scheduled to be reopened within the coming week. The IDF wants to prevent cargo from entering the Strip via Egypt. 

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How Human Rights Watch Shattered Yugoslavia

On August 25th 2025, this journalist documented how the 1975 Helsinki Accords transformed “human rights” into a highly destructive weapon in the West’s imperial arsenal. At the forefront of this shift were organisations such as Amnesty International, and Helsinki Watch – the forerunner of Human Rights Watch. Supposedly independent reports published by these organisations became devastatingly effective tools for justifying sanctions, destabilisation campaigns, coups, and outright military intervention against purported overseas “rights” abusers. A palpable example of HRW’s utility in this regard is provided by Yugoslavia’s disintegration.

In December 2017, HRW published a self-laudatory essay boasting how its publication of “real-time field reporting of war crimes” during the Bosnian civil war’s early stages in 1992, and the organisation’s independent lobbying for a legal mechanism “to punish military and political leaders responsible for atrocities” committed in the conflict, contributed to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia’s establishment. Documents held by Columbia University “reveal the fundamental role of HRW” in the ICTY’s May 1993 founding.

These files moreover detail HRW’s “cooperation in various criminal investigations” against former Yugoslav officials by the ICTY, “through mutual exchange of information.” The organisation is keen to promote its intimate, historic ties with the Tribunal, and how the ICTY’s work spurred the International Criminal Court’s creation. Yet, absent from these hagiographic accounts is any reference to HRW’s pivotal contribution to manufacturing public and political consent for Yugoslavia’s breakup, which produced the very atrocities the organisation helped document and prosecute.

In November 1990, HRW founding member Jeri Laber authored a tendentiously-titled op-ed for The New York Times, “Why Keep Yugoslavia One Country?”. Inspired by a recent trip to Kosovo, Laber described how her team’s experience on-the-ground in the Serbian province had led HRW to harbour “serious doubts about whether the US government should continue to bolster the national unity of Yugoslavia.” Instead, she proposed actively facilitating the country’s destruction, and laid out a precise roadmap by which Washington could achieve this goal.

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Ding dong the legacy media and its slavish war reporting is dead

In a major development that must be frustrating to an establishment trying to sell their policies to an increasingly skeptical public, the rising popularity of independent media has made it impossible to create broad consensus for corporate-compliant narratives, and to casually denigrate, or even censor, those who disagree.

It’s been a long road.

In terms of foreign policymakers being able to control the message, the first Gulf War in 1991 was a high-water mark in retrospect. At that point, Americans were getting their national news almost exclusively from corporate sources and especially the evening news, with the young CNN (launched in 1980 the only cable alternative) adding to network coverage. With such a narrow band of options, narratives could be foisted upon the American public by the Washington establishment and their compatriots in the media, who largely shared the same social circles, backgrounds,and career interests.

Such fanciful and self-serving narratives (babies stolen from incubators and “liberating” Kuwait, the Iraqis, and especially the Kurds from the brutal dictator, Saddam Hussein) were accepted by the public pretty much without question. There was an anti-war movement in those days, but it was disorganized, and considered by the mainstream to be vaguely unpatriotic. There was a heavy Pentagon hand, if not outright censorship in the coverage of the war, a deliberate reaction to the independent and more impactful reporting of the Vietnam War a decade before.

In the run-up to the second Gulf War in 2003, TV host Phil Donahue was fired from MSNBC for hosting antiwar voices and, according to an internal NBC memo at the time, giving the network “a difficult public face for NBC in a time of war.” This from a network that was itself owned by a defense contractor, General Electric, which profited hugely from the invasion of Iraq.

The media fired and marginalized its dissenting voices, including Ashleigh Banfield, a rising star who said she was “banished’ by NBC after making comments in 2003 about how Americans weren’t getting the full picture of the Iraq War. She criticized the network embeds, which ensured only compliant reporters would be allowed into the war zone. The corporate media became handmaidens of the U.S. military and the powerbrokers in Washington, allowing the war there and in Afghanistan to continue for decades, without a serious questioning of the logic.

Then something unexpected happened: public trust in media plummeted from approximately 72% in 1976, to 28% today. Part of this public mistrust may have resulted from the fact that so many of the media narratives of our century, devised in concert with the permanent bureaucracy in Washington, have turned out to be wildly wrong (for example, that the Iraq invasion would bring democracy and freedom to the Middle East, and would end a threatening WMD program; that the NATO bombing of Libya was necessary to prevent a “rape army” fueled by Viagra and methamphetamines, and would bring, again, a democracy to Libya).

But the other obvious reason for the collapse in public trust in corporate media and, by extension, for policymakers’ ability to sell a chosen narrative, is the rise of independent media in the years during and following the wars. The general acceptance of blogs and social media as a source of information coincidentally took off around 2007 — at the very moment that Washington and the corporate media’s lies and misdirections were breaking down and destroying American faith in their institutions writ large.

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Ukraine Moves To Purge Dostoevsky & Tolstoy From Public Mention

In the latest escalation of Ukraine’s cultural purge and targeting of all things Russian, Ukraine’s Institute of National Memory has this month formally branded the famed classic Russian authors Fyodor Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy as vectors of “Russian imperial propaganda”.

This has included a call from the body which operates under the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine for all streets, monuments, and public institutions bearing their names be wiped from the map.

According to Interfax, commenting on the ruling, “the assignment of their names to geographical objects, names of legal entities and objects of property rights, objects of toponymy, as well as the establishment of monuments and memorial signs in their honor in Ukraine was the embodiment of Russification – Russian imperial policy aimed at imposing the use of the Russian language, promoting Russian culture as superior compared to other national languages ​​and cultures, displacing the Ukrainian language from use, and narrowing the Ukrainian cultural and information space.”

In a January 20 statement, the Institute of National Memory’s ‘expert commission’ claimed the literary legacy of both writers is “directly connected to the glorification of Russian imperial policy.” The Ukrainian officials also asserted there are signs of “Ukrainophobia” in their books.

The move was met with complete silence in Western media, and the story has gone almost completely overlooked, despite Dostoevsky and Tolstoy having long been widely studied and appreciated across the globe, and in American colleges, literary programs, theaters – and among common avid readers.

Their works, from The Brothers Karamazov to the massive War and Peace have done much to shape Western culture and higher education in the 150 years of the works’ existence. 

And yet the Ukrainian government-linked institute now claims the historic prominence of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy across Ukraine was not because it is literary art with universal appeal, but somehow part of a long-running Russification campaign designed to marginalize the Ukrainian language and culture.

Ukraine has in essence just labeled two of the world’s greatest historical authors, which far pre-date both the modern Russian Federation and Soviet Union of the 20th century, as ‘propaganda’.

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Pentagon Expands Base Commanders’ Authority to Counter Rising Drone Threats Following Inspector General Warning

Small drones have transformed modern conflict overseas, but their rapid spread is now forcing a rethink much closer to home. From suspicious drones observed near military bases to the growing availability of inexpensive, easily modified unmanned aircraft, U.S. defense officials have begun to acknowledge that drones operating in domestic airspace pose a serious and growing security threat.

This week, the Pentagon issued updated guidance granting base commanders greater authority and flexibility to respond to unauthorized drone incursions across the United States, marking one of the most significant shifts in domestic military counter-drone policy in years.

The move comes amid rising concern over repeated drone sightings near sensitive facilities and follows a new Department of Defense Inspector General warning that gaps in policy and inconsistent implementation have left U.S. military installations vulnerable.

The updated guidance builds upon a restructuring effort already underway since last summer, when the Department stood up Joint Interagency Task Force 401 (JIATF-401) to centralize counter-drone efforts across the military.

The latest policy changes now push operational authority closer to the commanders responsible for defending installations day to day. Taken together, the developments represent a shift from a fragmented, slow-moving approach to one designed for speed and adaptability in the face of rapidly evolving drone threats.

“The operational landscape has fundamentally and irrevocably changed,” a statement issued by the DoD reads. “The proliferation of inexpensive, capable, and weaponizable unmanned aerial systems (UAS) by both peer competitors and non-state actors presents a direct and growing threat to our installations, our personnel, and our mission, both at home and abroad.”

It’s undeniable that small unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) have transformed modern warfare. Cheap, commercially available drones can now carry cameras, sensors, or even explosives, and the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine has demonstrated just how profoundly these systems can shape and disrupt military operations.

At the same time, unauthorized drone flights near U.S. military installations, energy infrastructure, testing ranges, and training facilities have surged in recent years. While defense officials have often publicly downplayed the national security implications of many of these incidents, they have slowly begun to acknowledge that the threat posed by drones is no longer confined to distant battlefields or foreign conflicts.

The Pentagon’s new guidance expands authorities available to installation commanders to detect, track, and defeat drones threatening military assets, reducing delays previously caused by layered approval processes.

The updated policy also removes a previous “fence-line” limitation, allowing commanders to respond to drone threats beyond the physical perimeter of military installations. It additionally clarifies that “unauthorized surveillance” of facilities now explicitly constitutes a threat.

“This, combined with the authority for commanders to make threat determinations based on the ‘totality of circumstances,’ grants greater operational flexibility,” the DoD says.

The move is tied to the Department of War’s Joint Interagency Task Force 401 (JIATF-401), which was established in August 2025 when the Secretary of Defense disbanded the Joint Counter-small Unmanned Aircraft Systems Office and created a new organization intended to streamline the acquisition, testing, and deployment of counter-drone technologies.

As described in a memorandum for senior Pentagon leadership, the task force was formed to “better align authorities and resources to rapidly deliver Joint C-sUAS capabilities to America’s warfighters, defeat adversary threats, and promote sovereignty over national airspace.”

The goal of the task force was to eliminate duplication and speed delivery of counter-drone capabilities, especially as the number of organizations involved in drone defense efforts has grown, often operating without tight coordination.

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A dream-like psychedelic might help traumatized veterans reset their brains

A new study suggests that the intensity of spiritual or “mystical” moments felt during psychedelic treatment may predict how well veterans recover from trauma symptoms. Researchers found that soldiers who reported profound feelings of unity and sacredness while taking ibogaine experienced lasting relief from post-traumatic stress disorder. These findings were published in the Journal of Affective Disorders.

For decades, medical professionals have sought better ways to assist military personnel returning from combat. Many veterans suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, as well as traumatic brain injuries caused by repeated exposure to blasts. These conditions often occur together and can be resistant to standard pharmaceutical treatments. The lack of effective options has led some researchers to investigate alternative therapies derived from natural sources.

One such substance is ibogaine. This psychoactive compound comes from the root bark of the Tabernanthe iboga shrub, which is native to Central Africa. Cultures in that region have used the plant for centuries in healing and spiritual ceremonies. In recent years, it has gained attention in the West for its potential to treat addiction and psychiatric distress. Unlike some other psychedelics, ibogaine often induces a dream-like state where users review their memories.

Despite anecdotal reports of success, the scientific community still has a limited understanding of how ibogaine works in the human brain. Most prior research focused on classic psychedelics like psilocybin or MDMA. The specific psychological mechanisms that might allow ibogaine to alleviate trauma symptoms remain largely unexplored.

Randi E. Brown, a researcher at the Stanford University School of Medicine and the VA Palo Alto Health Care System, led a team to investigate this question. They worked in collaboration with the late Nolan R. Williams and other specialists in psychiatry and behavioral sciences. The team sought to determine if the subjective quality of the drug experience mattered for recovery. They hypothesized that a “mystical experience” might be a key driver of therapeutic change.

The concept of a mystical experience in psychology is specific and measurable. It refers to a sensation of unity with the universe, a transcendence of time and space, and deeply felt peace or joy. It also includes a quality known as ineffability, meaning the experience is too profound to be described in words. The researchers wanted to know if veterans who felt these sensations more strongly would see better clinical results.

The study analyzed data from thirty male Special Operations Veterans. All participants had a history of traumatic brain injury and combat exposure. Because ibogaine is not approved for medical use in the United States, the veterans traveled to a clinic in Mexico for the treatment. This setup allowed the researchers to observe the effects of the drug in a clinical setting outside the U.S.

The treatment protocol involved a single administration of the drug. The medical staff combined ibogaine with magnesium sulfate. This addition is intended to protect the heart, as ibogaine can sometimes disrupt cardiac rhythms. The veterans received the medication orally after a period of fasting. They spent the session lying down with eyeshades, generally experiencing the effects internally rather than interacting with others.

To measure the psychological impact of the session, the researchers administered the Mystical Experiences Questionnaire. This survey asks participants to rate the intensity of various feelings, such as awe or a sense of sacredness. The researchers collected these scores immediately after the treatment concluded.

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Trump Announces Aggressive Action Against Longtime U.S. Adversary

President Donald Trump on Thursday signed an executive order titled “Addressing Threats to the United States by the Government of Cuba,” which formally declared a national emergency with respect to Cuba.

The order invokes authorities under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) and the National Emergencies Act (NEA), describing the situation as an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to U.S. national security and foreign policy

“NOW, THEREFORE, I, DONALD J. TRUMP, President of the United States of America, find that the situation with respect to Cuba constitutes an unusual and extraordinary threat, which has its source in whole or substantial part outside the United States, to the national security and foreign policy of the United States and hereby declare a national emergency with respect to that threat,” the order reads.

To address this declared emergency, the order establishes a new tariff system rather than imposing direct sanctions on Cuba in this specific measure. It authorizes additional ad valorem duties on imports into the United States from any foreign country that directly or indirectly sells or otherwise provides oil to Cuba.

“Under this system, an additional *ad valorem* duty may be imposed on imports of goods that are products of a foreign country that directly or indirectly sells or otherwise provides any oil to Cuba,” the order continues

“(a) Beginning on the effective date of this order, an additional *ad valorem* rate of duty may be imposed on goods imported into the United States that are products of any other country that directly or indirectly sells or otherwise provides any oil to Cuba, in accordance with subsections (b) and (c) of this section.”

No fixed tariff rates — such as a specific percentage — are outlined in the order itself, and no countries are immediately named for application.

Instead, the policy creates a flexible framework. The Secretaries of Commerce and State, along with other relevant officials, are directed to determine which countries qualify by monitoring oil provision to Cuba, issuing rules, guidance, and implementing the tariffs accordingly. The president retains authority to modify, adjust, or terminate the order if Cuba or the supplying nations take meaningful steps to mitigate the perceived threat or align with U.S. national security and foreign policy goals.

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